

US Navy







The aircraft carrier "is at the very core of our maritime strategy," US Navy Assistant Secretary of the Navy for Research, Development and Acquisition Sean Stackley told the House Seapower and Projection Forces subcommittee on Tuesday. But as Stackley and other Navy officials testified, the Navy can't currently keep enough carriers ready to meet the readiness levels mandated by Congress. And for the first time since 2007, there is no aircraft carrier task force in the Middle East—just as the US is raising the stakes in its fight against the Islamic State in Syria and Iraq.

The reasons are simple: years of deferred maintenance because of budget sequestration and wear and tear from constant demand for aircraft carriers for military operations around the world. It's not a problem the Navy is going to be able to turn around on a dime. The Navy leadership testified that the fleet's carriers won't be able to get back to the prescribed readiness levels—two carrier strike groups deployed at all times, with three additional strike groups ready to deploy if there's a need for a "surge"—until 2018.

The USS Gerald Ford, the next US aircraft carrier, is being built to replace the now-retired USS Enterprise, which was deactivated in 2013 after more than 50 years of service. But the Ford's completion has run into delays in part because of the budget sequestrations enacted by Congress. Stackley said the Ford is not expected to join the fleet at full readiness until 2021, which means the Navy will be operating with one less carrier than called for by Congress for the next six years.

The result is that there will be an occasional "carrier gap" for some time—multiple periods when the Navy can only put one carrier strike force to sea. Next year, the Navy will have a period with no carrier coverage anywhere in the Pacific Ocean. Stackley said that operating down one aircraft carrier had required the Navy to extend the deployments of existing carriers to fill the void, but the longer deployments have led to greater maintenance issues and even longer periods in the shipyard after each deployment.

"The net effect is a degradation of the Navy's ability to provide the balanced presence and surge capacity" that Congress has mandated, Stackley told the subcommittee. "We have more in depot maintenance today than we would normally have under a stable operational cycle, so we have a shortfall in our ability to generate the forces we need."

Carrier shock (no awe)

The USS Gerald Ford was originally intended to be commissioned next year and join the fleet at full capability by 2019 as the replacement for the USS Enterprise, the first nuclear aircraft carrier built by the US. But those plans were slowed by the need to check the structural integrity of the ship with "shock trials"—subjecting the ship to the forces of a nearby underwater explosion. The Navy performs such tests on all its ships and often on their subsystems separately. Many of these tests take place at sea and sometimes at the "Super Pond" facility at the Army's Aberdeen Proving Grounds—a giant enclosed pool, 150 feet deep, where the Navy can conduct tests without killing sea life. These tests take place with a test crew aboard, as shown in the video below.

The Navy planned to defer shock testing on the Ford to get it out to the fleet faster and to only shock-test some of its components, saving more complete tests for the next carrier in line (the new USS John F. Kennedy, slotted to replace the USS Nimitz). But because the Ford is the lead ship of a new class, the Defense Department's director of the Office of Test and Evaluation, Michael Gilmore, pushed to get thorough shock tests done on the Ford. The Navy relented, but that pushed back final delivery of the Ford by over a year.

That delay exacerbates the problem faced by the Navy. The USS Nimitz has been in service for 40 years, the USS Eisenhower nearly as long. While Representative Mike Conaway, a Texas republican on the subcommittee, immediately introduced legislation after the hearing to require the Navy to maintain a 12-carrier fleet, that measure is almost certain to go nowhere. Even if it passed, it wouldn't accelerate the delivery of new carriers; it would only force the Navy to keep the Nimitz in the fleet for as much as another decade.

Listing image by US Navy