Why America’s Aircraft Carriers Are Stretched to Breaking Point

The aircraft carrier has long been a potent symbol of American power. With a crew of more than 5,000, carrying 75 aircraft, they are 100,000-ton floating airfields that can be deployed to trouble spots at short notice. Carriers are so beloved by American politicians that they've passed laws mandating the minimum number that the US Navy has to have. Since 2007, the force has been set at 11. Yet we know in recent months that the US Navy has struggled to bring together more than three aircraft carriers on operations simultaneously. So what's gone wrong? And does the aircraft carrier now symbolise America's military decline rather than its prowess? The problems start with the ships themselves. So let's look at a graphic of the 11 current US Navy carriers. The new ones, the Ford class, have been taking too long to build. The USS Gerald Ford entered service four years late and $3 billion over budget. The second one, the John F. Kennedy, is nearly four years behind schedule but is now undergoing its sea trials. Go to the top of the chart and you can see the knock-on effects of that problem. The Nimitz, with over 50 years in the fleet, should have been retired years ago. And the next oldest one on the list, Dwight Eisenhower, will reach its half century next year. But neither Nimitz nor Eisenhower are now fully operational. Then let's go to the middle of the list, to the John Stennis, which is halfway through its operational life and is therefore getting a major overhaul and the refuelling of its two nuclear reactors. That process has already been more than five years and is 14 months behind schedule. Again, there are knock-on effects. I'll spare you the details. The point to take away from all this is that the building and refitting of these leviathans is taking too long because of technical glitches and shortages of key skills in the workforce, which can't be quickly put right. And the delays could get even worse if the third ship in the Ford class gets redesigned, something that the Navy says it's considering because of President Trump's objections on carrier design. It had all sorts of modern day things that were all, instead of using steam for the catapults, they used electric. Yes, you heard that right. For some reason, Mr Trump has taken against the electromagnetic catapults fitted to the Ford class and wants the Navy to go back to steam powered ones. Perhaps the Pentagon is humouring him, as it may do, by renaming the next carrier in the class, the Donald Trump. But if they're serious about significant design changes, it could add further years of delay. So the issues start with building and maintaining the ships, but they're compounded by the way that they've been used recently in the Middle East. Back in 2003, when President Bush invaded Iraq, the US Navy deployed six aircraft carrier groups in the Middle East. Now, even keeping three there is a struggle. Yet the overall force of those ships, 11, is the same now as it was then. That's partly about shipbuilding and maintenance, as we've seen, but it's also about deploying them operationally for too long. That six carrier deployment 23 years ago was a surge, one that couldn't be sustained except for a short period. This year, with President Trump acting against Venezuela and a lengthy period of keeping the flattops in the Middle East as part of coercive diplomacy, this has created a big problem. The Gerald Ford returned home after 326 days on deployment. The Abraham Lincoln has been relieved after 250 days on station off Iran. Missions longer than six months used to be very rare. Such long deployments wear out everything from aircraft to stores to the people on board. During their absence, training exercises are missed, scheduled maintenance forgotten and marriages fold. It then takes longer to get everything ready to deploy again. The whole operational cycle slows down. So the pips are squeaking and in relieving the Lincoln carrier group, which had been the subject of reports of starvation, rations and poor morale, the US Navy has had to shift its only carrier out of the Western Pacific. For a country trying to deter China from acting against Taiwan, that sent a signal of overstretch. The number of these carrier air wings is not set by law and there are therefore nine for the 11 carriers. But for many years during the Iraq and Afghanistan operations, they operated on the basis of having just three carrier air wings deployed at any one time. The others would be recovering from deployment or working up their training in expectation of going abroad soon. So having four or even five wings at sea at any given time at the moment is overstretching the whole system. And the same goes for the ships that escort the carriers like destroyers, which could be used to shoot down incoming missiles and those auxiliaries or supply ships that have to sustain the whole task force while it's at sea. So what does the state of the carrier force tell us about America and its defences? For many years, the debate about these supercarriers used to be whether they were too vulnerable. Did they put too many eggs in one basket? The cost of each carrier, the aviation, munitions and a couple of accompanying warships to protect them has been put at around $25 billion. Operating as part of a team, these huge ships would not be easy to sink. But China has spent decades developing a whole family of weapons to do just that, as well as the spy satellites needed to find the carrier groups at sea. The fact that we know as much as we do now about carrier operations tells its own story about the growing difficulties of keeping them secret. While working on this film, I wanted to check the whereabouts of four East Coast-based flattops. By looking at satellite imagery, I confirmed that they were not at sea. Two of them were in the Newport News shipyard and another two nearby at the Norfolk Naval Base. But faith in the power of these task groups and their importance as symbols of national pride led Congress to fix the size of the carrier fleet by law. And inevitably, when budgets have been tight, other parts of the Navy not protected in this way have suffered. So running the carrier fleet has come at a cost, a net drain on the wider fleet. And as the problems in doing that over the last couple of decades multiplied, it caused what some in the Pentagon have called a hollowing out. There are still 11 of those ships on paper. But push the operational tempo and you get exactly what we've seen during the last couple of years. At heart, though, this comes down to big questions about national priorities and manufacturing ability. US defence budgets were markedly reduced during the so-called War on Terror after 9-11. And although President Trump has asked for a big increase in the defence budget, the enormity of the cost of rebuilding America's military across the board means it may never get back to the military scale that we saw during the late Cold War. As the size of its fleet shrank during those years, shipyards closed, supply chains contracted and key skills faded. That's all contributed to the very long build and refit times of the carrier fleet that we see now. Add to the mix a president elected on the basis of making America great again, resorting too often to the use and threat of the military option, and the accumulated strains of recent years have come into the open. Now the carrier has become a symbol of the enormous challenges facing America's military as much as of its former power.