THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1994, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Saturday, July 2, 1994 TAG: 9407020556
SECTION: LOCAL PAGE: B1 EDITION: FINAL
TYPE: Column
SOURCE: Guy Friddell
LENGTH: Medium: 60 lines
A new phrase - ``building down'' - startled me the other night as I watched City Manager Jim Oliver and retired Adm. Harry Train chatting on City Talk, Channel 48.
It was like finding a shiny dime in childhood dreams.
Even as he used the phrase, broached three or four years ago, Adm. Train expressed some distaste for it.
Yet, as we talked about it Friday, I realized it is a word of exactitude.
It means, he explained, that even as we are downsizing our military force levels we are not simply deleting ships, aircraft and weapon systems; we are also continuing to build and modernize the fleet.
I drew him out about aircraft carriers. Even to a layman the sight of a carrier squatting on the waters of Hampton Roads in a silhouette as large as a headland is heartening.
The aircraft carrier, bulky yet graceful, is as awe-inspiring in the Navy as is an elephant in the animal kingdom, both of them mighty and majestic so that other creatures move warily in their realm.
``The reason the United States is a superpower,'' he said, ``is because it has aircraft carriers and nobody else does. We own the sea and we own the littorals that are reachable from the sea.''
Littorals! Ah, there's a fine, lip-smacking, Welsh-born word. When people who have lived on the sea talk about it, they grow top-lofty, poetic. Look it up. You'll remember it that way.
The carrier is such a complex and efficient system that every one we remove from the inventory is ``permanently gone,'' he said.
``In my view, it is the the most important weapon system that the United States has today.
``It is the system that we use to reply to threats to our interests all over the world, and we have done so hundreds of times since World War II.
``Not only have we never lost one since the early months of World War II, we have never had an aircraft carrier attacked. We need to be very cautious in considering proposals to reduce the size of our carrier-force levels.''
The phrase about a carrier being ``permanently gone'' intrigued me. Couldn't we pull one out of mothballs?
``I don't see us ever deciding to lay up a carrier and then, turning around, spend the enormous amount of funds to reactivate it,'' he said.
I mentioned the ships attending the carrier as ``escorts.'' He prefers ``consorts.'' The Aegis cruiser and two destroyers combine to make the carrier battle group a force that no one is going to be able to challenge.
Adm. Train, who has just returned from six weeks as a senior fellow with the National Defense University at Fort McNair, is happy to see carrier CVN-76 sliding through the shoals of Congress.
When a president is awakened at 2 a.m. with news of a crisis on the other side of nowhere, no wonder he asks: ``Where are my carriers?'' ILLUSTRATION: [Photo of a carrier]
by CNB