The onboard systems of the most expensive ship in the world, the Gerald R. Ford, were condemned as unserviceable for combat operations.
Photo: US Navy
The Pentagon has ordered an independent review of the most expensive ship in the world, the Gerald R. Ford new generation’s nuclear aircraft carrier. During tests, the onboard vehicle systems were condemned as unserviceable for combat operations, Bloomberg reported on Monday.
Identified problems were outlined in the letter of US Deputy Secretary of Defense, Frank Kendall, addressed to Navy Secretary Ray Mabus and obtained by media. “With the benefit of hindsight, it was clearly premature to include so many unproven technologies on the vessel”, Kendall wrote.
The building of the head carrier of the new series ‘Gerald Ford’ was started in Newport in 2009. The vessel was launched four years later. It is considered the most expensive ship in the world – 13 billion dollars were spent on its development and construction.
The aircraft carrier was created as an improved version of the Nimitz ships with a reduced number of crew by automating and an increased reactor life. A number of innovations was applied on the Gerald R. Ford, including mass drivers, which replaced steam-driven catapults, turboelectric arrester gears, and a reduced-size superstructure shifted back. The ship should carry 90 aircraft and helicopters for various purposes, including a deck-based variant of the F-35.
In July, it was reported that the transfer of the aircraft carrier to the fleet is delayed until 2017 due to serious problems, identified during testing. According to the memo of Defense Department’s director of operational test and evaluation, Michael Gilmore, the vessel does not meet the set parameters on four key areas: launching and recovering aircraft, moving onboard munitions, conducting air traffic control and ship’s self-defense.
OLD news but… This is what happens when you let the kids tinker with something that they shouldn’t be…
This aircraft carrier is all electric…. Horrible decision… Water and electricity don’t mix. Steam equipment was just fine, and allows a ship to be more battle damage resistant. Especially a nuclear steam powered ship.
Tech for tech’s sake providing the US taxpayer was paying.
Well, it’s always a win for the contractors, the politicians getting a cut and senior officers retiring to six and seven figure executive VP positions. The product doesn’t work? Even better! Then they can embezzle more money ‘fixing’ it. And when the fixes only half work, they can sell you a new, more expensive model! It works just the same as the US medical/pharmaceutical industry. Keeping everything broken and selling half-measure fixes so you will always be ready to buy the next model is the whole corporate profit model. If they sold working products they would get less repeat business, so to speak. (Or so they think. I actually doubt the validity of their model, but they do assiduously believe and follow it, and this s what follows.)
Of course, the whole thing is even more of a farce when you consider that even if it worked perfectly, it’s a waste: ‘The commitment to aircraft carriers is literally cannibalizing the rest of the Navy and simultaneously interfering with its ability to meet emerging requirements and threats.’ ‘…these craft require 46 percent of the Navy’s personnel to man and support…” yet, Navy Capt. Henry Hendrix estimated China could produce 1,227 DF-21D ballistic anti-ship missiles for the cost of a single U.S. carrier.” and ‘new anti-ship missiles “put U.S. forces on the wrong side of physics,” the U.S. Naval War College’s Andrew Erickson warned.’
‘A U.S. carrier group only came face-to-face with a Russian carrier task force during the Cold War once. During the tensions surrounding the Yom Kippur war, the presence of a “locally superior Russian force” resulted in the American ships having to reposition further west in the Mediterranean.’
But of course, the most damning of all comes from Admiral Hyman Rickover’s famous 1982 response in Congress to the question of long American carriers would last in an actual war: “Forty-eight hours.” Everybody in the US submarine service knows this. In US wargames, our subs aren’t allowed to sink the carriers, which is why sub commanders have traded periscope shots of the carriers they’ve ‘killed’ for decades. Every time we take a carrier to a NATO wargame, it gets sunk, often multiple times per game. In most such wargames, the US carrier battle group never even detects the enemy sub. Plenty of Australian, Canadian, Danish, Dutch and French sub commanders can testify to that. In some cases, the whole BG has been wiped out by one or two subs.
The Navy won’t let anything else sink them in US wargames either, as for example in Millenium Challenge 2002, when a US marine general playing Iraq used missile boats to sink 2 carriers and 14 other ships, and the Navy halted the game and put all the ships back on the table, declaring the entire attack to have not taken place.
‘In 2012, test of a slower and higher-flying surrogate of the Muski missile demonstrated that “the Aegis system could not be relied on for effective defense of itself or the aircraft carriers it was escorting,”’
https://warisboring.com/the-u-s-navy-s-big-mistake-building-tons-of-supercarriers-79cb42029b8
American built Carriers that worked back in the 30’s lol. Now under the Zionist Occupied Government, everything is non-operational junk lol. The more mixed the USSA gets, the less competence can be found in society as it implodes. The more other countries become like modern-America, the more incompetent they to are becoming.
Technology has passed them by. Fighting the next war based on the lessons of the last war is never a good idea.
2017 in the US is next year. I’m not sure what you Russians are drinking, but may I suggest looking at your calendar. The reaction here is laughable, reminds me of the rhetoric when NASA had to put up with Russian shit called a space station and the haphazard workmanship and the lack of professionalism of the Russians. US standards are much higher.
“2017 in the US is next year” Next year it’s 2017 everywhere not just in the US…..and therein lies the explanation for the latest batch of Wunderwaffe in the US arsenal. USA is well below it’s peers and well below the OECD average ranking in 27 position in math and even worse in science and reading comprehension.
The USA hasn’t graduated decently educated students since the 1960’s and it shows in the weapons they build and the decisions they make. You gotta build society from the base of the pyramid, dumb people can’t build smart weapons
Go pound nails and leave the thinking to those capable. You are too stupid to understand sarcasm, and incapable to realize the futility of this story. No matter how many times the Russians and their “useful idiots” such as yourself want US sytems to be substandard will NOT make it a reality. If you had any idea of what CVN 78 represents as a evolutionary step in so many areas not the least is Battle Space Command and Artificial Intelligence would shock you-so go pound nails dumbass.
The only thing more pathetic than an Internet troll is a thin skinned Internet troll.
After reading you posts i understand why you need artificial intelligence but do you really believe that “battle space command” is going to put aircraft carriers in space?
A backward step in evolution me thinks.
I was a Machinist Mate in the navy…
Ford class is garbage…
Tom Johnson – All those carriers are worth shit compared to super captivating torpedoes and hyper sonic vehicles making your dreamed of battle space command more like a 30-40 billion anchor including aircraft and crews. Times that by 10 for all the aircraft carriers and ask your defense department why are they wasting capitol with WWII ideals when the Russians are due to surpass your firepower and make the US the laughingstock of the world
It was launched in 2013 to even if it is fully in service in 2017 that is a delay of 4yrs, correct? That is four years late for the most expensive capital ship in the U.S. fleet.
More humour from Tom ‘We are Exceptional’ Johnson