One of those AOE's will have been USS Camden, my cousin's old ship -- he served in her on the Gun Line in '72 and '73 as an SK3. He can tell his grandchildren he saw Olongapo when it was full of drunken American sailors ..... before the Chinese took it over!
Camden had half an engine set intended for the later Iowa-class and Montana-class BB's that were never built (Kentucky's bow wound up grafted onto USS Wisconsin, I think the story went, after a collision). Camden and her sisters bumped up the ante on unreps; they'd do over 20 knots. "One-stop shopping" was the cry; now the "theory" has gone back the other way, no telling why.
Camden was one of the last ships in the Fleet to burn Bunker "C" fuel for that reason, btw .... that was supposeddly part of the rationale for retiring her (that, and Big Dick Cheney clapping her out like the "unwanted" CV's and CVA's, running her with no yard periods or SLEP work) -- so Mr. Bush could get all those icky expensive ships off the books and he could give his old-boy Yale classmates on Park Avenue a nice, big "peace dividend" tax cut.
Then there were the units in the shipyard-IRRC the drydock could take CVNs.
Won't that be a kick in the head when the PLA-N schedules the Shi Lang for a yard period there, in the shipyard Slick Willie got for them, cheap.
Bet they make us do the work with Chinese subcontractors.
Actually your naming of Camden makes me see I was mistaken. It wasn’t AOEs, it was AORs at Long Beach. The West Coast AOEs were up in Bremerton.