Is it time for the U.S. Navy to reconsider the supercarrier?
Continued problems of the Ford Class aircraft carrier raises questions.
China is once again upset as it observes two aircraft carriers operating in the western Pacific. The U.S.S. Carl Vinson and its escort group are operating in the South China Sea, and the French nuclear-powered aircraft carrier, the FS Charles De Gaulle, is conducting exercises along the edges of the South China Sea and outside of the first island chain. This is the first time a French aircraft carrier has been in the Pacific Ocean since 1968, when the FS Clemenceau was part of a French nuclear test. The Chinese Defense Ministry accused France of attempting to extend NATO’s reach into the Asia-Pacific region and has ordered its Southern Theater Command to carry out maritime and air patrols to monitor the two aircraft carriers. The aircraft carrier serves not only as a military asset but also as a symbol of national power to reassure allies or signal to enemies the commitment to deploy aircraft carriers as a demonstration of resolve through the deployment of a sizable portion of a country’s military strength. Aircraft carriers that can deploy across a region or across the globe not only serve as a signal of a country’s hard power of the military but also the soft power of diplomacy. The U.S., being a superpower, uses aircraft carriers extensively for projecting its strength across the globe, but are the days of the aircraft carrier numbered?
The U.S. has been the preeminent global leader in the use of aircraft carriers since the days of World War II. The U.S. currently has a fleet of 11 nuclear aircraft carriers; that is a number that the Navy is statutorily obligated to maintain according to 10 U.S.C. 8062(b). The U.S.S. Carl Vinson, which is operating in the South China Sea and the West Philippine Sea this month, was commissioned in 1982 and is in its 42nd year of its estimated 50-year life span. It was the third-class nuclear-powered Nimitz aircraft carrier. The Nimitz-class aircraft carriers represent 10 of the 11 aircraft carriers of the U.S. Navy fleet. The other class is the nuclear-powered Ford-class aircraft carrier, with its single U.S.S. Gerald R. Ford rounding out the 11 U.S. aircraft carriers. There is an ongoing debate over the Ford class and the statutory requirement of maintaining a fleet of 11 aircraft carriers.
The Congressional Research Service released an updated report on January 14, 2025, under the title “Navy Ford (CVN-78) Class Aircraft Carrier Program: Background and Issues for Congress” that highlights many of the issues of the Ford class and its expectation that it can replace the ten Nimitz class aircraft carriers before the end of their lifespans and maintain the statutory limit of 11 active aircraft carriers. The first issue is that the Ford class, like all U.S. aircraft carriers since 1958, can only be built at one facility, the Huntington Ingalls Industries/Newport News Shipbuilding in Newport News, VA. Recently, the production facilities could only support one aircraft carrier construction at a time, but they were recently increased to two at a time after Congress approved a two-ship authorization to build the CVN-80 (Enterprise) and CVN-81 (Doris Miller). Currently six Ford-class aircraft carriers have received various levels of approvals from Congress.
Each Ford-class ship is expected to cost in excess of $13 billion apiece to build, and the increasing costs have forced Congress to place price caps on the cost that will be paid for each aircraft carrier. This has led to discussions of how to order more aircraft carriers at a single time to reduce the costs of construction. This does not completely solve the issues due to the Newport News shipyard being constrained in how many it can build at one time, and since it is the only shipbuilding yard for aircraft carriers, the U.S. Navy is constrained. The other issue outside of the shipbuilding space available is ongoing supply chain issues that are exacerbated by a supply chain that involves 2,000 supplying firms in 46 states. It is not only an issue of delivering the needed parts; the supply chain also needs to deliver them in the right construction order. For example, a propeller cannot be installed until the propeller shaft has been delivered. The other issue is that since COVID-19, many of the more experienced shipbuilders have retired and have been replaced by inexperienced shipbuilders who are slower and more prone to errors, as seen in a navy-wide issue of finding faulty welding in ships delivered to the fleet.
The Ford class has a reduced crew size when compared to the Nimitz class and replaces the steam catapult system used to launch aircraft with a magnetic catapult system, called EMALS, that is supposed to generate more aircraft sorties than the traditional steam catapult. The Ford class's more advanced nuclear reactors can also generate 25% and a theoretical 300% more power than the Nimitz class, which will be needed as more power-hungry systems can be expected for future weapon systems. The result is that the Ford class reduces the lifetime operating cost by $4 billion compared to the Nimitz.
However, this has not come to fruition, as the new catapult system has failed so far to generate rates as fast as the traditional Nimitz-class steam system, and despite hardware and software upgrades, there have only been marginal improvements to the system. This can be attributed to teething problems, but currently all six Ford-class carriers are slated to have a launch system that is a performance downgrade from the Nimitz class. The primary strength of an aircraft carrier is sortie and recovery rates, and the Ford class is proving to be less effective at the primary mission than its older siblings and at a much greater cost and slower procurement. Expect this issue to continue driving up the cost of the Ford-class carrier.
The other issue is the Ford class has not completed all its Initial Operational Test & Evaluation requirements despite going on an extended deployment in 2022 and an underway evaluation period in 2023 that was able to conduct some of its evaluation requirements. But it has yet to complete many of its tests of systems that are specific to the Ford class, and it has delayed its Total Ship Survivability Trial. This is a certification of the onboard damage control tests to demonstrate the survivability and recoverability of the ship. This means again, the aircraft carrier has additional ships being built despite the lead ship not being fully certified, which again can lead to unforeseen cost overruns of the future ships.
As the costs continue to increase and the certification is delayed, questions are growing louder about the wisdom of investing in such large, complicated, and extraordinarily expensive platforms in the current and expected future threat environment. The U.S. Navy would be expected to operate in the western Pacific against China, which has invested heavily in “aircraft carrier killer” missiles such as the DF-21 Dongfeng. The U.S.S. Truman, a Nimitz-class carrier, demonstrated how dangerous missiles were when it nearly was struck by a missile from the Houthi rebels operating in Yemen in 2024. The Chinese can be expected to deploy more and more effective missiles than the Houthi rebels, so there is a distinct and real threat to aircraft carriers. The Ukraine War has also demonstrated the effectiveness of long-range missiles and of using low-cost drones to destroy expensive military hardware; these are distinct threats to aircraft carriers, even large and expensive ones such as the Ford class.
Politicians and the Navy are being asked if the U.S. should not buy as many Ford-class aircraft carriers and instead look for cheaper alternatives, like self-driving ships and planes and the use of smaller aircraft carriers. For example, the U.S.S. America, an amphibious assault ship with a displacement of 46,000 tons was sent to Japan with F-35B Lightning II fighters, and the Japanese Izumo class, with a 26,000-ton displacement and has the ability to support F-35B strike fighters as well. Smaller aircraft carriers would have a more expensive lifetime operational cost per sortie compared to the Nimitz class but could also be made cheaper, and since they are smaller, they could be made at competing shipyards outside of Newport News. This means that more ships could be produced in a quicker time frame, and the loss of one small carrier has a much smaller impact on the total carrier force than a much larger but fewer supercarriers in the current U.S. fleet.
Another thing that makes keeping the Ford class alive difficult is that long-range U.S. missiles like the U.S. Army Typhon and the creation and use of U.S. Marine Corps Littoral regiments with anti-denial and long-range strike capabilities have made the aircraft carrier less necessary for its striking role. Instead, missiles could be deployed to Pacific islands to do that job. The Marine Corps recently updated its F/A-18 Hornets to fire the AGM-158 Joint Air-to-Surface Standoff Missile, or JASSM. This is a stealthy cruise missile with a range of 230 miles (370 kilometers), which will increase the number of standoff missiles that can be launched from both land-based and sea-based strike aircraft in the western Pacific. The argument is that proven and cheaper technologies may make the need for so many super aircraft carriers obsolete.
Neither Congress nor Navy critics believe the supercarrier era is ending. The aircraft carrier, especially the supercarrier, still has a role to play in power projection for a military crisis or a show of force in support of U.S. diplomatic efforts. It still is a projection of demonstrating American intent and priorities. In a kinetic war with a peer adversary, such as China, the vulnerability of what is proving to be prohibitively expensive—yet to be proven—platform that can arguably be stated as being outmoded by the threat environment of the modern battlefield. There are a lot of question marks around the Ford class that justify a vigorous debate of the future, and one that should be had as the Nimitz class approaches its retirement and the delays in the Ford class will make the statutory 11 aircraft carrier requirement impossible to maintain.
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References:
https://www.19fortyfive.com/2025/01/u-s-navy-and-france-have-aircraft-carriers-sailing-in-chinas-backyard/
https://www.newsweek.com/france-news-nato-aircraft-carrier-reaches-pacific-waters-china-2023297
https://crsreports.congress.gov/product/pdf/RS/RS20643/294
As far as I'm concerned, we are facing an antagonist with four times our population; we need to maintain and grow our navy.