Decision at Sea

by Symonds, Craig L.

  For a few brief days after the loss of the Yorktown, Nimitz had only two carriers at Pearl Harbor. The arrival of the Saratoga and Wasp doubled that number. Then in December, six months after the Battle of Midway, the newly constructed carriers began to arrive. The first of them was the Essex, namesake of its class. It was eight thousand tons larger and sixty-five feet longer than the Yorktown, and it boasted two improved catapults that could launch planes more quickly and with significantly less risk. Nine more Essex-class carriers followed. The second of them had been scheduled to bear the name Bonhomme Richard in honor of John Paul Jones’s flagship in the American Revolution, but after Midway its name was changed to Yorktown, which is how it happened that both CV-5 and CV-10 bore the same name. That second Yorktown, nicknamed “The Fighting Lady,” fought throughout the Pacific war and retired after a lengthy career. It is now open to visitors at Patriot’s Point in Charleston Harbor, South Carolina.

  After the ten Essex-class carriers came ten Ticonderoga-class carriers and then five Independence-class carriers. Every one of these twenty-five vessels was larger than any of the American carriers that fought at Midway, and taken together, they carried a total of more than two thousand combat aircraft. When Nimitz began the island-hopping campaign across the central Pacific in 1943, the carrier task force that accompanied the landing force grew to sixteen carriers, all of them under the command of the man who had commanded the Hornet at Midway: Captain (later Vice Admiral) Marc “Pete” Mitscher. And even as the Pacific War neared its culmination, American industry continued to churn out new weapons of war. By V-J Day in September, the United States Navy boasted an astonishing total of one hundred heavy, light, and escort carriers. It was an armada that would have been unimaginable in June 1942, and its very existence constituted a dramatic sea change not only in American history but in world history, for it evidenced the emergence of the U.S. Navy as the greatest sea force on the planet.

  In February 1945, as U.S. Marines were going ashore on Iwo Jima, America’s newest carrier, appropriately named the USS Midway, was launched at Newport News, Virginia. At 45,000 tons, it was more than twice the size of the Yorktown that had sunk at its namesake battle, and the Midway’s 1,000-foot flight deck carried an authorized complement of 137 aircraft, all of them bigger, faster, and capable of heavier payloads than anything flown by Jimmy Thach, Jack Waldron, or Wade McClusky. Fifteen years later, long after the Second World War was over, in September 1960, the United States launched the USS Enterprise. Here was another sea change, for the Enterprise, at 85,600 tons, was not only much larger, it was propelled by nuclear power, and the planes that were catapulted from its 1,100-foot-long flight deck were jets capable of delivering nuclear weapons.

  By then, the world had changed again. Only six months after the Japanese surrender on board the U.S. battleship Missouri, Winston Churchill offered a subsequently famous speech in Fulton, Missouri, in which he declared that an “iron curtain” had descended across Europe. His declaration merely recognized a historical reality: that a postwar rivalry between the Soviet Union and the West had emerged from the ashes of World War II. In that conflict the United States assumed a global leadership position dramatically different from its traditional aloofness. This time it was not a false dawn: American industrial capacity and American leadership in World War II made the United States a global power, and there would be no retreat from either the burdens or the responsibilities of that status.

  [PART FIVE]

  MISSILE WARFARE AND THE AMERICAN IMPERIUM

  Operation Praying Mantis

  The Persian Gulf

  April 18, 1988

  THE COLD WAR WAS A PERIOD OF PUTATIVE WORLD PEACE punctuated by countless small wars—and some that were not so small. From Berlin to Cuba, Korea to Vietnam, the two superpowers focused much of their national energy—and their national treasure—on an effort to gain an advantage over the other, or at least to prevent the other from gaining an advantage. The weapons grew increasingly sophisticated and terrible as both sides developed nuclear capability as well as ever-larger rocket engines to increase warhead “throw weight” in a grisly calculation of mutual deterrence.

  U.S. aircraft carriers more than doubled in size, from 45,000 tons to 96,000 tons, and the planes they carried were supersonic jets capable of carrying nuclear payloads. Submarines, too, became bigger, much quieter, and much, much deadlier. The advent of nuclear propulsion made possible extended sea-keeping capability for the nation’s huge new carriers and especially for its ballistic-missile submarines—called boomers—which gave the Navy a role in strategic deterrence. By the 1960s a “triad” of Air Force bombers, land-based missiles in silos, and Polaris missiles housed in nuclear-powered submarines was supposed to provide a deterrent so convincing that the Soviets would fear to embark on the program of world conquest that most Americans believed was their ultimate goal.

  Of all these technological changes, however, the one that marked the most dramatic milestone in the character of naval warfare was the revolution in electronic integration, communication, and missile capability developed toward the end of the twentieth century even as the Soviet Union was collapsing. That a revolution in warfare had taken place first became evident to the American public during the 1991 Gulf War when it watched with awe and admiration as U.S. ordnance fitted with television cameras took out Iraqi targets with astonishing precision. If subsequent investigation proved that not every strike was quite as precise as initially advertised, it was nevertheless a far cry from the gravity-guided bombs of World War II. Moreover, the integrated electronic infrastructure that made the delivery of these weapons possible marked a revolution as well. While a World War II naval aviator might nod in recognition at a nuclear-powered aircraft carrier even as he wondered at its size and puzzled over its propulsion plant, he would have been dumbfounded by his first look inside the combat information center on an AEGIS-equipped guided missile cruiser: a dark, air-conditioned room filled with banks of humming computers that linked air, surface, and even satellite assets together in a worldwide, real-time network.

  For much of the Cold War, the important battlegrounds were in Europe (Berlin), Asia (Korea and Vietnam), and even Latin America (Cuba), but toward the end of the twentieth century the Middle East emerged as a region of special concern for the United States and for the U.S. Navy. Though the ancient empire of Persia officially changed its name to Iran in 1935, the body of water that marked its western boundary retained its former designation, and it was in the Persian Gulf that the post–Cold War U.S. Navy made its public debut.

  The Persian Gulf is roughly twice the size of Lake Erie, and it washes the shores of eight countries: Iran, Iraq, Kuwait, Saudi Arabia, Bahrain, Qatar, Oman, and the United Arab Emirates. That, and the fact that it is the centerpiece of a region that possesses 80 percent of the world’s proven oil reserves, made it one of the busiest waterways in the world by the 1980s. Every day dozens of tankers carrying millions of barrels of oil transited the length of the Gulf to pass into the Arabian Sea through the narrow Strait of Hormuz, heading for America, Europe, and especially Japan, which in the 1980s obtained nearly two-thirds of its oil from the Persian Gulf.

  On April 18, 1988, in the last twilight days of the Cold War, the U.S. Navy provided a glimpse of the new template of naval warfare, and of America’s apparent willingness to act as a world policeman, when it fought the largest naval battle since World War II in what was known officially as Operation Praying Mantis.

  ON THE EVENING of May 17, 1987, the USS Stark, an Oliver Hazard Perry–class frigate, was cruising in what was nearly the geographical center of the Persian Gulf, ninety miles northeast of Bahrain. Poking along at three knots, the Stark’s mission was vague at best. While it was supposed to demonstrate American interest and concern in a part of the world that supplied much of the world’s oil, it was also cruising through a war zone. For more than six years, ever since Iraq had invaded Iran in an attempt to expand its own tiny coastline at its neighbo
r’s expense, Iran and Iraq had been engaged in a vicious war that showed no sign of ending. By 1987 the war had settled into a bloody stalemate and had spilled over into the waters of the Gulf, where Iraqi warplanes attacked shipping headed for Iranian ports, and Iranian gunboats attacked vessels that traded with Iraq. Although no U.S. vessels had been targeted so far, the ships of several neutral countries were being assaulted by both sides. Just that week the United States had pledged itself to begin protecting oil tankers from Kuwait, but as of May 17 it had not yet begun active patrols, and the Stark’s role was essentially one of showing the flag.

  The Stark was a relatively new ship, built less than five years before as part of a program to develop a “low-cost, no-frills warship.”1 At only 3,600 tons, it was no larger than the ABC cruisers that had heralded the “New Navy” back in 1883 and considerably smaller than Dewey’s Olympia. In theory a large number of such vessels would give the United States a greater worldwide presence than fewer larger (and therefore more expensive) warships. Because of the American concern with Soviet submarines, the Stark’s primary mission was antisubmarine warfare (ASW). It had a small landing deck and twin helicopter hangers aft, and its main battery consisted of a single seventy-six-millimeter (three-inch) rapid-fire gun amidships. It also had the ability to fire what the Navy called its standard missile (SM-1), which could be aimed at either surface or air targets and which had a range of some thirty miles. Most of the rest of the superstructure of the Stark was covered by an array of communications antenna and radar receivers: air search, surface search, and fire control systems. In conformance with its ASW mission, it also had a modern sonar system to detect and pursue Soviet submarines.*

  The Perry-class frigates had numerous critics, who derisively called them “Kmart ships,” noting that they had only one propeller, which made them both slower and less maneuverable than larger twin-screw warships. They were also relatively thin-skinned, having only five-eighths of an inch of aluminum alloy between the living spaces and the sea, and unlike Ericsson’s Monitor, they had almost no armor. When operating beyond the range of friendly air cover, they could be vulnerable to air attack. They were not defenseless, however. The Stark could fire off clouds of aluminized plastic confetti, known as chaff, to confuse the radar of inbound missiles. And atop the helicopter hanger at the stern was an odd-looking contraption: a radar dome shaped like a giant beehive with a bundle of six gun barrels poking out of it. It was a Phalanx close-in weapons system (the acronym was CIWS, but everyone pronounced it “C-WIZ”): a self-aiming, automated Gatling gun capable of throwing up a virtual wall of twenty-millimeter depleted-uranium rounds at the rate of three thousand per minute. Though useful only at short range, its purpose was to shoot down incoming missiles.

  The Oliver Hazard Perry-class frigate USS Stark is shown soon after its commissioning in 1982. The small white beehive-shaped object above her twin helicopter hangers is the CIWS—the automated Gatling gun designed to shoot down incoming missiles. Note the extensive antennae forward. (U.S. Navy)

  At a few minutes after 8:00 P.M. on that May 17, Lieutenant Basil Moncrief, who had the duty as tactical action officer (TAO) in the Stark’s combat information center (CIC), received a report from an airborne warning and control system (AWACS) airplane—essentially a flying radar station— that an Iraqi F-1 Mirage fighter had departed Shaibah Military Airport in southern Iraq and was “feet wet” over the Gulf, flying southward toward the Stark’s position. By itself, the report did not set off any alarms. Ever since the outbreak of the Iran-Iraq war six years earlier, there had been a lot of air traffic over the Gulf, most of it Iraqi. Almost routinely, Iraqi fighters and attack planes flew southward down the center of the Gulf— which Americans had begun to call “Mirage Alley”—then turned east toward the coast of Iran to launch their missiles in the general direction of Iran, or at shipping that was headed for Iran, before streaking home again. Just that morning an Iraqi jet had fired missiles into a Cypriot tanker in an Iranian port. By itself, therefore, the information that an Iraqi Mirage jet was flying south down the Gulf was unremarkable.

  The Stark’s air search radar picked up the Iraqi plane at two hundred miles; it was keeping to the western side of the Gulf, well out of Iranian air space, and it was closing on the American frigate. At about 9:00 the Stark’s captain, a forty-four-year-old, sandy-haired career officer named Glenn Brindel, asked Moncrief for an update. The plane was then about seventy miles out and still closing. The petty officer manning the radar system asked if he should generate a standard warning message, but Moncrief hesitated. “No,” he said. “Wait.” During the past few months the Stark had experienced a number of close fly-bys, and he suspected that this was simply one more. Five minutes later, with the Iraqi jet less than fifty miles out, it turned sharply toward the Stark. Moncrief alerted Brindel, who directed Moncrief to send out a message on the international air distress frequency demanding identification: “Unknown aircraft, this is U.S. Navy warship on your 078 for twelve miles. Request you identify yourself.”2

  Even as this message hit the airwaves, the Iraqi pilot fired an Exocet AM39 air-to-surface missile. Launched at two thousand feet, the missile dropped quickly to sea level and then began streaking toward the Stark, only eight feet above the surface, at five hundred miles an hour. Within seconds, the Iraqi pilot fired a second missile, then turned abruptly northward and headed for home. The SPS-49 radar on the Stark did not detect the separation of the Exocet from the Mirage. If it had, Brindel could have ordered the deployment of the chaff or CIWS systems. The first notice of approaching disaster came not from the sophisticated sensors but from a lookout on the bridge, who spotted the Exocet when it was only a mile away, which gave the ship about four seconds’ warning. A shout from the lookout led Brindel to order the Stark hard to starboard in order to unmask the CIWS system astern.3

  Too late. At 9:09 the first missile slammed into the Stark’s port side just below the bridge. The warhead did not detonate, but it tore a ten-by-fifteen-foot hole in the ship’s side, then disintegrated into a hundred pieces, the largest of which ripped through the crew’s quarters, the ship’s barber shop, and post office and lodged against the starboard side. The second missile struck thirty seconds later, and its warhead did explode, igniting fires that spread almost instantly through the crew’s quarters. Seven men were thrown into the sea by the impact. Resting in the crew’s quarters near where the first missile hit, Petty Officer Michael O’Keefe was thrown from his bunk onto the deck. Jumping to his feet, he dashed to the main hatch and pulled it open only to encounter a giant fireball. “That’s when I knew we were in real trouble,” he said later.4

  Brindel ordered counterflooding on the starboard side to avoid capsizing and to keep the huge hole on the ship’s port side above the waterline. The damage control teams performed heroically, fighting the fires all night, joined later by teams from the guided missile destroyers USS Wad-dell and USS Conyngham. The fires were so hot (eighteen hundred degrees) they melted the aluminum alloy of the ship’s superstructure; water sprayed onto the fires turned into superheated steam that scalded the firefighters. A shortage of oxygen canisters, which allowed firefighters to breathe amid the heavy smoke, also retarded the crew’s firefighting efforts. For several hours it was problematic whether they could keep the ship afloat. Not until the afternoon of the next day was it evident that the Stark would survive. The fire in the combat information center was not quenched until 5:00 P.M., nineteen hours after the attack. Assisted by a salvage tug, the Stark limped into Bahrain with thirty-seven dead on board.5

  The Stark lists alarmingly to port after being struck by two Exocet air-to-surface missiles on May 17, 1987. Heroic damage control saved the ship from going down. (U.S. Navy)

  In keeping with the traditions of the sea, Brindel lost his job. A Navy investigation concluded that he had “failed to provide combat oriented leadership,” and he was forced to resign. Many, both in and out of the Navy, acknowledged that the rules of engageme
nt (ROE) under which Brindel had to operate had severely limited his options. Those rules authorized him to fight back “whenever hostile intent or a hostile act occurs.” But “hostile intent” is impossible to know, and due to the failure of the ship’s SPS-49 radar, it was not evident that a “hostile act” had occurred until four seconds before the missile struck, when the forward lookout shouted a warning. Brindel’s critics suggested that he should have put the chaff and CIWS systems into automatic mode, or at least challenged the approaching fighter sooner than he did. His defenders insisted that if he had shot down the Mirage before it launched the missiles, he would have been cashiered for being too quick on the trigger. Whatever the merits of either argument, it is the merciless law of the sea that a captain accept responsibility for his ship’s failure or success, and Brindel was no exception. Lieutenant Moncrief was also forced to resign.6

  The Iraqis explained away the incident as a matter of mistaken identity and pilot error, which it almost certainly was, for Iraq had nothing to gain by alienating the United States, which was supporting its war against Iran. If some Americans doubted the sincerity of Iraq’s apology, the Reagan administration accepted it because it wanted to maintain its pro-Iraqi stance. The disaster did provoke sharp questions from Congress and the press. The Senate voted ninety-one to five to delay the implementation of the American commitment to escort Kuwaiti tankers in the Gulf until the Reagan administration clarified its policy. In a rare criticism of his own party, Republican Senator Robert Dole of Kansas declared bluntly, “We need to rethink exactly what we are doing in the Persian Gulf.” More pointedly, the New York Times editorialized that “the Administration . . . had no business sending ships sailing into harm’s way without having thought [it] through.” And Newsweek chimed in with an article entitled “A Questionable Policy,” which asked, “What are the administration’s goals in the gulf?”7