When The American Aircraft Carrier Loses Its Aura

But this is not the visual memory that decades of Hollywood, military publicity and political theater taught much of the rest of the world. Captain America was supposed to arrive with his uniform immaculate, his muscles tightened and his shield held at the proper angle.

The aircraft carrier belonged to much the same visual world. As an art historian who works with visual culture, I am interested in how remarkably consistent its images have been. Fighter jets roar from the flight deck. Sailors stand in formation.

The enormous ship cuts through a perfect blue ocean while escort vessels arrange themselves around it in geometrical order. The carrier is almost always given the distance it needs. And that distance turns machinery into monument.

A submarine becomes more dangerous by disappearing. A missile can wait unseen in a silo. An aircraft carrier announces itself. It is enormous, expensive and deliberately visible. It turns abstract military power into a physical object that can be photographed, filmed and sent across the world.

For much of the postwar era, American military superiority, political theater, television and Hollywood reinforced one another so successfully that the supercarrier became one of the most immediately recognizable images of national power on earth. It became a kind of Mount Rushmore at sea.

And Mount Rushmore is not supposed to stumble out of a go-go bar.
Monuments work best from the proper distance. Look too closely, and the image becomes less simple.

This is particularly important for an aircraft carrier because it carries more than aircraft. Its appearance carries an expectation about how the person looking at it should respond. Awe is part of the machinery. So is fear.

Shortly before the USS Abraham Lincoln reached Thailand, a US Navy P-8A Poseidon flew through the Taiwan Strait. The Seventh Fleet said the transit demonstrated America's commitment to a“free and open Indo-Pacific” and repeated that the US military“flies, sails, and operates anywhere international law allows.”

Operations like this are announced publicly because presence must be visible if it is to become a political signal. I understand that signal perfectly well. I simply find it increasingly difficult to feel its intended effect.

This is not because the aircraft carrier has suddenly become militarily irrelevant. The Lincoln itself has just demonstrated the opposite. It sustained months of operations at extraordinary distance, supported combat operations against Iran and kept thousands of people and dozens of aircraft functioning through an exceptionally long deployment. As a machine of war and military organization, it remains formidable.

But being formidable and looking almighty are not quite the same thing.
Even the language surrounding the ship reveals something about the grandeur attached to it. In Chinese, an aircraft carrier is hangkong mujian (航空母舰) - something like the“Mothership of Navy and Air Force,” a union of naval and air power in a single name.

The English“aircraft carrier” sounds logistically uncool and almost comically mundane by comparison, especially when the words themselves are so strangely unpompous: a carrier carries things, while craft can be something made by hand.

Read too literally, the mightiest warship in the world begins to sound like a mule carrying a load of little wooden birds made by a folk craftsman. Chinese has somehow given the American warship an additional layer of grandeur in translation. Yet even linguistic assistance cannot protect an image forever.

This is what makes the Lincoln episode interesting to me. Rust by itself means almost nothing. Ships rust. Broken toilets do not change the balance of naval power. Food shortages do not make fighter jets stop flying. Sailors needing a shower and a night ashore is hardly evidence of imperial decline. Nor does a visit to Pattaya make the carrier's aircraft any less lethal.