Navy to Commission $3.5-Billion, Nuclear-Powered Aircraft Carrier : Defense: The ship represents the future of U.S. fighting forces. But budget constraints leave fleet buildup in doubt.

With a blare of bands, clouds of red, white and blue bunting and the cheers of an expected 17,000 guests, the Navy will commission its newest nuclear-powered aircraft carrier today, the $3.5-billion Abraham Lincoln, at Norfolk Naval Base in Virginia.

To some, the 95,000-ton ship represents the bright future of massive carrier fighting forces that can carry the battle into the very teeth of the most formidable superpower and at the same time extend America’s reach in an era of Third World brush fires and dwindling overseas bases.

To others, however, another carrier--docked 10 miles away in the quiet autumn mists of Norfolk Navy Shipyard--tells of another side of the Navy’s future, a more constrained and constricted side. The other carrier, the 43-year-old Coral Sea that glided into Norfolk for the last time on Sept. 30, is waiting to be decommissioned in April, 1990, two years ahead of schedule.

The Coral Sea is a casualty of budget constraints. As such, it is one more sign that the Navy’s cherished goal of building a 600-ship, 15-carrier fleet--the centerpiece of the Reagan Administration’s $350-billion naval buildup--is slipping over the horizon, perhaps forever.

“We’d all like to have 15 carriers,” said Defense Secretary Dick Cheney in an Oct. 29 interview aboard the aircraft carrier America. But he added: “I made a decision not to build up (to) 15 for budget reasons. . . . My problem is I’m given a budget by the Congress, and I have to live with that.”

The Navy is not giving up. One carrier and 33 ships short of its goal, it is mounting new arguments for the full 600-ship, 15-carrier fleet. Most notably, it has not abandoned the controversial “maritime strategy” for waging conventional war against the Soviet Union, which was billed as the driving force behind Navy shipbuilding goals.

That strategy calls for the Navy to seize the offense against the Soviet fleet, attacking and destroying it or bottling it up in its home waters both in the Pacific and in the Atlantic at the outset of a conventional war in Europe. If that could be done, U.S. convoys could then speed reinforcements and supplies to Europe relatively unmolested.

In the wake of the proposed East-West reductions in non-nuclear forces, proponents of continuing the building program argue, the remaining armies in Western Europe would rely more heavily than ever on seaborne reinforcements to fend off aggression from the East. The offensive maritime strategy is the only way to shield those shipments from attack, Navy officials contend.

“There’s been a lot of talk . . . about tactics and execution, but the strategy itself is the same,” said Adm. Frank B. Kelso II, who would oversee the allied thrust northward as Supreme Allied Commander, Atlantic Command.

To protect the convoys, the Navy says it must use submarines and carriers to trap and destroy Soviet ships, submarines and bombers in Soviet ports and coastal waters, before they slip out into the open oceans. From stations near Soviet harbors, the carriers could then threaten strikes on key Soviet ports such as Murmansk in the Barents Sea and Petropavlovsk in the Northern Pacific.

After five years of debate and budgetary decline, Navy officers said, that remains the essence of the maritime strategy.

Yet a host of other factors have raised questions about the maritime strategy and the need for the large carrier fleet designed to carry it out.

For one thing, the Pentagon has judged the likelihood of superpower conflict “perhaps as low as it has been at any time in the post-war era.” That, combined with budget pressures, has created intense pressure from Congress, the Soviets and some European allies to negotiate reductions in the U.S. carrier fleet.

In addition, the deployment of accurate naval weapons such as the Tomahawk cruise missile have made carriers less important as the Navy’s chief offensive weapon. With the introduction of those long-range missiles, U.S. subs, battleships, cruisers and destroyers can conduct strikes on land that once required a carrier.

The proliferation of other missiles throughout the world also has made the carriers more vulnerable. Much of a carrier’s aircraft force is designed to protect the ship from waves of attacking Soviet bombers. But a single Silkworm missile or Soviet cruise weapon could penetrate its ring of airborne defenses and wreak major damage, experts said.

“As we get further into the missile age--nuclear and non-nuclear--carriers become more vulnerable and less necessary,” said Robert Komer, the Carter Administration’s undersecretary of defense for policy.

As such missiles spread, Komer said, submarines--which lurk undersea and out of sight of missile radars--will become more important as platforms for strikes on land.

Navy and Defense Department officials argue that the carriers are also crucial in a new era of small-powers conflicts, since they can be dispatched rapidly to Third World flash points and do not depend on the approval of irresolute allies or fickle base hosts.

“Given their flexibility and mobility, carrier battle groups offer us unique capabilities to influence events far--and not so far--from our shores,” Cheney said in remarks prepared for delivery at the Lincoln’s commissioning. “They are a capability we must preserve.”

But “the size of the carrier force has always been more dependent on the big-war scenario,” said one naval analyst on Capitol Hill. The Third World rationales for carriers could justify a force of no more than 12 carriers, said experts.

In the long run, experts said, two factors--a strategic arms control agreement and the increasing quietness of Soviet submarines--could have the most profound effect in nudging the Navy away from its offensive strategy built around the carriers.

Partly because of Toshiba Corp.’s widely reported sale of machining equipment to Moscow, Soviet subs have become significantly quieter. The development “raises profound national security problems, such as our ability to reinforce Europe by sea in time of war (and) the survivability of our carrier task forces,” a House Armed Services Committee report recently concluded.

That is so because as Soviet missile-carrying subs, often called “boomers,” grow quieter, they will need fewer attack submarines to protect them. Freed of that escort duty, the Soviet attack subs--themselves increasingly able to elude detection--can slip past the U.S. fleet as it bears down on Soviet ports and escape into the open oceans to attack convoys.

A superpower arms control agreement such as that favored by the Bush Administration also would do much to free Soviet attack subs, analysts said. According to Rand Corp. analyst Rose Gottemoeller, the strategic arms reduction, or START, proposal now on the table in Geneva would likely whittle the Soviets’ 63 missile-carrying submarines to a fleet of about 19.

As that happens, most of the attack submarines now committed to the protection of the boomers would be free to harass convoys--reducing the potential viability of the maritime strategy. For the foreseeable future, it is clear that the Navy will maintain no more than 14 carriers ready for deployment at any one time. Over the next five months until its formal decommissioning, the Coral Sea is being stripped of weapons and material that can be used aboard other ships.