The Strange Missed Opportunities In The USS Gerald R. Ford (CVN 78) Deployment
The Navy's failure in fully committing to the first USS Gerald R. Ford (CVN 78) deployment was a big mistake.
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America’s newest aircraft carrier, the first-in-class USS Gerald R. Ford (CVN 78) finished a 53-day shakedown cruise, creeping back into port on a holiday weekend, two days after Thanksgiving. That’s not exactly the triumphant return one might expect for America’s first deployment of a shiny, new aircraft carrier, and it suggests that the Navy is still struggling with their new $13.3 billion flat-top.
The carrier did what it needed to do. It flew aircraft, sailed the seas, and everyone returned home. But, as with the ship’s first experience with alongside replenishment, reported here, the ship’s basic performance was still relatively uninspiring. After about 45 days at sea, the 50-60 aircraft aboard the USS Ford completed more than 1,250 sorties. That sounds great, but, unless the USS Ford did a whole lot more than 1,250 sorties, the aircraft carrier’s performance still pales in comparison to older carriers.
The numbers don’t lie. In 1991, over the 43 days of Operation Desert Storm, the 56 aircraft aboard the USS Midway (CV 41), an old, World War II-era carrier, generated 3,019 sorties. The Nimitz-class USS Theodore Roosevelt (CVN 71), with 78 aircraft, generated 4,149 sorties. The USS Ford is nowhere near this level of performance.
PROMOTED
And, while the USS Ford struggled to generate aircraft sorties, the carrier was provided almost the same level of at-sea-support demanded by fully-engaged aircraft carriers during Desert Storm. The Ford conducted 13 underway replenishments—one for about every 3.5 days it was at sea. During Desert Storm, with the U.S. carriers consuming an enormous amount of fuel and ordinance, carriers needed to conduct low-speed and risky at-sea resupply missions every 2.7 to 3.3 days. If this was just for practice, there was no mention if the Ford’s fancy new electromagnetic elevators offered a tangible war-fighting benefit by making the resupply intervals—often hours-long exercises in coordinated steaming alongside a slow supply ship—any shorter.
Of course, the USS Ford may be more of a success than the Navy lets on. Much of the “under-the-hood” testing and interoperability efforts undertaken on this deployment were classified. But even if the multinational exercises were useful, the Navy missed several obvious opportunities to chalk up some easy public wins, demonstrating that the ship is becoming less of a science project and more of a viable warfighting asset.
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The Ford Has Never Sailed More Than 35 Consecutive Days At A Time:
One lost opportunity was to simply chalk up sea time. Since delivery, the USS Ford has been at sea a lot, but only in short, two-week doses between pierside stays. After five years, the Ford’s odd operational patterns are becoming a distinguishing feature of the vessel.Unlike America’s other big carriers, the USS Ford never goes to sea for long. According to the Navy, after over 66 months of service, USS Ford has been underway more than 30 consecutive days only once, in late 2020. This latest deployment, featuring only a 24 day stretch of consecutive steaming between Norfolk and Halifax, Canada, was no exception.
It is increasingly hard for observers to understand why the Navy appears unwilling to send a 5.5-year-old ship to sea for more than a month at a time.
Before the deployment, the Navy stated that the cruise was to show the ship could survive a period away from the Navy’s Norfolk superbase, unsupported by specialized contractors. But rather than stretch—just for a couple of days—and set a new operational record for consecutive time at sea, USS Ford’s time at sea decayed.
After managing to cruise 24 consecutive days before pulling into a four-day port call at Halifax, Canada, USS Ford went to sea for only two weeks more before stopping for four days at Portsmouth, UK. It then returned to Norfolk a week later.
That sort of performance fails to inspire confidence. To compare, America’s oldest aircraft carrier, the soon-to-decommission USS Nimitz, completed an epic 321-day deployment in 2021 with no port calls. Can the USS Ford do the same?
Until the USS Ford can function for long periods at sea, it is useless as a combat asset. The record, to date, suggests the USS Ford experiences some sort of knotty operational or safety-oriented limitation somewhere around the third week of consecutive cruising.
The ‘Great White Fleet’ Moment That Wasn’t:
Out of the USS Ford’s 53-day “deployment”, the carrier was only at sea for 45 days. The new ship spent 8 days on port calls. That’s fine. This was an ideal opportunity to show the new vessel to new audiences, and the diplomatic niceties were good for everybody. The vessel itself looked great, and the Navy seems to have offered more access to foreign news services than it does to domestic outlets.But the Navy’s timorous lack of confidence in the platform left the USS Ford somewhat adrift, unable to fully leverage the moment. There was no high-level send-off, and no visits from top naval dignitaries. Both the Chief of Naval Operations, Admiral Mike Gilday, and Secretary of the Navy Carlos Del Toro jetted off to the far side of the world for much of the deployment, distancing themselves from any emergent Ford-related problems.
The missed opportunities by the Navy’s failure to commit to the moment are staggering. From Halifax, the vessel could have easily made a quick detour to the north, making a ceremonial cross into the Arctic Circle. And rather than meet the Chief of the Royal Canadian Navy, Vice Admiral Angus Topshee, aboard the USS Ford in late October, Admiral Gilday’s staff somehow figured it would be better to introduce the two a week later, in Japan.
This prudent exercise in preemptive avoidance was a mistake.
Both Canada and Europe embraced the vessel, celebrating the audacious project despite the technical hiccups. Having high-level naval representation at both port calls would have been a real vote of confidence in the troubled ship, a sweetener to push the crew to arrive in time for high-level receptions, and a real diplomatic coup for a Navy that is, at times, challenged by the intricacies of maritime diplomacy and public showmanship.
Put bluntly, the USS Ford is about as American as you can get in the maritime domain-audacious, brash, and bit bumbling in execution. In 1907, when America’s modest and technically feeble fleet of white-pained ironclads puffed off to an uncertain and risky globe-spanning cruise, American diplomatic representatives still pulled out all the stops, celebrating the “Great White Fleet” as it made twenty port calls on six continents. In the end, the gamble was a huge diplomatic success, and President Theodore Roosevelt met the fleet upon its return. That celebratory fleet might have been operationally fraught and relatively insignificant as a military force, but the fully supported celebratory engagements paid enormous diplomatic dividends. The same could have been said of the USS Ford had the Navy fully leveraged the opportunity presented by this deployment.
There will certainly be other chances for the Navy to hone their diplomatic mettle. If, next year, the five-and-a-half-year-old Ford is still unable to endure the rigors of more than four consecutive weeks at sea, the Navy had best get about embracing the carrier’s diplomatic value as a sort of port-hopping party barge—because it certainly isn’t quite the battle-ready carrier it was supposed to be quite yet.
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Craig Hooper
