On his visit to Newport News, Va., this month, President Trump met with executives from Huntington Ingalls Industries, prime contractor for the USS Gerald R. Ford, the first in a new class of American supercarriers.
In a speech to sailors and shipbuilders aboard the soon-to-be-commissioned Ford, Trump proclaimed, “I just spoke with Navy and industry leaders and have discussed my plans to undertake a major expansion of our entire Navy fleet, including having the 12-carrier Navy we need.”
“I was jumping with joy, I wish I were there to hear him say it,” said Rick Giannini, president and CEO of Milwaukee Valve Company, which as his company’s name indicates, makes valves for Navy ships, more than 12,000 on a typical aircraft carrier.
Giannini also heads up a group called the Aircraft Carrier Industrial Base Coalition, whose members gathered in Washington last week to lobby their congressional delegations to turn Trump’s vision into reality.
The coalition is made of more than 220 suppliers, many whom are unsure of whether Obama-era plans for a 308-ship Navy, and now Trump’s planned 350-ship Navy including 12 carriers, are Washington hot air, or something to really get excited about.
“We have over 400 employees in the U.S.,” Giannini told the Washington Examiner, speaking of his Wisconsin-based firm. “They are not all on carrier work but, nonetheless it’s a big chunk of what we do, and it’s very difficult to man a force with those skills and keep them employed when the volume is bouncing around.”
Still, charting a course back to a 12-carrier Navy is anything but smooth sailing.
“I just don’t see how that is possible,” said naval historian Barrett Tillman, author of a just-published book, On Wave and Wing: The 100 Year Quest to Perfect the Aircraft Carrier.
His pessimism is based on the performance to date of the Ford, the same ship Trump hailed as “a monument of American might,” but which Tillman points out is billions over budget, years behind schedule and loaded with unproven technology.
The Navy’s plan is to build three Ford-class carriers in the coming years, eventually retiring the USS Nimitz, which was commissioned in 1975, and will reach 50 years of service in 2015.
The Ford is due to be commissioned this year, six years late, and the next ship in the class, the USS John F. Kennedy, is already under construction.
That could, in theory, produce a 12-carrier fleet just before the end of Trump’s first term in 2021, assuming no further delays.
An analysis by Congressional Research Service concluded that to sustain that fleet, the Navy would have to increase aircraft carrier procurement from the current rate of one ship every five years to one ship every three years, and that would stabilize the fleet at 12 by about 2030.
The plan is fraught with potential pitfalls, Tillman said, and requires a lot of things to go right with the new carriers that, so far, have not.
“The electromagnetic catapults, and the new generation arresting gear are still under development as I understand it, so it will probably be quite a while before we have enough at sea experience with that ship and all the new systems to know how well it’s been perfected,” Tillman said.
“That’s fine if it works,” Tillman added, “but the whole program has been marked with budgetary and scheduling problems, and of course that doesn’t even include the F-35, which is a separate-but-equal problem.”
Getting back to a 12-carrier fleet doesn’t only require building more ships, it also means more planes for the carrier air wing, and more sailors for the ships and their escorts.
The Navy is counting on the fifth generation F-35C to be its primary carrier attack plane, along with a complement of fourth generation F/A-18 Super Hornets.
“With approximately 5,000 people aboard a carrier, are we able to recruit and retain enough people not just for those new carriers but for the battle groups escorts, the frigate and the cruisers that go with them?” Tillman asked.
“It’s really a complex Rubik’s Cube involving technical, personnel and operational problems that all have to be sorted out and integrated,” he said.
Why the rush?
The reason behind all this is the aircraft carrier gap.
Exhibit A: When U.S. commanders wanted to bomb an ISIS training camp in Libya in January, they had to resort to sending a pair of B-2 stealth bombers on a 34-hour, round-trip mission that required 18 in-flight refuelings from their home base in Missouri, rather than dispatch F/A-18s in what would have been a relatively a short hop from an aircraft carrier in the Mediterranean Sea.
What would have been a routine bombing run for Navy warplanes turned into a marathon demonstration of Air Force global reach, largely because the aircraft carrier USS George H.W. Bush was stuck in Norfolk undergoing maintenance required by its extended deployment schedule.
At one point during that month-long gap in January, the United States, for the first time since World War II, had no aircraft carriers at sea on deployment anywhere in the world.
A decade ago, the U.S. Navy had a dozen deployable aircraft carriers, but as older fossil fuel carriers came to the end of their 50-year service life and the next generation replacement mired in delays and cost overruns, the number of carriers in the U.S. fleet dipped to 11 in 2007, and then dropped to 10 in 2013.
With just 10 carriers, the Navy is caught in a vicious cycle.
Fewer carriers means longer deployments for each carrier, which means more wear and tear on the ships, which results in longer down time for maintenance, which makes the coverage gaps even bigger.
Maintenance for the Bush, which was supposed to take eight months, stretched to 13 months. It eventually deployed in February, and is now on station in the Persian Gulf.
A second carrier, the USS Carl Vinson, is taking part in exercises near South Korea.
With the current fleet of 10 carriers, the Navy can put to sea at most three flattops at once, a far cry from just a decade ago when, with its 12-carrier fleet, as many as four carriers could be deployed at the same time.
Controlling cost
Trump wants to fix all that. But first, he has to get by Senate Armed Services Chairman John McCain, who in late 2015 blasted the Ford-class carrier program as “one of the most spectacular acquisition debacles in recent memory.”
And last year McCain, upset about another delay, said more than $2.3 billion in cost overruns have made the unproven high-tech carrier unaffordable at nearly $13 billion a ship.
In his January 2017 white paper, McCain suggested the golden age of the supercarrier might be ending.
“Traditional nuclear-powered supercarriers remain necessary to deter and defeat near-peer competitors, but other day-to-day missions, such as power projection, sea lane control, close air support, or counterterrorism, can be achieved with a smaller, lower cost, conventionally powered aircraft carrier.” McCain wrote.
“Over the next five years, the Navy should begin transitioning from large deck amphibious ships into smaller aircraft carriers with the goal of delivering the first such ship in the mid-2030s.”
In his visit to the Ford, Trump promised he would use his negotiating skills to get the best deal for the taxpayers. “We don’t make a good deal, we’re not doing our job,” he said. “The same boat for less money. The same ship for less money.”
In the end, cost may be the thing that torpedoes the 12-carrier fleet.
“We simply cannot afford to pay $12.9 billion for a single ship,” McCain said in 2015, “And if these costs are not controlled we must be willing to pursue alternatives that can deliver similar capability to our war-fighters on time and on budget.”
