Aircraft Carriers III

Facing critics of the plan to retire the aircraft carrier USS Harry S. Truman with half of its service life left, two Navy officials told a key Senate panel March 27 that the decision was the result of a hard choice that would enable them to acquire other capabilities — such as unmanned surface vessels — to bolster the carrier force.

James Geurts, assistant Navy secretary for research, development and acquisition, and Vice Adm. William R. Merz, deputy chief of naval operations for warfare systems, told the Senate Armed Services Committee’s Subcommittee on Seapower that the decision to skip the Truman’s midlife refueling could be reversed if Congress would provide more funding to invest in those new technologies.

Sen. Tom Cotton (R-Arkansas) countered, saying Geurts’ and Merz’s posture was typical of the Pentagon to “tell Congress we can solve the problem if you give us more money.”

Geurts said the Navy would have to decide to retain Truman by 2021, when parts for the refueling and update would have to be ordered. “After that, it would be irreversible,” he said.

But Merz said the Navy would have to make the decision in 2020 to program advanced procurement funds for spending in 2021. The carrier was planned to go into Newport News Shipbuilding in 2024 to start the overhaul.

Merz said retiring Truman early would have no operational effect until 2027-28, when Truman was expected to rejoin the fleet.

Geurts said retiring Truman at midlife “was not a sign that the Navy was walking away from carriers.” But, looking at how the fleet could be competitive against the peer adversaries of the future “necessitated some bold moves, some trade-offs,” he said.

The Navy is focused on getting the Ford-class carriers and the future carrier airwing into the fleet, but also on getting unmanned systems to complement the carrier, he said.

Merz said it was “a warfighting decision” resulting from a lot of studies on future capabilities. Retiring Truman would save $1 billion a year that “could be put into technologies to complement the carriers.”

But several committee members expressed concern about the loss of warfighting capacity in the face of the threat from a resurgent Russia and rapidly growing Chinese navy. They also worried about the impact on the skilled workforce if hundreds of jobs were no longer needed to refuel and modernize Truman.

Geurts and Merz also addressed members’ concerns about the capability of the private shipyards to get surface ship repairs done on time and the public yards’ ability to keep up with the nuclear submarine workload.

Geurts said the Navy’s budget had funds to modernize the yards, particularly the dry docks, which average 60 years old. The Navy also was supporting programs to train new workers to replace the veteran shipbuilders who are retiring.

Asked about long-range plans for the fleet, Merz said a new force structure study would be completed by the end of this year. Although he did not think the goal of a 355-ship battle fleet would change, he said the mix would be different.

Pressed by Sen. Angus King on reports that the Columbia-class ballistic missile submarine program was having trouble, Geurts said the problems with defective welding on the missile tubes had “eroded some of the margin” in the schedule, but there still was an 11-month margin to have the first Columbia operational before the Ohio-class strategic subs would have to retire.

Subcommittee chairman David Perdue noted that Navy Secretary Richard V. Spencer has said a return of sequestration would cut Navy funding by $26 billion and asked about the impact of Congress failing to again bypass the 2010 Budget Control Act.

Geurts said it “would be devastating” and “essentially undo everything we’ve done the last two years” when Congress overrode the BCA to allow big increases in defense spending. It would not only increase the cost of procurement but erode readiness, he said.

Merz said it would “impact virtually everything we do” and pointed out that the years that BCA was in effect cost the navy $8 billion in buying power.

Lt. Gen. David H. Berger, commanding general, Marine Corps Combat Development Command, said sequestration would mean “we would trade modernization for readiness. Everything would go backwards.”

Committee members congratulated Berger on the announcement that he had just been nominated to replace Gen. Robert B. Neller as Marine Corps commandant this fall.

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Jura said:

Mar 15, 2019
and
The Pentagon’s plan to decommission an aircraft carrier looks half baked and dead on arrival

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reposting just
‘Civil War’
part so that I'll have read it three times:

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Lawmakers grilled

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leaders about a plan to send an aircraft carrier into retirement decades early when military leaders around the world are calling for more, not less, naval support.

Members of the House Armed Services seapower subcommittee pressed service leaders on Tuesday to explain why they should get behind cutting short the service life of the

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.

The plan is detailed in the

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, which was released earlier this month. The money the service had planned to spend on refueling the carrier's nuclear reactor core would instead be used on new cutting-edge technology, including unmanned ships.

But combatant commanders in the Middle East and Europe who have called for a carrier presence already

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, said Rep. Elaine Luria, a Virginia Democrat and retired Navy surface-warfare officer.

"We're not meeting that forward-deployed presence, so how can you justify further reducing the carrier presence?" she asked.

Retiring the Truman early is "not a warfighting decision," said Vice Adm. William Merz, deputy chief of naval operations for warfare systems. "It was more of an investment decision."

The service needs to free up funds to pay for "the Navy of the future," James Geurts, assistant Navy secretary for research development and acquisition, told lawmakers. The Navy must be ready to compete against a near-peer enemy, he said.

"[That] led to some tough choices," Geurts said. "One of those is to retire that ship early in favor for looking at other technologies, other larger cost-imposing strategies."

That plan seems to go against the Navy's own recommendations, said Rep. Rob Wittman, a Virginia Republican. The service's own force-structure assessment calls for 12 flattops, he said. Retiring the Truman early would drop the total number below 10, years before the new

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carriers are expected to hit the fleet.

"Why then would we retire the Truman 25 years early in relation to the demands that we see around us and with our adversaries building carriers at a pretty brisk pace?" Wittman asked.

The Navy is "all in" on the Ford-class carriers though, Geurts replied, estimating that the first of those ships would be ready by October following a

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. The Navy has plans to buy two more Ford-class carriers.

"We are ... moving to that carrier as fast as we can," he said. "It's got increased survivability and increased capability to fly the air wing of the future."

But Luria questioned whether booting an existing carrier years before it's expected to be retired is a good use of taxpayer dollars.

"The cheapest ship we have out there is the ship we already have. We just have to take care of that ship and make sure it lasts for its full expected service life," she said. "I just can't even comprehend the thought process that we're 'saving money' by decommissioning a ship halfway through its life."

In an earlier hearing on Tuesday, Acting Defense Secretary Patrick Shanahan was also questioned about the Truman. While he called it a strategic choice the Navy needs to make, he indicated the Pentagon might still reverse course.

"There isn't a drawdown of capacity until mid-2020, so it's not like this is an irreversible decision," he said.

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Jura said:

Tuesday at 8:29 PM
now
Navy to Congress: You Need to Let Us Retire Carrier Truman

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Lawmakers told industry representatives today that, if it wasn’t already clear from their hearings with Pentagon and Navy leadership this week, they had no intention of letting the Defense Department shed an aircraft carrier instead of refuel it.

“I think that’s’ a ridiculous idea,” Rep. Elaine Luria (D-Va.), a retired Navy commander and current representative of the district that includes Naval Station Norfolk, said at the Aircraft Carrier Industrial Base Coalition’s annual Capitol Hill breakfast and lobbying day.

“That math doesn’t work,” said Rep. Rob Wittman (R-Va.), the ranking member of the House Armed Services seapower and projection forces subcommittee whose district stretches into the Hampton Roads region.

“The idea of squandering an asset and not refueling when it has another 30 years of existing life seems like a big waste of money,” Sen. Tim Kaine (D-Va.) said at the event.

The lawmakers’ comments come as no surprise, after three hearings in two days when lawmakers grilled Pentagon and Navy witnesses about the decision to not refuel carrier USS Harry S. Truman (CVN-75) and instead spend that money developing future weapon systems that will help the joint force win in a contested environment.

“An important assumption is that the money that was saved by not refueling the Truman would be used to develop new ways of conducting maritime strike. So when we look at the carrier, we’re looking at it from a maritime strike capability. And a more diverse way of providing maritime strike is among the initiatives inside the department,” Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Marine Corps

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.

The Pentagon estimates it would save $3.4 billion from not refueling the carrier, as well as about a billion dollars a year by not operating the carrier and its air wing.

But lawmakers don’t agree with those calculations.

“We built a carrier that was meant to last 50 years, and I think it’s a joke to say it’s a cost-saving measure to retire it at 25 years. If you amortize the cost we put into it over 25 years instead of 50, we’re not saving the taxpayer any money,” said Luria, a retired “nuke SWO” who deployed on Truman and oversaw carrier maintenance in a tour at Naval Air Force Atlantic.

“It doesn’t make sense to take a carrier that has 25 years of life left in it and tie it up at a dock and say somehow we’re going to retire it and that helps us save money. That’s $3.4 billion of potential savings, as they point to, that now takes away 25 years of capability. To me, that math doesn’t work. So we want to make sure that we are doing the refueling on Truman, we’ve had some good discussions here in the recent posture hearings over the past couple of days,” Wittman said at the event.
“I can guarantee you that will be front and center in the conversations we have as part of the seapower and projection forces subcommittee.”

Kaine recalled that the Navy and Pentagon suggested this in the past – stating when sequestration first kicked in that they wouldn’t pay to refuel USS George Washington (CVN-73) as a way to consolidate all the service’s required spending cuts into a single program rather than harm all their spending lines. Congress rejected that idea and, after a delay to the planning and start of the refueling and complex overhaul, George Washington is

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in Virginia.

“I would say the opening reaction of my [Senate Armed Services Committee] members in this first public meeting that we had around not refueling the Harry S. Truman was highly, highly skeptical. And that was on both sides of the aisle,” Kaine said at the breakfast.
“If I had to bet, I would bet that this one would sort of come out the way the George Washington refueling effort came out, when the Obama Administration suggested that they might not do the refueling of that ship at midpoint. We were able to obviously decide as a Congress that we wanted it to be refueled; my gut tells me this is going the same direction, but no complacency, we’ve got a lot of work to do.”

Luria noted in her remarks that, in addition to disagreeing with the idea to not refuel Truman in principal, the talk of not conducting the RCOH creates uncertainty for workers at Newport News Shipbuilding and in the supply base.

Navy acquisition chief James Geurts acknowledged at the Wednesday SASC hearing that canceling the Truman RCOH and having a large gap between the USS John C. Stennis (CVN-74) and USS Ronald Reagan (CVN-76) RCOHs could force Newport News Shipbuilding to shed employees and potentially lose critical skillsets related to conducting RCOHs. He told USNI News afterwards that a carrier inactivation involves similar skillsets but only requires a third of the man hours compared to an RCOH, so he said that was a consideration the Navy and shipyard would work closely to address if the Truman refueling is indeed canceled.

Of course, if lawmakers – and the Navy – get their way, that won’t be an issue.

“If we were to give you more money, you’d keep the Truman in place, wouldn’t you? Would that be your druthers?” Sen. Mazie Hirono (D-Hawaii) said during the SASC hearing Wednesday.

“Our druthers would be to not surrender a carrier that has 50-percent of its life remaining, but we would like to not do that at the expense of moving out on these other technologies that every assessment has told us” the Navy will need in the future, Vice Adm. Bill Merz, deputy chief of naval operations for warfare systems (OPNAV N9) responded, after having said the RCOH money would be rerouted to fund the development of unmanned systems, energy weapons and other future technology.

“So basically we should consider giving you more money, right?” Hirono asked.

Replied Merz, “yes, ma’am.”

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Jura said:

Jan 8, 2019
and
Navy: Ford’s Advanced Arresting Gear Will be Ready for Fleet Super Hornets, Growlers by End of Year

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General Atomics Electromagnetic Systems (GA-EMS) announced in a March 29 release that the Advanced Arresting Gear (AAG) system successfully executed the first exploratory aircraft barricade arrestment at the Jet Car Track Site in Lakehurst, New Jersey, marking a critical testing milestone in qualifying the AAG system for barricade use on board Gerald R. Ford-class aircraft carriers. This is the first such test event performed by the Naval Air Systems Command in more than 20 years.

“An E-2C Hawkeye aircraft weighing approximately 46,500 pounds was accelerated to a representative arresting speed into the barricade, where the net attached to the AAG via stanchions caught the aircraft and brought it safely to a stop,” said Scott Forney, president of GA-EMS. “We are extremely pleased that AAG performed as planned in the first attempt. This is significant, particularly since this is the first time in 23 years a barricade test event like this has even occurred.”

“While barricades are rarely used in naval aviation, they remain a critical safety mechanism to arrest aircraft in an emergency situation,” stated Rolf Ziesing, vice president of Programs at GA-EMS. “The AAG system recently completed a series of roll-in and fly-in arrestments for both prop and jet aircraft at the Lakehurst site. This latest test verified the system’s emergency barricade arrestment capabilities when standard aircraft recovery cannot be executed.”

Barricade systems are installed on all American aircraft carriers for use only when required. While no at-sea barricade testing of aircraft using the AAG system is planned, ship personnel routinely practice rigging barricades for emergency situations as part of their training and operations procedures.

AAG is a turbo-electric system designed for controlled and reliable deceleration of aircraft. AAG is installed on board USS Gerald R. Ford (CVN-78) along with the GA-EMS Electromagnetic Aircraft Launch System (EMALS), which uses electromagnetic technology to launch aircraft from the deck of naval aircraft carriers. Both systems have been successfully tested during at-sea periods on CVN-78 and are in production for the future USS John F. Kennedy (CVN-79) and USS Enterprise (CVN-80).

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Obi Wan Russell said:

“Our druthers would be to not surrender a carrier that has 50-percent of its life remaining, but we would like to not do that at the expense of moving out on these other technologies that every assessment has told us” the Navy will need in the future, Vice Adm. Bill Merz, deputy chief of naval operations for warfare systems (OPNAV N9) responded, after having said the RCOH money would be rerouted to fund the development of unmanned systems, energy weapons and other future technology.

“So basically we should consider giving you more money, right?” Hirono asked.

Replied Merz, “yes, ma’am.”

And THAT is what it's really all about. The Pentagon wants more money for these programmes, Congress hasn't stumped up the cash as yet so threatening to withdraw a CVN prematurely to divert money is the way to go. Congress will not allow the Truman to go early because, and I agree with them on this, it will be a false economy that won't actually save anything and end up costing much more in the long run. The UK had a submarine building holiday in the 1990s and when they restarted production with the Astute class, the loss of skilled workers at the shipyard was devastatingly expensive to replace. It's a bargaining tactic, nothing more.

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gelgoog said:

If it was me I would demand an itemized budget request and make them justify it line by line.

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gelgoog said:

Well I'll give you examples of something I would cut. The block purchase of two Ford class carriers. How can you justify building two of those when the Ford isn't anywhere close to mature and it cost almost TWICE as much to build as the George HW Bush did? I wouldn't put a cent on any more Ford class carriers until the issues are fixed on the initial ship.

I would also pair down the number of strategic nuclear submarines by six ships so you would have 12 of them instead of 18. I would reduce the purchases of Virginia class submarines or retire some of the Los Angeles class submarines to use some of that budget to build large diesel electric submarines. I would downselect the LCS to a single design (the Freedom-class), sell off all but one of the Independence-class ships, and use the savings to build specialized versions of the Freedom-class for the minesweeper role and develop an updated spec for the Freedom-class which actually has VLS cells in it as the base spec. I would also expand the America-class into an escort carrier which has a catapult and eventually use that to supplement the supercarriers.

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bd popeye said:

How much truth is in this video? Anyone know?

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