The United States would discover that there would be little gratitude, even from its traditional allies, for its new assumption of authority as the world’s cop.
EPILOGUE
Naval Battles and the Twenty-first Century
The five naval battles described in this volume highlight the dramatically changed roles played by the men (and, more recently, women) who commanded the ships and operated the weapons of the U.S. Navy over the past two hundred years. In 1813, when Oliver Hazard Perry was desperate for manpower, he cared little about the education or training of his prospective recruits—he wanted bodies. He eagerly accepted any able-bodied souls, including soldiers and militiamen, who were willing to abide the confined quarters, the fierce discipline, and the dangerous work aboard Navy warships. What he needed was the brute muscle necessary to manhandle the guns over the decks, to wind up the anchors, or to haul on whatever rope was pointed out to them by the sailing masters.
Fifty years later in Hampton Roads, at least some crewmen on both the Virginia and the Monitor had to understand and maintain the steam engines, but most of the crew was assigned to work the guns, and once again any soldier who volunteered was eagerly accepted. Steam moved the ironclads around the roadstead (albeit rather slowly), but ships— even ironclad ships—were still essentially floating platforms for heavy guns.
By 1898, when Dewey steamed into Manila Bay, the engine plants had become more complex and much more efficient; the range of the naval artillery had expanded from one to several miles, and men needed more experience and training to make the ships function efficiently. Even so, whatever expertise might be needed to maintain the engines or point the guns could still be learned on board. Moreover, Dewey’s ships, like those of most late-nineteenth-century navies, had a large number of international crewmen on board, few of whom had any real training as sailors, and many of whom could not even read or write English.
A bigger sea change took place in the forty-four years between Manila Bay and Midway. While Dewey’s gunners aimed their ordnance as best they could at targets two and a half miles away (and missed most of the time), at Midway the ordnance was flown out to a target nearly two hundred miles away by highly trained Navy pilots, most of whom were officers. Brute labor was still needed on board America’s carriers—the planes had to be pushed from place to place, and the bombs and torpedoes were hauled out by hand trucks to be attached to the planes. But it was becoming increasingly evident that specialized training was essential to operational success, not only to fly the planes but to operate the radar systems, man the radio nets, and exercise effective damage control. The training necessary to produce such men was extensive. Although airplanes could be made relatively quickly, especially once America’s astonishing industrial capacity reached its potential, the training of a carrier pilot took time. Indeed, one of the reasons that the U.S. Navy carrier force was able to assert itself so dramatically over its Japanese foe after Midway was that the United States sent its best pilots stateside to train more pilots while Japan tended to keep its best pilots on the front line, and as a result, Japan soon ran out of skilled pilots altogether. The skill and training of the crew, even more than the increased sophistication of the weapons systems, was the key element of naval success.
By the time of Praying Mantis in 1988 (another forty-six years later) the entire crew on America’s combat warships, officers and enlisted alike, was composed of specially trained and often highly educated personnel. Virtually all of the men on board the Wainwright, as well as the other ships of the Persian Gulf force, had worked their way through a number of service schools in order to develop the expertise necessary to operate the array of sophisticated electronic gadgetry in the ship’s combat information center. One dramatic element of the sea change in naval warfare, therefore, was the specialized training and education of the officer corps, and more particularly the enlisted force, that manned the ships.*
In addition to that, however, the five naval battles profiled here also reflect the dramatic changes in America’s conception of itself as a nation and its proper role in the world. These changes were both multidimensional and interconnected. Just as the two-masted brigs of Perry’s squadron on Lake Erie gave way first to ironclad steamships, then to seagoing battleships, aircraft carriers, and finally highly technical missile warfare, so too did the dominant concern of Americans about the security of the frontier give way to a passionate confrontation over the issue of national union, then to debates about overseas empire, international involvement and alliances, and finally the responsibilities of superpower status. They mark, in short, milestones in national culture and outlook as well as technology and training.
The naval battles discussed here did not cause these changes. Still, at some level, the national policy of any era of American history depends in part on the capability of the nation’s military arsenal, as well as its intentions, good or bad. What a nation decides to do depends very much on what it can do. The United States decided not to go to war with Spain in 1873 in the wake of the Virginius affair partly because it lacked the means to do so; similarly, fifteen years later after the destruction of the Maine, it did go to war in part because it could. Technology and resources are therefore integral elements in national policy planning and execution. At no time is that more evident than in the early years of the twenty-first century, when America’s military technology has become globally dominant.
In 1648, at the end of the Thirty Years’ War, the exhausted nations of Europe signed an agreement—the Treaty of Westphalia—in which they essentially agreed to coexist with one another. That agreement established the nation-state system in which a number of nations, each with a sovereign government, agreed to occupy the planet together. It did not abolish war—war, it seems, is a permanent characteristic of the human condition—but it rationalized war to the extent that governments exercised control over national armies and employed them to compete with one another for territory, trade, or some other tangible advantage. Occasionally one nation or another—one person or another—would attempt to overwhelm its neighbors and become dominant (Napoleon and Hitler being the obvious examples), but in every case the nation-state system survived. In time, a kind of balance of national power prevented any fundamental challenge to this system.
Then only months after Operation Praying Mantis, the world balance of power not only shifted tracks but fell completely off the rails when the Soviet Union, strained literally to the breaking point by forty years of Cold War rivalry, began to implode, starting a process that within a few years caused it to collapse entirely, dissolving eventually into its constituent parts. It was an astonishing development.* For nearly half a century the U.S. military, including the Navy, had measured itself against the vaunted Soviet juggernaut. During the 1980s the Reagan administration had poured billions of dollars into an effort to build a six-hundred-ship navy that could support a “Maritime Strategy,” the principal goal of which was to confront the Soviet Navy on its own doorstep. This program was still under way when the Soviet Union collapsed.1
The iconic moment in this historic phenomenon was the fall of the Berlin Wall on November 9, 1989. The world watched live as television cameras recorded the historic image of citizens from East and West Berlin hacking at the wall with hammers and crowbars, literally tearing down the most widely recognized symbol of the Cold War. But five months before that incredible scene another iconic moment, little noted at the time, took place when, in recognition of the thaw in U.S.-Soviet relations, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Admiral William Crowe, accepted an invitation to visit the new flagship of the Soviet Navy, the 45,000-ton Kirov. As Crowe reached the deck of the giant Kirov, the Soviet navy band struck up “The Star-Spangled Banner” and an American flag broke out overhead. “Suddenly the weight of the moment swept over me,” Crowe recalled. “Truly we were in the midst of a sea change.”2
The collapse of the Soviet Union marked a watershed moment not only in the history of the United
States but in the history of the world. If it did not immediately supplant the nation-state system established at Westphalia nearly three and a half centuries earlier, it at least produced what President George H. W. Bush called a “new world order.” In that new order, the United States emerged as the single dominant military power on the globe. Some Americans thought the time had come for the United States to shoulder the responsibility of world management, for it certainly had the military power to do so. The United States stood alone as the one great superpower on earth. The U.S. Navy, too, stood alone: unchallenged, and indeed unchallengeable, as master of the world’s oceans. By the end of the century, a single U.S. Navy carrier battle group and its embarked air wing carried more potential firepower than the rest of the world’s navies combined. An article in the Washington Post in 2003 declared unequivocally that “all other nations have conceded the seas to the United States. . . . The naval arms race—a principal aspect of great power politics for centuries— is over.” More than Rome at its height or Victorian Britain at its peak, the United States had emerged as a power of unprecedented supremacy. It had become arbiter mundi, the power of the world—an astonishing circumstance for a republic that a mere nine score years before had strained its resources to build two twenty-gun brigs on Lake Erie.3
Though the United States stood unchallenged as the dominant economic and military power in the world, it also stood at a crossroads, because the part it would play in these new circumstances had not yet been decided. So much thought, energy, and money had been poured into the forty-five-year struggle with the Soviets that relatively few had considered the character of U.S. policy in a post–Cold War world. Over the next dozen years, however, two wars in Iraq would illuminate the possible alternatives. In the first of them, the United States led an international coalition to repel aggression and restore order to the Persian Gulf region after an Iraqi invasion of Kuwait; in the second, a dozen years later, it chose a different path, asserting that its unchallenged military power and moral certainty gave it the right to overthrow the government of Iraq and attempt to remake the Middle East in its own image. Rather than two chapters of a single conflict, America’s wars in Iraq marked distinct and dramatic alternatives for the United States in the post–Cold War era.
As if to prove that no good deed goes unpunished, Saddam Hussein rewarded Kuwait for the staunch support it had provided him during the war with Iran by invading it in August 1990. If Hussein could not extend Iraq’s coastline at the expense of Iran, he would do so at the expense of the smaller and weaker Kuwait. Hussein very likely assumed that the United States would benignly accept Iraq’s rapid conquest of what he proclaimed to be “Iraq’s nineteenth province.” After all, not only had the George H. W. Bush administration continued to supply Iraq with arms during and after its war with Iran, it had signaled through diplomatic channels that the United States had “no opinion” on conflicts between Arab states and would therefore have no problem with an “adjustment” of the Iraq-Kuwait border. From the beginning, however, American policy in the Gulf had been a product less of genuine support for Iraq than of opposition to Iran because of lingering bitterness over the hostage crisis. To most Americans, Iraq’s invasion of Kuwait looked much like the kind of naked aggression that Hitler had inflicted on Poland in 1939, or the North Koreans on South Korea in 1950. Perceiving an opportunity to reassert American leadership as well as his own political fortunes, Bush declared that the Iraqi conquest of Kuwait “will not stand,” and he successfully mobilized both domestic and international support for a war to repel the Iraqi invaders from Kuwait.4
That war, officially Operation Desert Storm, but subsequently called the First Gulf War or Gulf War I, was an astounding success. President Bush assembled an international coalition that included not only America’s traditional NATO allies but also (and crucially) a number of Arab nations, and he secured at least benign acceptance by Russia, no longer the Soviet Union. He sought and received the backing of both the U.S. Congress and the United Nations. Then he assembled the military forces that drove the Iraqi army out of Kuwait.
Though a genuine international coalition won the victory in Iraq, American money, American technology, and American sea lift capability were keys to victory. During the buildup phase (Operation Desert Shield), the United States moved more than half a million people and ten million tons of supplies to the Gulf. This logistic phenomenon could not have been achieved without American sealift capability. It took more than a thousand of the Air Force’s largest transport planes to match the tonnage capacity of a single U.S. Navy transport ship, and in the end, 95 percent of all the cargo used to support the war came by sea. It was, as one commentator noted, “equivalent to moving the entire city of Atlanta—its people and all their food, cars, and other possessions—to the Middle East.”5
Then, after this lengthy buildup, the United States applied overwhelming force to achieve a decisive result. The use of overwhelming force—subsequently labeled the Powell Doctrine after General Colin Powell, chairman of the Joint Chiefs—was in part a reaction to the Army’s frustration with the incremental approach used in Vietnam during the 1960s and ’70s. U.S. ground forces spearheaded the attack that smashed Saddam Hussein’s military, including its much-vaunted Republican Guard, and inflicted an estimated one hundred thousand deaths on the Iraqis, all at an astonishingly modest cost to the United States and its allies. Though U.S. Marines played an important role in the ground war, there were no naval battles in Gulf War I because Iraq had no force that could even pretend to contest the seas with the powerful U.S. Navy. The Navy was, however, a full partner in the air war that preceded the ground attack.
Two elements of that air war deserve mention here because they illuminate the evolving character of naval warfare at the end of the twentieth century. The first of these (indeed, the dominant image that emerged from Gulf War I) was the dramatic success of so-called smart bombs. Though coalition forces expended hundreds of tons of conventional bombs on the Iraqi front lines in Kuwait, the unchallenged media star of the air war was the new technology that featured the use of laser-guided ordnance. During the air bombardment of Baghdad that preceded the ground attack, the United States unveiled the newest generation of precision ordnance. The first phase of that air assault was dominated by U.S. Air Force radar-resistant “stealth” airplanes and sea-launched cruise missiles.* Both of these new technologies allowed the United States to put ordnance on target without serious risk to American pilots.
One key was the increased range of the Navy’s new generation of missiles. The SM-1 standard missile used in Praying Mantis had a range of thirty miles, and the ship-to-ship Harpoon missile had a range of fifty-six miles, but the ship-to-ground Tomahawk Land Attack Missile (TLAM) used in Desert Storm carried its thousand-pound warhead up to seven hundred miles, which allowed U.S. Navy ships well out in the Persian Gulf to attack targets in downtown Baghdad. The Tomahawk also demonstrated an unprecedented accuracy for an unpiloted weapon thanks in large part to a terrain-contour guidance system (TERCOM) that allowed the missile’s internal computer to match the signals it received from its active radar to a three-dimensional map built into its computer memory so that it could guide itself (theoretically, at least) to within eighteen meters of a predetermined target. The Navy fired some 282 Tomahawks into Iraq during Desert Storm, 170 of them in the first two days of the war.6 At a million dollars a shot, it was a profligate use of ordnance, but the Tomahawks allowed the United States to strike Iraqi targets in daytime without risking a pilot, and they quickly gained a reputation for astonishing accuracy. On one occasion, an American TV reporter was giving a live report from downtown Baghdad when both he and his viewing audience were startled by a Navy Tomahawk missile as it flew past him down one of Baghdad’s streets en route to its preassigned target.
Air-launched ordnance was, if anything, even more impressive. Though Air Force planes carried the lion’s share of the air war, U.S. Navy pilots flew a total of 18,303 sorties during
Desert Storm, with Marines flying another 10,683.7 Tiny television cameras in the noses of the projectiles they delivered allowed Americans in their living rooms to ride the ordnance all the way to the target—like Slim Pickens in Dr. Strangelove—watching the target expand on their viewing screens until it disappeared in a blur of visual static. Since the Pentagon had to approve each film clip before it could be shown publicly, only the most accurate attacks made it to the airways, and the overwhelming impression was that American weapons had become infallible. A Saturday Night Live skit portrayed a U.S. smart bomb pursuing Saddam Hussein down a hallway and into a bathroom, where it knocked on the door. If U.S. bombs were not quite as smart as that, they nevertheless demonstrated a dramatic change in the nature of warfare and proved again that the United States was at least a full generation ahead of the rest of the world in the sophistication of its weapons systems.
The second element of the air war that illuminated the continuing evolution of warfare was the tight control that the military planners placed on the warriors who deployed and triggered these weapons. The targets of the Tomahawk missiles fired from Navy warships in the Persian Gulf were determined not on board those warships but at Central Command (CENTCOM) in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, or even in Washington. Likewise, many of the pilots who flew their F/A-18s, A-6s, or A-7s from carriers in the Red Sea as well as the Persian Gulf felt restricted by the very specific and precise targeting instructions they received. Unlike the Battle of Midway, where Jack Waldron and Wade McClusky used a kind of seat-of-the-pants intuition to locate the Japanese carrier force, the pilots in Gulf War I received detailed instructions concerning their launch time, flight path, ordnance package, target selection, and virtually every other aspect of the operation. The air tasking order (ATO) for each day’s air operations ranged from three hundred to six hundred pages, and because transmission of such a document by electronic means would have choked the fleet’s capacity, the five- or six-pound orders had to be flown out to the carriers by helicopter. Though President Bush and his advisers sought to avoid involving themselves in the conduct of the war, Gulf War I nevertheless demonstrated that decision making in naval warfare continued to move up the chain of command from individual ship or unit commanders to staff officers and technocrats hundreds or even thousands of miles away.8
Decision at Sea Page 35