This is a truly awesome sight and yesterday our American ‘allies’ (er, they are still allies, aren’t they?) parked it just outside Portsmouth dockyard. It’s not that we failed to invite them in, I mean, who would argue with that behemoth, but the damn thing is just too big to get in! It is the USS Theodore Roosevelt which carries a crew of around 6,000 and some 90 very deadly aircraft. It acts, of course, as a warning to cynical old pessimists like me not to write off American power too quickly.
It is, of course, a delicious irony that inside the dockyard lies one of the greatest ships in history, HMS Victory, Nelson’s flagship at Trafalgar. Memento mori! How many Victorys could you fit inside the Theodore Roosevelt, I wonder?
Even so, packed with military testosterone as it is, I wonder just exactly how powerful the Theodore Roosevelt, and its ilk, is today and, more to the point, how powerful will it be in 10, 20, 40 years from now? In a comment thread ‘down there’ somewhere, the name of the late and very great Adm. Jackie Fisher came up. It is worth recalling his great battles – no, not with enemy fleets but with his fellow admirals, his domestic politicians and the popular press of the day. At the turn of the 19th into the 20th century the philosophy of naval warfare was all over the place which is hardly surprising given the revolutionary changes that had taken place since Trafalgar – iron ships, driven by engines so that wind and tides could be ignored, huge breech-loading guns throwing shells miles rather than yards, radio communications beginning to take over from flags and so on and on.
It needed naval officers of huge intellectual ability to cope with all this change and, thank God, we had just the man in Jackie Fisher. Of course he didn’t get everything right but he was right far more often than he was wrong, and he was certainly far more right than the naval nincompoops who surrounded him.
Now, ex-Cpl. Duff is in no position to provide you with a naval warfare philosophy fit for purpose in the 21st century and so it may well be that, for a change, ‘our’ (by which I mean American because for all intents and purposes we no longer have a navy) admirals have the sort of intellectual abilities of a Jackie Fisher. Yeeeeeeeeeeeeeees, quite! I do not have much confidence either. These great Neanderthal ships of war are almost designed (and certainly sold!) to tickle the male hormones of any fighting sailor. Which would you rather command, the USS Theodore Roosevelt, or a fleet of titchy, little speed boats packed with hundreds of tiny drones carrying a variety of ‘nasties’ including bio-chem agents and devices designed to close down enemy e-systems? How long, I wonder, would the Theodore Roosevelt and its crew last under a sustained assault from thousands of such ‘deadly insects’? I don’t know, is the answer but is anyone asking the question?
All of that, of course, is but one example from the wide range of possibilities becoming available in 21st century warfare with miniaturisation, robots, computers and all the rest of it. And so my question remains, where is the American Jackie Fisher?
ADDITIONAL: For the very best history of Jackie Fisher and his 'battles', and indeed, for one of the very best history books I have ever read, try Dreadnought by Robert K. Massie.