Are America's Supercarriers the Weapon of the Future or a Throwback?

Head on from the wave tops, it rises like a sleek steel Adonis, shoulders swelling massively from a taut waist. From high above, the jutting contours of its deck map the outlines of a miniature continent. The newest of America's 14 aircraft carriers, the 1,092-ft-long Carl Vinson, is the most powerful and expensive conventional weapon of war ever built. It is a symbol of the Reagan Administration's new globalism, in which the 19th century notion of gunboat diplomacy has been transformed into one of aircraft-carrier diplomacy. It is the pre-eminent weapon of an age in which America can no longer depend automatically on its 40-year-old system of alliances to project its power overseas. And it is at the heart of a heated debate that engages diplomatic strategists and Pentagon reformers alike: What is the role of the supercarrier in the military of America's future?

Aircraft carriers have been controversial ever since the U.S. Navy commissioned its first flattop, jury-rigging a converted collier by sticking a long black strip of tarmac over its deck in 1922. Battleship captains back then mocked the ungainly craft as a "covered wagon." More than half a century later, long after the carrier became the capital ship of the U.S. Navy, the doubters and true believers are still trading salvos in an engagement that has only heated up since ships of the Sixth Fleet sailed into harm's way in the Gulf of Sidra.

The aircraft carrier is Ronald Reagan's big stick. In an "era of violent peace," as Chief of Naval Operations Admiral James Watkins has dubbed this time of terrorism and global tension, American carriers can cruise the globe as island fortresses in troubled seas. Aimed at a Third World despot like Muammar Gaddafi, they can add an explosive exclamation point to presidential rhetoric. To John Lehman, Reagan's aggressive Navy Secretary, the carriers have an even more important strategic role. He believes they can safeguard vital sea-lanes during peacetime and could press close to Soviet shores in the early hours of a full-scale conventional war with the Soviet Union.

To some critics, however, the Navy's supercarriers are the Maginot Line of the late 20th century, monuments to military obsolescence. Would-be military reformers question whether enormously expensive supercarriers provide enough bang for the buck. If the U.S. tried to re-enact the Battle of Midway against the Soviet navy's modern cruise missiles and submarines, they warn, the American fleet would wind up like the Spanish Armada--on the ocean floor.