The Navy wants to ditch an aircraft carrier to buy new weapons for a next-level fight

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The Navy wants to ditch an aircraft carrier to buy new weapons for a next-level fight with China
By: Ryan Pickrell, Business Insider March 12, 2019 at 01:38 PM
RE: https://taskandpurpose.com/navy-trum...arrier-c-hiina

The U.S. Navy plans to retire one of its aircraft carriers decades early, a highly controversial move to free up funds for the new weapons needed to fight a powerful adversary.

"We made the difficult decision to retire CVN 75 (USS Harry S. Truman) in lieu of its previously funded refueling complex overhaul that was scheduled to occur in FY 2024," the Navy said in an overview of the fiscal year 2020 budget released Tuesday, referring to the refueling the carrier with new reactor cores.

The purpose is to free up funding for new weapons that are more likely to survive were the U.S. to go to war with China, a senior defense official told Breaking Defense, which first broke the story about the Pentagon's plans to mothball the Truman.

The decision to retire the Truman decades early, which reportedly came from Acting Secretary of Defense Pat Shanahan, "is in concert with the Defense Department's commitment to proactively pursue diversified investments in next-generation, advanced, and distributed capabilities," the Navy said, noting it would be looking into both manned and unmanned systems.

"This approach pursues a balance of high-end, survivable manned platforms with a greater number of complementary, more affordable, potentially more cost-imposing, and attritable options," the service added.

Nonetheless, the Navy still intends to move forward with its planned purchase of two more Ford-class aircraft carriers.

While aircraft carriers have long been beacons of American military might, they are becoming increasingly vulnerable. Carriers remain difficult to kill, but near-peer adversaries are developing weapons capable of knocking them out of the fight at long range.

Naval experts say that U.S. carriers now need to operate at least 1,000 nautical miles from the Chinese mainland to keep out of range of China's precision anti-ship missiles, according to USNI News. That puts carrier-based fighters out of range for attacks on mainland command and control centers.

The U.S. Navy is turning its attention away from traditional capabilities to robotic vessels, such as unmanned scout ships to conduct surveillance and draw enemy fire and unmanned missile boats to fire on targets identified by the robotic scout vessels, Breaking Defense reported.

The loss of an unmanned platform is nothing compared to damage to a Nimitz-class supercarrier loaded with bombs, an air wing of about 60 aircraft, two nuclear reactors — and roughly 5,000 sailors on board.

The entire U.S. military is investing more heavily in long-range, precision fires — missiles and artillery — to punch holes in contested battle-spaces.

Commenting on the Department of Defense's proposed $718 budget for fiscal year 2020, Shanahan stated that "this budget will strongly position the U.S. military for great power competition for decades to come." The budget is expected to face pushback from Congress.

After all, there is a strong possibility the USS Harry S. Truman, like the USS George Washington before it, is a bargaining chip in the Defense Department's effort to secure additional funding from Congress.

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The Pentagon will reportedly retire an aircraft carrier 2 decades early to save money
By: Ryan Pickrell
RE: https://taskandpurpose.com/uss-harry-truman-retirement

This is an earlier post about this subject:

The Pentagon reportedly plans to send one of its Nimitz-class aircraft carriers into early retirement at least two decades early, shrinking the carrier fleet to save billions of dollars.

The U.S. military will scrap plans for a mid-life overhaul of one of its carriers, the Washington Post's David Ignatius reported Tuesday. The carrier is the USS Harry S. Truman, which was scheduled to have its nuclear reactor core refueled in 2024, Breaking Defense's Sydney Freedberg reported Wednesday.

The Truman, which entered service in 1998, was set to serve for half a century, as is the case with all of the Navy's nuclear-powered aircraft carriers. In 2024, the ship was to sail to Newport News shipyard for a Refueling & Complex Overhaul (RCOH) that was to be completed in 2028, Breaking Defense reported.

The plan to cancel the mid-life overhaul and retire this aircraft carrier, part of the soon-to-be-released 2020-2024 budget plan, would see the U.S. carrier fleet shrink in size from 11 to ten in the next few years.

While the Post estimated $4 billion in total savings, Breaking Defense writes that the decision may result in as much as $30 billion in savings over 25 years. The Post reports this decision was a compromise to ensure that the Navy could purchase two new Ford-class aircraft carriers, as the service announced last month.

This is not the first time the U.S. military has gone down this road, and there is a good chance that Congress sinks these plans.

During the Obama administration, the U.S. military proposed retiring the USS George Washington, commissioned in 1992, to cut costs. To prevent a fight with Congress, the White House intervened, offering to provide additional funding.

Retired Navy Capt. Jerry Hendrix told Breaking Defense that the military may be using the Truman as a "bargaining chip" for a larger budget.

This new report comes as the debate intensifies about the value of aircraft carriers given the growing threat from Chinese standoff capabilities. While U.S. carriers have long been symbols of American military might, some experts say that they are becoming increasingly vulnerable targets rather than strategic assets.

The Navy, however, views the situation very differently.

"Rather than expressing the carrier as uniquely vulnerable, I would say it is the most survivable airfield within the field of fire," Chief of Naval Operations Adm. John Richardson said earlier this month.

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Personal note: Something's afoot as Holmes would say. Whose really calling these shots?

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