U.S. nuclear supercarrier sent to fight Somali pirates

[wakantanka]

WASHINGTON, Feb. 23 (UPI) -- The pirate threat off the Horn of Africa is now so bad that the heavy hitters have to move in: The Pentagon has deployed a nuclear-powered aircraft carrier to the area.


Rear Adm. Kurt W. Tidd, commander of the Eisenhower Carrier Strike Group, has announced that the nuclear-powered aircraft carrier Dwight D. Eisenhower has been dispatched to patrol nearly 7.5 million square miles in the Middle East region, The (Norfolk) Virginian-Pilot reported Sunday.
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Sending regular naval frigates or destroyers to the region, as Russia, India and China have done, is good for showing the flag and protecting specific vessels or very narrowly defined sea lanes. But it can do nothing to eliminate the threat or to hunt down and destroy the pirates when they are at sea either. In modern warfare, the only vessels that can do that job are aircraft carriers. And nuclear-powered ones are actually much easier to deploy and much more effective for the job than smaller, conventionally powered ones.

The obvious reason for this is that American nuclear-powered supercarriers, because they are much larger than the far smaller conventional carriers that the rest of the world operates, can carry a far larger and more formidable complement of aircraft. They therefore can patrol far larger areas of sea at the same time and launch fast response attacks with powerful squadrons far more often and easily.
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Tidd said the Eisenhower, which left its home port in Norfolk, Va., Saturday, will offer a strong message to U.S. naval allies, "standing shoulder by shoulder with them in some of the dangerous parts of the world."