Word: carriers
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...Navy's 14 flattops range in age and size from the World War II-vintage Midway (64,000 tons) to the nuclear-powered Vinson (91,487 tons), commissioned in 1982. Each carrier can launch a mix of planes for self-defense and hitting enemy targets. The Vinson, for example, carries 24 F-14 fighters and 38 A-6E and A-7E attack planes, as well as four E-2C Hawkeyes to detect incoming enemy planes, four EA-6B Prowlers to jam enemy radar and radio, six SH-3 helicopters and ten S-3 Vikings for antisubmarine warfare. By 1991, Secretary...
Critics warn that Lehman's so-called forward strategy would be as doomed as the Charge of the Light Brigade. "The carrier battle group is not going to do very well against the air defenses of a first-class power armed with cruise-missile-carrying submarines and surface ships, Backfire bombers and oceangoing surveillance," says Robert Komer, a former top Defense Department official who is now a consultant with the Rand Corporation in Washington. "The triumph of the carrier was in World War II. We made the same mistake back then when we concentrated on battleships at first. The Japanese...
...recent engagements with Libya have highlighted another, and perhaps more important, role of carriers in an age of less than total war. The willingness of Reagan to go it alone--to use force unilaterally without the aid and approval of U.S. allies--has made the Navy's floating air bases almost indispensable. Carrier diplomacy is hardly a novel idea; in about half the 250-odd shows of force by the U.S. since World War II, carriers steamed to the scene. But in the past the U.S. has usually been able to rely on its allies to provide forward staging areas...
...Middle East, had an irresistible Gaullist urge to preserve their military independence. "No blank checks," a French official said of Paris' refusal to go along with the U.S. action. Concurred a French army colonel: "We will not be the Americans' valet d'armes--their orderly or spear carrier." The Italians have an enduringly bad con-science about Mussolini's colonial war against Libya and, to be sure, are concerned about 4,000 Italians living there today. West German leaders appear to have chosen to indulge the strong, barely dormant pacifist streak in the country...
...last June by Cooper, the plane's pilot, whom U.S. intelligence sources describe as a veteran of CIA operations and the leader of the airborne contra-aid group in El Salvador. Hasenfus said he and Cooper had both flown missions in Southeast Asia for Air America, a CIA-owned carrier, during the Viet Nam era. Since June, Hasenfus claimed, he had flown on ten missions, four from Aguacate, a contra base in Honduras, and six from Ilopango. He said he was paid $3,000 a month to work as a "kicker," the crewman who pushes cargo bales out of flying...