Navy aircraft carrier operations were up 40 percent in 2020 over 2019, even as the service had fewer carriers available for tasking because of maintenance and acquisition challenges.
From 1 January through 6 December 2020, U.S. carriers spent a combined total of 906 days at sea—309 more than all of 2019, according to a USNI News analysis of carrier deployments.
That heavy usage makes 2020 the busiest year for the carrier fleet since the 2011–12 Arab Spring, forcing some to stay on station for record-length deployments and conduct doublepumps even as others were sidelined and could not contribute to the workload. The increased demand and workload come at a time when, under the 2018 National Defense Strategy (NDS), the Navy wants to be focusing on building readiness and lethality for a future high-end fight, rather than exhausting its readiness as quickly as it builds it.
Some of this comes down to what the Navy is being asked to do in the Middle East, which is home to threats the NDS identifies as second tier. Since 2001, the Navy’s presence in the region has grown, supporting at times a two-carrier presence, with the Navy only briefly getting the chance to reset, as the Army and Air Force have done during lulls and withdrawal periods. For the first two years after the NDS’s release, the Navy decreased from 25 percent of carriers operating at sea in 2017 to just 20 percent in 2018 to only 16 percent in 2019—the lowest carrier usage rates in 25 years.
But 2020 reversed that trend.
Keeping up with demand has required several carriers to do double-pump deployments—back-to-back deployments overseas without a major maintenance period in between—or curtail scheduled maintenance. The convergence of high demand and low supply is most visible on the East Coast, where two major issues have combined to put significant strain on the rest of the carriers.
The service is down a flattop because of the delayed entry of the USS Gerald R. Ford (CVN-78) to the fleet. Though the ship was commissioned in 2017, she will not deploy before 2022.
A second East Coast carrier—the USS George H. W. Bush (CVN-77)—is out of the deployment rotation until at least early 2022. Her maintenance was scheduled for 28 months—more than a year longer than a normal docking maintenance availability ordinarily should take—in part because of backups and slow performance at Norfolk Naval Shipyard.
With two carriers unable to deploy in the near future, the constantly busy USS Dwight D. Eisenhower (CVN-69) and Harry S. Truman (CVN-75) are effectively the only two carriers on the East Coast.
The latter is now in maintenance, however, after being deployed more than half of the past two years. She will not be available for another deployment until the second half of 2021, meaning the 43-year-old Dwight D. Eisenhower and her crew cannot afford to have any setbacks—even amid the COVID-19 pandemic. For the next 6 to 12 months, “Ike” will be the only East Coast carrier that can deploy.
But this reliance on the Dwight D. Eisenhower comes after ship and crew returned in August from a strenuous deployment. The ship broke records for at-sea time because the COVID-19 pandemic prevented her from making port calls, which would have given the crew time for a break and also would have provided opportunities for some maintenance work that cannot be done under way.
There is some hope for a better balance of carrier supply and demand on the horizon: Once the Gerald R. Ford enters the fleet, the additional ships in the class should have a smoother path to fleet entrance. The public shipyards that are overwhelmed with work today will wrap up two major projects—moored training ship conversions and ballistic-missile submarine (SSBN) refuelings—that were high-priority work that took resources away from getting carrier maintenance done on time.
However, the question of demand remains. Geographic combatant commanders have a long history of gobbling up as many carriers as the Navy can provide. With that notion being out of line with the NDS (and that document’s focus on preparing for operations against a sophisticated adversary such as China or Russia), it is unclear if or how the Navy and Pentagon would reduce routine deployments to the Middle East and focus on high-end training and presence operations in the Pacific and North Atlantic.
Editor’s Note: This article is adapted from a longer analysis of carrier deployments and maintenance issues conducted by the author for USNI News. The full story can be found at news.usni.org.
