1995 Dayton Peace Accords. Bosnia continues to be a hot spot, requiring continuous monitoring by NATO forces, while old ethnic hostilities are erupting in Kosovo and other areas.
• Algeria-A chronic Islamic insurrection faces a repressive military regime, as fanatic groups commit brutal massacres in villages near the country's large cities, killing hundreds of innocent civilians.
• Central Africa-Hutu and Tutsi factions wage genocidal war, spilling across national borders and defying international relief efforts.
• West Africa-Destitute nations continue to be wracked by coups and civil wars that have been endemic since the end of colonial rule in the 1960's, requiring frequent evacuations of foreign civilians.
Current U.S. national military strategy calls for a force structure sufficient to deal with two 'major regional contingencies' (small wars or big crises) plus one 'complex humanitarian emergency' (natural disaster, epidemic, famine, refugee migration, etc.). You might think that a dozen CVBGs would be enough to handle all that. Unfortunately, the unforgiving demands of complex machinery and the natural limits of human endurance set boundaries that make a dozen carrier groups just barely sufficient to maintain two or three carriers on distant deployment at any one time. Let me explain.
When you build a warship like an aircraft carrier, it is not available for deployment overseas all the time. Warships require regular maintenance and upgrades. Thus, in the forty-five-year planned life of an aircraft carrier, it will spend as much as a fifth of its time in docks and yards being repaired and maintained. For example, for every year the ship is in service, two or three months are spent on minor upgrades and maintenance to keep the ship going between 'deep' overhauls (when the warship is brought into dry dock for major work). These major overhauls are done every five years or so, take from eight to twelve months to complete, and include everything from repainting the hull to upgrading the living quarters and combat systems. Additionally, nuclear-powered carriers are periodically out of service for a three-year refueling, an intricate surgery (with meticulous attention to radiation safety) that requires cutting great holes through decks and bulkheads and then welding everything back together. All this means that a warship is only available to sail about three years out of every five.
The crew, also, requires its own 'overhaul,' for the multitude of combat skills embodied in the battle group's ten thousand sailors, marines, and aviators are 'perishable.' If skills are not taught, practiced, and tested regularly, the combat potential of a ship or air group rapidly deteriorates, even when deployed into a forward area. So a battle group must be assembled and 'worked up' for almost six months before each six-month deployment.
Finally, and no less important, today's sailors and marines demand and deserve a personal life. People are not robots; they need rest, family relationships, and opportunities to advance personally and professionally. Warship crews need some portion of their service careers at or near their home ports. This human factor is the first casualty when politicians deny pay increases and hardship bonuses, or extend emergency deployments to extreme lengths. Because relatively few of today's national leaders have the personal experience of long military deployments, the sea services have especially suffered. To remedy this problem, Admiral Johnson has instituted a six-month 'portal to portal' deployment policy. That is, the Navy has promised that sailors will spend 50 % of their time in home port.
Navy planners struggle constantly to build schedules that maximize the number of carrier groups available for deployment, while providing the best quality of life for embarked sailors and marines. Given a carrier force level of a dozen units, it works out something like this:
• Deep Overhaul/Nuclear Refueling-Two or three units at a time. Currently, there are three shipyards (Bremerton, Washington; Norfolk, Virginia; and Newport News Shipbuilding) capable of doing this intensive job, which essentially 'zeros the mileage' on a ship.
• Yearly/Periodic Maintenance-Two or three additional carriers are usually conducting yearly/periodic maintenance, which is mainly done dockside at the ship's home port.
• Deployment/Workup Cycle-The remaining six or seven carriers are on an eighteen- month cycle, broken into the following phases:
— Leave/Unit Training Period-The first six months of the cycle are devoted to resting crews coming off deployment, with leave and training time. Some individual ship or unit training is also conducted then.
— Workup Period-The second six months of the cycle are designed to refresh unit combat skills, conduct combine training, and validate the unit's ability to conduct joint operations prior to deployment.
• Deployment-Designed to be six months long, this is the period where the combined battle group is packaged and forward-deployed for actual operations.
Assuming that this cycle is not interrupted by a major regional contingency, two or three CVBGs can be forward-deployed at any given time. There is always one from the East Coast, which can be assigned to the 2nd (Atlantic), 5th (Persian Gulf/Indian Ocean), or 6th (Mediterranean) Fleets. The West Coast usually has one or two groups available, which work with the 3rd (Eastern Pacific), 5th (Persian Gulf/Indian Ocean), or 7th (Western Pacific) Fleets.[65]
Yes, it takes a great deal of effort and investment to keep just two or three carrier groups forward-deployed at one time. Yet the lack of forward U.S. bases in areas critical to American national interests makes these mobile air bases critical to the national leadership. If America wants to have a voice in a crisis somewhere on the other side of the world, then we need either a friendly allied host nation[66] or a carrier battle group offshore. And CVBGs have one major advantage: They do not need anyone's permission to sail anywhere in recognized international waters.
The current scheme of carrier group rotations assumes a generous (by past standards) allotment of home- port time for ships and sailors, given the operations tempos (OpTempos) of today. In an emergency, though, the groups working up can be rapidly 'surged' forward to reinforce groups already in the crisis zone. This is exactly what happened in 1990 and 1991 during Desert Shield and Desert Storm. By the time war broke out in early 1991, six CVBGs were in place for strikes against Iraq. Two other American CVBGs had operated in support of Operation Desert Shield and rotated home, while a British carrier group covered the Eastern Mediterranean to fill NATO commitments. In other words, even if forward-deployed carriers are tasked in a crisis, there is enough 'flex' in the rotational schedule to allow units at home in the U.S. to 'backfill' other American commitments.
USS
Let's take a look at one of these groups 'up close and personal.' Specifically, the CVBG based around the USS
