Is double plus ungood…
The next Ford-class aircraft carrier is facing a two-year delay that will leave the Navy with ten carriers for about a year, USNI News has learned.
The future USS John F. Kennedy (CVN-79) will now deliver in March 2027, according to the Navy’s Fiscal Year 2026 budget justification documents. The carrier was supposed to deliver this month, according to last year’s budget plans.
“The CVN 79 delivery date shifted from July 2025 to March 2027 (preliminary acceptance TBD) to support completion of Advanced Arresting Gear (AAG) certification and continued Advanced Weapons Elevator (AWE) work,” reads the latest FY 2026 shipbuilding budget book.
Those two technologies – the system used to catch aircraft landing on the carrier’s deck and the weapons elevators that move ordnance through the ship – are new systems incorporated into the Ford class. A spokesperson for General Atomics, which makes the AAG, did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
The Ford was two years late, not delivering until 2017, and did not deploy until 2023, six years later! This was due to numerous ‘problems’ with new systems and the plumbing on the ship…
I can see the same thing happening with the Kennedy. So effectively, the USA will be down a carrier (actually down three from the 13 we need to maintain OPTEMPO/PERSTEMPO), not for just a year, but potentially for seven years…
When you add in the ‘tensions’ in the world right now, and the fact that more and more countries are getting well ahead of us in not only shipbuilding, but in total numbers of Navy ships, this does not bode well for the Navy’s mission of freedom of the seas and freedom for commerce at sea.
China for one, is pushing to kick the Navy outside the ‘first island chain’, e.g. out of Japan, Taiwan, and the Philippines. And they are determined to claim everything inside the infamous 9 dash line as Chinese property…
The US Navy, along with other NATO, Australian, and New Zealand navies routinely do FONs (freedom of navigation) between Taiwan and China, and down through the SCS to Brunei, Vietnam, and Malaysia.
USS Nimitz just did a ‘speed run’ to get to the Indian Ocean and Persian Gulf area. If they had not been able to ‘cut the corner’ as it were, that would have added roughly a week to the trip.
And being down another carrier will put a lot of stress on the remaining ships, crews, and the small boys that accompany them…
Sigh…
Two issues. The more complicated something…anything…is the harder it is to build and implement. Add in the fact that America’s industrial base and capabilities are a mere ghost of what they were a few decades ago and you have the recipe for problems. BIG problems.
There are very good questions about air power and its viability to project kinetic power in battle. Aircraft carriers passed Battleships as the predominant means of surface warfare in WWII. Drones and hypersonics may mean the end to large floating targets.
I’ve been out of the Navy too long to have any valid opinions, but I will note that the historical records of the Naval Powers is they learn lessons the hard way. God help our sailors.
Add in the USAF is scrapping 240+ aircraft including all A-10s but only buying 45 on that same budget cycle. This makes it the smallest Air Force in history. (Source Ward Carroll podcast)
So much for deterrence and pilot retention.
Under the previous Sec AF, they didn’t need all of those white pilots.
The axiom (motto) “Better is the Enemy of Good Enough” is reputed to have hung on the wall in the office of ADM Sergey Gorshkov, for many years the Commander-in-Chief of the Soviet Navy.
Knowing little about the Navy and what is needed, to an outsider it appears those in charge are too enamored with gee-whiz.
The entire US Navy ship acquisition program has been a mess for some time now.
Looking at the LCS, CG(X), and the scandal of the Constellation-Class frigate program going from an off the shelf solution to a drawn-out development nightmare.
The entire system is fundamentally broken and needs to be fixed, yesterday.
When did General Atomics get into making arresting gear?
Smells to me like a contract issued because of influence instead of ability.
While the carrier based arresting gear does need an upgrade, I’m pretty sure they are not the people to do it.
P.S. I’m one of the few people who have worked on the designs for both land based and carrier based arresting gear. They operate on very different principles but are both fundamentally simple systems where the details are VERY critical.
Dan- Good point!
Xoph- Another good point… sigh
Gerry/Bill- True, but now the AF wants to control ALL fighter procurement for all services… Can we say FB-111???
WSF/Aaron- You are both correct. And even when a GOOD program gets to acquisition, it will be years, if ever, before it gets to the Fleet. I know… I saw it from the inside, including LCS and Zumwalt… sigh
Jon- Good question. Thanks for adding your perspective!
One, ships are big and have a long lead time. We would expect the effects of shutting down a bunch of economy, and retiring people with medical complications to have a longer impact there than even the big airliners.
Two, there is the theoretical strategic need for capabilities, and then there are the political consensuses on perceiving the need, desiring the capability, and being able to pay for it. There are serious arguments to be made, and troll or joke arguments to be made.
One strawman would be making the recent Israel and Ukraine successes with pre-emplaced attack drones into a golden bullet, and wonderwaffe that can solve all problems, and answer all alternatives. IE that ‘drones’ can of course sink carriers, so we can’t risk anything anywhere, and also we don’t want shipping lanes open to merchants because of shipping containers being extremely dangerous, etc. (My true feeling is that while drones can be dangerous, the answer to them at sea is probably airborne radar, and hence carriers. )
‘Can we really pay for X?’ is an interesting question that deserves a lot more academic awareness than it seems to have. I think I am basically Austrian in my economic thinking, and hence think that value and currency numbers can reprice against each other, and that nothing requires that the value of strategic capabilities or procurement costs to be particularly fixed to anything we might use to estimate the American economy with. Though, my extreme scenarios are probably more absurd than I had guessed.
I have my own hobby horses, but arguably I have my head too much on the clouds to really understand the big picture here.
I was ship’s company on the USS John F. Kennedy. Of course, that one was CV 67, & it was decades ago……
Bob- The issue IS the big picture, because the Navy keeps getting overcommitted to a number of different ‘requirements’…
TB- You’ll be glad to know they saved the dinnerware and flags from your boat, and it will go on the NEW JFK!
OldNFO,
Oh, hockeysticks…
You mean that the procurement culture is not able to prevent projects of this scale from being screwed by dancing specifications?
That being the case sorta makes sense, but also would have no easy fixes apparent to me.
A different interpretation of your words is that the procurement is not strictly inherently a disaster, and good hardware can be obtained, but that the elected official feuding and lack of willingness to commit to trade off decisions of any sort result in the Navy being required to use the hardware to do impossible things. Like twenty ships worth of patrolling with three ships, etc.
On the merchant shipping side, the (Whatever BS acronym, call it EIEIO) training ships/disaster relief ships being built for the Maritime Admin and lent to the merchant marine academies, are a uniform disaster, apparently being hurried out before they’re able to pass safety inspections.
It’s not just the Navy. One serious issue is pay for shipyard workers. A yardbird is an expert in at least one well-paying trade- pipefitting, plumbing, welding, fabrication, machinist, millwright, electrician… all 6 figures trades or close to it. But many yardbirds are at least journeyman level in 2 or more of those trades… and shipyards pay less than the unions do, starting yardbirds off at less pay than a union apprentice.
I can’t help but think that that is also a problem at Newport News where the Kennedy is being built.
Thank God the Koreans have taken over the Philly Shipyard. They can build the hell out of ships. 13 weeks to our 52, from keel laying to flooding the drydock.