USS Ronald Reagan: In terror war

New Delhi, Feb. 10: The Indian and US navies have set up a Valentine’s Day tryst with aircraft carriers.

The USS Ronald Reagan, named after a predecessor of US President George W. Bush who is scheduled to visit in early March, will be teaming up with the INS Viraat off the coast of Sri Lanka on February 14.

The USS Ronald Reagan is steaming in from Singapore at the head of a carrier strike group that is forward deployed in the US’s “global war on terrorism”.

The rendezvous for the passage exercise ? or Pas Ex ? was set up in quicktime because the Reagan and the Viraat were scheduled to be in the vicinity of Sri Lanka around the same time, US embassy sources in New Delhi said. The Viraat will be steaming southwards from Visakhapatnam en route to its homeport in Mumbai.

Normally it would take months of planning for a drill ? even an elementary one ? between two carrier battlegroups. The Indian Navy exercised with a US carrier group led by the USS Nimitz off the coast of Goa only in September last year. Those manoeuvres took a year’s planning.

Now it has taken barely a week. “This (the setting up of the exercise) goes to show the level of comfort that our militaries have achieved,” a source said. “We have been able to organise this at short notice with minimal alteration to naval plans.”

The USS Ronald Reagan is the latest in the Nimitz class of carriers and was commissioned into the US Navy only in 2003. It has the same dimensions of the Nimitz but with superior technology and capability in anti-submarine warfare.

The INS Viraat has reached Visakhapatnam from Mumbai for the President’s Fleet Review ? being held in the east coast for the first time ? on February 12.

It is expected that after the event, it would be off the south coast of Sri Lanka en route to its home base in Mumbai. The Viraat is leading seven ships from the western fleet. The western fleet is the Indian Navy’s largest strike group.

But the Viraat does not bear a comparison to the Ronald Reagan that is leading a strike group of six ships among which are a cruiser and two destroyers.

The Viraat, a Centaur-class carrier, served in the UK’s Royal Navy as the HMS Hermes till 1986 after it was commissioned in 1959. The design is of World War II vintage. The Reagan, that towers 20 storeys from the water and displaces more than 10,200 tonnes, has a 4.5-acre flight deck. It is three times the size of the Viraat.

The flight deck of the USS Ronald Reagan holds 20F-14D Bomcats (Tomcats in strike role), 36-F/A-18 Super Hornets and four E-2C Hawkeyes, besides other aircraft. In its latest exercise off the coast of Hawaii, the Reagan used its capabilities to track a Swedish diesel submarine known to be the quietest of its kind.