The United States Navy just came up short on carriers

[Skroe]

So where do I begin on this topic. @ringpriest is, of course, completely correct. To offer context, there are several issues at play here. The source of the shortage has two, maybe three heads.

First, the delays related to the USS Gerald R Ford are the most notable. The US nominally has 11 carriers. In actuality, it has 10, as the Ford is a floating still-in-process engineering project that may be finished some time in the next five years (really who knows). Functionally, it has 7, as one is always cut open under going a mid-life refueling, and two others are in maintence.

Secondly, and this links into that, the US operates a 15 carrier project projection / security policy (and has since 1993) with 11* carriers. Even before the USS Enterprise ans USS Kitty Hawk were retired, which led to this short handed shit show, the US used carriers somewhat wantonly for things maybe carriers shouldn't have been used for. And beyond that, it just didn't have enough to control regions it really SHOULD control as part of the core mission of the US Navy. The law says the US Navy must have 12 carriers and 355 ships. The Navy will reach that sometime in the early 2030s. But here's the thing: the Chief of Naval Operations testified a few years ago that if he had to fulfill 100% of requests, he'd need well over 400 ships. And the one thing the US actually needs more of than anything else right now is attack Submarines.

This is something folks have missed about my posts here for many, many years and a big reason I generally stopped doing them. When I say "the US should build 355 ships", "the US should build 100 attack subs", "the US should build 15 carriers"... I don't say it to get my dick hard over war porn. That's immature nonsense. Is say it because it's good governance as civilians to fulfill 100% of what the people in charge of our security need, rather than fulfill 65%. And if we don't want to pay for the full 100%, we need to rescale our commitments (change our foreign and security policy) around that 65% number and establish that as the new 100%. But this thing we've been doing for many, many years now - where we set missions then under resource it. It has to stop. So either we go full trillion dollar defense budget to pay for it in full, so there aren't carrier shortages and things of that nature... or we change our foreign policy to not need to cost that. The thing is nobody in this country actually wants to do that, including Democrats, who keep in mind, greatly benefit in their states and districts from a huge defense budget (shout out to Senator Elizabeth Warren, D-Raytheon).

Since this country won't develop a smart security policy that is efficient in it's resource requirements and allocation, it needs to grow so we stop doing shit like under manning ships and delaying maintenance.


Which leads us to the third thing. Maintenance. A carrier (or anything in the military) is basically like your car. The more you drive it, the more run down it gets. Periodically take it in for minor repairs. After a while, take it in for a big overhaul. And then in the year or two before you plan to replace it, stop putting money into it. Also every year, there is a cost of ownership (for a car, it's gas and repairs).

All together, it costs about $1.5 billion a year to keep a carrier. That's the grand total per ship. That means pay and supplies for the entire crew, maintenance for the ship AND the air wing on it. Fuel costs for the aircraft on it. Weapons expended per year needing to be replaced. All up. $1.5 billion sounds like a lot, but it really isn't against the whole budget. But it's $1.5 billion that can be spent on new carriers and new stuff.

Carriers are nuclear powered. They nominally have a 50 year life span, but the last year is not a hard date. The nuclear reactor can probably take it to near 60. But in the five years leading up to its retirement, the Navy will start short changing on repairs, cutting out equipment and upgrades and planning to dump it in its last year so it doesn't spend extra. Why is this relevant? Because the USS Nimitz is scheduled to be retired in 2024. It's replacement, the USS John F Kennedy, is still being built, with no indication it will be any more combat ready than the USS Gerald R Ford. It should be kept until 2030, when likely both will be ready. But that costs more money.

We are here, because the US Navy deferred maintenance for years, and it caught up.


How could this have happened differently? Well, it's a 20/20 hindsight kind of thing. The US reliably stamped out Nimitz class carriers for $4-6 billion for years. The last one, the USS George H.W. Bush, a "transition ship", arrived in 2009. In another world, the US would have ordered an 11th Nimitz class, of the same build as the USS George H.W. Bush, that would have arrived around 2014 or 2015, and it would have ordered the first-in-class USS Gerald R Ford to arrive basically where the USS John F. Kennedy is on the timeline. That would have mitigated (though not prevented) carrier shortages.

The Ford will pay off in the long term. It's technologies make a LOT of sense from the perspective of what you'd want from a carrier 20 or 30 years from now, when that ship will still be being built. It is ready made for drones, directed energy weapons, high-powered sensors and electric aircraft. But the Navy tried to do too much all at once and as a result basically "skipped" building a carrier, which lead to the shortage. It's inexcusably poor planning. Ford technologies should have been phased in over the life of the ship design. The deeply troubled fully-electric weapon elevators for example (no hydraulics... purely electrical linear motors)... yeah, they'd be a great thing to have one day. The first-in-class ship really didn't need them. Should have been saved for Ship #4.

If anything the entire concept may be a dead end. The idea of a ship carrying a lot of aircraft to attack things is still a great idea. But the US losing a single super carrier as it stands now would put an entire war effort into jeopardy. It's a massive single point of failure. The future may be instead of revisiting a revised "Sea Control Ship" concept, which competed with the Nimitz design in the 1970s, but pairing it with extremely long distance aircraft and high endurance drones. Building a lot of ships that carry 10 manned fighters and 30 high endurance drones - where if you lose them the war isn't over - is probably the better route than building a gigantic floating single point of failure.

Right now, China's ability to destroy a carrier is badly oversold. Oversold by Chinese propagandists who want to pretend China has caught up (when it hasn't). Oversold by anti-American and anti-war idiots who just want to give America a black eye. Oversold by people who have no clue what they're talking about. But it won't be that way forever. There is no reason to thing given the time and money, China's engineers won't overcome the technical hurdles that make breaking the kill chain (the US approach to missile interdiction) much harder than it is now.

The US will likely permanently need and want a force-projection surface ship that can launch attack aircraft (preferably ones with great endurance). But the fact we are even talking about a shortage at all just points to the fact that this "model" may be not the right one to go forward with in the future, where distributed defense is everything, and monolithic solutions are sitting ducks.

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I tend to think that frigates and destroyers, if anything, are the wastes of money... but obviously they aren't since the Navy does indeed find uses for them.

This is perhaps the wrongest thing I've read in months on a military topic in this forum.

And how, pray tell, do you intend to defend said carrier from submarines and missiles? With happy thoughts?

A carrier without its escorts is a floating coffin.

In fact the Navy's current BIGGEST shortfall is a lack (well, essential elimination) of "Frigates" that will only be somewhat reduced by 2030 because the US is likely to buy a foreign model. The Navy built Destroyers - and a lot of them - and they're super expensive, but it cut off Frigate "half destroyers" completely. And now it finds itself short of ships.

[Fincayra]

It's hard to maintain the military without conflict. Frankly, you should always be at war; there are enough bad guys around the globe to keep your military machine well oiled.

The ONLY pro I see in war is innovation technologically. Everything else about it is a huge con. Loss of our soldiers, loss of foreign people, loss of innocent life, and us butting our values into places they aren't wanted.

[Skroe]

It's hard to maintain the military without conflict. Frankly, you should always be at war; there are enough bad guys around the globe to keep your military machine well oiled.

This is a sickening comment and you should be ashamed of yourself for writing it.

War is death. War is disaster. War is failure. The United States should always maintain the world leading defense and be able to win any conflict on its own terms, but war should never by anything greater than the absolute last choice.

War destroys lives beyond just the dead themselves. To treat war as something akin to going to the gym is to treat life destroying as something with little cost, when in fact, the modern world is shaped in no small part because conflicts decades, even centuries ago, are not fully resolved or healed, despite all those being alive long since being dead and gone.

The US Military is not the Avengers. Their job is to defend American security, the security of our allies and friends, and our interests. Their job is to not go gallivanting around the world in search for dragons to slay. That will be destructive for Americans far more than anybody else.

Truly, I ask, how old are you? Because I've lived my entire adult life in the America of the "War on Terror" age, but am old enough to remember a time before it. And I have seen even this slow burning, low intensity brushfire war, corrode America's reputation, power, morals, standing, legitimacy, wealth, politics and yes, our young people. It has been a cancer. A sickness. An "imperial disaster" as every bit as great as Napoleon's march on Russia.

From a pure national policy perspective, power is a finite resource. It must be carefully cultivated and only spent in great degree in the utmost need. And never without regard for the cost of spending it. These wars since 2001? They've cost America about half its relative power compared to China. Perhaps moreso now given Trump's Syria disaster. Waging war means spending power, the end. The gain on the other side is rarely greater than what is spent. World War II was the exception, rather than the rule.

But from a human perspective war is an abomination, not an opportunity, and we should always be actively working to avoid it. If you think otherwise, you perhaps should actually talk to people who have fought in wars or lived through its suffering.

[Skroe]

Okay, I think I fixed my earlier post in a later one.

Yeah and it's not any better. Performing combat missions still means what I said. It's the same thing. I speak as someone whose entire real life is robotics and artificial intelligence - Americans in particular have zero clue the implications about what even the "Drone War" has wrought upon us. Yes... it's been an incredibly effective and unforseen answer to getting terrorists in hard to reach places. It's also turned America into the invisible bringer of death at any moment in the eyes of hundreds of millions of people and has played an enormous role in destroying our moral authority, which does matter and is an instrument of power we can't use anymore, thanks to our national recklessness.

We have training for what you want. Drills. They're regularly scheduled, realistic and effective.

I'll tell you what the United States needs to do. It needs to realize that between Afghanistan/GWOT and Iraq, it's lost two wars in twenty years and seen its relative power cut in half (or more), while China has risen and Russia started to make moves. And it has emptied our national treasury to do it, depleted our national willpower to defend and promoted Democracy (America's core mission), and totally demolished America's moral authority.

Osama bin Laden won, and it wasn't even close. It's been 20 years for nothing. We knew what he was baiting us into. Really. We knew. We folks who were adults around 9/11 talked about. And we swore we were going to avoid the trap. But we didn't. Like true pros, we walked right into it. And lo and behold, here we are... America the defeated. America the vanquished. America the failure.

Want to stop losing wars? This is what we do. First and foremost, we reset our commitments to something clearly defined and defensible within our current budget realities, which include mass number of baby boomers retiring over the next decade and service on the debt exploding. That means Western Hemisphere, Indo-pacific allies, and Europe. Next, we stay out of all fights. Really all of them. We don't freak out like we did over ISIS. We don't go slapping Iran or anybody else. No more Yemens. No more Libyas. No more Syrias. No more drone strikes. We reset our forces and engage int he planned and currently executed military build up, in full. And we spend the next decade and change engaging in our most energetic era of diplomacy in 70 years. We alliance and trade build. We repair relationships the last three Presidents have let rot. We massive expand foreign aid. We build up international credibility as stable, trustworthy, reliable and fair. Oh, and because it's crucially important to everybody else on Earth, we lead on Climate change. Even if it isn't important to us, it's crucial to them.

We do that starting tomorrow, and maybe - MAYBE by 2035, we'll get back a good chunk of what we have shat away via "America fuck yeah!" culture since 2001. The America that cosigned Germany and France to the "Axis of Weasels". The America that tortured people and made excuses over GITMO for 20 years. The America that just betrayed the Kurds.

The thing knuckledragging America-fuckyeahers have missed since 2001 - and I say this as someone who in the early and mid 2000s was ALL that - is that leadership comes only from the ASSENT of those being lead. And right now a good portion of the human race is looking at their options, and wondering if China is the better choice, because of the truly idiotic and wrong things we have done. And lets be clear, we deserve that. That's FAIR. That's exactly where we should be, because we've been rotten, egocentric and short-sighted leaders.

The strongest America is the one that leads. So we have to earn it again. Not through "always performing combat missions". But by surrounding ourselves with a phalanx of allies, relationships and guarantees so that we never have to fight at all.

[Hammerfest]

takes longer than 8 years to get an aircraft carrier approved and out the door.

And it takes far less than 8 years to stymie the process of getting one approved and out the door.

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This is perhaps the wrongest thing I've read in months on a military topic in this forum.

I honestly could not care less how you feel about my casual opinions regarding the fleet. As a submarine vet, I tend to think of everything else in the water is just a target anyway. But, hey, I guess that's my loss.

[Skroe]

I honestly could not care less how you feel about my casual opinions regarding the fleet. As a submarine vet, I tend to think of everything else in the water is just a target anyway. But, hey, I guess that's my loss.

You cared enough to respond. And it's kind of funny because as an alleged submariner, you'd know those things you think are wasteful are the things that would be hunting you.

And yeah and I've flown B-2 bombers on loop di loops. Wanna compare merit badges? Claims of military service on a forum are meaningless and are not a reliable source of subject matter expertise about anything involving it. Military service internet forum performance art is the oldest internet forum performance art.

[Hammerfest]

You cared enough to respond.

Yep. And that's about it.

[Thekri]

The ONLY pro I see in war is innovation technologically. Everything else about it is a huge con. Loss of our soldiers, loss of foreign people, loss of innocent life, and us butting our values into places they aren't wanted.

War itself is bad, obviously. But preparation for War is not.

Unfortunately, Policy will always be decided by the most powerful. Right now the Kurds are getting slaughtered because they are less powerful then the Turks, and the Turks decided to slaughter them. The only thing the Kurds can do is go find someone stronger then the Turks to stop that. They did have the US, and that worked out well until Trump decided to liven up a boring Saturday with a bit of betrayal, so now they have to talk the Russians into helping or they will all die.

This isn't a good thing of course, ideally the Kurds could use reason and logic and the power of friendship to convince the Turks to not kill them, unfortunately that isn't likely to work, so they need things like SAMs and Warships and tanks instead. Which they don't have. So they need friends that do.

What is true for the Kurds is true for everyone else. The ability to defend oneself is extremely important if you don't have anyone willing to do it for you. With the US becoming increasingly unreliable at defending our allies, we are going to see a lot more military spending in the world over the next few decades. And probably a lot more wars, because the US isn't going to be waiting to smash people who step out of line.

[Kellhound]

As I've been saying on this forum for years, the United States power projection has been headed for trouble - multiple problems on the logistical, decision-making, and project-management levels are leading to a degradation of capabilities that was going to come home to roost sooner or later; "sooner or later" has become now:

Pentagon announces new troop deployments to Saudi Arabia


(This is likely a follow-on effect from last month, when the USS Harry S. Truman Strike Group deployed... without the Truman, which was down for repairs - the Truman was the designated reserve carrier for the US East Coast when it suffered an electrical failure back in August; in theory the Eisenhower Strike Group should be available "soon" as it just finished a shakedown cruise, but soon is not now - and unless the United States gets its act together (to which all signs point to "no") instances like this are going to become more frequent.)

The US currently has 2 carriers on patrol, one in the 5th Fleet, one in the 7th Fleet. There are also 2 big deck amphibs deployed.
The Lincoln is no stranger to staying in the Gulf far longer than scheduled, even in the 1990s.

Ike finished her Final Evaluation Problem, and can deploy if actually needed. But she really isnt needed in the Gulf, as a hot war with Iran is not really a good use of a carrier. They are far better used in the Pacific.

The Roosevelt is undergoing 2 month maintenance period.
The Truman really should not have been scheduled for a deployment so soon after a deployment ended, but it was an experiment that failed.
Nimitz is working up from a 15 month overhaul.
Vinson is 1/2 through a 12 month overhaul.
Bush is getting close to finishing her 2 year overhaul.
Washington is 2 years into her 4 year refuel.
Stennis is getting ready for her refueling.
And the Ford is, well, the Ford. That one is a mess.

The carriers have been deployed harder than they were intended for, and now the repair bill is due. However, they ARE being repaired.

[Ghostpanther]

It's no surprise to me that after eight years of Obama, the Navy can't send another aircraft carrier out there to relieve the current one. Nobody should be surprised by this at all.

Well said and I agree. But that is slowly changing. It takes a lot of time however to change 8 years of weakening the US Military.

[Kellhound]

This is also an argument for really downsizing the number of fleet carriers and to replace them with a larger number of escort carriers. Maintain the same number of aircraft available for deployment but from more, smaller, cheaper, tactically flexible platforms.

This would allow more mission specific numbers of carriers assigned to specific areas of need, and make it easier to plug holes in unforseen situations.

STOVL carriers lack the specialized EW and AEW aircraft that make a carrier wing combat viable in a contested area though.

[Thekri]

Well said and I agree. But that is slowly changing. It takes a lot of time however to change 8 years of weakening the US Military.

Oh piss right off with your blaming Obama for everything. Obama didn't do any such thing and you know it. His military policy was shit, but nothing that has been discussed in this thread has anything to do with his administration. In fact, the solutions were generally created during the Obama years, most of the damage we are seeing now is from the dramatic overreach caused by Bush's declaration of war on an emotion.

Good to see you are stick to the false quotes in your signature. Mine are more accurate then yours though.

[Ghostpanther]

Oh piss right off with your blaming Obama for everything. Obama didn't do any such thing and you know it. His military policy was shit, but nothing that has been discussed in this thread has anything to do with his administration. In fact, the solutions were generally created during the Obama years, most of the damage we are seeing now is from the dramatic overreach caused by Bush's declaration of war on an emotion.

Good to see you are stick to the false quotes in your signature. Mine are more accurate then yours though.

lol!! Oh have a good day tomorrow. And thanks for confirming what I said.

[Kellhound]

Lincoln isn't on a standard deployment, and isn't assigned to the 5th or 7th - she's en route to her new home in San Diego with the 3rd, and is supposed to be there by the end of this month (despite denials by the Trump admin, a long stopover with CENTCOM was clearly not in her initial itinerary); that's not a hard deadline or anything of the sort, but the more she's late the more things will slip and the more likely the USN will end up looking at a situation like this again, again sooner than they'd like, which is doubtless why the US DoD has not extended her deployment with them (plus, her crew is awfully green - this was supposed to be a working cruise to help smooth things out, not full steam ahead into a shooting war; the absolutely last thing US international prestige needs is to abruptly abandon an ally to slaughter at the whims of a Chekist's bootlicker, but only slightly above that is losing a carrier in a skirmish with a 3rd-tier regional power like Iran).

Technically, she is assigned to the 5th just like all other transient carriers that operate in the 5th's AOR. And as I mentioned above, she is used to being in the 5th Fleet far longer than scheduled. The Navy knows that a carrier does not belong in the confines of the Gulf during a shooting war with Iran.

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I tend to think that frigates and destroyers, if anything, are the wastes of money... but obviously they aren't since the Navy does indeed find uses for them.

The escorts are needed to defend the capitol ships, and perform a wide range of naval operations not suited to a 100,000 ton ship. There is a reason you see lots of navies with destroyers and no carriers, but no navies with carriers and no destroyers.

[Thekri]

lol!! Oh have a good day tomorrow. And thanks for confirming what I said.

Your inability to read past a comma is not a redeeming feature. You used to occasionally post sensible things, apparently you overdosed on Fox News or something.

[Ghostpanther]

Your inability to read past a comma is not a redeeming feature. You used to occasionally post sensible things, apparently you overdosed on Fox News or something.

Awww hugs. I am not going to bad mouth a fellow vet.

[Skroe]

Awww hugs. I am not going to bad mouth a fellow vet.

As a vet, any comments on Donald J Trump, your President's (and few others), comprehensive surrender to Turkey, Syria Russia and Iran?

So about that War against ISIS....

I stand corrected. America has lost three wars in twenty years.

[Kellhound]

As a vet, any comments on Donald J Trump, your President's (and few others), comprehensive surrender to Turkey, Syria Russia and Iran?

So about that War against ISIS....

I stand corrected. America has lost three wars in twenty years.

I would argue its more correct to say the US lost the post war reconstruction phase in those cases. We are not (save post WWII) very good at that historically.

As for the Kurds, it is never good to turn your back on allies, but Trump is a strategic idiot.

[Mihalik]

STOVL carriers lack the specialized EW and AEW aircraft that make a carrier wing combat viable in a contested area though.

That's why fleet carriers remain core. But you really don't need that many fleet carriers to cover every area, there are what 2 nations that aren't allied with the US that have the means and capabilities to even put a serious airforce in the air, China and Russia. You hardly need a fleet carrier to patrol the straight of Hormuz, to bomb Syria, etc.

Also drones could soon take over the EW-AEW roles.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boeing_MQ-25_Stingray is being designed to be capable to carry sensor packages. I don't know whether the Stingray would be able to take off of a LHA, but there's no reason to assume there isn't some variant of a naval drone already in the works somewhere that would either be capable of SVTOL or would be downsized enough to be capable of taking off a LHA deck, which is still long enough that it would be able to operate full sized jets if it gets a catapult (I'm not saying they should be fitted with one, just that the deck is still sizeable if it doesn't need to launch full sized jets with combat load outs).

[Zan15]

As a vet, any comments on Donald J Trump, your President's (and few others), comprehensive surrender to Turkey, Syria Russia and Iran?

So about that War against ISIS....

I stand corrected. America has lost three wars in twenty years.

Good luck any attempt to engage him with logic and facts just gets you put on his ignore list....so he can continue just to troll each thread with nonsense and slow down actual constructive discussion .

He should have been banned years ago.