Navy Carriers Face
Waves of Change
Budget restrictions and new strategic realities put future of the military’s predominant warship into doubt
One of the Obama administration’s first reactions when Islamic insurgents swept into northern Iraq in June 2014 was to order the nearest aircraft carrier, coincidentally the USS George H.W. Bush, into the Persian Gulf in case its planes and missiles were needed.
In fact, moving carriers around the strategic chessboard of the oceans has become Washington’s standard first response to a crisis, whether it’s a terrorist strike, a military threat or a humanitarian disaster. Carriers are fast, flexible and powerful.
They are also expensive.
The cost of building and maintaining the Navy’s current fleet of 10 big carriers — it is supposed to have 11 but one was retired before its replacement was ready — has made them a subject of debate in military circles for at least a decade. No other country has more than two; China and Russia each have but one.
Add in the potential vulnerability of carriers to the latest missiles, which could keep them from operating close to hostile shores, and the discussion over their future role has grown.
National security thinkers inside and outside the Navy have begun to question whether the United States can afford 11 carrier strike groups. Some suggest the country could get by with as few as eight. They argue that the savings could be used to develop new technologies, such as a long-range stealthy attack drone or electromagnetic weapons and lasers, which could address carrier vulnerabilities and extend their usefulness.
Frank Hoffman, a senior research fellow at the National Defense University, says the high cost of carriers risks distorting the military’s broader portfolio of weapons. The result, he says, is that “you might not afford the research and development for game-changing technologies. You may actually open up vulnerabilities to the carriers that you invested in.”
The new class of supercarriers now under construction, starting with the USS Gerald R. Ford, will cost about $13 billion each, not counting their aircraft. For comparison, that’s about $1 billion more than the entire budget of the Interior Department. It will take $7billion just to overhaul and refuel a nuclear carrier halfway through its 50-year lifespan, an amount that could buy three and half of the most modern destroyers or about 115 of the Navy’s Super Hornet fighters.
“It’s a lot of eggs in one basket,” Hoffman says.
In a report last year for the centrist Center for a New American Security, Navy Capt. Henry J. Hendrix, a career flight officer, wrote that the aircraft carrier “is in danger of becoming like the battleships it was originally designed to support: big, expensive, vulnerable — and surprisingly irrelevant to the conflicts of the time.”
He estimated that each of the nation’s carrier strike groups — a carrier, its five attendant surface warships and a fast-attack submarine — requires about 6,700 personnel and costs some $6.5 million a day to operate.
Aircraft carriers, though, have been at the core of every major U.S. military operation since World War II, and neither the Pentagon nor Congress shows signs of changing that doctrine to any great degree.