Carrier: A Guided Tour of an Aircraft Carrier

FROM OUR EDITORS

The Barnes & Noble Review
Clancy on Deck

"This is 4.5 acres of sovereign U.S. territory."
— Rear Admiral Michael Mullen, Commander, George Washington Battle Group

Admiral Mullen's quote, which introduces one of Tom Clancy's chapters, captures in a short, quick phrase the essence of the aircraft carrier, both its form and its function. Its 4.5-acre flight deck (the equivalent of more than four football fields) overwhelms the imagination and impresses upon the reader what a massive war machine a carrier is. And by asserting the "sovereignty" of the carrier, it calls to mind the absolute resolve of the U.S. military mission. A carrier takes no crap.

To help those interested cope with the scale of a carrier's operation, Carrier takes the reader on a detailed tour of the ship and goes in great depth into the role of the carrier in the armed forces.

The standard awe-inspiring information is all there (a carrier is as tall as a 24-story building, has a combined ship and air crew of more than 6,000, and can carry and launch 80 aircraft), but Clancy's tour is aimed at the fan who wants much, much greater depth and much, much more jargon. The 13-page glossary at the back of the book (from "A-12" to "XO," with more arcane and colloquial entries along the way, such as "GBU-29/30/31/32 JDAM" and "pucker factor") is an essential guide for the novice, though even with that help, CARRIER can be a dense, technical read: "Joint Task Force Exercise (JTFEX) 97-3 — Run over three weeks in late August and early September of 1997, JTFEX 97-3 was a 'final exam' for the combinedGWCVBG/CVW/ARG/MEU (SOC) team."

But whereas a casual fan may lose interest, a military buff will revel. Clancy spends almost 70 pages detailing the aircraft you find aboard a carrier and their armaments. He includes a fascinating 50-page chapter on "Building the Boats," a process that makes the Hoover Dam's construction seem like an afternoon of Lego play. Here, mercifully, Clancy opts more for a detail of the process than a rundown of the engineering specs, a flood of numbers that would surely drown all but the most qualified technician.

And, of course, because this is Tom Clancy, the text flows smoothly and quickly. Clancy's interview with Chief of Naval Operations Admiral Jay Johnson reads like the novelist's research notes for one of his thrillers. The final chapter is an informed but fictionalized projection of what a carrier's job will be in 2016. This chapter is one of Clancy's thrillers.

—Greg Sewell
— Barnesandnoble.com

FROM THE PUBLISHER

Bestselling author Tom Clancy returns to the military hardware his fans love with this behind-the-scenes tour of the U.S. Navy's crown jewel, the aircraft carrier.

SYNOPSIS

Tom Clancy, the bestselling author of fiction thrillers such as Rainbow Six and nonfiction military tales like Into the Storm, takes the reader on a richly detailed tour of the largest, most powerful weapon in the world: a United States aircraft carrier.

FROM THE CRITICS

Publishers Weekly

Hot on the heels of his most recent fiction bestseller, Rainbow Six, comes this latest addition to Clancy's Hardware series (Submarine, Fighter Wing, etc.). This time, the man in the hat shows readers around the modern navy aircraft carrier. Part tutorial, part journal, with a short story thrown in for good measure, this is something of a Boy's Own album to be read and savored at leisure. Clancy's softball interview of the chief of naval operations, Admiral Jay Johnson, is a skimmer, but Clancy fans will relish much else in this heavily illustrated guide. There's a military officer rank table to help neophytes wade through the difficult navy ranks, which differ from those of the other services; a guide to carrier battle group departments and their mind-muddling acronyms; and gorgeous diagrams of such staples as the F-14D Tomcat fighter-bomber. The highlight is a journal recording events of August 1997, when Clancy and his researcher and project partner accompany the navy on an exercise modeled after the 1990 invasion of Kuwait by Iraq. From this vantage, Clancy reports on hair-raising games of chicken between ships and on the impact of e-mail on crew members' morale. Noting that, since the end of the Cold War, U.S. Navy surface forces have not had a serious enemy, Clancy candidly describes his own initial misgivings about U.S. naval capabilities. But what he sees while watching the exercise changes his mind: "our surface Navy still has 'the right stuff.' " Designed for readers who agree wholeheartedly with that assessment, Carrier will be pure candy to the large corps of Clancy devotees.
FYI: The broadcast on ABC of Clancy's new miniseries, Net Force, coincides with publication of this book.

Kirkus Reviews

The best-selling author of Without Remorse (1993) and the nonfiction Submarine (1993) examines the past, present, and future of America's largest warships. Clancy offers an insider's look at the key capital ship in the American naval forces, the aircraft carrier, and the various "systems" (that's Clancy-speak for weapons, especially aircraft and missles) aboard them. Clancy offers an alphabet soup of military acronyms but overall manages to give a thorough look at exactly what the role of the carrier is in a navy that no longer faces a major blue-water threat, as it did when the carrier was developed to take on the Japanese and then the Soviets.

Clancy focuses on the new role of the carrier as an offensive platform to launch strikes, as it did in the Gulf war and continues to do in Bosnia. Clancy, always the consumate navy booster, looks at the manner in which the hugely expensive carriers have been negelected during times of peace, only to be returned to their place of importance when international events heated up.

Lumped in with the carrier is a history of the development and mission of naval aviation, which makes for far more fascinating reading than the history of their floating airfields.

Clancy's conversations with naval personell, especially the chief of naval operations, Admiral Jay Johnson, are wooden, as if they were conducted by fax rather than in person.

The concluding chapter, in which Clancy casts his imagination forward 20 years to the role US carriers might play in a nuclear conflict between India and Afghanistan, is worth the price of admission; though too brief, for drama it ranks with the scenarios he creates in his novels. Clancy's loyalfollowers, especially those in the military, are sure to love this rich look at our nation's most expensive floating hardware, but they will need to cut through Clancy's sabre-rattling along the way.