When Empires Strike Back

Ships have to talk to each other, and that is far easier now than in Nelson's time. "One of the great difficulties of operating a man-of-war in the Age of Sail was just communicating," says John Hattendorf, a professor of maritime history at the Naval War College in Newport, Rhode Island, "both between ships and onboard a ship. For routine commands, like changing sails -- which involved a great many men -- the boatswain piped a set of precise orders. And the captain might use a megaphone." But imagine the situation in combat, as the cannons roared, firing raggedly after the first united salvo, with the wind and sea sometimes roaring too, and the smoke -- especially on the gun decks -- making it nearly impossible to see. "Once in battle," Hattendorf says, "they might signal from ship to ship with flags that had a particular meaning, like ?Enemy fleet in sight' or ?Engage closely.' And sometimes at night they used lanterns, though night battles were rare. Occasionally, the fleet would have a frigate stand away from the line, and avoid the smoke, to relay signals to the fleet." Onboard ship, during a battle, the captain used runners -- often boys known as "powder monkeys" -- to communicate with, say, gun crews.




Today, boatswains still use their pipes -- sounding over a ship-wide PA system -- to alert the carrier crew to a major announcement, but a PA system does not suffice for most of the onboard communicating. There's a "ship's telegraph" between the bridge and the engineers. Between ships in the battle group and up and down the chain of command, from the admiral in charge of a battle group through the commander of the Naval Air Force Atlantic Fleet and all the way up to the Pentagon and the White House, communications are encrypted. "We actually do the bulk of our communicating by e-mail," says Lt. Comdr. Brenda
Malone of the Truman. "For unclassified stuff, we use Microsoft Outlook. Of course, there are also secure networks that use other programs. And between ships we do some video teleconferencing, both secure and unclassified. Our telephoning is done via special secure satellites."




The launch of the Reagan this year represented, the Navy says, the most significant technological leap forward for the Nimitz-class carriers since the Nimitz itself, with much more emphasis on the digital display and distribution of information. Digital instruments in the bridge produce a more intuitive "glass bridge" modeled after the so-called glass cockpits in modern aircraft, and there are touchscreens instead of old-style gauges and dials. Communication data flows through a fiberoptic system.