Seven December 1941 and 11 September 2001 are dates that will forever live as days of infamy for our country. But did you realize that on 7 December 1941, USS Enterprise (CV-6) was 400 nautical miles southwest of the Hawaiian Islands? A storm system had forced it toward the south — the same storm system that hid the arrival of the Japanese striking force also delayed Enterprise’s arrival into Pearl Harbor. VADM Halsey, who was riding the ship, upon hearing of the air raid on Pearl Harbor, ordered the captain of Enterprise to put his rudder over and launch search and strike sorties, hoping to find the Japanese carrier striking force.
Enterprise went on to participate in every major campaign in the Pacific in World War II. She earned more battle stars than any other carrier, and at one time in 1943, she was the only Navy operational carrier. Enterprise was truly prepared and we needed her for that war.
Almost 60 years later, VADM Charles W. Moore Jr., Commander, 5th Fleet, upon seeing the attacks on the World Trade Center, ordered Enterprise (CVN-65) to put her rudder over and close the North Arabian Sea at full speed to join her sister Carl Vinson (CVN-70) and prepare for war. I love that connection.
Recounting the Attributes
In many ways Operation Enduring Freedom is validating the Navy and its mission. I believe it’s important to revisit the Naval service’s attributes in the recently completed Quadrennial Defense Review.
First attribute … immediately employable. Two carriers and an amphibious ready group were immediately on scene and ready to go to war. Because of the readiness of our forward-deployed Naval forces in Japan, Kitty Hawk (CV-63) immediately deployed for war, closing the North Arabian Sea for a special mission.
Second … the sovereignty of Naval forces. There is great irony here. We have a world conflict on terrorism, but three countries that could provide counter-offensive leverage for U.S. forces rolled up their sidewalks.
Third … the enabling of joint forces. Could there be a better example of this than Kitty Hawk’s role as the forward staging base for U.S. special forces? Army special operations forces lived, slept, trained and lifted for war from her deck. Her performance was simply magnificent.
The EA-6B’s mission of enemy electronic suppression, completed in the first several days of the war, moved to communications jamming that allowed U.S. joint forces to localize al-Qaeda and Taliban forces.
Airborne Assets Pave the Way
F-14 Tomcats using tactical targeting of their LANTIRN pods were able to first pinpoint and then pass precision targeting coordinates to Navy and Air Force strikers. Navy fighters escorted Air Force bombers as a prerequisite to their initial entry into the Afghani airspace and until air supremacy was established.
There’s another side to this story too. Clearly, the Navy was also assisted by the U.S. Air Force. That service provided lift, munitions, shared intelligence and surveillance and over 80 percent of the mission tanking to our carrier striking forces. This tanking supports the reach we need to target the northern half of Afghanistan, where our Navy strike missions have been as long as 10 hours and are averaging about seven hours. That’s equivalent to taking off from Washington, D.C., striking targets in St. Louis and flying back. That’s also a long time to be strapped to an ejection seat and to come home to your “bird farm” for a night arrested landing. It’s amazing what our pilots and aircrews have been doing in this war.
We also received the joint support and strong leadership of LGEN Chuck Wald and now-LGEN Buzz Moseley as the air combat commander. And as you are aware, the Navy leadership, particularly VADM Moore as the fleet commander and RADMs Thomas E. Zelibor and Mark P. Fitzgerald as the task force commanders, have been all about first-class warfighting.
Real Work Produces Lethal Effects
This brings me to a significant point. Over the last several years I’ve spoken to audiences like this one about Naval Aviation’s revolution in strike warfare and its fundamental contribution to an effective revolution, network-centric warfare. What the men and women of our carrier battle forces and our expeditionary squadrons did was real. It was real work, it had a real effect. I had the privilege of hearing Air Wing 11 commanding officers on Carl Vinson debrief their ability and their role as they returned home from war. Everyone in this room would have been filled with such pride to hear what they had done.
You have to understand a little about this air wing. Air Wing 11 had a very long turn-around before their deployment, about 70 percent longer than the normal turn-around for our wings. And a little bit more than half of the pilots and NFOs in that air wing were what we call “nuggets,” or new, first-deployment aviators. They described their mission. They described how they worked. They described their challenges. I wanted to understand if their training and if their equipment supported what they were asked to do in the war. It did not in every case. But in the majority of cases it did.
They all set flying hour records. One squadron, VFA-97 flying F/A-18As, the oldest F/A-18s we have in the active force, flew 1,400 hours in one month. That’s a record for an F/A-18 squadron. The pilots averaged 72 hours a month where they typically get around 30 hours per month on deployment. We flew at rates while we were deployed in the war about two and a half times more than the programmed rate in the flying hour program. The maintenance-capable rates of their aircraft were equivalent and actually slightly better than the maintenance-capable rates of the air wings just before the war.
I asked them how they did it. And to a man I think their answer was, “We were great.” And I think what they meant by that was, yes they were great, their squadron was great and their leadership was great, but they also meant that the team was great. The way they were supported, the way they felt connected to their ship, and the way they felt connected to the process that they’re in was something they were very proud of. And they understood that all of this brought about their ability to affect our nation’s war in Afghanistan.
And so beginning with 7 October, the day of our first strikes into Afghanistan, Carl Vinson joined with Enterprise, soon after Kitty Hawk, and then Theodore Roosevelt (CVN-71) and finally relieved on station by John C. Stennis (CVN-74) on 16 December, Task Force 50 flew nearly 4,000 sorties that delivered ordnance, killing the enemy. There are many more that were flown than this to support the strike missions, and we had many sorties that were armed that did not have the opportunity to deliver ordnance for various reasons. The Navy fought and won over the Afghani battle space with tremendous effect. Bombs were falling faster from Navy air wing aircraft than 1,000 shares of Enron stock.
Real Effects
There were real effects. This is not about a point paper in the Pentagon. Our pilots were kicking somebody’s butt. That’s one of my personal metrics. But let me talk to you about more.
First effect … lethality. Of the Navy sorties that delivered ordnance, 84 percent of those sorties hit a target. That’s incredible accuracy.
Second effect … precision. With 93 percent by number, 94 percent by weight, the ordnance that was delivered was precision-guided. This is a complete reversal from our experience in Desert Storm.
Third effect … agility. In Desert Storm, we fragged or scheduled numbers into the tens of aircraft per target. In Operation Enduring Freedom, Navy tactical aviation on the average struck more than two targets per aircraft that delivered ordnance.
Fourth effect … the time-criticality of the mission in Afghanistan meant that around 80 percent of Navy sorties that delivered ordnance did it against targets unknown to the pilots when they launched. This is unheard of responsiveness and critical to our success in Afghanistan. Navy air, combined with Army Special Forces ground forward air controllers proved an unbeatable combination against real-time targets.
Let me give you one example:
Ground FACs from the Army were regularly locating Taliban and al-Qaeda forces. The infrastructure of Afghanistan as you can see on CNN is not very robust. There was a particular bridge that was critical to U.S. Army ground forces moving back and forth through that part of the country, east of the capital of Kabul. It was a bridge that looked like an overpass that you’d see off an Interstate. A group of al-Qaeda forces had parked their Toyota pickup trucks and Land Cruisers — they knew that they were in trouble and they all ran underneath the bridge. The Army ground FACs, talking to a Navy F/A-18 pilot, said, “Hey, we don’t want you to blow up the bridge, but there’s about 50 of the enemy hiding under it. We want you to put ordnance underneath the bridge.” We had a young man, a young pilot out there, on scene. He’s obviously a combat veteran now. He skipped a laser Maverick missile underneath the bridge. He got the bridge dusty, but he killed a lot of al-Qaeda — he accomplished his mission.
Fifth effect … persistence. To the soldier on the ground, this attribute is without question, the most important contribution of carrier air power in this war. We provided seven-days-a-week, 24-hours-a-day strike sortie coverage for our troops on the ground. Marines at Kandahar were never without Navy top cover. These points are all about validating Naval Aviation’s path toward a revolution in striking capability and network-centric warfare.
There are some who would say that the metric of effectiveness in this is the weight of bombs dropped or carried … that this measurement is what we should value most or learn the most from.
If weight were the metric of choice in the National Football League, then owners would be telling coaches to get running backs that look like William “The Refrigerator” Perry of the 1986 Chicago Bears. I happen to believe in the agility, the precision and persistence of a running back like Emmitt Smith. A great team, like our nation’s in Enduring Freedom, has both. Big players like The Fridge are important. But Naval Aviation was the Emmitt Smith on this team.
Ben Franklin said, “There is no little enemy,” but he never met an al-Qaeda. We are fighting and winning this war because we have a president who has the will to win it. The President has said Operation Enduring Freedom is about justice, not revenge, and there is much to be done. We believe this man. I would add the Navy and Naval Aviation are making a big difference. The country of Afghanistan looks much different today because our flattops and the aircraft that fly from their decks are killing people that need to be killed. There’s a lot of fighting left to be done. But just as those squadron commanding officers in Air Wing 11 said, “We were great.”
Don’t you agree?