… is it worth it to take on ships that will not enter service very soon and will be insanely expensive?
- the opinion of President F. D. Roosevelt on the construction of large aircraft carriers
45,000-ton ship will be unreasonably large and uncontrollable
- Admiral Chester Nimitz, Commander-in-Chief of the US Pacific Fleet during World War II
If Admiral Nimitz found out that nowadays his name bears a monstrous project of a nuclear super-aircraft carrier with a displacement of 100,000 tons, I'm afraid he would have expressed his opinion in a much more rude form. The modern "Chester W. Nimitz" is a sea anomaly, an amazing "floating city" pretending to be a formidable weapon.
A real weapon is always created to solve a specific problem and must justify its existence. But the trick is, there was no justification for building a Nimitz-class aircraft carrier!
Official versions: "power projection", "protection of sea communications", "control of the Strait of Hormuz" - are suitable only for the younger group of the kindergarten. Unbiased statistics of military conflicts over the past 70 years show that it is impossible to "project force" if there is no force - nuclear aircraft carriers are too weak to influence the course of even a small local war.
In powdering Iraq, Libya or Yugoslavia, the United States is using more lethal tactics than a few unfortunate Nimitzes with two hundred carrier-based vehicles, whose combat performance is usually lower than that of ground-based aircraft.
The rest of the tasks of nuclear-powered aircraft carriers, connected with the "control of sea communications", today are successfully duplicated by simpler, cheaper and more effective means - progress in aviation does not stand still.
When a fighter-bomber is able to fly from Great Britain to Saudi Arabia in one night, without intermediate landings, to fly over the English Channel and Western Europe like an arrow, to jump over the Mediterranean Sea in an instant, to leave Israel, Jordan, and the Big Nefud desert under its wing, in order to, finally, to land under the walls of Holy Mecca - in such conditions, the need for "floating airfields" is completely eliminated.
Especially if the life cycle of the "floating airfield" is estimated at $ 40 billion! (The cost of building and operating an aircraft carrier for 50 years, excluding the cost of its wing. Aircraft, aviation fuel, ammunition, pilots and equipment - this is a separate interesting set-off). And the gigantism and extreme complexity of the design led to the inevitable result - 30 out of 50 years of their life "Nimitz" spend in the dock.
The above case is the real redeployment of the F-111 and F-15E squadrons to the forward airbases in the Arabian Desert (winter 1991). The vehicles flew in full combat gear with tons of bombs, air-to-air missiles, PTBs, sighting and navigation containers and jamming stations - the US Air Force was once again practicing long-range combat missions.
The task is simplified if the United States has 865 military bases on all continents of the Earth - this is without taking into account allied airfields and potential options, with the deployment of aircraft on the territory of third countries. Why drive a 100,000-ton whopper somewhere, waste its precious resource, burn fuel uranium assemblies and pay salaries to 3,000 sailors, if in ANY region of the Earth you can find a dozen first-class airfields with many kilometers of concrete runway and convenient infrastructure.
Simple, fast, cheap, effective. Safe (the accident rate of carrier-based aircraft is a separate, deep conversation). And most importantly - POWERFUL. One or two thousand combat aircraft will sweep away any enemy in their path. The nuclear super-aircraft carrier "Nimitz" with six dozen carrier-based vehicles did not lie close here - the forces are simply incomparable.
Why did America need 10 useless aircraft carriers? What is the meaning of the existence of the "Nimitz"? Who is financing the knowingly losing project? In my opinion, there is only one explanation:
Nuclear aircraft carrier? Nonsense! An unpaid loan can be used to build a starship.
The last aircraft carrier "Midway"
Admiral Chester Nimitz, denying the need to build large aircraft carriers, previously had in mind "Midway" - the largest aircraft carrier ship of the Second World War. Alas, even 45,000 tons of full displacement "Midway" seemed to the admiral an excessive luxury - he advocated the continuation of the construction of 35,000-ton "Essex".
The admiral's doubts are understandable - he was afraid to "cross the Rubicon", to break the line that separates a normal warship from a stupid "wunderwafe". There is a logical limit beyond which the progressive growth in the size and complexity of the ship's design is no longer compensated by the increase in its combat power. The efficiency of the system drops below the baseboard. As a result, the super-ship rusts in the base: it is easier for sailors to cull it at anchor than to use it elsewhere.
Subsequent events showed that the 45,000-ton Midway was precisely the limit that should not have been crossed. The optimal size and cost, with an impressive combat potential.
The aircraft carrier "Midway" did not have time to take part in hostilities - it entered service a week after the end of the war - September 10, 1945. Its sister ship, the aircraft carrier Franklin D. Roosevelt, was completed by October of that year. The last ship in the series, the aircraft carrier Coral Sea, entered the US Navy in 1947. Three more aircraft carriers of this type were dismantled on the stocks in connection with the end of the Second World War.
The key difference between the old Midway and the modern Nimitzes and Fords: the veteran aircraft carrier was created for very specific tasks!
1943, the laying down of the aircraft carrier "Midway" at the Newport News shipyard … Memories of air battles over the Coral Sea and Midway Atoll are still fresh, carrier-based aircraft were bathed in the rays of their glory. The combat radius of piston fighters did not exceed 1000 kilometers, which inevitably required the presence of a certain number of aircraft carrier ships in the Navy. Even the most daring science fiction writers had no idea about the imminent onset of the era of jet aircraft, and refueling in the air seemed like an outlandish aerial acrobatics. Few suspected of the possible existence of nuclear weapons, and only the specialists of the von Braun team knew (at least they dreamed) what an "intercontinental ballistic missile" was.
From this vantage point, Midway's mission was clear: the fast and powerful ship would lead a US Navy squadron into battle; 130 aircraft of its air wing will reliably cover the compound on the high seas, and, if necessary, will destroy anyone who dares to approach the squadron. Raiding operations on the enemy coast, covering convoys, fierce naval battles with an enemy equal in strength …
Having tested the meaning of the phrase "combat damage" on their own skin, the Americans immediately drew the appropriate conclusions. Three armored decks: flight deck, 87 mm thick, hangar and 3rd deck - 51 mm thick steel. The horizontal armor mass reached 5700 tons!
Bearing in mind the death of the aircraft carrier "Glories" in an artillery battle with German battleships, the Americans supplied the "Midway" with a vertical armor belt - 19 centimeters of solid metal! There was a conning tower, protected by 165 mm armor plates, all important cables were contained in pipelines with thick 102 mm walls.
Defensive armament (initial version):
- 18 anti-aircraft guns of 127 mm caliber;
- 20 "quadruple" machine guns "Bofors" caliber 40 mm, - 28 automatic anti-aircraft guns "Oerlikon" caliber 20 mm.
The maximum speed is 33 knots (≈60 km / h!). The full fuel supply (10,000 tons of oil) provided a cruising range of 20,000 miles at a cruising speed of 15 knots. - in theory, "Midway" could go around the entire globe without refueling.
The ship's standard displacement is 47,000 tons (draft). At the end of the service, the total displacement of the Midway increased to 60-70 thousand tons.
A serious ship for serious tasks. No one will dare to laugh at the aircraft carrier "Midway" and call it "a means for the war with the Papuans"!
The reality turned out to be discouraging: a serious war at sea was no longer foreseen, and the aircraft carrier was too weak for strike operations on ground targets - as a result, none of the Midwayes took part in the Korean War (where everything, as usual, was decided by the land-based aviation).
By the mid-50s, it became clear that the age of piston aviation had come to an end, the increase in the size, mass and landing speeds of jet aircraft required additional measures to ensure the efficient operation of the carrier-based wing - the Midway went through a global modernization with the installation of an angular flight deck, new aircraft lifts, aerofinishers, steam catapults; the heavy armor belt was removed, the "electronic filling" of the ships underwent an update, anti-aircraft artillery barrels disappeared one after another - in the age of rocket weapons, five-inch anti-aircraft guns seemed outdated interceptors, moreover, the aircraft carrier always went in a dense ring of escort cruisers.
By the way, "Midway" has undergone numerous upgrades throughout its entire service life: in the 1980s, to improve stability, the ship was welded from each side 183-meter boules; around the same time, "Midway" was equipped with modern self-defense systems: two air defense systems "SeaSparrow" and two anti-aircraft guns "Falanx".
Despite all the twists and turns in the fate of the Midway aircraft carriers, they were distinguished by one important quality - they were relatively simple, and therefore cheap (how cheap an aircraft carrier can be).
The Midway was 1.5 times smaller than the Nimitz - therefore, it needed a much lower power plant; there were no nuclear reactors on board, there were only two steam catapults (on the Nimitz - 4), three aircraft lifts (on the "Nimitz" -4), the crew size did not exceed 4 thousand people (against more than 5, 5 thousand. Nimitz "). These circumstances should have affected the cost of operating the "Midway" in the most positive way.
At the same time, the aircraft carrier "Midway" successfully performed tasks on a par with the newest "Nimitz", "Kitty Hawks" and "Forrestals"!
Phantoms, E-2 Hawkeye early warning aircraft, EA-6B Prowler electronic warfare aircraft, transport aircraft and helicopters were based on the Midway deck, as well as on the decks of nuclear aircraft carriers. In the 1980s, the modern F / A-18 Hornet fighter-bombers appeared. The only difference was in the number of aircraft: the number of Hornets on board the Midway rarely exceeded 30-35 units.
However, the difference in the number of aircraft did not matter: Midway and Nimitz were equally weak to perform strike functions. At the same time, to perform the primary tasks of carrier-based aviation: control of the airspace and air defense of the squadron in open sea areas, it is not required to simultaneously raise fifty aircraft into the air - one or two combat air patrols (AWACS aircraft + its escort of a pair of fighters) and four fighters on duty on deck. The decrepit Midway coped with this task no less successfully than the super-aircraft carrier Nimitz.
The last combat campaign of the Midway took place in the winter of 1991 - the ship took part in Operation Desert Storm (that time, the air wings of six aircraft carriers completed … 17% of combat missions - the remaining 83% of combat missions, as usual, were solved by land based aircraft) …
In 1992, the aircraft carrier was removed from the US Navy, and 12 years later, the ship was moored at a pier in San Diego (California) with the aim of becoming a naval museum.
