Are Aircraft Carriers Obsolete?

Are aircraft carriers becoming obsolete?

That is an interesting and complex question.

In the current issue of the US Naval Institute’s Proceedings, Captain Jerry Hendrix, USN and Lt. Col J. Noel Williams, U.S. Marine Corps (Retired) argue that the aircraft carrier is in its twilight, faced with being eclipsed by long-range missiles and sensors (“this battle of signatures and long-range strike”) that threaten to ‘outrange’ the carrier and its aircraft in the same way that the carrier’s aircraft outranged the battleship’s guns. The authors look particularly towards China as a challenger to the US Navy’s control of the sea, and warn of a metaphorical ‘21^st-Century Pearl Harbor,” meaning a situation in which the Navy is caught a technological step behind, a specter that has in one form or another haunted that Navy arguably since the CSS Virginia wrecked two wooden Union warships at Hampton Roads in 1862.

The USS Abraham Lincoln and her escorts

Hendrix and Williams float several propositions for the navy’s future, which they argue would help maintain control of the sea in the face of rising costs and potential technological upsets:

• Smaller, 45,000-ton aircraft carriers at a cost of $2 billion each, compared to a $14 billion supercarrier (about $20 billion with aircraft). These smaller aircraft carriers would serve as a forward-deployed force that can be maintained less expensively than the supercarriers, with the ‘remaining supercarrier inventory’ available for a ‘surge capability.’ The authors imagine carriers similar in size to the Navy’s amphibious assault ships, 45,000-ton ships that have flight decks for helicopters and ‘jump jet’ (Vertical/Short Take Off and Landing, or V/STOL) Harrier fighters, which can take off and land vertically or in a short distance. In fact, Hendrix’s ideal sounds an awful lot like the forthcoming USS America, an amphibious assault ship designed around airborne assaults and that trades the usual well deck for launching landing craft for a big increase in aircraft capacity.

• The proponents argue that with two squadrons of the future F-35B fighter-bomber aboard, a ship like the USS America could deliver an appreciable fraction of a supercarrier’s firepower for a much more reasonable investment in money, manpower, and risk. As the US Marine Corps intends to purchase the same aircraft, Marine squadrons could be used from carriers when not needed on land. In fact, their proposal depends so heavily on the F-35B and its ability to take off and land on smaller flight decks that without the future aircraft, their proposed ships would be nearly useless.

• More reliance on unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs), including the proposed UCLASS, which can operate from smaller ships than fixed-wing fighters can.

• Cancelling the Littoral Combat Ship program and devoting the resources to sixty small amphibious assault ships of 10,000-tons displacement to serve as ‘utility infielders’ in baseball metaphor, supposedly “providing a tremendous platform for engagement missions and humanitarian-assistance/disaster-relief response at one end and amphibious operations and sea control at the other.”

• Maintaining a light/heavy balance of forces, with smaller inexpensive ships deployed around the world, and a “heavy surge force” held in reserve, ready to deploy to trouble spots.

The proposition as a whole has some merit—supercarriers do represent an immense cost and potential loss packed into a single target. Still most of the authors’ proposals would carry more weight if they were actually new, but with the possible exception of the 10,000-ton multirole ships, they’re not. The Navy has been here before. Smaller aircraft carriers have been proposed a number of times in the last few decades—most notably the Sea Control Ship of the 1970s, championed by the late former Chief of Naval Operations, Admiral Elmo Zumwalt. All of these foundered on the reefs of institutional prejudices and operational expectations—the Navy didn’t really want them and couldn’t fit the concept into its plans well enough to satisfy Congress.

The first major shoal in the waters of institutional prejudice is that the Navy has for the last six decades usually detested the idea of small ships, a category which in terms of surface ships came to include virtually everything smaller than a 5,000-ton guided-missile destroyer. The Navy complained that smaller ships were too limited in their abilities, couldn’t be upgraded with new weapons, required too many men and too much money, and so on, and generally argued that the money would be better spent on a smaller number of big ships. The same is true of aircraft carriers—if you want one at all, the Navy would argue, then you should get a big one.

Part of this attitude stems from genuine apprehension at the thought of sending men to sea in ships that were unequal to circumstances (witness the furor over the fragile and lightly-armed Littoral Combat Ship), which is why the Navy has never really embraced the idea of the high/low or big/cheap split, where a core of high-quality ships was supported by larger numbers of smaller, more expendable units. The archetypical example was the Victorian-era Royal Navy, which had two main battle forces, the Channel Fleet and Mediterranean Fleet, that comprised most of the fleet’s most powerful ships, supported by swarms of less-expensive cruisers and gunboats on overseas stations. The US Navy flirted with the ‘high/low’ concept during the 1970s, but even the ‘low end’ ships were fairly large and complex. This high/low scheme is, of course, the exact model proposed by Hendrix and Williams, and raises the possibility that the lightweight forward-deployed forces could find themselves outgunned and alone in the event that a major regional conflict erupts.

The second institutional prejudice is the issue of the aircraft carrier itself. Ever since the Second World War, the Navy has been dominated by the carrier clique, men wedded to the idea of the aircraft carrier as the ultimate Big Stick. By the 1960s, this attitude had been taken to such an extreme that virtually every other kind of ship in the fleet was reduced to supporting the aircraft carrier—cruisers became single-purpose air-defense ships that shot down enemy airplanes or cruise missiles, and destroyers and frigates became single-purpose ships that sank enemy submarines. Either type was basically a defensive auxiliary to the aircraft carrier, and were ill-equipped for operating out of their intended roles, or even for the task of simply fighting other surface ships—the Navy didn’t even have a purpose-built antiship missile until the late 1970s, when the RGM84 Harpoon entered service.

In the particular case of aircraft carriers, bigger being better was embraced virtually as a universal constant, since the US Navy’s supercarriers were essentially designed around their aircraft. As built, they embodied certain engineering assumptions about the aircraft in service at the time, and other assumptions about aircraft expected to enter service in the next decade or so. By comparison, the rest of the ship was there to move the flight deck around. If you want to operated supersonic jet fighters, you need a carrier of a certain size, dictated by concerns for hangar space, length of flight deck for takeoff and landing, and so on. The Navy’s fleet of amphibious assault have a similar problem — the MV-22 Osprey tiltrotor aircraft won’t fit on most of the ships built during the late 1980s and early 1990s.

The reason for this bigger-is-better train of thought was simple—the US Navy spent half a century preparing to fight a war that never came to pass, only to be faced with a series of missions that it had never really contemplated. During the expected World War III, aircraft carriers would have had the unenviable tasks of sweeping the seas of Soviet ships and aircraft, and of hammering their way into the Warsaw Pact’s defended airspace. This required aircraft at least as good as their land-based counterparts, and a carrier with the capacity to launch major airstrikes. Both were major challenges. Since the war with the Soviets was the only thing on the radar (sometimes nearly literally so), the whole system of carriers, aircraft, training, tactical doctrine, weapons design, and contingency planning was focused on fighting the Soviets in certain areas under certain assumed conditions, and to the exclusion of everything else. The F-14, for example, was designed primarily to kill Soviet bombers with super-long-range Phoenix missiles weighing half a ton each, thereby hopefully preventing the bombers from getting close enough to the carriers to launch their own missiles. The result was a very large fighter plane engineered for a specific role.

The Navy’s original goal in designing its carrier fleet was to operate aircraft from a carrier that were equivalent to their land-based counterparts—for example, the F-4 Phantom II (one of the first combat aircraft to be extensively operated by both the Navy and the Air Force) or the F-14 Tomcat. Carrier-borne aircraft had previously been considered inferior to land-based aircraft because of the compromises in design necessary to fit them onto a carrier—weight and size were limited by the hanger size and deck length of the carrier. For example, the Grumman F4F Wildcat, the Navy’s mainstay during the early years of the Pacific War, was slower, shorter-ranged, and less well-armed than the Army Air Corps’ contemporary land-based Curtiss P-40 Warhawk. This general trend persisted into the 1950s as jet technology matured, with the Navy’s stubby little F9F Cougar lagging behind the Air Force’s hotshot Century-series (F-100, F-101, F-105, etc) fighters, but later advances leveled the playing field between carrier and land-based aircraft.

As combat aircraft evolved and got bigger in the pressure-cooker environment of the Cold War they needed larger aircraft carriers; the first ‘supercarrier,’ USS Forrestal, launched in 1951, displaced 59,650 tons standard (81,101 tons full load), had an overall length of 1,067 feet and a beam at the flight deck of 238 feet. She drew 37 feet of water and had a crew of 5,540 personnel. The Forrestal was an immense ship for her day, over twice the displacement and 25% longer than the Essex-class carriers built during the Second World War, and which made up the bulk of the Navy’s carrier fleet during the 1950s and 1960s. The never-built USS United States of 1948 would have been larger still, but was cancelled after the end of the Second World War.

The Navy’s newest operational aircraft carrier, Nimitz-class USS George H.W. Bush, has a nominal displacement of 102,000 tons, a length of 1,092 feet, and a beam at the flight deck of 252 feet. She draws 41 feet of water and has a crew of 5,680 personnel. The forthcoming USS Gerald R. Ford class will be at least as large.

In hindsight, it is perhaps surprising that the supercarriers haven’t grown more than they have, to keep pace with aircraft sizes—the Nimitz is bigger than the Forrestal, but not by that much; much of the increased displacement comes from her nuclear power plant. Rather, it is a credit to the naval architects’ foresight in estimating future needs, and to the aircraft engineers’ skill in fitting new aircraft into old ships, once a practicable maximum size of an aircraft carrier had been reached. The Forrestal served until 1993, deploying with several successive generations of aircraft, including the massive F-14, the largest carrier-borne fighter ever built, which was twice the size and four times the weight of the F9F Cougar that was entering service along with the Forrestal in the 1950s.

The F-14 Tomcat in the foreground aboard the USS America in the 1980s; the aircraft in the background are an A-7 Corsair II and an A-6 Intruder

Older, smaller carriers often couldn’t accommodate newer aircraft and had to be scrapped, or were limited to older, sometimes obsolete aircraft. The US Navy scrapped its herd of Second World War-vintage Essex-class carriers during the late 1960s largely because they couldn’t accommodate the then brand-new F-4 Phantom II. The Forrestal remained in service until 1993 because she had been designed to accommodate the Douglas A-3 Skywarrior, a jet-propelled nuclear-capable bomber (from the era of nuclear weapons the size and weight of a dump truck) that was bigger and heavier even than the later Tomcat, and so could handle even that enormous aircraft. The Forrestal even managed the largest aircraft take-off and landing ever, a USMC KC-130 tanker aircraft, in 1963)

Other navies faced the same problem. The French Navy’s Foch and Clemenceau, for example, were stuck with the Vought F-8 Crusader for a fighter until the late 1990s, decades after it had been retired from front-line service in the US Navy. The Royal Navy essentially gave up on conventional aircraft flown from carriers altogether when HMS Ark Royal was retired in 1979 and replaced with three “through-deck cruisers” (HMS Invincible, Ark Royal, and Illustrious) that couldn’t operate conventional fixed-wing aircraft, and which had initially been conceived as a mere escort to the never-built CVA-01 supercarrier. The Wilson and Callaghan governments’ stance on defense spending was so tight-fisted during the UK’s economic troubles of the 1970s that the Admiralty forbade the ships be described as ‘aircraft carriers,’ for fear of the ferocious opposition to defense spending in Parliament.

Other nations with carriers left over from the 1940s and 50s—for example, Argentina’s 25 de Mayo, Brazil’s Minas Gerais, or India’s two small ex-Royal Navy flattops, Viraat and Vikrant—were limited to helicopters, propeller-driven antisubmarine planes such as the Fairey Gannet or Breguet Alize, and obsolete fighter or attack jets like the A-4 Skyhawk. Even these small and limited carriers consumed an enormous share of a small navy’s resources, for all that the carrier may well have been a sort of tokenism, much as having even a single dreadnought was a considered to be a mark of status fifty years earlier.

Thus the argument for supercarriers. In short, if the operational priorities were high-intensity combat against Soviet land-based fighters and bombers, then dinky little World War II leftovers flying Gannets, Skyhawks, and helicopters were obviously nonstarters, and so for several decades the prejudice against small carriers made good sense. Small carriers were useful for protecting convoys against submarines—and indeed, helicopters remain the submarine’s greatest nemesis-- but were too limited to be useful for offensive operations.

The US Navy itself toyed with the concept of purpose-built smaller carriers in the early 1970s, as part of a general interest in lower-tech, less expensive weapons and methods that all four armed services entertained in the waning years of the Vietnam War, in the season of embarrassment resulting from the belief that the comparatively crude Soviet weapons had outperformed the costly, high-tech products of the American military-industrial complex. The Soviet Unions’ then-new Kiev-class ‘heavy aircraft-carrying cruisers’ were a further spur, in that they combined a flight deck with heavy antiship missiles and a formidable air-defense armament, making US carriers look lumbering and defenseless. Admiral Elmo Zumwalt, Chief of Naval Operations at the time, advocated a high/low mixture of inexpensive, single-purpose ships together with high-value multirole ships; some of the proposals generated under this initiative eventually saw daylight as the Perry-class frigates and the Virginia-class nuclear-powered guided-missile cruisers. The former were designed as new-generation convoy escorts, optimized for antisubmarine warfare, and the latter were conceived as carrier escorts, their nuclear power plants enabling them to keep up with the carriers themselves.

The most significant of these small-carrier experiments was the Sea Control Ship, conceived as a conceptual evolution of the ‘low end’ escort carriers of the Second World War, and as a means of bringing the number of flight decks back up after the mass retirement of the Essex class. The SCS—nobody dared call it a carrier, much as HMS Invincible was officially a cruiser— would in wartime have been a convoy escort and submarine killer, devoted to roles for which a supercarrier would have been overkill, or too rare; in other words, jobs that the aging, too-small Essexes would once have done. In peacetime, the SCS would have been used for showing the flag and gunboat diplomacy.

A 1974 conceptual drawing for the Sea Control Ship

The SCS design described a ship a tenth the size and an eighth the cost of a Nimitz-class carrier, or roughly the size of a contemporary guided-missile cruiser, and carrying an air wing of antisubmarine helicopters and a handful of V/STOL fighters. An alternative, smaller design would have been built on a converted Spruance-class destroyer hull. The USS Guam, a helicopter-carrying amphibious assault ship, was used for extensive trials for the concept on a 1974 Atlantic deployment, supporting a detachment of three first-generation Marine Corps Harriers and seventeen antisubmarine helicopters. The USS Franklin D. Roosevelt, a 1940s-vintage Midway-class carrier too small and too old for front-line use, carried Harriers and antisubmarine helicopters in a 1976-1977 test program intended to evaluate how V/STOL aircraft could be integrated into normal carrier operations.

The SCS idea as a whole showed promise, but eventually foundered on the rocks of Congressional politics in 1977, after Admiral Zumwalt’s retirement took the program’s strongest supporter off the chessboard. The Spanish Navy bought the design and built a 16,000-ton ship to a modified plan, the Principe de Asturias, which has done good service since 1988.

Save that Hendrix and Williams’ proposed smaller carriers are bigger and include humanitarian missions alongside low-intensity operations and showing the flag, their proposal sounds like a larger regurgitation of the Sea Control Ship.

A comparison of size, with the Spanish Navy's Principe de Asturias (17,188 tons) in foreground, USS Wasp (40,500 tons) second, USS Forrestal (81,000 tons), and HMS Invincible (25,000 tons)

Almost forty years after the SCS concept sank, the world is in a very different state of affairs. The Cold War ended twenty years ago and the Soviet Union no longer exists. There are no prospects for a high-intensity conflict on that scale in the foreseeable future. Most of the Navy’s combat or combat support operations involve low intensity conflicts, sometimes even very-low intensity conflicts such as the Somali pirates. These type of operations usually just don’t need an aircraft carrier. If they are available, the Navy also uses amphibious assault ships, capable of operating vertical-takeoff Harrier fighters and helicopters, as surrogate aircraft carriers for crisis areas such as the Libyan intervention, or for humanitarian operations.

Though there isn’t any occasion these days to use them to their full capabilities, the US Navy sticks to its fleet of eleven supercarriers largely because they’re what it knows best, and also because there is currently no reason good enough to justify departing from them. Supercarriers are by this point a proven thing, and despite all the drawbacks of size, cost, and (arguably) inflexibility, they represent a tremendous amount of force that can be moved around the world with considerable speed and almost total impunity. Two or three supercarriers and their escorts can outgun most of the world’s smaller countries, and are capable of shutting down a small country within days, such as the NATO air power did in Serbia in 1999. That’s not a capability to be given up or whittled down without good reason.

The argument about the development of anti-carrier weapons such as the Chinese military’s new DF-21D antiship ballistic missile certainly holds water. It would be foolish to expect possibly hostile nations not to put considerable effort into ways to destroy aircraft carriers. One or two hits from a missile that size could disable or sink a supercarrier, but as with any attack, the problem is getting the hit. Supercarriers are not passive targets, and they do not operate alone. In the long run, though, it’s just another step in the offense-versus-defense development process. The USSR sought to counter aircraft carriers with antiship missiles and the US Navy responded with better missile defenses, including the Aegis system. The same process is going on now—many of the US Navy’s surface ships have been or will be fitted with the antiballistic-capable SM-3 missile, originally as part of a national scheme of ballistic missile defense, but easily adaptable to carrier defense. More broadly, ballistic missile launches are by their nature impossible to hide, and the US has plenty of spy satellites and other detection systems. Any carrier threatened by a ballistic missile attack would have advanced from the time of the attacking missile’s launch.

The supercarrier has reigned supreme for so long that several other countries are bending great efforts towards obtaining them. The UK has two supercarriers HMS Queen Elizabeth and HMS Prince of Wales, under construction, nearly thirty years after the Ark Royal was retired. France is considering a second carrier, an improvement over the underpowered Charles DeGaulle, and both India and China are exploring the possibilities.

Now granted, there have been technological changes over the last thirty years that would make a smaller aircraft carrier more feasible. For one thing, there are now more ways to exercise long-distance power than to use conventional fixed-wing aircraft. The initial salvos of cruise missiles from the submarine USS Florida in March 2011, as part of the US Navy’s involvement in the NATO intervention in Libya, devastated the Gaddafi regime’s military and essentially shut down the country’s air defense network within a couple of hours. Twenty years ago, no ship besides an aircraft carrier could have done the job, but a repurposed ballistic missile submarine crammed to the brim with Tomahawk missiles accomplished it in a matter of hours. The short-lived idea of the ‘arsenal ship’ discussed in the years after the first war with Iraq was an even simpler concept—a large ship, similar to a freighter, carrying hundreds of cruise missiles. This concept was proposed in 1994, but funding has never been appropriated for a full study or design.

Vertical or short take-off and landing (V/STOL) aircraft have also matured as a technology, and second, the great and unexpected strides that unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) have made in the last ten years. Neither of these technologies existed as anything other than crude prototypes when the first Nimitz-class carrier was launched in the late 1960s. The most significant weakness to the SCS concept was the lack of a good V/STOL fighter, the early model Harriers not being designed as fighters. The Rockwell XFV-12, a purportedly supersonic V/STOL fighter designed as a complement to the SCS, proved wholly impracticable and was abandoned after millions of dollars had been spent to produce an aircraft that simply could not fly.

The Hawker-Siddley Harrier was an oddball little plane introduced in the early 1970s, initially as a land-based attack plane used by the Royal Air Force and the US Marine Corps, but it only made a big impact ten years later, when the Royal Navy’s Sea Harriers acquitted themselves well against the Argentine military’s land-based Mirage and Skyhawk aircraft during the 1982 Falklands War. Suddenly every navy that operated a carrier had a passable fighter and attack plane that could operate from a small deck, and many countries such as Spain and Italy were launching new small carriers designed with the Harrier in mind. Sure, the Harrier wasn’t nearly as fast or long-ranged or high-performance as a MiG-29 or an F-14, but it was better than most of the older-generation aircraft operated by, say, Libya or Pakistan.

Nearly thirty years after the Falklands War, however, the Harrier remains the only combat-proven V/STOL aircraft in the world. The Harrier’s Soviet counterpart, the Yak-38, never saw combat and was never produced in large numbers. The US Navy and Marine Corps (and many other nations) intend to purchase the V/STOL version (the F-35B) of the Lockheed-Martin F-35 Lightning II (formerly known as the Joint Strike Fighter) when it becomes available.

At $150 million each, the F-35B promises to be a great improvement over the Harrier, with performance comparable to a conventional modern jet fighter, better range, weapons payload and speed, and stealth characteristics. The F-35’s development has been a long, painfully slow, and heavily politicized one. The F-35 has been in development since 1996, first flew in 2006, and fewer than twenty aircraft have been produced to date. Over the objections of the Department of Defense, Congressional Republicans led by members from Ohio and Indiana have repeatedly tried to earmark funds (up to $450 million) for manufacturing a second engine, to be produced by General Electric and Rolls Royce in those states, in addition to the approved Pratt & Whitney engine. The F-35 is also the most expensive defense project in the United States’ history, with over a trillion dollars spent or projected to be spent on an aircraft that still hasn’t completed all of its tests. Each aircraft also costs three times as much as a late-model Harrier ($35 million in 1997 dollars during USMC procurement, or about $48 million in 2011 dollars). As costs skyrocketed, the number of planes proposed for purchase has been steadily reduced (the US Marine Corps still wants more than 400 of them). If the Pentagon’s other procurement programs are anything to measure by, the F-35 is highly unlikely to meet it’s planned in-service schedule of 2016-2018. Secretary of Defense Gates has threatened to cancel the F-35 program unless it starts meeting its goals without continued financial drain.

Without aircraft, a carrier is useless, and the performance of the available aircraft dictates the carrier’s abilities. For example, the Navy’s carrier force was significantly weakened when the A-6 Intruder attack aircraft were retired due to age in the late 1990s. Although they were replaced with an equal number of F/A-18 Hornet fighter-bombers, the Hornet has half the range and two-thirds the weapons payload of the Intruder. This not only limits the carrier’s offensive power (in terms of number of missiles or bombs that can be launched at a target) but both forces the carrier to operate closer to shore, more likely within range of enemy attack. Aircraft range also limits how far inland the carrier can reach-- from a carrier in the Persian Gulf, an Intruder could hit Baghdad, but a Hornet can’t. The Intruder’s replacement, a carrier-based stealth bomber named the A-12 Avenger II, was a financial boondoggle and engineering failure that died in development.

On the other hand, improvements in guided weapons have made it possible to effect damage on the enemy using far fewer aircraft sorties than were previously necessary.

Unmanned aerial vehicles are the newest addition to military aviation; the RQ-4 Global Hawk, MQ-1 Predator, and MQ-9 Reaper drones have been one of the most conspicuous success stories in military technology of the last twenty years, springing off the drawing boards to become a mature and indispensable tool within only a few years. After 2004, they became one of the most useful weapons the US military had. UAVs were used in 118 air attacks in Pakistan alone during 2010, in addition to doing yeoman service in Iraq, Afghanistan, Yemen, Somalia, and now Libya. Successive generations of UAVs have become longer-ranged and more useful (or in the case of the Marines, small enough to be flung into the air by hand), with better sensors, loiter times, and weapons payloads; the General Atomics-manufactured MQ-1 Reaper is a major improvement on the Predator, carrying fifteen times as much ordnance as the Predator, while the Navy’s Global Hawk has a range of 15,000-miles and an endurance of 36 hours, enough to get from California to Hawaii and back. Compared to a manned aircraft, UAVs are slow and limited, but they are inexpensive ($10.5 million for a Reaper), capable of loitering for long periods of time, hard to see, avoid, and kill, and if fitted with missiles, can more or less immediately attack any target they can see. If more firepower is needed, they can be used to bring other aircraft or artillery fire onto the target. Many of the UAV’s jobs until recently required manned aircraft patrolling the area, with increased costs and risks, and which required a land base or an aircraft carrier. UAVs, by contrast, can be launched from the back of a truck or from the helicopter deck of a frigate, and could as easily be launched from a smaller carrier as from a large one. Helicopter-type UAVs are also joining the arsenal, in addition to the fixed-wing Global Hawk and Reaper. A small carrier remaining on-station in the Gulf of Aden with a hangar full of UAVs could maintain surveillance over an area encompassing Yemen, the Red Sea, and Somalia.

Captain Hendrix proposes that three smaller (40,000-ton) aircraft carriers could be built for the cost of a single Nimitz or Ford-type supercarrier. This assertion is best taken with a grain of salt. Given the US Navy’s ship design and construction contractors’ apparent inability to get any project completed without years of delays and hundreds of millions of dollars in cost overruns, (e.g. the USS San Antonio, completed three years late, $840 million over budget, and still grossly unfit for service) the argument that any smaller ship is going to be cheaper is on very shaky ground to begin with. As a more direct analogy, the Littoral Combat Ship was originally supposed to cost $200 million, 1/5 as much as a Flight IIa Arleigh Burke class destroyer. As of early 2011, however, the going rate for a Littoral Combat Ship is $450 million, or nearly half as much as a Burke for a ship that was supposed to be smaller, simpler, and less expensive. So much for the ‘low’ end of the balance.

Setting aside the cost-effectiveness proposition, however, there are numerous advantages to having a greater number of smaller aircraft carriers available:

• Availability is, in fact, the key. The US Navy has shrunk from a circa-1990 peak of nearly 600 warships, including fifteen carrier groups and four groups built around the reactivated Iowa-class battleships, to a total of 286 ships in 2011, including eleven carriers. Granted, the 1990 peak reflected the Reagan administration’s arbitrary and fiscally profligate ‘600-ship navy’ goal, as opposed to actual need, and included a large number of warships retained past their truly useful lifespans, at considerable cost in manpower and maintenance. Granted also, such a large fleet simply wasn’t necessary after the Soviet Union collapsed. Still, the US Navy has commitments spanning the globe, and a much smaller fleet with which to meet these commitments. A Burke-class destroyer is considerably more powerful than one of the 1980s-era Spruance class, with a far greater radius of effect thanks to her cruise missiles, but it still can only be in one place at one time. The same is true of supercarriers, only more so. The carrier off the coast of Libya cannot be of use in the Persian Gulf.

• If the resources equivalent to a supercarrier are spent on three smaller ships, three crisis areas can be covered instead of one. This metaphorically allows us to spend small change on a cup of coffee, rather than having to hand over a $50 bill.

• Given that of the eleven operational supercarriers, two or three are generally out of service at any given time for maintenance or other work, a fleet of smaller, more numerous carriers would in theory have more ships available for service at a given time.

• Smaller carriers could be maintained using smaller shipyards, without need for facilities that can accommodate supercarriers. This point may be moot, however, given the considerable infrastructure the US Navy has built up for supercarrier maintenance over the last half-century.

• Smaller, ‘routine’ missions (though no mission is truly routine when human life is at risk) are more likely to occur than the need for a major air assault. For the last ten years of the ‘war on terror,’ with the exception of the invasion of Iraq, the usual role of naval airpower has been to conduct small attack missions on specific targets, rather than the sort of blitz that savaged Iraq in 1991 or that turned out the lights across Serbia in 1999. Given appropriate aircraft, smaller aircraft could handle routine missions more cheaply and with less need to weigh carefully the small number of supercarriers against the number of missions.

• Many missions do require air support, but aren’t big enough to justify a supercarrier—for example, a limited intervention such as in Libya.

• Assuming three small carriers collectively possessed the same combat power of a single supercarrier, the sinking of one ship would leave the other two operational.

• Improvements in communications and networking among ships make it possible for ships to operate more closely.

• Smaller ships would theoretically be quicker to construct and bring into service, though in view of the current state of naval procurement this is highly unlikely.

• Supercarriers very rarely operate at maximum capacity; in fact, the most recent full-capacity combat operations were during the invasion of Iraq in 2003, and smaller ships could handle the quotidian operations at less cost.

• The logistics of supporting smaller carriers would be simpler; current supercarriers are limited to certain bases and harbors by their size and draft, and cannot pass through the Panama Canal. Dredging of the Suez Canal since 1975 has made it possible for supercarriers to pass through the canal rather than sailing around the Cape of Good Hope.

There are also several important arguments against smaller aircraft carriers.

· The small carrier’s actual usefulness would depend on suitable aircraft being available, and in this case it means the small carrier is married to the F-35B. Granted, the Harrier is available now, but the F-35 is unlikely to be available in suitable numbers for as long as ten years, and may be cancelled outright like the A-12 Avenger II was. It is generally a very bad idea to develop one’s ships or operational doctrine around an airplane, vehicle, or other weapon that hasn’t entered service yet—for example, consider the jolt to the Marine Corps when the Expeditionary Fighting Vehicle was cancelled, essentially junking over a decade of research, testing, and planning. If a new small carrier is forced to rely on Harriers, it will lack the punch that Hendrix expects. For that matter, even Hendrix’ example of the USS America is still under construction, due to commission in 2012 but probably several years from entering service.

· For Libya-sized operations, or issues such as the Somali pirates, an available amphibious assault ship could be used as a surrogate carrier (as in the authors’ own example), filling the small carrier’s proposed niche with an existing ship and rendering the need moot.

· Operating costs can outweigh the construction cost of a ship in cost-effectiveness evaluations. An amphibious ship of the Tarawa or Wasp classes—the America’s predecessors—is second only to a supercarrier in manning, running, and maintenance costs.

· The 10,000-ton multirole ships they envision instead of the Littoral Combat Ship—the size of an Arleigh Burke class destroyer-- would likely be too small to be of much use, facing serious tensions between cargo and troop space, power plant, offensive and defense weapons, and other design requirements. In other words, the same tensions that resulted in the LCS being such a bastardized compromise of design. Even the South Korean navy’s small Dokdo-class amphibious assault ship is 50% larger than Hendrix and Williams’ proposal.

· In the event of a major regional conflict, such as a hypothetical war involving North Korea or Iran, a smaller carrier with thirty aircraft would be seriously out of its depth. Granted, an F-35 would be more than a match for most of the Soviet-era relics operated by North Korea, but maintaining high operation tempos (keeping many aircraft in the air and maintaining that status for a long period of time), requires lots of aircraft, lots of man-hours, and lots of deck and hangar space, since for every aircraft airborne there will usually be one or two on deck rearming and refueling.

· Any threat formidable enough to ‘outrange’ and threaten a supercarrier, as Hendrix and Williams discussed, would by definition also outrange and threaten a smaller carrier. The only advantage to a smaller carrier would be that a cheaper ship with fewer crew would be at risk.

· Given current budgeting and manpower limitations, any construction of smaller carriers would almost certainly have to come at the expense of something else, such as the retirement of a supercarrier. The USS Enterprise, the first nuclear-powered supercarrier, is scheduled to decommission within the next several years, but as two more supercarriers (USS Gerald R. Ford and USS John F. Kennedy) already in the construction pipeline, any such trade-off is unlikely to happen anytime soon.

· If the number of aircraft carriers is significantly increased, there may not be enough escort ships to go round. Aircraft carriers have a limited self-defense capacity, and defend on their aircraft and other ships to protect them. At present, a Carrier Strike Group theoretically consists of a carrier, one or two Aegis-equipped cruisers, two destroyers, and two frigates. In practice, however, escort ships are frequently detached for other missions, simply because there aren’t enough ships to go round. The US Navy’s fleet of surface escorts currently consists of 22 Ticonderoga-class cruisers (the five oldest were retired circa 2003, as they had Mark 26 twin-arm missile launchers instead of the Vertical Launch System) and 60 Arleigh Burke-class destroyers of various models. There are also 28 Oliver Hazard Perry-class frigates, which are essentially “worn-out and maxed-out” in the words of Vice Admiral Barry McCullough, and which are scheduled for retirement. From the Navy’s perspective, this is few enough surface ships as it is (110 all told) for the missions already on the table, and one of the reasons of the hue and cry over the Littoral Combat Ship is that the Navy needs them to free up bigger ships for other roles.

· Lastly, the design and construction of smaller carriers would unfortunately be subject to the same delays and overruns as any other defense (particularly warship construction) project. A ship initially proposed as a ‘small and cheap’ 40,000-ton carrier would be very unlikely to remain either small or cheap, and if the past is any guide (e.g. the Littoral Combat Ship, the prototypes of which cost 3-4 times the original budget) it would soon balloon to the point where it would have all the drawbacks of a supercarrier but none of the advantages. In that situation, the Navy might as well follow its historic practice and spend the money on a supercarrier. If that happens, the ship could also face the same budget axe that killed the Air Force’s F-22, the Marine Corps’ Expeditionary Fighting Vehicle, and a number of Army projects over the last few years. The ship could also turn out to be as much an unfit-for-deployment white elephant as the LCS USS Independence, whose aluminum hull is disintegrating, or the USS San Antonio, who almost shut down the Suez Canal in 2009 with a narrowly-averted collision and grounding caused by the failure of her steering equipment.

It is a sad thing indeed that one of the most damning arguments against an idea like this is that the defense industry can’t seem to produce anything that is small, inexpensive, and easy to implement, and can’t produce anything on-time, on-spec, and on-budget. Secretary of the Navy Winter and Secretary of Defense Gates have had essentially to go to war with their own contractors in order to try to get the system on track, including canceling the entire Littoral Combat Ship program in 2007.

In conclusion, Hendrix and Williams’ proposition as a whole has some merit—supercarriers do represent an immense cost and potential loss packed into a single target. Smaller carriers do have many arguments in their favor, as well as many arguments against them. The Navy currently faces the dilemma of not having enough ships to go round, a stretched-thin budget, and a procurement and shipbuilding system that is grossly incapable of providing the ships the Navy needs.

In the current climate, with a stretched-thin Navy and an even more stretched budget, however, the issue of introducing an entire new type of warship is a hard one to greet with open arms.

Flag Day

Today is Flag Day. It is one of those holidays that you learn about in elementary school, but which then gets bulldozed out of your mind by high school, college, work, and family necessities. Flag Day, established in 1916 by President Wilson, was enacted to commemorate the adoption of a common flag by the original thirteen colonies on June 14, 1777, understandably an occasion of some importance during the war for independence.

The flag of the United States is one of the most conspicuous symbols on the planet, and for the better part of a century was one of the very few symbols or traditions that all parts of the United States (1861-1865 excepted) had in common, and so it became a major emblem of our national identity. For more reasons than there is room to discuss here, Americans make a very big deal out of the flag, to an extent that very few other nations equal. We hang flags all over the place and stick the flag on bumper stickers, hard hats, tool boxes, flowerbeds, textbooks, and mailboxes. We have a holiday just for the flag, though since nobody gets a day off, in 2011 nobody seems to care. The country’s national anthem isn’t about the country, it’s about the flag.

Sometimes the spirit is genuine, sometimes it’s rote memorization and regurgitating thirteen years of reciting the Pledge of Allegiance every morning in a school classroom, and sometimes it’s just not thinking at all.

For better or worse, the flag has become an inescapable touchstone, with moments as uplifting as the Apollo 11 moon landings, and as frustratingly banal as the Republican party’s manufactured furor over then-Senator Obama not wearing a flag lapel pin during the 2008 presidential campaign. Granted, not all the memories are happy ones–for example, the famous photograph of firefighters raising a flag in the ruins of the World Trade Center. Many people (myself included) also remain uneasy about the kind of indoctrinating flag-cult encouraged during the Cold War, in tandem with the use of the Pledge of Allegiance loyalty oath and its post-1954 religious elements, which strained the bounds of decorum and threatened to corrupt patriotism into mindless nationalism.

Flag-related issues do tend to crop up at times when patriotism is at issue—for example, proclaiming Flag Day during First World War, the Second World War, the Cold War, or during the post-9/11 ‘war on terror.’

Now here’s where it gets interesting. One of the things that drives me up the wall is bumper-sticker patriotism, where people stick flags and other symbols all over the place without understanding what they’re doing. In particular, many of the things commonly done with the flag these days are quite disrespectful of it, and specifically prohibited by federal law.

Sadly, this behavior also extends to people who profess to be the champions of the nation’s historic rights, dignities, traditions, etc. (I’m looking at you, Tea Party) are so mind-blowingly ignorant of the traditions they’re supposedly championing, that they actively trample and abuse the things they want to protect.

I am not a blood-and-thunder patriot by any means, but I believe that people should understand what they’re doing, and should practice what they preach. If you want to proclaim your patriotism, go right ahead—but if you’re going to use the national flag to do so, you should at least use it properly.

There’s no excuse for ignorance. The care and handling of the flag of the United States is actually stipulated in federal law (Chapter 1 of Title 4 of the United States Code, or 4 U.S.C. § 1 et seq), where anyone can look it up. That’s the point of having things published into law—so that people CAN look them up. The Flag Code was passed into public law in 1942 and was based on a voluntary guide popularized by the American Legion and other patriotic organizations during the 1920s and 1930s.

Some of the Flag Code’s rules for handling and displaying the flag are fairly common knowledge—e.g. don’t let the flag touch the ground. Some are less well-known than they should be. For example, some salient points (all citations from 4 U.S.C. § 1 et seq)

1. § 3 The flag is defined as “any flag, standard, colors, ensign, or any picture or representation of either, or of any part or parts of either, made of any substance or represented on any substance, of any size evidently purporting to be either of said flag, standard, colors, or ensign of the United States of America or a picture or a representation of either, upon which shall be shown the colors, the stars and the stripes, in any number of either thereof, or of any part or parts of either, by which the average person seeing the same without deliberation may believe the same to represent the flag, colors, standard, or ensign of the United States of America.” (In other words, if it has red, white, and blue colors and a stars and stripes arrangement, and a reasonable person would identify it as the flag, then it is the flag.)

2. § 6 (a) It is the universal custom to display the flag only from sunrise to sunset on buildings and on stationary flagstaffs in the open. However, when a patriotic effect is desired, the flag may be displayed twenty-four hours a day if properly illuminated during the hours of darkness. (Tom’s note- in other words, unless you have a light shining on it, it’s inappropriate to leave the flag up all night. It goes up with the sun, and it goes down with the sun. This is why many national monuments illuminate or have provisions to illuminate the flag.)

3. § 6 (c) The flag should not be displayed on days when the weather is inclement, except when an all weather flag is displayed.

4. § 7 (b) The flag should not be draped over the hood, top, sides, or back of a vehicle or of a railroad train or a boat. When the flag is displayed on a motorcar, the staff shall be fixed firmly to the chassis or clamped to the right fender. (Pay attention, bumper-sticker people)

5. § 8 (d) The flag should never be used as wearing apparel, bedding, or drapery. In other words, flag shirts are out. (Just think about it- if you wear a flag shirt, you’re sweating, spilling beer, and smearing mustard on the symbol of your country. Causing the flag to smell like a poorly-maintained armpit isn’t really respectful of the symbol of your beloved country, now is it? When Jimi Hendrix wore a flag shirt back in the 60s, he got death threats from patriotic groups. Now conservative Republicans wear flag shirts to political rallies! John McCain had the flag on his campaign t-shirts! Sarah Palin wraps the flag around herself like a blanket. They times they are a-changin’ indeed. Don’t even get me started on flag underwear. Skidmarks are never patriotic. )

6. § 8 (g) The flag should never have placed upon it, nor on any part of it, nor attached to it any mark, insignia, letter, word, figure, design, picture, or drawing of any nature. (McCain again.)

7. § 8 (i) The flag should never be used for advertising purposes in any manner whatsoever. It should not be embroidered on such articles as cushions or handkerchiefs and the like, printed or otherwise impressed on paper napkins or boxes or anything that is designed for temporary use and discard. Advertising signs should not be fastened to a staff or halyard from which the flag is flown. (Flag Kleenex- you want to blow your nose on Old Glory? The ban on disposable goods and advertising is a noble sentiment but, of course, this is America—nothing can be allowed to be so sacred that nobody can make a buck from it.)

8. § 8 (j) No part of the flag should ever be used as a costume or athletic uniform. However, a flag patch may be affixed to the uniform of military personnel, firemen, policemen, and members of patriotic organizations. The flag represents a living country and is itself considered a living thing. Therefore, the lapel flag pin being a replica, should be worn on the left lapel near the heart. (Cheerleaders and the NFL, take note.)

9. § 8 (k) The flag, when it is in such condition that it is no longer a fitting emblem for display, should be destroyed in a dignified way, preferably by burning. (What does it say about how genuine your patriotism is if you let the country’s symbol be worn-out and reduced to shreds?)

One exception in the display specifications is that displaying one’s flag upside-down has long been an internationally-recognized maritime distress signal. This evolved into the upside-down display as a protest symbol—“my country is in distress.”

As a fun historical fact, the original version of the flag guide included the so-called ‘Bellamy salute’ originally used during the Pledge of Allegiance (also in Title 4), and which was quietly and permanently dropped in favor of the hand over the heart due to the Bellamy salute’s resemblance to the Nazi and other Fascist salutes, and so thoroughly written out of the nation’s memory that old pictures of schoolchildren giving the Bellamy salute evoke a sense of the Twilight Zone. My father remembers the day the teachers announced that the students had to salute differently. Though Francis Bellamy was advocating his salute and his Pledge of Allegiance long before the fascists came on the world stage, both Bellamy and the fascists were likely emulating the ancient Roman salute (‘ave, Caesar’ and so on). Paradoxically, Bellamy himself was a socialist and Baptist minister who had wanted to include the words ‘equality’ and ‘fraternity’ in the Pledge in reference to equal rights for racial minorities and women, but as he was writing a pledge to be used in schools, had to bow to the less broad-minded members of the educational establishment.

Ultimately, although the Flag Code is enshrined in federal law, there are no longer any criminal penalties for defacing or mistreating the flag—the Supreme Court held in Texas v. Johnson, 491 U.S. 397 (1989) and U.S. v. Eichman, 496 U.S. 310 (1990), that these penalties unfairly restricted free speech. Prior to those cases, a Republican patriot wearing a flag bandanna was as open to prosecution as a Black Panther stomping on the flag.

Rather ironically, then, the right of a Tea Party activist to wear an American flag hat depends on the same free speech protections that allow an anti-government protestor to burn the flag. I wonder if they know that.

Still, it’s their prerogative to be hypocrites. I guess it’s too much to hope for that they actually live by the principles they preach. Just try not to sweat on the flag too much.

Bin Laden is Dead

I’m not one for real-time blogging, but here we go.

President Obama is about to announce that Osama Bin Laden has been killed during a US operation in Pakistan.

Almost ten years after 9/11 and, ironically, on the eighth anniversary of President Bush’s “Mission Accomplished” announcement…… the guy’s finally dead.

What’s the lesson? Maybe it’s something like Masada, when the Roman army under Lucius Flavius Silva spent years building a ramp up the side of a plateau with a Zealot-held fortress on top in order to exterminate the last cyst of the rebellion. No matter where an enemy of the US goes, even if it takes ten years we will find you and bring the hammer down.

I doubt Bin Laden’s death will mean much on the ground right now—Al Qaeda and the Taliban are a franchise operation these days…. But as a symbol and as closure, it means everything. I watched the 9/11 attacks as they happened. I remember where I was every minute of that day, and now I’ll get to remember where I was when the circle was closed.

I feel like I’ve just let out a breath that I didn’t know I was holding.

Why the Egyptian and Tunisian Armies Didn’t Shoot, and Why the Libyan Army Did

The question is, why did the Egyptian and Tunisian militaries refuse to take action against the protesters, when the Libyan military did?

Someone IM'd me that question earlier today, in idle conversation.

There are few more embarrassing things that can happen to someone at my time of life (age 32) than suddenly to come out of a fugue and realize that your music playlist has run out of tunes, the tea's untouched but gone dead cold, your Firefox has about fifty open tabs, it's 11 PM and you somehow lost five hours out of your life.

Then you gaze blearily at your computer screen and realize that you've written a six-page analysis of a problem in response to a question a friend of yours IM'd you as a digression from a conversation about chemical vapor intrusion, muffins, and Pearl Jam.

Well, that's what happened to me, and this is the result.

The nations of the Middle East are shaking on their foundations these days. A dozen nations have seen massive public protests, Tunisia and Egypt have had long-term rulers displaced by popular discontent, and a third nation, Libya, is racked by a nascent civil war between the regime and its popular opposition.

One of the most singular features of the Tunisian and Egyptian revolutions is the lack of military force. In the case of Egypt, the turning point in the protests was when the Egyptian military refused to take sides in the confrontation between the protestors and the Mubarak government, and indeed soon found itself refereeing between the two parties. In Tunisia, the turning point came when General Rachid Ammar, Chief of Staff of the Tunisian armed forces, refused a presidential order to fire on the crowds; within days the military had turned entirely against the Ben Ali government. In Libya, meanwhile, Muammar Gaddafi’s army showed no hesitation in attacking the protestors with aircraft and heavy artillery.

The question is, then, why did the Egyptian and Tunisian militaries refuse to take action against the protestors, when the Libyan military did? It is a complex question, and is directly tied to the sort of government a state has (one of several shades of authoritarianism), and the role of the military within that state.

The origins of this political and military idiom in the modern Middle East lie in the early 20^th Century. Most of the post-colonial nations of the Middle East, such as Syria, Libya, and Iraq, were essentially created by lines drawn across maps of the former Ottoman Empire between 1910 and 1920. As historians, political scientists, and others have noted on innumerable occasions, the colonial powers famously ignored historic affinities or local conditions when creating new kingdoms for their clients to rule—Jordan, for example, was created essentially as a job-well-done reward for a younger son of Sharif Hussein of Mecca, T.E. Lawrence’s ally from the desert campaigns, and who ruled Arabia until he was displaced by the al-Saud tribe in 1924. The Sharif’s other son became the first king of Iraq.

The results were, in some cases, states that could never have naturally emerged as true nations—Iraq in particular is a Frankenstein, comprised of three former Ottoman provinces stitched together and including a Kurdish-dominated north, an ethnically-distinct Shi’ite south, and a Sunni Arab area around Baghdad, with a majority-Shi’ite population until recently ruled over by Sunni Arabs who belonged to the old pan-Arab nationalist Ba’ath party that emerged as a regional movement in the 1950s, an organization that many fundamentalist Muslim groups consider to be an abomination all of its own for its short-lived attempts at secularizing, socializing, and modernizing Arab society during the 1950s and 1960s.

Syria is perhaps less extreme and certainly less ethnically diverse, but originated in much the same manner. Syria is to this day dominated by the al-Assad family (the late Hafez and the ruling Bashar, pere et fils), whose tribe belongs to the minority Alawi branch of Islam that many Sunnis and Shi’ites consider to be heretical. The al-Assad regime is also the last remnant of the Ba’ath Party.

Under the circumstances—extreme poverty, sudden independence, domestic turmoil, endless economic troubles, the pressure-cooker political climate of the Cold War, and the decades-long vendetta of the Arab/Israeli conflict-- virtually all of the countries in the Middle East defaulted to autocratic authoritarian governments—despots, tyrants, and kings in all but name.

One of the characteristic features of autocratic authoritarian regimes in the late 20^th and early 21^st centuries is a direct control by the ruler of at least part of the nation’s military force. The last thing any tyrant wants is a locus of power or influence other than his own self, and a unified and professional military would be exactly that. More particularly, no ruler could stay on his throne if an independent military wanted him deposed.

In the military context, the result was that if a particular ruler, family, or political party wanted to keep control over a diverse and fractious population, it had to have at its disposal a private army—the inner circle-- that could be relied upon in situations for which the regular army might not be reliable. These situations could include managing riots, staving off military coups, crushing religious unrest, control over weapons of mass destruction, and the like.

Most of the dictatorships produced by the 20^th Century therefore divided their militaries up into a series parts, typically including a small, well-equipped elite (the inner circle) personally loyal to the dictator and often drawn from the same narrow tribal, ethnic, political, or religious group, and a larger ‘regular’ army (the outer circle) of comparatively poor quality and drawn from the general population. Like the Praetorian Guard of imperial Rome, the actual quality of the inner-circle units can, of course, range from competent fighting men to parade-ground paper tigers and palace poodles incapable of managing anything more than terrifying unarmed villagers.

Inner-circle units typically get better pay, better training, and better equipment, and frequently have much higher proportions of long-service professionals as compared to conscripts. In open warfare, such as the 1991 Gulf War, they are kept in reserve, hoarded like a poker player’s blue chips, avoiding casualties while ready either to exploit a victory or to protect the regime in case of defeat.

Domestic prestige is also a significant factor—inner-circle units typically have resonant titles such as the Presidential Guard, Republican Guard, Revolutionary Guard, or Special Forces to indicate their high status, and take pride of place in parades and public ceremonies. These inner-circle units are also often closely tied to a dictator’s cult of personality, which in cases such as Saddam Hussein or Muammar Gaddafi can reach delusions of grandeur on a messianic scale.

As a quick explanation of terminology, in Western parlance the term ‘special forces’ usually refers to elite commando-style units such as the American Delta Force or the British SAS. In Soviet-influenced forces such as the Iraqi and Libyan militaries, however, the term generally denotes elite inner-circle conventional military units that can be used for internal security and keeping control over less-dependable outer-circle units.

These elite units are usually closely tied to the regime’s secret police and intelligence organizations (whether they are the Gestapo, NKVD, or Mukhabarat), the better to perform their domestic repression roles. For example, consider the Third Reich’s SS organization, which included the Reich’s entire internal security apparatus as well as a military wing that operated in parallel with the regular German army, or the USSR’s ‘internal troops’ fielded by the NKVD during Stalin’s regime, who operated behind the Red Army units (proverbially with bayonets leveled to keep the soldiers marching forwards). In some cases, such as the Libyan and Iraqi armies, the inner-circle units had exclusive control over the arsenals and ammunition supplies, and disarmed their outer-circle counterparts before parades lest some soldier take a potshot at the dictator.

Inner-circle units are also usually tied directly to the what might be termed the dictator’s “royal family,” a sprawling organization that is equal parts tribe, political machine, and economic venture, in which ‘family’ members provide inner-circle military manpower and political support in exchange for a chance to share in the oil revenues or some other economic banquet. Examples include the al-Assad clan in Syria, Saddam Hussein’s sprawling affinity in Iraq, or Muammar Gaddafi’s Gaddafa tribe in Libya. Similar preferences for having members of the royal family or at least the royal tribe in command positions prevails in Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, Bahrain, Abu-Dhabi, the United Arab Emirates, and Jordan.

It is no coincidence that all of the major military units garrisoned around Syria’s capitol, Damascus, are commanded by members of the Assad family, or that the elite Defense Companies that serve as bodyguards and political muscle for the regime are composed mostly of Alawi Muslims from the same district as the al-Assads. Most telling of all, when Hafez al-Assad leveled much of the Syrian city of Hama in 1982 in response to religious upheaval, the man he put in charge of the job was none other than his brother Rifaat al-Assad, head of the internal security forces. Sadly, Rifaat ultimately betrayed his brother’s trust with an attempted coup in 1983, and has spent the most of the subsequent years in genteel exile.

Egypt, by contrast, is relatively unusual in that the army (or at least, the officer class) is one of the more modern, egalitarian, and progressive elements in Egyptian society. There are no true inner-circle units, although the army is the tenth largest in the world. In addition, most of the officers in the upper echelons have attended the reputable Egyptian Military Academy, as well as college or professional schools in Europe or the United States. This background gave the officer class a different perspective on the role of the military in society, albeit one in which the military is loyal primarily to itself, rather than to the national leadership, and sees itself as a corrective mechanism for keeping the country on-track. In conjunction with the reluctance of conscripts to shoot civilians who may well be friends, neighbors, and relatives, this lack of an immediate connection to the Mubarak government, and the interest in reining in a government that fails or goes too far, is one of the reason the Egyptian army largely stayed out of the recent street unrest, forcing the Mubarak regime to depend on the police and hired thugs.

This was not always the case, however, as for many years the Egyptian military was virtually a caricature of the political army, rife with plots and coup attempts. Indeed modern Egypt’s history essentially began when a military cabal known as the Free Officers overthrew King Farouk in 1952 and installed first Muhammad Naguib and then Gamal Abdel Nasser as head of state. Nasser’s successor and Mubarak’s immediate predecessor, Anwar Sadat (himself one of the Free Officers), was assassinated by a similar military cabal composed of fundamentalist Muslim officers. The military’s shift away from it’s post-colonial and Soviet-influenced political role and into a western-style professional model is, ironically, one of the Mubarak government’s most significant achievements in Egypt’s domestic politics. The Supreme Council of the Armed Forces, an implicitly political committee of senior commanders, had not actually met for over thirty years before convening in January 2011 to temporarily assume power after the resignation of President Mubarak.

Egypt’s Central Security Forces, a paramilitary force used for domestic security and similar roles, but unlike inner-circle units in other nations the CSF is comprised primarily of poorly-paid conscripts rather than favored praetorians, and had no direct ties to Mubarak. Mubarak increased the number of CSF personnel to 100,000 in the early 1980s in an attempt to balance the military’s influence at the time, but met with little success. One of the most significant episodes in military unrest under Mubarak’s rule was a 1986 mutiny by several thousand CSF troops in response to a rumor that their terms of conscript service were being extended.

Tunisia, like Egypt, has a professional and historically apolitical military that was not directly under the control of President Ben Ali’s regime. Unlike Egypt, however, the small (approximately 35,000-man) Tunisian military has never fought in a war, and has since the 1960s spent most of its time doing peacekeeping and humanitarian work.

If that is why the Egyptian and Tunisian militaries stayed out of the recent turmoil, consider the other extreme.

The late Saddam Hussein’s Iraqi regime was a rather extreme example of the cult of personality and extreme paranoia in military organization, but the Iraqi situation illustrates the inner circle/outer circle dichotomy. The “outer circle” Iraqi armed forces under Hussein’s regime included the Iraqi armed forces into the regular Iraqi army (draftees little better than cannon fodder), the more professional Republican Guard, and the Air Force, which was of a status approximately equal to the Republican Guard.

The ‘inner circle’ in 2003 included several corps of elite bodyguards and special forces, including the 12,000-man Special Republican Guard or ‘Golden Division.” Augmenting this in 2003 were the paramilitary Fedayeen Saddam organization mustering up to 30,000 men and an irregular corps of ‘foreign fighter’ volunteers and mercenaries.

Hussein’s inner-circle units drew heavily on manpower sources with a personal affinity to Hussein and his family, including the al-Tikriti tribe, the Ba’ath political party, and to a lesser extent the general Sunni Muslim population of central Iraq.

The several divisions of the Republican Guard had been an vaunted inner-circle unit, reporting directly to Hussein himself rather than to the army general staff. Following its near-destruction in the 1991 Gulf War, however, it lost most of its prestige and was essentially replaced at the dinner table by new, smaller elite units. A previous paramilitary organization, the Popular Army of Iraq, was essentially a Ba’ath party militia; it numbered over half a million men at its peak in the late 1970, but declined rapidly in prestige after it suffered heavy casualties during the Iran-Iraq war and was dissolved in 1991.

The fate of the Iraqi army during the 2003 invasion by the United States and its allies is well-known. The regular army and most of the Republican Guard disintegrated, the Air Force was destroyed on the ground, and most of the inner-circle units broke up and went underground to carry out guerilla attacks, as Iraq descended into an ethnic and religious civil war that lasted several years, with the US-led occupying forces caught in the middle while trying to restore order.

Libya did not suffer from the same ethnic, religious, and economic strains as Iraq—the country’s population is far smaller than Iraq’s, homogenously Sunni Muslim, and overwhelmingly concentrated in cities along the Mediterranean coast. While still poor by western standards, the Libyan GDP and standards of living are significantly better than those in Hussein’s Iraq. The principal ethnic tension is Gaddafi’s obsessive hatred of the Berber tribal groups, which is apparently not shared by the general population. Rather than any ethnic, or religious tensions, as were the case in Iraq, the primary driver behind the popular uprising against Gaddafi is an overwhelming disgust at the continuously erratic, corrupt, and tyrannical behavior of his regime. Gaddafi’s loyalists are drawn primarily from his own Gaddadfa tribe, other residents of the coastal Syrte district where most of the Gaddafa live, or other persons personally loyal to the regime.

Though Gaddafi spent lavishly on sponsoring foreign terrorist organizations, on attempts to acquire weapons of mass destruction, and in acquiring vast quantities of conventional weapons from the USSR, his regime essentially starved the 50,000-strong regular military of men, money, ammunition, and equipment. Much of the equipment purchased from the USSR simply sat in warehouses unused, or was given away to militias and terrorist organization. The result was a poorly-motivated and underequipped force, half the strength of which were draftees, that failed on just about every occasion that it saw action, and which was quite literally decimated—suffering losses of up to 10% of its total manpower-- during the so-called “Toyota War” in Chad during the 1980s.

The Libyan Air Force was higher in prestige than the army until the late 1980s; Gaddafi spent lavishly on aircraft, and indeed the Air Force had far more aircraft than it had trained pilots or ground crew to operate them. When the humiliating defeats inflicted by the US during the Gulf of Sidra encounters and the 1986 Operation El Dorado Canyon made Libya a military laughingstock, however, Gaddafi appears to have essentially turned his back on the Air Force and let it decline.

The real muscle behind Gaddafi’s regime over the last forty years has been his intelligence and secret police organization, who usually exercised power by ‘disappearing’ or assassinating foreign or domestic critics rather than by brute force. Loyal inner-circle military units included the 3,000-strong Revolutionary Guard Corps drawn from Gaddafi’s own tribe, and the elite “Khamis Brigade” commanded by Gaddafi’s youngest son.

These inner-circle units are augmented by Gaddafi’s intelligence organization, his secret police, and the ‘Revolutionary Committees,’ which are in reality equal parts party brownshirts, local government councils, political commissars and paramilitary militia. The Revolutionary Committees also theoretically served as a leadership cadre for the People’s Militia, an unorganized force composed of anyone eligible for military service, but which existed largely on paper.

Gaddafi also maintains for his immediate personal protection a 40-strong “Amazonian Guard,” comprised entirely of handpicked women who allegedly must be virgins, as well as several other units of bodyguards. It is unclear as to whether Gaddafi had foreign mercenaries on the payroll in Libya before the outbreak of the ongoing revolt on February 15, but he certainly began importing as many as he could find as the revolt gained headway.

From 1972 to 1987, Gaddafi’s regime also maintained the Islamic Legion, a corps of foreign volunteers mostly from sub-Saharan Africa, the membership of which included Arab supremacists, soldiers of fortune, and migrant workers who had been dragooned into military service. This ‘foreign legion’ conducted a number of operations in Uganda, Palestine, Lebanon, and Syria, but was only deployed in strength in Chad, where it suffered a number of severe defeats and essentially disintegrated. Several leaders of the Janjaweed militias terrorizing the Sudan are veterans of Gaddafi’s Legion.

The actual state of affairs in Libya is confused. Some of Gaddafi’s troops willingly fired on the protestors at the outset of the February protests, and in fact the Libyan army has a long history of using violence on protestors. This time, however, many regular army units reportedly mutinied or disintegrated as the protests gained momentum and accelerated into open rebellion and civil war, leaving Gaddafi to throw open his arsenals to criminals, prisoners, and anyone willing to bear arms. The Air Force is essentially split—while much of the force has turned against the Gaddafi regime, including several pilots who flew to Malta or ditched in the Mediterranean rather than bomb the protestors, some squadrons appear to have remained loyal to the regime and continue to launch sporadic airstrikes.

In a stellar example of how something old can become new again, the examples of Iraq and Libya bear a close resemblance to the common state of affairs under the later Abbasid Caliphate (approximately 850-1258 CE). As the Abbasid caliphate’s central authority weakened after the death of the great Harun Al-Rashid, provincial lords attempted to increase their own power by acquiring corps of foreign soldiers to use as bodyguards and to keep restless populations and unreliable local troops in check.

These soldiers, variously referred to as mamluks, ghilman, or saqaliba, and their later cousins the Janissaries of the Ottoman Empire, were long considered to be more trustworthy than native troops. Many were also either technically slaves, owned by their lord, or mawla, free clients with specific reciprocal obligations to their lord, and as such considered part of his extended family, with all the social, political, and economic advantages that included. Without other tribal or familial attachments, they were expected to be more loyal to the ruler alone, and less prone to mutiny, treachery, and court intrigue.

These initially small units increased as their usefulness became clear—the Caliph al-Mu'tasim, second son of Harun al-Rashid, enlarged his mamluk units from a 4,000-man palace guard to a 70,000-strong private army during his reign. This was due in large part to Mu’tasim’s weakening control over the provincial emirs who had historically provided most of the Caliphate’s troops.

In the end, however, the mamluks’ loyalty to a specific ruler usually decreased as their numbers and prestige increased. The men who were supposed to be without faction became a faction of their own, and by the late 900s corps of mamluks were frequently capable of deposing a ruler and replacing him with one the erstwhile ‘bodyguards’ controlled. This situation devolved until much of the modern Middle East was ruled by dynasties of Turkish sultans whose ancestors had been bodyguards of an Arab lord, and a “Mamluk Sultanate” ruled Egypt for nearly three centuries until it was absorbed by the Ottoman Empire.

As of February 2011, there are no democracies in the Arab world. Tunisia and Egypt are on the road towards democracy, but they are not there yet. The protests continue in other countries, and Gaddafi is obviously on his last legs. The future is uncertain—while relatively moderate rulers such as King Abdullah of Jordan offer political concessions rather than sending in the army, it is hard to imagine Bashar al-Assad meeting his opponents with anything other than force, as his father and uncle did at Hama. If democracy is to emerge, however, the praetorians and secret police must be dispensed with.

My take on what's going on in the Middle East and what we should do about it.

These are tumultuous times. The Middle East is in worse chaos than usual; a popular uprising overthrew the dictatorial government of Tunisia. Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak lost the battle for Tahrir Square in the heart of his own capitol city. Protests and riots have rattled Yemen, Bahrain, and Jordan. This is the largest upset to the world’s status quo since the disintegration of the Warsaw Pact and the collapse of the Soviet Union twenty-odd years ago.


Now the attention is on Libya, where the mentally maladjusted Muammar Gaddafi is in the process of being overthrown. The ‘neoconservative’ wing of the United States political establishment—for example, former Bush apparatchik Paul Wolfowitz and Senator Joseph Lieberman -- has issued loud and numerous calls for the US to immediately intervene in force in the Libyan upheaval, while also criticizing the Obama administration’s handling of the uprisings that have shaken the region over the last two months. Even Christopher Hitchens (who is by no means part of the establishment but who is a self-styled radical with a penchant for interventionism) weighed in with a typically sarcastic but insubstantial opinion piece.


This is what guys like Wolfowitz and Lieberman always, always, always get wrong. They look at the last sixty-odd years of US foreign policy, particularly in the Middle East, and see that we’ve always got ourselves involved. The Islamic Revolution in Iran, the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait, the Yom Kippur War, for sixty years the White House has had every ruler or other politician of note in the region who would speak to us on speed-dial. The last time there was a major incident in the Middle East and the US didn’t immediately barge in was the Suez Canal crisis in 1956—when Wolfowitz, now 67, was 13 years old—and we stepped in only at the end.


Lieberman, Wolfowitz (whose alleged foreign policy credentials should be forever revoked for his involvement in Bush administration’s invasion of Iraq), and the rest of the hawkish neocons take it as a matter of faith that just because we’ve always jumped into the pool right at the start, that it’s the right thing to do and that’s what we should keep on doing.


This is a very dumb assumption to make. If we have an unfavorable position in the Middle East, it would be a particularly dumb thing to keep doing what put us in that position—Einstein’s definition of insanity is, after all, doing the same thing repeatedly and expecting differing results.


First, consider our general favorability rating among the peoples of the Middle East – the ‘Arab street.’ The US is a very unpopular brand in the region, largely because we have been meddling in it since the Eisenhower administration, and treated its nations and peoples as pawns on a chessboard during the Cold War. Over the last six decades, the US did a lot of unpleasant things in the Middle East, and for most of that time it was done out of calculated and cynical realpolitik. Put in the simplest possible terms, the US would prop up any autocratic bastard and give him a nearly unlimited line of credit if he would toe the line on certain policy issues. Human rights violations, corruption, and other issues didn’t even enter into the equation; after all, this was war, albeit a Cold War, and for several successive presidents, beating the USSR required the US to compromise its principles by supporting ostensibly reliable dictators instead of self-willed democrats. We burned the village in order to save it, to paraphrase the slogan from the Vietnam War, and we did on a scale of nations rather than just villages. Guess what? The Arabs remember.


The term “blowback” is one of the more pungent terms of art in the intelligence and foreign communities, referring to the unforeseen negative consequences of one’s actions. The US’s status on the Arab street has been eroding steadily over the last forty years by a steady stream of blowback from things we did during the Cold War. Even aside from what many in the region see as our ultimate sin in supporting Israel, for three or four decades we supported a seemingly endless list of tyrants who brutalized their own people and looted their countries simply because Washington could count on these dictators to toe the US’s line against the USSR, just as we did in Latin America. The scale of the brutality used is appalling-- Hafez al-Assad of Syria, tyrant and father of tyrants, leveled most of the city of Hama in 1982 in response to an uprising by Sunni Muslim fundamentalists, killing up to 20,000 people. Saddam Hussein was our boy in Baghdad until he ended his war with Iran and turned on Kuwait, at which point he stepped outside of his box and became persona maximum non grata.


This behavior continued during the Bush administration’s War on Terror—the US even reached an accommodation with Muammar Gaddafi’s Orwellian regime in Libya in the early 2000s in order to pry him away from publically supporting international terrorist groups, and we quite probably absolved him for his role in the Pan Am Flight 103 bombing as a cost of doing business. The UK apparently released the Libyan intelligence operative who planted the bomb in exchange for oil concessions from Gaddafi’s state-owned oil company. Egypt and Syria became valuable subcontractors to the Bush administration precisely because they were brutal dictatorships with horrible human rights records—the US shipped prisoners there to be tortured because we couldn’t do it ourselves.


One of the most important figures I can quote on the subject is none other than Osama bin Laden himself. His notorious ultimatum to the west, delivered in 1998, was essentially a cease-and-desist demand for a lengthy list of things he wanted the US to stop doing, including support for corrupt and brutal despots like Hosni Mubarak and the al-Saud dynasty, maintaining garrisons in Saudi Arabia, and the starving of the people of Iraq with sanctions aimed at the Hussein regime. Granted, bin Laden is a terrorist, the worst sort of a murderer, the most wanted man in the world, and couched his ultimatum in terms of a “crusader-Zionist alliance” between the US and Israel, but in this instance he simply articulated what many Arabs across the region want—for the US to stop manipulating the region like a rigged poker game.


Second, most of the Middle Eastern nations are self-consciously post-colonial. The ordinary people in the street know their countries have been manipulated by foreign powers for a long time, have struggled by the congenital economic and social deficiencies left by their colonial origins, and they don’t like it when foreigners try to meddle or order them around. Old people in Egypt still remember when the Union Jack flew over Alexandria, Cairo, and the locks of the Suez Canal. Even when Gamal Abdel Nasser threw off British control in the 50s, he immediately cut a bargain with the USSR because he needed a powerful ally to play off against the UK and France. This proved to be an object lesson in poor judgment because the USSR proved a far less benevolent master than the British Empire, and for two decades treated Egypt as little more than a garrison base on the Suez Canal. The Soviets were displaced in turn by the US, who propped up a tyrannical and corrupt police state for three decades because that was the cost of keeping Egypt out of another Arab-Israeli war, which meant the oil would keep flowing.


If the US jumped into the Egyptian revolution—let’s call it what it is, every bit as much a revolution as the one that started at Lexington and Concord—it could have been the worst possible thing to do. The Mubarak regime has never had a problem being two-faced, and could quite easily have permanently ruined the Tahrir Square protestors’ credibility with the Egyptian people by labeling them as agents of a foreign power. That it would have been the same foreign power that backed the Mubarak regime wouldn’t have mattered.


Third, last, and most important, these are popular and nationalist rebellions—“Egypt for the Egyptian people” and all that—fueled by popular concerns. What the US wants is generally irrelevant to the people who gathered for weeks on end in Tahrir Square in Cairo. Big matters of global foreign policy simply don’t matter there. What matters to them is the decades of grinding poverty, government corruption, and a tyrannical regime that drags grandfathers from their beds and smashes their bones with hammers to intimidate the population into fearful obedience. In other words, what the Egyptian people were protesting against was the status quo maintained by the regime we supported. That is blowback, yes, but in this case everyone except the Mubarak regime benefited from it. When they want help from the US, they’ll ask for it.


The Obama administration, in my opinion, did an excellent job with its hands-off approach to the Egyptian revolution. The White House watched carefully, but did not take an official position on the matter until the Egyptian people had made it clear that they were ready, willing, and able to throw Mubarak out themselves. Doubtless there was a lot of high-level, high-tension stuff going on behind the scenes and the telecom lines between Cairo and Washington were humming nonstop, but the Egyptian people needed an opportunity for self-determination, and letting them do things themselves was the best thing we could do. Now we’re doing the same thing with Libya, and again it seems like the right thing to do.


The US needs to think less like Richard Nixon or Henry Kissinger, and more like Woodrow Wilson or Franklin Roosevelt—stop trying to manage the world’s foreign policy like it’s a giant spider web, with us the spider rushing to every little disturbance. It’s true that the developed world now suffers from a 24-hour news cycle, and that American interests span the globe, yes, but they are not so delicate that but not every crisis demands an immediate response from the White House.


Remember the Fourteen Points Wilson offered during the First World War—the most important of these was the right of self-determination—or Roosevelt’s ‘good neighbor’ policy, which put a stop to a half-century of constant American meddling in Latin America. The Egyptians are people, too, and they deserve a chance to try to work things out for themselves. For our own part, the US should take the opportunity to mend fences and genuinely win new friends in Tunisia, Egypt, Libya, and other countries. This is 2011. The Cold War is over, and the dictators we took advantage of then are inexcusable now.


The only thing that stops the US from embracing this calmer and more rational foreign policy is our collective national ego, particularly the belief that the world can’t function without the US, and the presumption that America is always right. This is where jingoism, bumper-sticker patriotism and right-wing sneers about the “blame America first” crowd have to give way to a fearless moral inventory of the last century’s history. The original context of the ‘my country, right or wrong’ epithet was, after all, Commodore Stephen Decatur of the US Navy’s after-dinner toast "Our Country! In her intercourse with foreign nations may she always be in the right; but right or wrong, our country!"


While the Obama administration’s hands-off approach may look like indecisive lethargy to a quick-on-the-trigger interventionist like Lieberman or a ‘let’s start a war and see what happens’ guy like Wolfowitz, (Hitchens called it “pathetic and dithering”) it’s a pleasant change. The last thing the Egyptian, Tunisian, Jordanian, Yemeni, Bahraini, or Libyan people want or need is another superpower telling them what they should get without listening to what they want. I wouldn’t expect either Lieberman or Wolfowitz to understand popular movements—the last time the US experienced this sort of popular upheaval by ordinary citizens in the streets was the early 1970s, and neither of them strike me as the sort to stare down Bull Connor or protest at Kent State. Lieberman, in one of the stranger episodes of the 2008 election, even managed to ignore the popular sentiment of his own Democratic party by running for reelection as an independent.


In summary…. President Obama shouldn’t be listening to Lieberman, or Wolfowitz, or Hitchens, or Gaddafi, or Prince Bandar Al-Saud, or even me. He should be listening to the people in the streets in Cairo and Tobruk, since they’re the ones who matter.