CHAPTER 2 – RATTLING THE U.S. NAVY
10:20 (Washington Time)
Wednesday, July 28, 1993 ‘C’
National Military Command Center’s (NMCC) conference room (‘The Tank’)
The Pentagon, Arlington, Virginia
On entering the NMCC’s conference room with two of his senior officers, Admiral Normand Klasser’s eyes were immediately caught by what appeared to be a large-scale model of some kind of ship which had been laid on top of the conference table. Both Ingrid Dows and Secretary of Defense John McCain stood near it, along with a man in a civilian suit. However, Klasser’s initial surprise and curiosity were quickly replaced by confusion and disapproval as he got nearer to the model.
‘’What kind of bastardized ship is this, General Dows? It seems to be some kind of aircraft carrier, but it looks like nothing that I would consider a proper aircraft carrier.’’
While John McCain threw a dubious look at Klasser, Ingrid took his initial judgment in stride and pointed at the civilian man next to her.
‘’That is a joint baby of me and of Mister Michael Ferranti, a naval systems engineer and naval architect from the firm Naval Dynamics. It is indeed the model of a new aircraft carrier project, which I commissioned Naval Dynamics to develop.’’
‘’But we already have plans for new carriers of the NIMITZ-Class, General. Why add a new carrier project to my Navy’s plans?’’
That was when John McCain jumped in on the exchange, looking coldly at Klasser.
‘’Because I agree with General Dows that we seriously needed to review our carrier doctrine and plans, Admiral. I thus decided to freeze for the moment all the funds planned for future aircraft carrier construction, until this new concept could be developed. By the way, our Navy is the United States Navy, not your personal property. As an ex-naval aviator, I have a lot of first-hand experience with life aboard a carrier and with its operations and tactics. General Dows exposed to me her concerns about our present carrier force and her ideas about how to deal with those concerns and I must say that she was very convincing. But I will let her explain to you her concerns and ideas. Let’s all sit down, lady and gentlemen.’’
Containing with difficulty his growing irritation, Klasser and his two senior officers, respectively the head of the Bureau of Naval Aeronautics and the head of his Carrier Operations Division, took seats opposed to that of Ingrid, McCain and Ferranti, with the ship model on the table between them. Once they were all sitting, Ingrid started speaking while making a slide appear on a wall projection screen. The slide showed an American aircraft carrier at sea, accompanied by its typical escort fleet of cruisers and destroyers.
‘’This slide shows the U.S.S. ENTERPRISE and its close escort flotilla, which was composed then of two cruisers and seven destroyers and frigates. Far behind it is its support group of fleet tankers, ammunition ships and logistical ships, itself escorted by more destroyers. Do you see a problem there, Admiral?’’
‘’No! In fact, this shows a typical carrier task group, of which we presently have eleven. Our carrier groups constitute the backbone of our naval power worldwide.’’
‘’They effectively are, Admiral, and they have done an admirable job up to now…despite their potential shortcomings.’’
Both Klasser and his two subalterns tensed up at once on hearing those words.
‘’Shortcomings? What shortcomings? What would you know about carrier operations and doctrine, General?’’
Ingrid noted the sarcastic tone used by Klasser to say the word ‘General’, undoubtedly meant to underline her lack of naval experience. She however answered back in an even tone while starring into Klasser’s eyes.
‘’What I know about carrier operations and doctrine is what was known in 2012, Admiral, thanks to our old Athena Files. I also have more than enough experience at commanding theatre combined forces in active war zones to see what could and should be improved. Furthermore, the Secretary of Defense has quite a lot of experience of his own about carrier operations and he happens to agree with me on what I am about to tell you. Up to now, our carrier force has met with success in combat operations, mostly thanks to the fact that our potential adversaries have nothing that could compare to it. However, those potential adversaries have developed and are continuing to develop other ways to counter our carrier groups. For the Soviets and, now the Russians, it is the use of nuclear attack submarines armed with anti-ship missiles and tasked to track and then attack our aircraft carriers at sea in times of war. For the Chinese, it is the building up of a sizeable force of terminally-guided ballistic missiles armed with nuclear warheads and specially designed to strike our carriers from hundreds of miles away. Also, despite what our own warship commanders would say, a number of hostile nations possess diesel attack submarines which would present a high threat to our carriers when they operate in or near coastal waters. Remember that last big allied naval exercise off Norway, when a Norwegian diesel attack submarine was able to slip inside the escort screen of the U.S.S. INDEPENDENCE and then theoretically torpedoed it? Or the instance three years ago when a Canadian submarine caught the U.S.S. MIDWAY flat-footed off the coast of our Washington State? And how about the old saying about a carrier being a ‘bomb magnet’? We may want to keep quiet about such events but the fact is that our carriers are facing a number of dangerous threats, with those threats multiplying constantly.’’
‘’And what would be your proposed solutions to those threats, General?’’ replied Klasser, refusing to concede to her points. Ingrid then pointed at the ENTERPRISE carrier group shown on the slide.
‘’For one, we should stop making our carriers so conspicuous, Admiral. One of our carriers and its escort force, apart from representing by itself a sizeable portion of our total naval combat power, also represents a large concentration of juicy targets for enemy planes, missiles and submarines, with their combined electronic radar and radio signatures acting like beacons for the enemy. Furthermore, while our carriers are nuclear-propelled and can sail tens of thousands of miles without refueling, the same cannot be said of their escort ships or of their embarked aircraft. Thus, our carriers and their escort ships still have to refuel and resupply at sea every few days, thus mostly negating the advantages of our carriers’ nuclear propulsion, unless our carriers sail along by their own. However, if they do that, then they will find themselves vulnerable to enemy nuclear submarines and to long-range missile attacks, as they have no anti-submarine defenses of their own and possess only a limited anti-missile and anti-aircraft capability, if you except their air wings. If, because of bad weather, our carrier’s embarked aircraft can’t fly off and land back on it, a rather frequent occurrence, then it becomes even more vulnerable. Thankfully for us, we have not had to fight yet a serious war at sea against those developing threats, but I am afraid that this has led to a complacency on our part that could prove disastrous in the future. Before you ask me again what we could do about that, I will resume my thoughts in a few words.’’
A new slide then appeared on the screen, showing a number of bullet points which Ingrid read in succession.
‘’First, as I just said, we need to disperse more widely our carrier forces and to make them smaller targets for the enemy, notably by avoiding the use of large escort forces. Second, our carriers need to have much better self-defense capabilities, including against submarines, so that they could operate by themselves, without escort ships. Third, by making the use of large escort flotillas superfluous, we would free a lot of our combat ships for other tasks, or we could build more carriers for the same total cost. Right now, a typical carrier escort flotilla of two cruisers and seven destroyers and frigates represents a total of nine separate propulsion systems and nine sensors, weapons and command and control ship suites. Those suites are what truly costs the most budget-wise, not the construction of their steel hulls, especially if you consider that most of our escort cruisers are nuclear-powered. With the same amount of money spent on building such an escort flotilla, we could easily build one or two extra aircraft carriers. Fourth, we should have more and smaller carriers in terms of tonnage, but still with sizeable embarked wings, in order to better disperse our forces at sea and make them less vulnerable to detection and long-range attacks. After discussing this with Secretary McCain and gaining his approval, I commissioned Mister Ferranti and its firm, Naval Dynamics, to study a new class of aircraft carrier for our Navy, a class that would respond to the new threats and make our carrier forces less vulnerable. The scale model of ship you see on the table is the preliminary result of that study, which am calling ‘Project Neptune’.’’
‘’But…this looks like a simple flat box mounted on stilts attached to underwater cylindrical hulls. You call that an aircraft carrier, General?’’
Ingrid’s eyes narrowed then, as she was getting truly tired of Klasser’s resistance to change.
‘’I call that the future of our carrier force, Admiral. It may look very unorthodox in design, but new problems demand new, innovative solutions, so I told Mister Ferranti and Naval Dynamics to think outside of the box and I also gave them a few suggestions of my own. I may not be a naval officer or ship designer but I have a doctorate in aerospace engineering and have personally designed or directed the designs of dozens of aircraft, spacecraft and even spaceships, like our U.S.S. CONSTITUTION and our U.S.S. PROMETHEUS. Furthermore, I piloted all of those aircraft, spacecraft and spaceships. I even piloted our U.S.S. PROMETHEUS to a landing on the surface of Titan, one of Saturn’s moons, flying through its thick nitrogen and methane atmosphere to do so. I am both an experienced user, designer and combat leader and I used that experience to direct this project. As for Mister Ferranti, he is an ex-navy commander and served aboard a number of our aircraft carriers as a ship’s engineer, so he has plenty of relevant experience and knowledge of his own. Since he did a lot of the preliminary concept study for this project, I will thus let him describe to you our Project Neptune. Mister Ferranti…’’
‘’Thank you, General Dows! Let me now describe our ship model to you, gentlemen. It is what is called a modified SWATH hull concept, SWATH standing for ‘Small Water Area Twin Hull’. In this case, our SWATH concept model was slightly modified by the addition of two short, separate centerline hull sections, one at the bow and one at the stern, with those sections linked to the two, full-length cylindrical underwater side hulls by pairs of stabilizer surfaces. In the case of an aircraft carrier design, a SWATH hull provides a number of very important advantages. First and foremost, a SWATH ship is a lot more stable and resistant to roll and pitch than a traditional monohull ship, and this even at high speed. That is due to the fact that nearly all of its buoyancy’s volume is under the surface of the water and is thus little affected by waves, which are the cause of pitching and rolling in conventional hulls. For an aircraft carrier, that means a lot, as it will remain rock steady even when sailing in rough seas and at high speeds. A SWATH aircraft carrier will thus be able to launch and retrieve its aircraft in weather conditions which would basically prevent a conventional carrier from operating its aircraft. Second, its hull form, with a large flat box-like superstructure mounted on lateral stilts and situated high above the sea surface, provides a maximum amount of internal volume for a large aircraft hangar, plus provides lots of flight deck surface for a runway and for aircraft catapults and elevators. That also provides plenty of space for a very powerful armament of guns and missiles, plus comfortable, decent quarters for the members of its crew. As envisaged, our preliminary model may be even bigger than one of our NIMITZ-Class carriers, with a length of 440 meters, or 1,452 feet at the flight deck level, but it is in reality a much slender design, with a displacement tonnage that is less than that of a NIMITZ-Class carrier. However, on that displacement, our NEPTUNE has an aircraft hangar measuring some 1,353 feet in length, 247 feet in width and 25 feet in free ceiling height, which makes it three times larger than that of the U.S.S. NIMITZ. That allows our NEPTUNE to safely shelter sixty or more aircraft and helicopters, with flight deck parking space for at least twenty extra aircraft, depending on the size of aircraft used. That hangar capacity still leaves an 82-foot-wide centerline aircraft circulation lane, which could be use to shelter the aircraft parked on the flight deck during severe storms. In contrast, the U.S.S. NIMITZ, despite its huge size and displacement of over 91,000 tons compared to the full load displacement of 85,000 tons of our NEPTUNE, can accommodate less than a third of its ninety or so aircraft inside its hangar, thus must keep most of its aircraft parked along the flight deck, where they are vulnerable to both storm damage and to enemy fire. Another, less obvious advantage of the SWATH hull of our NEPTUNE is a much-reduced construction cost and time, thanks to the fact that its main hull section above the waterline is made nearly exclusively of flat steel plates with no curves in them. In comparison, if you look at a NIMITZ hull, you will see a complex hull shape made up of curved plates of widely varying forms, which take a lot of work-hours to manufacture with precision on big hydraulic presses before they could be welded together to form ship modules. My preliminary calculations show that the hull of our NEPTUNE will take less than half of the time needed to build a NIMITZ hull, thus will result in tremendous savings in terms of man-hour costs. Also, being basically a large, long flat steel box, the main hull structure will be easy to build by sub-sections in separate construction halls and then assembled in the construction drydock, resulting in more time and money saved.’’
One of Klasser’s two subalterns, a rear admiral who was a qualified naval architect, seemed to appreciate Ferranti’s arguments and pointed at the long runway running from bow to stern along the starboard side of the model.
‘’Those are very attractive features of your design, Mister Ferranti. I also noticed that your hull shape allows for a long runway running parallel to the ship’s centerline. How long and wide is that runway, exactly?’’
‘’The runway on the NEPTUNE is 1,452 feet long by 115 feet wide, sir, and incorporates seven arresting wires and one crash barrier. Because it runs parallel to the ship’s centerline axis and is free from any nearby deck structures, our pilots will be able to land in a much safer manner than with our present oblique landing decks, which are lined on both sides with parked aircraft and superstructures and which measure only some 800 feet in length compared to the 1,452 feet of the NEPTUNE’s runway.’’
‘’That is something that endeared it a lot to me, gentlemen.’’ then said John McCain. ‘’As an ex-naval aviator, I can fully appreciate how much this will help our pilots and will greatly reduce the potential risks of accidents during carrier landings. That, along with the steadier ride in rough seas, makes the NEPTUNE’s concept very attractive to me.’’
‘’Uh, may I ask why the sides of the ship, which support the main box structure above the water, are sloped instead of being vertical?’’ asked the other officer accompanying Klasser, making Ferranti nod his head and point at Ingrid.
‘’To be frank, that feature was incorporated into the design by General Dows, so I will let her answer your question, Admiral.’’
‘’Thank you, Mister Ferranti!’’ said Ingrid, who then looked at the three admirals facing her from across the table.
‘’Those sloped sides will actually help turn our carriers into ghost ships, by making them stealthy to radar. You will notice that there are no vertical surfaces on the hull and superstructures of the ship. That is deliberate and is meant to reflect away the radar waves coming from other ships or shore stations, instead of letting them bounce back and thus provide a radar signature of our carrier to the enemy. We still have to conduct extensive radar signature testing on our model, compared to a NIMITZ ship model, to see how effective this stealth feature really is, but I fully expect our NEPTUNE to only have the radar signature of a small boat, at the most. If sailing by itself with no escort fleet, then our NEPTUNE will be extremely hard to detect and to target by the enemy, one of the major reasons I pushed for a SWATH hull design.’’
Out of arguments by now, Klasser mostly caved in but still asked a final question.
‘’And when could the first ship of this class be built and put into service? Our U.S.S. INTREPID is getting quite old and will need a replacement soon. Our proposed NIMITZ-Class addition was planned to replace the INTREPID in about three years.’’
‘’While much design work needs to be done, sir,’’ answered Michael Ferranti, ‘’the easier and cheaper construction methods for our NEPTUNE should make it possible for us to have the first of our new class of carriers completed and put into service in less than three years. That is, if the Congress and its cohort of lobbyists don’t object to this project and delays its approval and financing.’’
‘’The President and I will take care of the Congress, gentlemen.’’ declared at once John McCain, reassuring both Ingrid and Michael Ferranti. ‘’This is too important to let a few politicians play budgetary games and pork-barreling with it.’’
The meeting was concluded some ten minutes later, at which time the participants filed out of the conference room. Before they could go their separate way, Admiral Klasser politely stopped Ingrid to speak with her in a corner of the NMCC.
‘’General, I was at first doubtful about your competence in such naval matters, but I can now see that I was wrong in this. I am sorry if I appeared too antagonistic about your ideas and concepts.’’
Secretly relieved by that change of attitude, Ingrid smiled to Klasser and presented her right hand, which Klasser shook.
‘’The important thing is that we all work for the better good and security of the United States, Admiral.’’