Early retirement for aircraft carriers is weapons-grade stupidity

When the United States Navy is very short-handed, and there is a clear need for hulls in the water, you would think that the Navy would be figuring out how to keep the current ships it has going for as long as they can. It only seems like the smart thing to do.

You’d be very surprised to find out that the early retirement of one of 10 Nimitz-class nuclear-powered aircraft carriers, also known as CVNs, specifically, USS Harry S Truman (CVN 75), is instead being floated. That retirement would take place in 2024.

No matter when, or which carrier is retired early, this is an idea of weapons-grade stupidity.

To understand why, let’s take a look at the ship itself. USS Harry S Truman, no, there is no period after the S Truman’s middle name was just that letter, currently operates an air wing that contains four squadrons of multi-role fighters, either F/A-18C Hornets, F/A-18E/F Super Hornets, or F-35 Lightnings. There are also helicopters, all on the Sikorsky H-60 airframe, as well as support planes like the E-2 Hawkeye and the EA-18G Growler. All of this operates on a 100,000-ton vessel that is almost 1,100 feet long with a crew and air wing that totals more than 5,000 personnel.

Now for a dose of reality: These ships don’t get built overnight. If you wanted to have a carrier ready to replace the Truman in 2024, you needed to have ordered it in 2015. It takes nine years from ordering a new Ford-class CVN to having that ship delivered and commissioned into the fleet, to say nothing of it being ready to deploy and fight. That takes a fair bit of time, too. USS Gerald R. Ford (CVN 78) is still working up for her first deployment more than 18 months after she was commissioned.

So, what we are really talking about is a highly complex naval vessel that took more than a decade to get from making the decision to buy this asset to having it ready to defend this country. The United States found itself short on carriers after USS Enterprise (CVN 65) was decommissioned in 2012, just as Russia and China were getting more aggressive.

It wouldn’t seem so bad, but the Obama administration began scrapping many of the older carriers of the Forrestal and Kitty Hawk classes. Five valuable carriers were scrapped. Yes, these carriers would have been 60 years old, but having old carriers in reserve is better than having nothing in reserve, which is where we are headed should the old USS John F. Kennedy (CV 67) and USS Kitty Hawk (CV 63) end up going to Brownsville, Texas.

You might wonder what good these older carriers might have done. Well, maybe they couldn’t operate F-35C Lightnings, but they could operate planes like the F/A-18E/F Super Hornet, the AV-8B Harrier and the F-35B Lightning, which is replacing the Harrier, not to mention plenty of choppers.

So, really, the Navy needs to keep the Truman in service. But also, they need to re-think their total carrier force. Instead of accepting a cut from their goal of 12 carriers or the current total of 11, they need to think about pushing back up to the 15-carrier force that President Ronald Reagan left the Navy with.

Expensive? Yes, but it is far better to spend the money for carriers and the appropriate air wings and escort vessels to deter potential aggressors than to pay in the blood of dead and wounded military personnel because some despot decided America couldn’t stop them.

President Trump should tell the Pentagon to take the real bargain: Keep the Truman on schedule for a refueling while both speeding up the Ford-class carrier production run and seeing which of the decommissioned carriers can be brought back into service.

Harold Hutchison has 15 years of experience covering military issues for multiple outlets.

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