Vince Houghton - Nuking the Moon - And Other Intelligence Schemes and Military Plots Left on the Drawing Board

The Gerald R. Ford will also have the most modern radar systems in the world—the new Dual Band Radar (DBR), which is capable of dealing with multiple incoming antiship missiles, detecting incoming enemy aircraft, and then guiding the ship’s Evolved Sea Sparrow Missiles (ESSMs) to interdict. One day, it might even be able to mount laser-based self-defense weapons, to pew-pew enemy missiles and planes right out of the sky. Its ample electrical power system means that the Ford would have a virtually limitless supply of laser ammunition.

And then, of course, there is the whole reason for the ship itself: the aircraft. Two squadrons of F-35C Joint Strike Fighters (ten to twelve planes per squadron), two squadrons of F/A-18F Super Hornets, five EA-18G Growler electronic warfare aircraft, four E-2D Hawkeye AWACS (airborne early warning and control system) planes, helicopters, transport planes, V-22 Osprey tiltrotor aircraft, and someday, the new MQ-25 Stingray intelligence drone (which is also designed for refueling missions, but I’m an intel guy, not a logistics guy, so it’s a spy drone).

The Ford and its sister ships (several more are planned into the 2020s), will each cost in the ballpark of $13 billion, and that’s not even counting all the R&D costs that made them possible. This is worth the money if you are getting the world’s greatest warship, and if it gives you the means to protect America’s interests—and project American power—throughout the world, and deep into the twenty-first century.

But are we?

Yes, of course, to the first part: This is an extraordinary ship.

As for the second part, the ability to own the oceans for decades to come? Who knows. Antiship ballistic missiles, like the Chinese Dongfeng-21D (DF-21D), might someday make massive carriers obsolete. If you can take out a $13 billion aircraft carrier with a salvo of $20 million worth of antiship missiles? I’m no mathematician, but it seems like even if you win the sea battle, you’ve lost the war.

However, what if you could develop a completely invincible ship? An aircraft carrier impervious to enemy weapons?

You would own the oceans. Nothing the Chinese (or anyone else) could throw at you would make a difference. You’d sit there and laugh at their feeble attempts to damage your fleet.

This is the dream of every admiral in every country’s fleet.

The unsinkable ship.

During World War II,the difference in capabilities between Allied land-based aircraft and carrier-based aircraft was significant. Because they needed to be lighter than their land-based counterparts to effectively take off and land on small (by today’s standards) aircraft carriers, carrier-based planes had limited range, inferior armament, poorer survivability, and slower speeds. This would be fine if their main opponents were the carrier-based aircraft of their enemies. But they weren’t. A major part of the Allied strategy was to use naval aircraft to support ground invasions of distant shores. Which meant that they would be going head-to-head with better-armed, better-armored, faster planes with superior range. Not a good way to win a war.

Then there was the problem of the submarine war in the Atlantic. German U-boats were slicing up Allied resupply convoys crossing the ocean between North America and Europe. When the convoys were close to land, they could count on air cover from nearby land-based aircraft. But in the middle of the Atlantic, it was carrier-based aircraft or nothing.

And that usually meant nothing. Not only were the carriers busy supporting ground actions (like the invasion of North Africa, or the war in the Pacific), but a fat, expensive, poorly maneuverable aircraft carrier would make the juiciest of juicy targets for German U-boats.

So what could be done? Build bigger and stronger aircraft carriers that could launch and retrieve better aircraft.

Sounds rather straightforward. But it was much more difficult in practice.

The most pressing problem was the paucity of steel and aluminum, which couldn’t be produced at levels needed for full wartime industry. And what was available was needed for other purposes—like building tanks, bombers, fighters, trucks, destroyers, battleships, landing craft, helmets, rifles, pistols, bombs…

The rest of the war needed the steel and aluminum. Something else would have to do.

In stepped Geoffrey Pyke, an English inventor, journalist, and educator. He was one of the most creative minds of the twentieth century. I’ll never do as good a job describing him as English author Henry Hemming did in The Ingenious Mr. Pyke :

Shortly before the end of the Second World War, he had collected an unlikely set of lives. Over the past two decades he had been described as everything from eccentric genius to war correspondent, jailbreaker, bestselling author, educationalist, speculator, mass-observer, advertising copywriter, political activist, military inventor and scientist, while for those in MI5, the British Security Service, Pyke was thought to be an undercover Soviet agent who had gone quiet in recent years. In each of these descriptions there was, it would later emerge, at least an element of truth.

His obituary called him “one of the most original if unrecognized figures of the present century.” A contemporary proclaimed that Pyke was “one of the greatest… geniuses of his time.” A scientist at the time said he “stood out among his fellows like the North Face of the Eiger in the foothills of the Alps.” Another: “[He was] the sort of man who would have invented the wheel.” Theoretical physicist Lancelot Law Whyte compared Pyke to Einstein, and said his “genius was more intangible, perhaps because he produced not one, but an endless sequence of ideas.”

It’s no surprise then that, despite having absolutely no military experience (or any other applicable qualifications), Pyke was made the Director of Programmes for the British Combined Operations office, working under the British military’s Chief of Combined Operations, Lord Louis Mountbatten, who was one of the men most responsible for the British war effort. According to legend, Pyke walked into Mountbatten’s office and told him, “You need me on your staff, because I am a man who thinks.” Apparently, that’s all it took.

In October 1942, Pyke submitted a plan to Mountbatten to solve the aircraft carrier problem. It was called Habakkuk, and it proposed the construction of cheap, enormous aircraft carriers, capable of launching and retrieving land-based aircraft from the middle of the ocean, thousands of miles from any nearby land base. Such a carrier would be two thousand feet long, three hundred feet wide, and would have walls forty feet thick. It could easily house two hundred Spitfire fighter planes inside its cavernous interior. It would weigh in at two million tons—putting USS Ford to shame.

So what made this gargantuan carrier possible? Didn’t we just cover the fact that the Allies needed their steel resources elsewhere?

Yes. But this aircraft carrier wouldn’t be made of steel.

It would be made of ice.

Pyke’s proposal called for using an iceberg, either naturally occurring or artificially made, as a mobile floating airfield. In his mind, ice was the perfect material. It was difficult to damage (as shown by the near invulnerability of icebergs to shellfire), and melted very slowly when properly insulated.

It also wouldn’t sink.

Let’s take a second to investigate the science behind this proposal. You know how when you are drinking a glass of soda or iced tea (or your favorite adult beverage) and you boop the ice cube with your finger or a straw? What does it do? It pops right back up!