Free Republic

For the past 1½ years, on 18 trips off the Virginia and North Carolina coasts, sailors and shipyard workers from Newport News have prepped the Navy’s newest carrier for deployment — 27% over its original budget and years behind schedule. The costliest single item on the Department of Defense’s shopping list, the USS Gerald R Ford has been on a fast track to launch a series of new technologies intended to boost the Navy’s striking power for at least the next 50 years. It is a fast track that started two decades ago. [snip] Over the past 18 months of...

Angola’s bizarre, rumored aircraft carrier ambition David Axe in War is Boring Angola is in the process of acquiring the recently-decommissioned Spanish aircraft carrier Principe de Asturias, according to one news report. The entire Angolan navy has just 1,000 sailors. The 643-foot-long Principe de Asturias needs 830 sailors to fully function. No, this does not make a lot of sense. After all, Angola has no overseas military alliances and no major naval rivals. But if true, it is consistent with the country’s ongoing re-armament, which also includes a squadron of Russian-made heavy jet fighters formerly used by India. Necessary or...

Russian media reported in early 2015 that the Kremlin is preparing blueprints for a huge new aircraft carrier to replace the Russian navy’s current flattop, the relatively small and aged Admiral Kuznetsov. But Moscow’s new carrier is likely to remain a paper concept. A quarter-century after the Soviet Union’s collapse, Russia lacks the money, expertise and industrial capacity to build aircraft carriers. A new flattop could boost Russia’s military power by providing air cover to warships sailing far from Russian shores and by giving Moscow another option for launching air strikes on distant enemies — a particular concern for the...

On the bridge of the aircraft carrier Abraham Lincoln, there’s a 20-year-old quartermaster with a No. 2 pencil, a compass and a big map unfurled on a table. In one of the ironies of America’s modern Navy, that map and that quartermaster are the official method of navigation for the $4 billion carrier and the 5,000 souls on board. Even as the Navy installs the most high-tech equipment on its carriers — including the San Diego-based Carl Vinson, which recently returned to the fleet after a four-year overhaul — none of the nation’s 11 flattops is certified to rely on...