THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1996, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Thursday, May 16, 1996 TAG: 9605160383
SECTION: FRONT PAGE: A2 EDITION: FINAL
SOURCE: BY EARL SWIFT, STAFF WRITER
DATELINE: ABOARD THE CARRIER ENTERPRISE LENGTH: Medium: 75 lines
A week ago, bogies filled the skies and enemy ships plied the seas around this venerable flattop, and its flight deck shuddered with the launches of warplanes bound for a fight.
By Tuesday, all was quiet in the Enterprise's Combat Direction Center, the ship's war-making brain. The darkened room's big electronic screens, days before crowded with enemy blips, depicted only friends.
The war was all but won.
In the space of five days, a task force of 53 British and American ships and more than 53,000 troops brought an imaginary country in Virginia and the Carolinas close to surrender.
The seagoing arm of Combined Joint Task Force Exercise 96, the largest allied war game in decades, proved so successful that the Norfolk-based Enterprise heads for its pier this afternoon, a day ahead of schedule.
``It's all gone very, very well,'' said Cmdr. Thomas F. Keeley, the combat center's boss. ``No bad guys got through to us. All the individuals who work down here, all the operations specialists, showed what they could do.''
The games saw the Enterprise carrier battle group and Saipan amphibious ready group join a flotilla of British ships off the East Coast, and combined land and air forces put to work at Army and Marine bases in North Carolina.
The setting for the exercise was an imaginary country, Kartuna, that had been invaded by a larger neighbor, Korona. The waters off both were the imaginary Gulf of Sabani, bordered on one side by a neutral country that refused fly-over rights to allied forces.
Facing allied commanders was the task of destroying Koronan sea and air forces in the narrow gulf, striking Koronan troops with land- and sea-based bombing runs, and landing ground troops in Kartuna to eject the invaders.
The allies have confronted real dangers, as well as imaginary ones: 14 American Marines were killed last week when two helicopters collided during an amphibious assault on mock Kartunan territory at Camp Lejeune.
The exercise's overland fighting was scheduled to continue late Wednesday and early today with a massive paratrooper assault at Fort Bragg - said to be the largest since World War II - with more than 5,000 dropping from 144 planes.
But the naval portion of the exercise is essentially won, said Cmdr. James Coulson, the Enterprise's operations officer.
``In the past exercises I've been in, there have been reams and reams of paper produced talking about what we did wrong.
``This is as close to a perfect exercise as I've ever seen,'' he said. ``All the pieces came together.''
In the glow of computer screens in the Enterprise's Combat Direction Center, Keeley's staff detected and identified Koronan subs, ships and planes, and directed the allied attacks that wiped them from the radar.
Carrier-based planes on the Enterprise and British carriers made hundreds of sorties to pound targets and support ground troops.
Throughout, allied forces faced the prospect of imaginary casualties: Umpires were placed aboard ships and on the ground to tag them sunk, damaged or killed if they failed to fend off the Koronans.
``It's scripted, in that it's a war game, but you can lose,'' Coulson said. ``You can't get this kind of training from a tabletop war game. You have to get out there and find out where the supply lines falter for 53,000 people, where your supply of parts runs into trouble.
``You've got to encounter things you didn't plan on, and be forced to adjust your plan,'' he said. ``Those are lessons you can't learn from a computer.''
The exercise yielded ``a few minor'' shortcomings that Coulson said would be addressed in future training. But, he added: ``What it proved to us is that our training is working.'' ILLUSTRATION: Graphic
The Virginian-Pilot
THE SCENARIO
[For complete graphic, please see microfilm]
by CNB