SHE SHALL RULE THE WAVES

A CARRIER NOT ONLY DOMINATES THE WATERS AND THE SKIES AROUND, BUT ALSO PROJECTS POWER DEEP INTO THE COAST

- R. PRASANNAN

When George W. Bush invaded Afghanistan in 2001, among the first weapon platforms that he moved was the warship USS Carl Vinson. Sending a warship to invade landlocked Afghanistan? To those uninitiated into maritime strategies, it would have sounded like an Iznogud misadventure. It wasn't. 

Stationed majestically somewhere in the perennially troubled Persian Gulf, Carl Vinson sent Super Hornets and Tomcats in squadrons from her deck to pulverise the cities of Kabul, Herat and Mazar-e-Sherief. The precision bombs that those warjets dropped on the already scorched Afghan earth knocked offthe Taliban command and control systems, and sent their troops fleeing into the caves of the Tora Bora mountains. So much so, the Northern Alliance troops, who had been fighting the Taliban bravely but in vain for half a decade from the mountains of Panjsher, could walk into Kabul and occupy the city without having to fire a single shot.

That's an aircraft carrier. She (ships are female, even if named Vikramaditya, Carl Vinson, Admiral Gorshkov or Charles de Gaulle) is not just a weapon platform in the sea, but a repository of awesome power that can be projected to control and dominate thousands of square miles of the ocean surface and its deep fathoms, all the airspace over it, and hundreds of square miles of terra firma on the littoral and even interior.