While I understand the reasoning behind the decisions, I would like to make a few points
Make away
Also, I'm sorry to have missed this when it was first posted, I'm not always as good at keeping up with my own thread as I ought to be. Thanks for coming back with a follow-up.
having four carriers per fleet means that you can sustain a deployment of three (of eight total) at a time. If you've got one in the North Pacific and one in the North Atlantic/Mediterranean, then you've got one for the rest of the entire world. The fleet isn't yet all nuclear, so it takes time for that third carrier to get anywhere, and is less capable than we are thinking of.
The McGoverners' plan is to run them the way the British and French ran their big-deck carriers since the early Fifties (and as the RN plans to run the QEs when
Prince of Wales gets done with sea trials in the fullness of time) which is to say the one-off-one-on model. In this period the programmed deployments for carriers aside from wrap-up in SE Asia (taking into account fleet exercises and such) were
relatively static, and indeed tended to be relatively conservative in a sense I'll expand on below. In those days the USN ran a rule-of-three rotation cycle, and I'll get into some of the reasoning for that just below. Gerry Ford, old Navy hand that he was, brought that up in a speech IIRC to the National Chamber of Commerce during the '72 presidential campaign that made it into a now-PDF collection of Republican National Committee campaign materials and oppo research that's ended up online as part of somebody's (I forget who but can probably track it down) special collection of campaign literature for that year.
In practical terms one-off-one-on may affect the scheduling/staggering of drawdown, also of
Nimitzes entering service, since the two significant known effects on that coming up in the course of the Seventies would be Connie's fourteen-month combo deep refit and CV conversion (getting the ASW squadrons and F-14s aboard), particularly if there are any OTL-like complications that hopefully can be butterflied, and the
Kennedy's twelve-month scheduled refit in IIRC '78, so around the time the
Eisenhower would enter service. Otherwise they plan to run eight ships to generate four, but basically just the four outside of general war with Moscow, tied thereby to the whole "de-emphasizing carriers as instruments of power projection" approach. And a variety of things affect what kind of rotation systems navies use, first and foremost institutional and governing-party politics/geostrategy, but also personnel housing and benefits systems, health-and-safety regs about frequency of in-port refits and systems checks or limits on afloat duty for personnel, supplies of replacement parts and fuel oil, etc. But probably the most important is the interplay between civilian and uniformed conceptions about "what is this particular navy's carrier fleet really for when it comes down to it?"
(On a sidebar, it wasn't a good era in which to outrun one's ASW screen unless things were
really calm in that particular region so task groups tended to run at the speed of their escorts at all times, regardless of power generation, although at the time things seemed to be getting a little more nuclear rather than less, in case of certain emergencies, with more CGNs being built and taken into service. Few military resources, other than the terrible irony of nuclear weapons, are really as rapid in their response as politicians would often like them to be.)
One thing it's useful to remember is the post-Vietnam strategic contours for carrier operations, which came from inside the USN as well as from civilian decision-makers, sometimes as much or more from inside the uniformed service. And the time frame for that distinctively "post-Vietnam" model really stretches from the last years
of the conflict in Southeast Asia, probably about 1970 or so, on to the hostage crisis in Tehran when the model was set aside in order to plan and generate a force of two, sometimes three, carrier groups in the northern Indian Ocean for most of the duration of those 444 days.
The distinctively "post-Vietnam" model called for a two-and-two standard for deployment. In terms of normal running that meant two carriers forward deployed in the Mediterranean, and two in the Pacific, with one expressly deployed towards Northeast Asia (Japan and the Korean peninsula) to give those allies a sense of US commitment to their mutual defense, and one on a kind of movable feast of exercises from the Sea of Japan down through Okinawa and the Philippines to the Gulf of Thailand. While carrier ops off Vietnam were still a consideration, of course that formed its own category and a prime mover for the deployment and refit/reconstitution cycles elsewhere. But as that eased off after very early 1973, two-and-two became the norm. Which meant the USN wanted at least 12 ships in active service because they ran a rule-of-three rotation. Partly out of habit, partly because working to that schedule - indeed insisting on it - guaranteed that they had some wartime loss-absorption capability baked into the active fleet.
In late '73/early '74, in the face of Jim Schlesinger insisting that he wanted capability provided inside the stringent budget guidelines of the time (stringent bc late-period Nixon and especially Ford, an orthodox budgeteer to his fingertips, wanted tight budgets as an anti-inflationary measure), the Navy sat down and calculated what it saw as its fundamental needs. They decided their baseline, if cuts came, was ten carriers, which they'd operate on the 2.5:1 principle to generate the two-and-two. But that forward power projection wasn't the real, principal driver for what the admirals saw as needs and duties. They set the base at ten because they believed at that number, by "swinging" carriers out of the Pacific through the Panama Canal to the North Atlantic, they could maintain sea control against Soviet subs in wartime. (That was the model for a lot of conventional forces then, based on the unrealistic model of fighting a conventional war in Europe for at least 90-120 days, an unrealistic model established precisely to safeguard force levels against post-Vietnam cuts. Now that's not
just malice, although really every bureaucratic life-form seeks sustenance and survival on the terms that prove necessary. They believed it was important to have a metric they could use to fend off demands for cuts, and some senior four-stars genuinely believed that keeping only short-term stocks for a European conflict would only encourage escalation to all-out nuclear release.)
So their force model had very little to do with any constant and varied demands for global power projection. It was focused, almost laser-like in Southeast Asia's wake, on maintaining (and improving on, they wanted
growth, but towards a particular goal) the necessary forces to conduct a shooting war with the Soviets when called on. Indeed Tom Moorer made proposals to "de-couple" the standard two-and-two taskings so the carriers could be more mobile. Ostensibly this was to make them more flexible as power-projection tools, and certainly it was to make them more available for major NATO and Pacific Rim-region exercises. But in particular Moorer wanted it done as part of his campaign to
prevent the Nixon and Ford administrations from engaging in gunboat diplomacy in the Middle East. Moorer and a number of other senior four-stars saw a creeping Nixon-era path to US military involvement in the region as a logistical and political nightmare. Also Moorer very much did not want the US to become a strategic backstop for the Israelis, who he disliked intensely: some of that may have been part of the garden-variety prejudices of a Deep South kid who grew up in the Twenties and Thirties, but a lot of it was very definitely to do with the bloody and deliberate attack on the USS
Liberty during the Six-Day War. So not only were power-porjection metrics mostly a nicety to keep Dick and Henry from getting involved in day-to-day naval affairs, to senior admirals they sometimes appeared as an active hindrance to force availability and preparation for a shooting war with the Reds.
The change in those conditions begins in part under the Carter administration, as folks we could identify as "proto-neocons" like Zbig Brzezinski and his deputy David Aaron looked for discrete regional locales where the US could throw its weight around in order to dispell post-fall-of-Saigon questions about American great-power reliability. And they did get task groups to make watchful-eye passes of the Horn of Africa and a few other places in the course of the administration. But most of those were fended off by other senior folks who saw that as counterproductive.
The real change when it came was three-fold. Part of it was practical, as the crisis in Iran introduced a third area - the Persian Gulf - besides the Med and northeast Asia, where the US might need duty-station carriers. The second was St. Ronald's being enamored with the imagery of Teddy Roosevelt, and with carrier task groups as "big sticks" that could be waved at micro and macro strategic targets where a New Right Republican administration wanted to exert US leverage (first among them the Gulf of Sidra, as part of a campaign to destabilize and displace the Gaddafi regime, secondarily the Straits of Hormuz
and the Caribbean because Castro remained a
bete noire for a lot of senior Reagan administration folk.)
The third was the arrival of John Lehman at the Department of the Navy. Lehman of course was profoundly - a number of DoD colleagues, some superiors, and occasional uniformed officers believed, excessively - fixated on aircraft carriers as the arbiters of naval power. Some of this was Lehman's romanticized reading of Mahan. Some of it was good, hard, cold bureaucratic calculation, much of the kind Curtis LeMay and Tom Power used as they bootstrapped what became SIOP to vastly increase the size and politico-bureaucratic weight of SAC itself and the Air Force more broadly. Building an American sub fleet that could overmatch the Soviets just bought you one sub at a time, with fairly small crews (personnel costs swinging heavy bureaucratic lumber in a volunteer military, of course.) But carrier groups got you a Big Damn Ship with five thousand or more souls aboard, plus an airwing of just under a hundred multifarious aircraft, plus the escort group. So the more carrier groups you had, you exponentially increased the politico-bureaucratic weight of the Navy
among the Cold War services. But Lehman overplayed his hand on the Murmansk Option (trying to design strategies for steaming carriers up to the Kola Peninsula and bombarding Northern Fleet home bases, which Lehman's critics argued would yield a Light Brigade-like result) and by rubbing colleagues the wrong way too often. So the fleet topped out in the mid-teens, then drew back in the Nineties with post-Cold War drawdowns.
if they are retiring all of the Essexes, then CVT-16 Lexington is leaving the fleet too (Lexington's continued service as the training carrier is one of the reasons why Oriskany wasn't scrapped until late - she was kept as a spare parts hulk). The continued existence of a training carrier reduces the workload on the rest of the fleet, and improves readiness. IF the fleet is being drawn down to the degree you are planning, then Lexington likely gets replaced with one of the Forrestals (whichever one is in the best shape at the time, probably Independence). She wouldn't be configured as a fleet carrier, but in the event of war, she could be used to help surge for the rest of the fleet.
I'll come back around to the
Forrestals just below, just to keep topic matter sorted. But like you I very much think the Navy not only gets a new training carrier at this point (a given ITTL) but that the worst case scenario is at least a one-for-one with, perhaps, the
Hancock (which seems to have been the
Essex-class in the best shape in '73), but actually quite possibly either
Midway or
Coral Sea. The Navy wants a
dedicated high-readiness (all things being relative) Reserve Fleet role for the
Forrestals, so that they can come back in as loss replacements in the event of a major conflict with the Soviets. The
technical gear on the
Midways is getting to be old-hat already at that point but the large deck offers a better approximation for modern "supercarrier" ops than another
Essex-class. If it comes to being a matter on the technological merits (e.g. which particular types of training they want to get done on the CVT) I suspect they take
Forrestal herself, she's been refitted extensively since The Fire (minor cool fact: my father knew people who put that fire out), and it saves
Forrestals in even better shape for war reserve (and the fact several of them would continue in service into the decade, as
Nimitz replaces Sarah (which I've been aboard back in her Mayport days, lovely ship),
Eisenhower replaces
Independence, and CVN-70 [ITTL christened
George Washington in honor of the Bicentennial] replaces
Ranger, or at least is
slated to. Even the Ike ->
Independence replacement is subject to who wins the '76 election and geopolitical circumstances.)
Now, of course, what Holloway among others is counting on is the potential for any among this succession of events:
- McGovern loses his reelection bid and a GOP administration augments the fleet right away (especially since the Virginia-class CGNs and Spru-cans are being built at the time, easy enough to up the orders) as USS Dwight D. Eisenhower becomes an addition rather than a replacement and the fleet carries on from there, but towards phasing out Forrestals to avoid spending money on refits that could be spent on new ships of various classes. Plus the USN fixes in place the McGoverners' plans for those six CVSes as a useful addition for convoy protection/sea control.
- McGovern somehow wins reelection but a combination of congressional pressure and changing geopolitical circumstances cause at least CVN-70 to reinforce-not-replace, so that you're at least up to nine hulls in the water plus the CVSes, and then rebuild from there. Basically a slow-burn version of the bullet point above. If a major crisis provoked it, the senior-most McGoverners seem willing to listen.
- Even in Holloway's worst-case scenario, after 1980 you get a new administration seemingly guaranteed (either GOP or less-McGovernite Democrats) to spend more on defense, who work quickly to rectify carrier numbers, and again you still get the Forrestals out before refit in favor of new ships, plus the CVSes in for support. So despite what many internal and external USN observers would call a hollow-force period for carriers, the long-term prognosis remains good.
I would also not be so fast to conflate the change over in the RN from power project to be the result of technology change. It was US foreign and military policy to push our allies in Europe and in the western Pacific to pick up more of the surface and green water ASW load, while the US retained the blue water, and strike missions. For the RN, this came at the same time as the final draw-downs following the loss of the East-of-Suez mission, and gave them something to focus on.
Oh, goodness no the RN change wasn't a technological issue. As a sidebar I don't know that the green-water label fits the methods or the map of the RN that well, at least through the end of the Cold War. Given the centrality of the GIUK Gap to RN strategy, operational art, and procurement, and the emergent secondary issue of maintaining some regional presence in the South Atlantic once security of the Falklands became a live issue, the late-Cold War RN's more of an interesting example of a blue-water fleet subsisting without big-deck carriers, on the strength of advanced ASW and SSNs. If anything the
Marine Nationale, despite keeping a pair of fleet carriers late into the Nineties, was more of a green-water force in a strictly operational sense in those days, and they've adopted more "blue-water" approaches to the use of their singleton carrier in the post-9/11 world. (It was more useful for them to be a green-water force - heavy into policing the
francophonie, strategically standoffish from the US - in those days, and more recently better to go blue-water in order to sit at the same conference table as Washington. As usual the French are really very good at the political aspects of strategy.) Likewise most other European NATO fleets focused on the North Sea/Baltic and Mediterranean. Like most decisions about strategy it was a mixture of individual canniness aggregated through various elected politicians, uniformed officers, and bureaucratic directors/analysts, along with clashes of ideology, struggles between powerful bureaucratic lifeforms (both inter-service and between the MoD and the almighty Treasury), what Herbert Simon so aptly called "bounded rationality" (decision-making based on good-enough outcomes, the limits imposed by available information, and the lure of past experience that may or may not still be applicable.) Though I would highlight each of these issues, mostly because talking about the Brits in general and the RN in particular is always fun
:
- The central strategic issue when these decisions were made was not a restructuring of operational priorities between the USN and the RN, at least not with the RN specifically. The uniformed US Navy liked and respected the RN, saw them as sober professionals who still in the Sixties had quite a large surface-fleet for a (relatively) declining power, plus SSNs and at that point Polaris waiting to come on line. During Black September in Jordan in 1970, and again during OTL's Yom Kippur War and 1974 Cyprus crisis, US admirals appreciated the existence of at least one British carrier and rather wished London had hung on to two. Like France's carriers that was understood to be a small contribution in the grand scheme of things but a useful one the Brits were qualified to provide. But the essential, the root strategic issue was Vietnam, and the really tremendous pressure the Johnson administration put on the Wilson government(s) to commit British forces in Vietnam. McGeorge Bundy talked actively and shall we say robustly in memos about "breaking sterling" if London didn't pony up for 'Nam, and he wasn't alone either in the opinion or his views about how to strongarm the UK.
- As a result, two hunches - we can call them that without the implication of disapproval, they were calculated gut decisions based on what British decision-makers knew of the circumstances - dovetailed in the making of UK defen(c)e policy at the time. One was that the UK needed to placate the US in a variety of ways so as to turn down the heat on the Vietnam question. The other - which turned out to be wrong but that wasn't clear at the time - was that it would be cheaper to buy American on a number of significant defense procurement projects than to carry through with domestic British solutions (hi, TSR-2!)
- Into that comes an issue of what we might call bureaucratic ecology, or biology (on my line that sufficiently complex bureaucratic entities are essentially life-forms.) That would be the really quite extraordinary place the Treasury has in the structure of the British state. In a country whose power elite was a mixture of gentrified rentiers and extraordinarily powerful bankers (and also what we'd now call financial-services types), the currency was king, and Her Majesty's Treasury were and are high priests of sterling. Sterling was in crisis at the time too, as Sunny Jim Callaghan at Number Eleven resolutely refused to take the political fall for devaluation, which made the Bretton Woods-era currency crunch that much worse until Wilson turfed out Callaghan and put in Roy Jenkins, who devalued and got on with trying to fix the mess. That put a lot of internal pressure on the Treasury, who then visited that pressure on all of what we could call the productive ministries of state, the folks who performed the various duties of a complex nation-state besides managing the money. It also put pressure on HMT's model of operations, what has been and still is HMT's model of operations for probably a century and a half: to alternately splash out and withhold funding for other ministries' projects, in the manner of a dysfunctional, controlling parent who has pretentions to grandeur. HMT is happy to fund prestige projects that (1) buy goodwill with their ministerial "customers" and (2) also make the state look good, but will also (A) withhold monies to keep those projects running properly after they first make a splash in the press and (B) make internal constituencies in the other ministries fight like cats in a sack to get their own pet project funded, which lets HMT divide-and-rule over other branches of Her Majesty's Government.
- In the Sixties, three cats-in-a-sack forces were at work in the MoD. One, sort of an undercurrent but it affected the other two, was the British Army, fresh off the end of National Service but (not unlike the US Army going into the VOLAR period) run by a hierarchy of officers who'd served in the big, conscripted armies of the two World Wars and liked having this sheer manpower edge over the RN and RAF when it came to fighting for resources and bureaucratic leg-room. The Army was also in a position almost unique in modern British history to that point where it, rather than the Royal Navy, could help define the parameters of grand strategy. Namely, keeping up the British Army of the Rhine in West Germany now took precedence over a globally-projected, or even regionally-masterful, naval presence. So that's one.
- The other two cats-in-a-sack forces came together in the battle between the Royal Navy and Royal Air Force for budgetary supremacy. (Remembering that the Treasury was stingy because (1) there was a genuine crisis over currency reserves and (2) they used scarcity to divide-and-rule against other departments.) This is a familiar story, between the Fifties and the Seventies, in the defense politics of most Western nations. And, as it was in most other Western nations (certainly in the US) and despite the Sandys Review in 1958 (the infamous "stick a fork in jet aircraft, it's all missiles now" crapsack), this was a golden age for Air Forces, even in the Eastern Bloc as well. The RAF won some arguments by straight-up winning the arguments, mostly that land-based strike aircraft were a necessary and sufficient complement to the British Army's principal mission in Central Europe. The RAF also won by losing another argument. Because the bulk of Britain's deterrent was about to be vested in Polaris, which was a Royal Navy preserve, the politicians (certainly Secretary of State for Defence Denis Healey, but he wasn't alone) believed the RAF needed some counterbalanced advantage to maintain their bureaucratic-political place. That would be strike air, now mostly tethered to the European theater.
- There were other elements there too, micro and macro. On the micro level, the RAF outfought the RN in a procurement knife fight over shares in UK license production of F-4 Phantoms, the ones with the Rolls-Royce Spey engines which those jets got specifically so they'd have the short-distance thrust to take off from HMS Eagle and HMS Ark Royal. At the time, the RAF also won a "buy American it'll be cheaper" argument to get F-111Ks in place of the cancelled TSR-2 *MILLIONS OF AVIATION NERDS BOO AND HISS*. That of course became a fiscal dumpster fire and got cancelled. But. When decisions were being made about the future of UK carriers, the F-111K order helped carry the day for "Light Blue Gets Strike." Otherwise it would be duplicative, went the argument, and duplicative cost too much, so said HMT.
- Into this also came questions we could label under the heading of ideological outlook. Much of the Labour government of that period, Denis Healey included (though there were dissenters, and Healey himself did make a real effort over a couple of years to listen to the competing arguments before his decisions), saw aircraft carriers as many other liberal-to-left politicians in the West did in those days, as the "gunboats" of Cold War diplomacy for which they had deep personal distaste. Also the total aggregate costs for carriers, especially the new CVA-01s the RN wanted, got to be too steep for the politicians' blood. The individual ships weren't bad, in an era of healthier shipyards their costs weren't entirely prohibitive. But putting a new-build air wing on them, and building surface groups around them, those costs seemed to spiral. So with the tight fiscal situation of the mid-Sixties, it was too rich for the Wilson government's blood.
- Also, and this does factor in too - there are good folks and bad folks on all sides of this story, and there are indeed multiple "sides," and people who could be both heroes and villains individually if you gave them enough time to do each - the Royal Navy disastrously overplayed its hand on getting new carriers in the nasty budget environment of the Sixties. This is not really surprising. By the mid-Sixties the RN had spent about the last 275 years as one of the top three naval powers on the planet and a good two centuries (from about the 1710s to about the 1910s) as a lone naval superpower. Vanishingly few deeply-established major institutions that are about to go off a cliff see it coming. They believed this was how to keep full-spectrum relevance (minus that boardroom-bullshit term) for the future and it also was a way to chasten the uppity RAF. (They did have a point about the RAF being uppity, but really downright personal enmity and dislike colo(u)red dark/light blue relations pretty deeply in that day, especially coming out of the Mountbatten years, at Arleigh Burke-vs-Tom Power levels or above.) As a result they made not just "carriers" but specifically the new CVA-01 design and the aircraft and escorts to go with it their hill to die on. That was, in retrospect, foolish. The fact that the admirals stuck with ever-less capable and more-compromised design specs for a CVA-01 into the middle Sixties hurt them with Healey too. Cinging to a fixed idea past the point where it had merit made him feel the RN were being irrational, and shored up his RN nukes/RAF aerial strike/big Army in the FRG model. Had the admirals instead backed off and just "Phantomized" Ark Royal and Eagle both, together with necessary refits for both, they could have stayed inside cost limits and held on for the budgets of a different decade. The fact that they'd blown huge sums tinkering with cruiser designs in the late Fifties and not building until too late, tied to continued belief that the RN needed to rival the Soviets as the second-largest global surface fleet, didn't help either.
Tl;dr a whole interconnected web of conflicting fiscal and ideological imperatives, human folly, Darwinian bureaucracy, along with chance and circumstance (good old butterflies), ended big-deck British carriers. Two elements in common with the alternate-defense McGoverners' POV were the arguments that (1) carriers needed to be less-available for gunboat diplomacy which could be legislated by budget and (2) that the high-tech way forward in naval warfare was submarines, both SSNs and SLBMs (in other words, that the Brits had their heads on straight when they named their first in-service nuclear attack submarine HMS
Dreadnought after another game-changing queen of naval battle.) Now that's not necessarily any more or less right than opposing options, and only the individual Butterflies and Trends of a given timeline are likely to render a verdict on that which will anyway mostly be self-justified by what did and did not happen, i.e. if different Stuff had happened needs and choices might ought to have been different. Also these are not guaranteed to be the
best choices, or free from creating mischief or heartbreak. It's not, at least not here, an exercise in perfective tinkering. It's an effort to create a "plausible fallacy" on lines that faithfully represent the elements in play, then to see both good and ill, often unanticipated in both cases, that comes of it.
Edit: One other thing that should be noted: By this point in time the USN has learned its lesson on reserve fleets - they are expensive, and if you ever want to bring the ships back, they are really expensive. I could see the USN pushing for the Forrestals to be in a well-kept reserve, in exchange for the scrapping of basically the rest of the reserve fleet that had not yet been scrapped. Most of this was due to be gone by the mid 1980s anyway, but the navy will be looking for something.
This is very true: I tend to see the McGoverners ready to compromise with the service on keeping the
Forrestals, Big E, and recently-decommissioned cruisers in a ready reserve (the
Belknaps, and potentially the
Leahys as they are scheduled to come out in the Eighties - whether they do or not is as I subject to the whims and designs of later administrations - also the early nuke cruisers like
Long Beach and
Bainbridge) and lose most if not all the smaller ships aggregated over time. The carriers and CGs/CGNs preserve depth in certain kinds of key capabilities, and for the rest you're right that total through costs make it almost cheaper to build fresh if you've got a budget programmed to be revenue-manageable.[/QUOTE]