the aircraft carrier club 85
Department of Defense. This review, jokingly known as the “Marshall
plan,” proposed a complete rethinking of American reliance on car-
rier power (Bull 2001 ; Prasad 2002 ). The Marshall report called for de-
emphasizing the carrier’s role and recommended a cut in the number of
carrier groups and a transition to lighter, faster, and smaller carriers. More-
over, the report endorsed a shift toward a more significant reliance on
long- range, unmanned precision weapons. The controversy over the Mar-
shall report reheated an ongoing debate regarding the effectiveness of
the American carrier fleet (e.g., Wages 1995 ; Wode 1995 ; Bagley and La-
Rocque 1976 ).
Similarly, in the summer of 2002 , as part of the preparation for the in-
vasion of Iraq, the United States conducted a three- week- long war game
titled Millennium Challenge 2002 , which involved 13 , 000 soldiers, count-
less computers, and a price tag of close to $ 250 million. Veteran Lieutenant
General Paul Van Riper, who played the role of the Iraqi leader, chose to
employ untraditional low- tech tactics that relied on surprise and numbers
rather than sophisticated technology. Van Riper created a flotilla of small,
explosive- laden kamikaze boats and planes in order to launch a surprise
attack on the incoming American fleet. The result was sixteen sunken US
warships, including one aircraft carrier and two helicopter carriers. The
Pentagon had a clear and decisive reaction to this loss; it stopped the game
and ignored the results. General Van Riper resigned and issued harsh pub-
lic critique of the Pentagon (Borger 2002 , 2 ). Again, the expensive carrier
fleet was vulnerable and ineffective when facing a simple assortment of
weaponry that required only a fraction of the procurement, maintenance,
and operation costs of a carrier group. Despite the results of these war
games, American naval planning includes a newly designed class of carri-
ers, similar in size and function to the Nimitz class — the current mainstay
of the American carrier fleet.^29
The carriers are heralded as the definitive instrument of power projec-
tion. They are intended to release American decision makers from the
need to make political concessions in order to gain access to land bases.
A carrier group can bring with it all the necessary equipment and thus
offer ultimate strategic flexibility. However, all recent American operations
required access to land bases, demonstrating the limits of carrier power.
The expensive carrier force was unable to exempt the United States from
the need to pay a political price for the use of allies’ airports, even when
facing rivals such as Serbia, Afghanistan, and Iraq, who lack significant air
force, navy, or missile capabilities. Thus, six carrier groups, more than half
