Commentary
Dismantling the USS Enterprise (CVN-65) is turning out to be so expensive that the U.S. Navy is contemplating sinking it.
While sinking the USS Enterprise might make sense, over the past 30 years sinking ships instead of mothballing them has become all too common. And perhaps not coincidentally, over the same 30 years it has become de rigueur to hear U.S. Navy brass and Pentagon spokespeople discussing the difficulties in maintaining fleet size. Yet, even as the Navy has been complaining about its shrinking fleet and lack of money to build enough ships, it has destroyed dozens of powerful warships such as the Spruance Class in meaningless SINKEX exercises.
The premature destruction of the Navy’s’ most capable anti-submarine ship, the highly versatile and powerful Spruance destroyers, made our Navy weaker. The rationale for doing so was to save money, but in reality, what the Navy did in the early 2000s was to opt for the riskiest of three future shipbuilding options that “coincidentally” gave lucrative contracts to defense contractors to design and produce grossly underperforming ships such as the Littoral Combat Ship and the 14,000-ton Zumwalt destroyer, which provide far less combat power than the more than two dozen Spruances that were destroyed.
Also making our Navy weaker is what I and other observers, including at least one retired Navy captain, would describe as the purposeful chronic under-maintenance of our powerful Ticonderoga-class cruisers, many of which sat in port for years in poor material condition despite having billions allocated to overhaul and upgrade them. This purposeful, chronic under-maintenance was then used to advance the argument that, because of their poor material condition, it would cost too much to restore them to full operational capability and that the money would be better spent giving lucrative contracts to defense contractors to build new ships.
Over the past three decades, the habit of sinking ships or scrapping them instead of putting them into mothballs has become standard practice. The Navy used to maintain a sizable reserve/mothball fleet, but today the Navy’s reserve fleet is almost non-existent and has been so for decades.
The modern Navy views putting into mothballs ships that are no longer the most advanced and complex in the world as a waste of money. But the fact of the matter is that with well-trained crews, older less advanced ships with reliable weapons systems can still provide much-needed naval power and presence as part the fleet. Further, the cost of getting a ship ready for mothballing is no more than getting it ready to be sunk. Finally, the cost for maintaining in mothballs very large ships such as a battleship is under $2 million per year, with smaller ships coming in at well under a million dollars. In other words, chump change.
As regards the value of older ships, even today a modernized World War II Fletcher-class destroyer would be a very powerful small surface combatant capable of providing a substantial naval presence.
Historically, the Navy did maintain a mothball fleet, and some of these mothballed ships were mobilization Category B ships, i.e., ships that were maintained at a level that allowed them to be reactivated for service in a matter of a few months. A prominent example of Category B type reserve ships exists in the Iowa-class battleships that were reactivated and that served with great effectiveness in the Gulf War. The Spruance-class destroyers would have been ideal candidates for being preserved as Category B assets.
This brings us to the fate of the USS Enterprise. With the USS Enterprise serving for more than 50 years, it certainly was not prematurely decommissioned. But it should be noted that she is a massive all-steel-constructed ship. It should also be noted that steel, unlike aluminum and other metals, has a very favorable fatigue limit, meaning that within certain limits, steel can be put under load and flexed an infinite number of times and not suffer metal fatigue. Consequently, an all-steel warship can, with proper corrosion prevention, last practically forever. In the context of the USS Enterprise, we have a massive, extremely strong steel hull with a huge hangar and flight decks and four aircraft catapults (new ones would need to be installed) that if upgraded and deployed today could go head-to-head with any carrier in the world.
Hence, what if rather than scrapping a hull that took millions of man hours to build, we decided to put new more efficient nuclear reactors in it, along with the latest and greatest Ford-class electronics? Sure, doing so would cost billions, but not nearly the $12 billion to $15 billion that a Ford-class carrier costs. In theory it could be done, but the one shipyard the United States has that is capable of doing such a job, Newport News Shipbuilding in Virginia, is at 100 percent utilization doing Refueling and Complex Overhauls on our existing Nimitz-class carriers and building new Ford class carriers.
This brings up another issue. The United States does not have adequate shipbuilding capacity to build enough new ships to reverse the decline in the Navy’s size while maintaining existing ships at a state of “full operational capability.” This sad state of affairs and ways to remedy it are being looked at by the new White House Office of U.S. Shipbuilding.
But for the moment, let’s optimistically assume that we actually bring back enough shipbuilding capacity to properly maintain and grow the Navy, including more shipyards capable of handling nuclear or conventional carriers. In that case we need to challenge the assumption that just because the nuclear reactor of a super-capable ship such as the Enterprise ages out, the whole ship must be scrapped. This is doubly true for the Nimitz-class carriers that could be modified to operate using the same, more powerful, reactors being used to power the flawed and less-resilient Ford-class carriers.
But back to the Enterprise. If she is not to be brought back as one of our fleet supercarriers, why not bring her back as a test carrier? For example, rather than deploying immature, unreliable technology such as the Electromagnetic Aircraft Launch Systems and Advanced Arresting Gear as we did on the Ford-class carriers that we are counting on to immediately provide sea power, we could deploy a test carrier where such technology is vetted and tested, including testing at sea, ensuring it both works as advertised and works reliably.
These are just a few ideas on how we can reverse the decline of our Navy by thinking a bit outside the box, including the idea that perhaps we should not be so quick to sink and destroy ships that could still fulfill a role in ensuring the U.S. Navy remains the most powerful in the world.
Views expressed in this article are opinions of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of The Epoch Times.
