Posted on 07/25/2016 11:38:32 AM PDT by Java4Jay
You've never had 12 Nimitz-class carriers. You built 10, plus one Enterprise. And every nuclear powered aircraft carrier has been built and refueled by a single shipyard in Newport News, Va.
With Gerald R. Ford-class carriers, the pace is slowed-down. We’ll eventually be down to 8 super carriers, each with air wings that require the ships get relatively close to their target; and, only one ship-yard. The strategic implications of the new configuration are enormous.
It's all a function of the funding and the single shipyard. You're never going to get past that.
“The libs spew this same crap about every new military program”
Yup. And some useful idiots here at FR happily parrot them.
When was the present day carrier sunk?
When has the present day aircraft carrier faced a non-3rd world enemy? You can bomb Iraq and the Taliban all day long and they will never even see your carrier but Russia and China would be a different story.
They will be obsolete in the next cruise missile/drone war. I’d like to see the Navy build some Ohio Class sized subs that can launch and recover a couple dozen full size drones and a couple thousand mini drones. That is the future.
She recently returned from sea trials. The purpose of sea trials is to find problems. She will deploy in a few days.
We never had 12 Nimitz-class carriers at any point in time. When we deployed 12 carrier groups, at least three were non-nuclear, Forrestal-class successors (America, Kitty Hawk, and Kennedy), plus the nuclear-powered Enterprise. And, the Forrestal-class carriers were still active for much of the time we had 12 active carriers. All Nimitz-class carriers were built at Newport News. The last carrier built at Brooklyn Navy Yard was the Constellation in 1957.
yep- should have left the Enterprise alone- till at least the Ford came online-
BTW- the Massive changes to this ship will take time to sort out-
EMALS- Needed to fast launch - reduce maintenance
arrestor gear- needed to safely recover DRONES
SPY/3 radar- This change was mandated by the Obummer’s
defense chief- was originally planned to integrate
with Rail guns, and Plasma weapons- hope they can still do that
Reactors- New build- as are the Electrical generators
weapons lifts- new design-
more and more — all needed for the 21 century
The Navy has been for many years well-aware of the threat from cruise missiles. Directed-energy defense systems as well as systems that effectively “blind” incoming missiles are in both testing and deployment phases.
In between the Enterprise and the Nimitz-class carriers were the three so-called Kitty Hawk class carriers, which were really just incremental modifications of the Forrestal. I worked on the Kennedy, which was one of the Kitty Hawk class carriers. The Kennedy was originally designed to be nuclear-powered, but was switched to conventional power after the keel was laid. Now that was a change order!
First in class with new technology, who could have forseen there could be major problems....
so what's new??
No, Feeling!
Energy dissipation equipment design for the arresting gear was modified to allow light unmanned aircraft to operate. A component allowing this feature is failing extremely short of MTBF design considerations when in use with heavy aircraft due to an engineering dynamics modeling error.
The launch catapult has a failure mode (unspecified) about 10% way to the design MTBF of more than 4000 launches.
.
>> “ and who would absolutely stomp your ass on a football field.” <<
But couldn’t descend the steps to exit an airplane without stumbling?
As much as I would like to blame the Oobama administration for these design flaws, the planning and design work for the Ford-class carriers began many years before January 2009.
Let’s tidy this thread up:
You seem to be o.k. with the Navy spending three times the cost of the most recent Nimitz-class (super) carrier on a carrier that doesn’t work. This is, after all, how DoD procurement works.
You are correct that at the time we had 12 super-carriers, some of them were pre-Nimitz class. (One, even, was non-nuclear, to deal with a certain peculiarity of foreign policy.) This fact does not negate the two arguments that I made: that 12 super-carriers allowed the Navy to project force while providing quality of life to those who serve on those ships. And, that the pace of these super-carriers coming into and leaving service, gave the President options to deal with the possibility of losing one of them.
I appreciate the information that during the 12-super carrier period in which the Nimitz-class dominated, there was only one shipyard that built super-carriers. I did qualify my statement with “I think.” We’re now down to four Navy Shipyards. Since the Brooklyn Shipyard was closed, seven more have closed (I looked this up). So, my vague knowledge that we are collapsing the infrastructure of our national defense, along with the number of weapons system wasn’t totally wrong. It was wrong with respect to Shipyards that built super carriers.
I am sorry that Romney didn’t have a quick retort to the President’s smug remark in 2012 that we’re not looking to fight future wars with the equipment and tactics of the past. Obama said this while our defense establishment had to draw heavily on the Guard and Reserve to maintain an expeditionary force in the Middle East only marginally capable of performing its function.
As a result of down-sizing the military during the 1990s, we - and others in the Middle East - have paid and continue to pay a heavy price because we could not prevent an insurgency from getting started.
I wasn’t alive then but I heard the Enterprise has similar issues when she was launched- she was overbuilt and had bleeding edge tech for the time.
The so-called “peace dividend” after the collapse of the Soviet Union and the Berlin Wall was squandered in just about every way imaginable.
I don’t think we disagree on much. The DoD procurement process borders on criminal and, at the least, is excessively bureaucratic and wasteful. I’ve been on both sides of the process, as a government contractor and as a government employee involved in evaluating bids. My comment about the “change order” on the Kennedy speaks to the point. I don’t know what the optimal number of carriers is, but 12 sounds about right, given the diversity of threats we face. At one point in the 1980s I think we had four or maybe five non-nuclear carriers deployed, well into the Nimitz-class era: Forrestal, Kitty Hawk, Kennedy, America, and Constellation. There is a GAO report arguing that non-nuclear carriers are less costly, by several billion dollars each, on a life-cycle basis. I don’t have an opinion about that. Naval shipbuilding infrastructure is an important and complicated issue. There hasn’t been in decades, and probably never will again be, sufficient ship orders to maintain two yards capable of building super carriers and more than two yards building submarines. The government-run construction yards were extremely inefficient and costly to operate. NNS and Electric Boat are, by comparison, paragons of efficiency although they both have their problems as well. The Ford-class carriers will integrate many new technologies at the same time. Maybe that decision was a mistake, and we would have been better off with incremental improvements to the 40+ year old Nimitz design.
thx jpl
Among the reasons we could use someone like Donald Trump as President is that his thinking would not be clouded by the corruption that permeates DoD procurement.
While the Democrats think the military should be used for social engineering, green politics, and a shakedown of contractors, Trump would focus on winning.
Plus, Trump isn’t very impressed by people and processes associated with boondoggles. He considers himself smart enough to make a quick study of what he needs to know at his level of decision-making, and to cut through the layers of pencil-pushers to connect with the actual experts in the area.
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