When Operation Desert Storm began on January 17, 1991, three American carriers were positioned in the Red Sea, and USS America (CV-66) was one of them. She arrived with USS Kennedy and USS Saratoga to form a Red Sea battle force that could strike Iraqi targets from the west and south simultaneously with the Persian Gulf carriers striking from the east — a three-axis air campaign that the Iraqi air defense system was never designed to cope with. America's air wing flew missions every day of the forty-two-day air war, and the ship that launched them was one of the most distinguished conventionally powered carriers in the fleet.
The Ship
USS America (CV-66) was commissioned on January 23, 1965, and served for thirty-one years before her decommissioning in 1996. She was a modified Kitty Hawk-class carrier — one of the large-deck conventionally powered carriers that formed the Atlantic Fleet's striking force through the Cold War decades. Homeported at Norfolk, Virginia, she spent her career in the Atlantic and Mediterranean, with occasional deployments to the Indian Ocean and Persian Gulf. By 1991, America was a ship with a long operational history, her crew experienced and her air wing well-prepared for the kind of sustained combat campaign that Desert Storm would demand.
The 1991 Deployment
America deployed from Norfolk in late 1990 as the Desert Shield buildup accelerated. Carrier Air Wing One (CVW-1) was embarked, with F-14 Tomcats, F/A-18 Hornets, A-6E Intruders, A-7E Corsairs, EA-6B Prowlers, and E-2C Hawkeyes providing the full range of strike, fighter, electronic warfare, and command and control capabilities that a carrier air wing requires. The Red Sea positioning gave her air wing a western approach vector into Iraqi territory, allowing simultaneous strikes from multiple directions — a capability that complicated Iraqi air defense geometry and diluted the effectiveness of their radar and missile coverage.
America joined Kennedy and Saratoga to form a Red Sea concentration of carrier power that had not been seen since the Cold War exercises of the 1970s and 1980s. Coordinating the strike packages from three carriers across a single approach axis required careful deconfliction and timing, but it also produced a volume of air power that the Iraqis could not effectively counter.
Operations During Desert Storm
America's air wing flew strikes throughout the air campaign: against Iraqi air defense systems in the opening nights, against command and control infrastructure, against military targets throughout western Iraq and Kuwait. The A-6E Intruder community carried the precision strike mission in all-weather conditions, flying missions at night and in the weather that limited other aircraft. The F-14s flew combat air patrol and fighter escort. The Hornets flew strike and suppression of enemy air defense missions. The EA-6B Prowlers jammed Iraqi radar and communications. Every element of the air wing contributed to a campaign that lasted forty-two days and ended with the liberation of Kuwait.
America departed the theater in spring 1991, returning to Norfolk. She had completed what would prove to be one of her most consequential deployments, participating in the largest naval air campaign since Vietnam in one of the defining military operations of the post-Cold War era.
Life Aboard
Life aboard a carrier in a Red Sea combat deployment has a particular quality: the heat, the confined operating area, the relentless flight schedule, and the knowledge that what the ship and air wing are doing connects directly to the outcome of the war. The 5,000-plus people who made up America and CVW-1 during Desert Storm worked through those months with the professionalism that training produces and the awareness that their work mattered in ways that peacetime deployments only approximate.
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Legacy
USS America was decommissioned on August 9, 1996, after thirty-one years of service. In 2005, she was used as a live-fire test target in an experiment designed to inform the design of future carrier survivability — sunk deliberately by the Navy after a four-week series of tests that yielded structural data unavailable from any other source. Her end was utilitarian rather than ceremonial, but her service was not. She fought a war in her final years of commissioned life, and she served that war well.