The USS Harry S. Truman will not be retired early, Vice President Mike Pence announced Tuesday, just hours after Pentagon officials forcefully defended the decommissioning decision before Congress.
Pence delivered the welcome message for the Truman’s crew when he visited the ship pierside at Naval Station Norfolk.
“I met with the president at the White House this morning, and I told him I was going to be with all of you here on the deck of the Truman,” Pence told the crew. “And as I stand before you today, I know that the future of this aircraft carrier is the subject of some budget discussions in Washington, D.C.”
“President Donald Trump asked me to deliver a message to each and every one of you on the deck of the USS Truman: We are keeping the best carrier in the world in the fight. We are not retiring the Truman,” Pence said to thunderous applause.
“The USS Harry S. Truman is going to be ‘giving ‘em hell’ for many more years to come.”
The Pentagon, under pressure from the White House, had proposed retiring the carrier in 2024, about halfway through its normal useful life. Pence’s surprise announcement must have blindsided the Pentagon. While Pence was in Norfolk announcing the Truman had been saved from the chopping block, Adm. Bill Moran, the vice chief of naval operations, was defending the decision to mothball the carrier in testimony on Capitol Hill.
At his Senate confirmation hearing to be the Navy’s next top admiral, Moran explained the Truman was being retired two decades early to fund the Navy’s plans to transition to a fleet of unmanned naval vessels.
“We believe we are going to need to modernize our force in a way that we haven’t thought of in the past, especially in the unmanned arena,” Moran testified before the Senate Armed Services Committee. “We certainly have seen the benefit of unmanned aviation over the last 17 years of combat.” He added, “We clearly believe that unmanned, undersea, and unmanned surface [vessels] will help us expand those threat vectors in the future at a lower cost because of the requirement not to man them.”
Clearly unaware of the policy shift, Moran argued that the money to refuel the Truman’s nuclear reactors and operate it for another 25 years would be better spent on “modernization, experimentation, prototyping, and R&D for the things that we should be delivering in the next 5 to 10 years.” The Pentagon has said that it could save $3.4 billion by decommissioning the ship.
Asked by Sen. Tom Cotton, R-Ark., if the Navy would turn down the money to keep the Truman afloat, Moran was careful not to commit to saving the ship.
“We wouldn’t decline more money,” Moran said, adding, “Even if you added money, I think we would have to be very careful about how that money was allocated.”
