New Carrier

ARMED FORCES Carrier New York State champagne frothed across the bow of the fourth of the U.S.'s 60,000-ton Forrestal-class supercarriers at the New York Naval Shipyard in Brooklyn last week, and the Navy christened her Independence. The Navy's provisional date for commissioning Independence: some time in January. She will be powered by turbines producing 250,000 h.p., is figured to reach a top speed of nearly 35 knots, will carry 100 planes and launch them at the rate of eight a minute, be manned by a crew of more than 4,000. Total cost of the carrier without aircraft: $200 million.

But even as the Navy hailed Independence as the biggest warship in the world (the liners United States and America would fit beam to beam on her flight deck), opposition was strong in Congress against the Navy's overall carrier doctrine. Part of the opposition comes from supporters of the Air Force's Strategic Air Command, who believe that supercarriers put the Navy into the Air Force's business of strategic nuclear attack. But the most effective fight is coming from Navy types who contend that too much money is going into carriers that are vulnerable to both missiles and submarines, too little into the U.S. Navy's own Polaris-missile-toting nuclear submarine program. Last week the House of Representatives weighed next year's Administration defense appropriation request, in which there was money for five nuclear submarines but not one cent budgeted for a new carrier for the first time since 1951. Nevertheless, Navy plans still call for construction of two more Forrestals, for a total of six, plus two atomic-powered attack carriers.

"In short," wrote the New York Times Military Correspondent (and Annapolis-man) Hanson Baldwin, "some sections . . . believe that the carrier is no longer the queen of the seas and that the missile submarine is the future capital ship of the world's fleets." Baldwin added a sailor's salty appraisal that "the carrier is still useful but less so than in the past."

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.