Angry Planet - The age of the aircraft carrier may be over

Episode Date: August 22, 2016

The United States has more aircraft carriers than any other country. Depending on what you call an aircraft carrier, it's 10 times as many. So why don't more countries have more carriers? Maybe they aren't such a great idea, anymore.Support this show http://supporter.acast.com/warcollege. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Love this podcast? Support this show through the ACAST supporter feature. It's up to you how much you give, and there's no regular commitment. Just click the link in the show description to support now. The opinions expressed in this podcast are those of the participants, not of Reuters' News. To conceive a ship that is longer than the Empire State Building is tall. You know, 5,200 people live on board. And when you're charged with their defense, you know,

that number actually means something more than just something the size of a small city. The United States has more aircraft carriers than any other country. You can add up all the flat tops plying the seas for Russia, China, India, France, the UK, and Italy, and you get to about half as many as the United States has out on the ocean. So, why don't more countries have more? more aircraft carriers. Well, they're incredibly expensive to build and maintain, but it's more than that. Launching and landing warplanes quickly and safely is hard.

I mean really hard. This week on War College, we look at whether modern naval defenses are making all this hard work and hard cash go to waste. You're listening to War College, a weekly discussion of a world in conflict focusing on the stories behind the front lines. Here's your host, Jason Fields. Hello and welcome to War College. I'm Jason Fields with Reuters. And I'm Matthew Galt with War is Boring. Today we're talking about probably the prestige weapon of the world's oceans, the aircraft carrier. There aren't a lot of navies in the world that actually can even put

them into the water. And the United States has far more than anybody else. Here to help us walk through the whole thing is retired U.S. Navy Captain and Senior Fellow and the Director of Defense Strategies and Assessments Program at the Center for New American Security, Jerry Hendricks. Thank you so much for joining us. It's my pleasure to be here. Let's start with the basics. What are aircraft carriers essentially?

What are they for, and why did we start building them in the first place? Of course, aircraft carriers, as their name implies, are large ships at sea that have essentially a runway built on top of them that allow aircraft to land and take off and support naval operations. They were originally conceived during World War I. A lot of people don't realize it goes back that far. The British actually created the first aircraft carrier during the war with the idea of using the aircraft as scouts to go. out and find the enemy, but also to use the aircraft to spot where the shells would fall from the major battleships. At that point in time, all of the navies of the world who began to look at this were principally looking for an ability to improve the accuracy of their guns, the guns that actually had the ability to shoot beyond the range of the visual observers on the ships. And so

the needed something that could look beyond the horizon. And so these aircraft had begun to be carried on board some of the battleships, and they thought it would be better if you would have one carrier that would come along with maybe something about 12 to 16 airplanes that could support the entire battle fleet, meaning that they would be out there communicating with the various ships of the battle line. So that was the original idea behind aircraft carriers. So when you're talking about ships of the line,

you're at that point talking about battleships, or just curious what we used to put out there? Yeah, so, I mean, the whole concept of the ship of the battle line, I mean, that term actually goes back to the sailing days when these large 74, 82, 94, and 104, and 104 gun sailing vessels would sail in a line, and then they would come alongside their enemies who were also sailing in a line that was just the preferred strategic tactic at the time. And then they would fight each other. And so the battleship, which evolved out of that, essentially still was conceived to fight. in a line that the ships would line up one after the other and that they would sail in essentially in parallel to their opponents and then throw large shells at them until you one force of the other was either damage or sunk. In fact, there was a number of battles, the battle of Sashima Straits

with the Japanese versus the Russians. The Battle of Jutland, of course, in World War I was essentially classic battleship, you know, battleship of the line battles. And the aircraft carrier it was an innovation that was essentially to come along as the guns grew in size to 14 inches, 12, 14, and then ultimately 16 and even 18-inch guns during World War II, these shells could travel out beyond the range. Most of the time when you're on a ship, you can see somewhere around 12 to 14 miles. A 16-inch shell can actually travel 23 miles. 18-inch shell could almost reach out to 30 miles.

And so you needed something to gain an increased altitude, to see where that shell was actually falling and then radio back so that the gun crew could correct where it was aiming. All right. If that was their role then, then what is their role now? Well, the 1920s and 1930s became a period of significant innovation. And what happened was that leaders within the United States Navy in particular, the Japanese Navy, by the way, underwent similar innovations, began to look at these ships as they work with them

in exercises and fleet problems, as the U.S. Navy called it, began to experiment with the ships as standalone platforms. And so, for instance, the commander of the aircraft carriers and one of the fleet problems in the 1930s actually used it to attack the locks at Panama. He was in the opposing force, fighting against the rest of the U.S. Navy, and he launched his aircraft at range and then masked them over Panama and actually attempted to attack the locks there. Another aircraft carrier commander actually ironically used them to attack Pearl Harbor, which was prescient for what the Japanese would do in 1941. And so the ships and their aircraft began to evolve away from the idea of just being a

scout force to becoming a strike force themselves and a sea control force. And so by the time we get to the 1941 in the advent of war, and of course the Japanese gave the entire battleship generation a rude wake-up call, there were a number of of commanders and leaders within the United States Navy who had come out of this period of innovation, the interwar period, with some definite ideas themselves about how if they were given their druthers, they would take these aircraft carriers and go out by themselves as a scouting and strike force to be able to strike the enemy at extreme range. And so that's where we were essentially at the beginning of 1941. The aircraft carrier itself had evolved and gone from

something that was relatively small to something that was about 880 feet long. It had grown in size from essentially around 20,000 tons to something in the mid-30,000-ton range. And its airwing had grown from about 12 aircraft when we first built the USS Langley to where we were carrying 60-70 and ultimately with the Essex class carrier up to 90 aircraft on them. And the aircraft themselves had evolved where they had gone from essentially short-range aircraft to longer and longer-range aircraft that could carry more and more ordinance. And so this sort of evolves along the line of the key capabilities that you look at with the air wing is how far can it fly on average, how much ordinance were they capable of carrying,

and how many of them, what was the mass of the air wing, its ability to concentrate over a given target and hit it with a lot of ordinance nearly simultaneously. And these were the themes that evolved out of this critical inner war period when naval aviation underwent such dramatic changes. Well, so which pushed which, if you're talking about the planes or the ships? Were the strategy evolved and then they developed the planes to carry it out? Or was it because the planes were already being created and changed and evolving, that they realized that they could use this particular strategy?

Well, I would say that the ships helped to evolve the aircraft, but I would also say that that was almost by accident. The first aircraft carrier was the USS Langley, and that was an old coelier. It carried coal around to the fleets, and it would deliver it to different spots, like taking coal out to Pearl Harbor and taking coal out to other places where the fleet would pull in.

And so they essentially built a large wooden deck up on top of it, and that became an experimental aircraft carrier. But the next two ships, we got by accident because the USS Lexington and the Saratoga, Lex and Sarah, as they were known in the fleet, those were cruisers. They were laid down as heavy cruisers. But when the Washington Naval Treaty of 1922 was placed into effect, those cruisers were in excess of what? what the treaty would allow the United States to have. And so they were converted midway through their construction. And because these were very large ships, they were ships that essentially had a length in excess of 800, almost 900 feet,

the flight decks on them ended up being extraordinarily long. It was something far beyond anything the British were thinking about at that time. The British had been the original builders of aircraft carriers. And so having this very long deck allowed, naval aviation leaders to place more aircraft on them. A longer deck means that you can take a larger aircraft because larger aircraft take longer to take off. You can also land those larger aircraft because you have a longer deck. And so those two first two aircraft carriers actually allowed us to grow and innovate and experiment in a way that we would not have had we just

taken the Langley and try to evolve upward from the Langley. And so we had this moment of great. as it were, where we had these ships that essentially allowed us to go a new direction. And we did. And then aircraft carriers that were designed subsequent to those two took into account sort of their best attributes. So let's talk about closer to the modern day. We know that there were carrier battles in World War II, and things kept evolving. And I was curious when the first nuclear carriers came into effect. That must have changed a lot of things, having that much horsepower. Well, to understand that, we have to step back just a little bit back into World War II because there's an anecdote that happens there that has a huge implication for the post-World

War II carriers and then ultimately the nuclear aircraft carriers. And that is that, you know, shortly after Pearl Harbor, there was a move to try and strike back against the Japanese. And so the decision was made to try and put some fairly long-range heavy bombers on to an aircraft carrier. This was the famous Doolittle Raid. Now, that aircraft carrier, the Yorktown, was commanded by Captain Mark Mitchell, who was one of the most experienced naval aviators. He was naval aviator number 33, given his wings in 1916. And so Mitchell did the calculations and realized that he could carry up to 16 of these B-25 Mitchells on there. And he had, he was forced because the Japanese discovered the force earlier than they expect, they launched them at about 680 miles from Japan,

which was at a very long range. And each one of those bombers carried 2,000 pounds of ordinance. And so they launched those bombers. Those bombers went on, but Mitcher regretted that the only thing that was wrong with the plan was that his carrier was not big enough to land that large of a bomber back on board the flight deck. Now, you have to flash forward because Mitcher is promoted to Admiral shortly thereafter. And in fact, he becomes sort of the the leading naval aviator commander of fast carriers in the war. In about 1944, it's going somewhat badly for carriers. We, in fact, lost four aircraft carriers, just flat out sunk that year. And a lot of others were damaged heavily. But the reason why that was happening was that our

aircraft did not have the range to reach the Japanese bases. And Mitcher was having to move his carriers up very close to the island of Luzon. And the Japanese were coming out with kamikazis, as well as other types of bombers. And they were hitting our kids. carriers and was wrecking havoc on the fleet. And he began to talk about building a very large aircraft carrier that could carry a larger plane that could fly a longer distance. And after the war was over, he came home and he actually wrote it all down in this major study that came out in late 1945 that talked about this supercarrier. And his idea was that he needed an airplane that was going to be about 70,000 pounds and could carry 8,000 pounds of ordinance and go 2,000

miles. That's a really big plane. And so they did the rough order calculations. They realized they needed an aircraft carrier that was around 75,000 tons, and that was at least 1,000 feet long, if not 1,100 feet long, and that would be about 250 feet wide to be able to launch these larger airplanes to go the longer distances. And so that aircraft carrier ultimately became the USS Forestal, CV-59, which was a conventionally fueled aircraft carrier. But Forrestal, you know, begat about three other carriers. And then ultimately, as we got into the 1950s, and the big push towards nuclear power came along. First, we built nuclear-powered submarines, U.S. Nautilus, and then the USS George Washington, which was a ballistic missile submarine.

But there came this idea that, hey, wouldn't it be great if we could put these nuclear reactors that were building into an aircraft carrier. So you'd have to have a ballistic missile submarine. have a carrier that never had to be refueled or at least refueled for its purposes. It still needed fuel for its airwings. And so we built the USS Enterprise, CVN, our carrier of fixed-wing nuclear, CVN, number 65. And Enterprise gets underway and, you know, was probably the preeminent carrier in the Navy right up until the day it retired. It actually had originally eight nuclear reactors. And it was one of the fastest ships in the world at that time because of the power those reactors could generate. And it fundamentally changed the way the naval aviation and the Navy operated because

originally we built, you know, some nuclear-powered escort ships to go along with her, the Long Beach and the Bainbridge, you know, creating this nuclear-powered task force that could go anywhere in the world and essentially not have to be refueled. I remember my father served on the enterprise and he was always upset that Bob Hope would never visit. Because he is afraid of the nuclear reactors, apparently, was the story that they were passing around. I don't know if that's true. That may be apocryphal, but I always thought it was interesting. I have never heard that story, but I will tell you that I remember flying missions myself when I was a young junior officer and using the infrared camera on my aircraft to look at the

enterprise and being able to pick up the distinct glow of the hot spots along her hole where her reactors were and thinking, wow, that is, that's a really interesting looking image. I will tell you that. When did it retire? Enterprise retired, oh, you know, I think about three or four years ago. I retired from the Navy two years ago, so all of these things seemed like they're in the distant, distant past now. But she was one of the longest serving ships in the history of the Navy.

Well, she was over 50 years old at the time that she retired. and, you know, still very capable ship. There were, you know, as ships, all ships age, you know, there's a brittleness that develops in some of the main frames and structures. And so there does come a day that everything has to retire. But it was with great regret that the Navy let go of Enterprise. And it was with great joy that we heard from Secretary of the Navy Mavis that, in fact, the third ship in the Ford class will be named Enterprise. So we will have an enterprise back here within the decade. So how many of these aircraft carriers does America have?

Well, it's interesting that you ask that question. So we have presently 10 super carriers, 10 Nimitz class super carriers. The USS Ford, which is it's a Ford class. The first of that line is in the water but is not ready to go to sea, not ready to deploy yet. It still has some systems that have to be checked out. So it'll be a few years before the Ford is ready to bring our number back up to 11, which is the congressionally mandated number that we're supposed to maintain. I will also tell you that we have an additional 11 light amphibious carriers that the U.S. Navy has, which are as large, if not larger than most of the other aircraft carriers in the world. With the exception of the French Charles de Gaulle, our light amphibious carriers are larger than the Brazilian carrier or the, or the,

the Italian carriers. And so everyone else in the world looks at the United States and would tell you that we have 21 carriers right now. But for our accounting purposes, the U.S. Navy says that we have 10 super carriers and then 11 light amphibious carriers. So the light amphibious carriers, I assume that they carry the vertical takeoff in landing aircraft. Is that right? We actually call them Stovl, which is short takeoff in vertical landing aircraft because you almost will never, either with the Harrier or the F-35. B, take them off vertically, but you give them a rolling start, and then you essentially set your thrusters at about a 45-degree angle, and then you get them airborne at the end of the deck, and then as you build up airspeed, you shift those thrusters into full aft, and then they become essentially a full-on jet at that point in time.

So one of the smaller carriers, though, they wouldn't be able to launch an F-18 or one of the other standard airplanes, right? No, they would not be able to launch an F-18 or, you know, they would not be able to launch an F-18 or an E2 or any sort of the larger aircraft that require a catapult, a K-to-bar type of an aircraft that would require a catapult and an arresting gear to operate. However, a light amphibious carrier can carry up to, you know, either 12, 14, or 16. I've seen different numbers of the F-35Bs, which means that, you know, they could be an effective attack platform themselves.

The other thing they can do is they can take smaller aircraft, like things like the OV-10, also the MV22 Osprey, which is a remarkable aircraft that doubles as a helicopter, you know, operates off of those. And so they have a lot of utility with them, and it's something I think the Navy has to spend more time exploring, but you are correct. They cannot take a Hornet, for instance, and operate a Hornet from the deck of a light amphibious carrier. So I honestly, probably a lot of our listeners know about the catapult system on supercarriers, but we had one conversation a while ago with someone who said that one of the things that's most remarkable about the U.S. Navy is these catapults, which get the planes up to enormous speed

within seconds or maybe even shorter than that, right? And that's a kind of a special attribute that, let's say, the Russians or Chinese don't even have. That's right. The British actually looked at catapults originally first. Originally, the catapults were hydraulic. They actually used sort of a large hydraulic piston. That was very complicated and was subject to a lot of breakdowns. We actually shifted to steam catapults during the 1950s, during the construction of the forestal.

And then nuclear power made that all the more easier because the nuclear reactor is really good at making steam. And so our supercarriers actually have four steam catapults that two on the bow and then two of what we call the angle deck or the waist of the aircraft carrier. So in heavy combat operations, we can actually be shooting four aircraft in near cyclic time, which makes it very easy for us to get a lot of airplanes airborne in a very short period of time, which is really important when you start talking about aircraft carrier cycle time. You know, the time between you launch the airplane, they all mass up,

and then when they're done with their mission, then you have to be able to bring them all back on board in nearly that same short of period of time. So for anybody who's actually watched an aircraft carrier operate at sea during flight operations, you realize that you're watching one of the most intricate valets ever designed. And it's one of the reasons why we still have a lot of confidence on our ability to operate up against forces like the Russians or the Chinese because they'll never be able to match us in mass, at least based upon what we've seen. thus far on watching their evolution. They simply can't get a large amount of airplanes airborne quickly and they certainly cannot recover them quickly. We would routinely recover an aircraft every 45 seconds to a minute and a half and that means landing it, taxing it forward, getting out of the way in time for the next airplane to land behind it using the exact same arresting gear. But that doesn't mean that they aren't attempting to find answers for aircraft carriers, right?

What kind of stuff are the Russians and the Chinese looking at to fight back against these? Well, they're looking at missiles. You know, the Chinese are building, of course, the DF21D, which is a ballistic missile that can go out to, you know, 900 nautical miles and has a maneuvering reentry vehicle that is designed to go after very large targets at sea. and so that's an anti-carrier ballistic missile. The Russians have, quite frankly, they've been developing cruise missiles since the 1960s to go out against our aircraft carriers. They would bring large regimental size formations of bombers, you know,

laden down with a lot of these cruise missiles to come out and try and attack American aircraft carriers based upon the premise that we would go into the North Atlantic or in the Pacific to attack, use the aircraft carrier as a platform to exercise. execute nuclear attacks upon the Soviet Union. And also, I must say, submarines. Submarine is probably the most effective anti-carrier weapon still in the world today. You know, putting a torpedo, exploding a torpedo against the keel of an aircraft carrier will, in fact, sink an aircraft carrier and can sink it rather quickly. So there are still plenty of threats out there against aircraft carriers, and these threats come in various different levels. So does that mean that, I mean, that does

make it sound like they're very vulnerable, does that change how we use them, or just their overall utility? So this is sort of the crux of the paper that I wrote about retreat from range. For the longest period of time, you know, we designed these aircraft carriers to go very long distances to execute nuclear attacks. So that's why we actually have supercarriers was to carry large nuclear bomber capable aircraft and launch them and recover them up a flight deck. It's we kept up that capability from the 1950s all the way through the early to mid-1990s. We had aircraft that were capable of going around 1,000 nautical miles. That was the average range, unrefueled range of an aircraft carrier airwing,

and carrying anywhere from 2,000 to 18,000 pounds of ordinance. The A6 intruder was really an amazing aircraft for how much ordinance it could carry. and then making their attacks and then returning. But of course, the fall of the Soviet Union at the end of the 80s and the early 90s, changed the way that we looked at the world. And throughout the 1990s, we executed carrier operations into Kosovo, Yugoslavia, also into Iraq with Southern Watch and a lot of other things. And essentially, these carriers were operating in a permissive environment.

And we were able to move our carrier very, very close. to the shoreline and conduct carrier-based operations in the Adriatic and the Northern Arabian Gulf and in the Persian Gulf. So we began to change the way that we looked at the airwings composition. So a lot of the airplanes from the Cold War, the A6, the F-14, the A-3 Sky Warrior, they all retired. So all that range sort of left, and we replaced them with F-A18 Hornets, which was originally designed to be a replacement aircraft for the F4 Phantom and the A4 Skyhawk, which were very short-range aircraft. And so suddenly we emerged, you know, into the 2000s with a carrier airwing that had an average unrefueled range of about 490 miles.

So we went from 1,000 nautical miles to around 500 nautical miles in about a decade. And then, you know, we designed an aircraft carrier to support that. That's what the Ford is. The Ford is there to generate a lot of sorters. It can do almost 30% more sorties than the previous Nimitz class. But the problem is that when your enemy zigs, when you zag, as what happened with China, for instance, developing the DF21, which was to force us back beyond the range of our airplanes, then you found that you kind of made the wrong investment. And so today, the U.S. Navy is attempting to buy back range. and get more range onto its carrier deck.

The F-35 Charlie has more range than the Hornet. Boeing is looking at some modifications to the Hornet that will extend its range. And also they're looking at the development of an unmanned tanker aircraft that can provide mission tanking that can drag some of these aircraft out, you know, by refueling them to extended ranges. And so these are the decisions that we're making now. Also, the price of our aircraft as individual aircraft has gone up, but our budget for procuring aircraft has essentially remained flat. And what that's done is it shrank the size of the aircraft carrier airwing from, you know, 80 to the low 90s back in the early 1990s, that our air wing today is right around 65 to 70 airplanes today. So we don't have the mass as much as we're going to. we did in the past. And so the air wing has undergone significantly, significant changes,

and not necessarily for the good over the last 20 years, 25 years. So does the F-35, you mentioned that it has longer range, and it's been a very controversial aircraft throughout its development. From what you know, do you actually see this as being, I don't know if a savior is the right way of putting it, but do you think that it's a positive step? Well, the F-35 has a positive. positives and negatives attached to it. I would tell you in a world that's becoming increasingly dominated by advanced anti-access air denial weapons. And that's not just things like DF21, but it's also things like the S-300 and S-400 surface-to-air missiles, which are incredibly lethal. And the Chinese HQ-9, which is, of course, a knockoff of the S-300. The older aircraft,

the Hornets, the F-16s for the Air Force, the F-15s for the Air Force, would all have have a great deal of trouble surviving in an environment where the S-300 and S-400 is deployed. And so that means places like up in the Baltic, in the Black Sea, even if they install these things in Syria, the Russians, then that would mean that we would lose access to most of the eastern Mediterranean. So the F-35, because of its stealthy design, along with the older aircraft, the F-22, would essentially be the aircraft which guarantee U.S. access into those types of environments. And so investing in to have some portion of your air wing be F-35s, I think, is critical to keep the carrier relevant in modern anti-access air-denied environments.

Can I ask you just a personal question? What is it like to serve on a carrier and what is it like to be in command of something like that? Thousands and thousands of people who are on board with you. Well, first of all, I didn't, I neither commanded an aircraft carrier and I, I'm sorry, I'm sorry. That's all right. But I will tell you, I did serve on board an aircraft carrier. I am not a carrier aviator. The airplane that I flew actually was a land-based maritime patrol aircraft. But what I did do, and this is a lot of the source of my experience, was that I served as a carrier tactical action officer. So I was part of ship's company, and my job was actually to defend the aircraft carrier. So I came on board first to train to defend the carrier against anti-submarine threat,

and then ultimately qualified to be a tactical action officer. And then that put the entire carrier strike group at my disposal to move the Aegis class cruisers and destroyers around to set up defensive perimeters as well as to launch the alert fighter aircraft to set combat air patrols out at the outer outer defensive ring. And so I, you know, on my first deployment as a TAO, I, you know, deployed with essentially the old air wing. I had A6s and I had F-14s, and I had the range that was associated with them as well as the S3 Vikings. On my second deployment, essentially we went out with a Hornet air wing. We had already begun to see the older airplanes begin to retire. And that changed the range calculations on where we would do intercepts and so on.

But I would tell you the thing that did strike me about being on board an aircraft carrier was, you know, first of all, I was overawed by the size of it the first time that I walked on board an aircraft carrier. Incredible to conceive a ship that is longer than the Empire State Building is tall. You know, 5,200 people live on board. And when you're charged with their defense, that number actually means something more than just something the size of a small city. And then, of course, to have everything on there that it has, you know, from its nuclear reactors to its radar systems to, you know, the basic things that you need to live comfortably, all the beds, the food, the water, and all those different things that come into play.

It really is a world unto itself. And I will tell you, of the two commanding officers that I did serve under, I thought both of them were perhaps the most superb leaders that I ever, ever had served with in my naval career, to become qualified to command a nuclear-powered aircraft carrier, it really places you a cut above. And I cannot tell you the degree of respect that I still hold for those men who I still know to this day and consider to be mentors and even father figures. It must take a special talent to do that, right? It's almost like you're the mayor of a battle city. Yeah. I noted the second.

The second commanding officer, the one thing that I always amazed was how little sleep he actually needed and how he was able to catch catnaps throughout the day in between flight operations and cycles and so on. Because he was the moment we were at sea, he was always on the alert. There was not a down time for him, even in the evening. You know, he would try to get four hours of sleep between midnight and four o'clock in the morning because it's not just flight operations. It's the operations of the reactor, it's the operations of the arresting gear and the launch catapults. And he was always intimately aware of everything that was going on and all parts of his ship. And his ship was the biggest thing in the fleet. And so it was interesting being around them and realizing what made them a cut above.

And by the way, incredibly intelligent officers as well, just their ability to understand where their ship fit in the overall fleet and where their fleet fit in U.S. foreign policy. Thank you so much for sharing that with us, too. I mean, you know, basically it's not an experience that it's not an experience civilians are ever going to have. And however many people there are on a carrier at any given moment, it's still a tiny percentage of the population that knows firsthand what you're talking about. Yeah. I had the actually, we do these things in the Navy called Tiger Cruises, where you're able to bring family members out and they're allowed to stay on the ship with you for a short period of time. And I had the privilege of taking my father, who was actually a previous enlisted sailor in the Navy, and I took him out on the Theodore Roosevelt with me for about five days.

And then on my last deployment, I actually took my oldest daughter out, and she made a three-day sail with me on board Pelaloo. And so I was able to share that experience. And my wife has actually been out on what we call day cruises, where we would just take the carrier out for the day, do an air show, and then come back. And all of them came away with a profound sense of awe, but also a profound sense as a Navy family member of being part of something so much greater than ourselves. And I think that's one of the great things about being in the United States Navy and serving on things like the aircraft carrier is you get a chance to be on something, take part in something that's much, much greater than yourself. And I remember a few years ago, my daughter was actually a champion athlete and made all-state first team three years in a row and won several championships.

And I told her, I said, you know, I joked with her in my own athletics. I'd never had a chance to win a championship. And she said, Dad, but you were in the Navy. And that's the championship team. And I recognize, you know, that she's correct. And that's a sense that we have in the Navy because of our experiences in World War II, which carried through to today that we are the largest, most powerful naval force that has ever sailed. And I say that, even going back to the time of Rome, that actually exerts influence over the entire maritime

surface of the globe. And when the U.S. Navy shows up and when an aircraft carrier shows up, everyone notices. And that's something special. Well, Jerry Hendricks, thank you so much for joining us. Thank you. It's my pleasure. Thanks for listening to this week's show. If you liked it and want to Even more, you can subscribe to it on iTunes and SoundCloud and, so I'm told, who will play. We've got 48 back episodes for you, including an amazing interview with a longtime U.S. operative who says one phrase could bring an end to ISIS, if it's said by the right people. You can reach us on Twitter. Our handle is at war underscore college.

We're happy to hear from you and get your ideas for shows. We'll even take criticism. The show was created by me, Jason Fields, and Craig Hedek. Matthew Galt has been bringing in all of the guests recently, and he co-hosts the show. He's wonderful. And this week's producer is Bethel Hoppe, who rocks, but in a quiet way.