Amidst supply chain disruptions and labor shortages, USS John C. Stennis (CVN-74) is now laboring under a major delay in its midlife refueling and overhaul that has stretched out the process by 14 months to nearly five and a half years.
Once it is completed, however, the Stennis will emerge as one of the most advanced Nimitz-class carriers with new propulsion systems, electronic upgrades, and better technologies like the Joint Precision Approach and Landing System (JPALS). We can’t afford to delay, said a Navy spokesperson, given the fact that this carrier will still be in its construction and acceptance period when it sets sail in the summer of 2010.
Due to yearly delays faced by U.S. Navy ship programs, which were further exacerbated by budget constraints and labor force shortages plus other supply factors, programs such as projects of new frigates, aircraft carriers, advanced fighter jets, and submarines, among others, get delayed due to the process lagging way behind schedule.
Overhaul and refueling of USS John C. Stennis, which was originally planned to be completed by 2025, now would take another 14 months to complete the full process which might take approximately five and a half years. The timing is always uncertain, but I’m assured the wait for this new, improved Stennis will be well worth it, Rear Adm. Casey J. Moton, Commander, Program Executive Office Aircraft Carriers, said.
The Navy includes reduced or unstable capability and capacity, as well as workforce recruitment, retention, and proficiency challenges. Still, he ensured that the team continued to work daily with partners in industry and throughout the Navy to accelerate the problem-solving and speed production toward a singular focus on readiness.
The USS John C. Stennis, a name that was bestowed upon her honorarily in memory of the Mississippi State Senator, was laid down back in the early 1990s by Newport News Shipbuilding. Similar to her sister Nimitz-class ships, she was designed to conduct sustained combat air operations while forward-deployed.
Stennis can carry up to 60 airframes of all types of fixed-wing and rotary-wing aircraft, up to 90 different types, most of them with cutting-edge capabilities. Equipped with a GPS aircraft carrier landing system called JPALS, which allows pilots to land on moving ships guided with much more technology than laser systems available today.
The U.S. Navy also considers extension in the service life for all its Nimitz-class carriers. CVN 68, commissioned in 1975, is unlikely to retire on schedule because of demand for carrier air wings and delays to the Nimitz-class replacement, the Ford-class. The Navy has already requested the extension of the first-in-class CVN 68 into another deployment cycle instead of the planned decommissioning in the fiscal 2023 budget. Service officials indicate the final determination on extending USS Dwight D. Eisenhower beyond its projected 2027 end date could still be part of the new budget request.
Vice Adm. Kenneth Whitesell, then-commander of Naval Air Forces, said that extending Nimitz and Eisenhower is likely to occur for every Nimitz-class carrier, with at least one extension. The Navy’s current plan for the Nimitz calls for $200 million for extension work as part of a 5.5-month maintenance schedule.
The first-of-its-kind USS Gerald R. Ford (CVN 78) is now deployed to the Mediterranean, having almost two years since its initial operating capability. The Ford was delayed by five years, being commissioned before deployment, and 15 years after naming. The ship was estimated to cost $10.5 billion but ended up costing $13.3 billion. Capabilities advanced, but the ship isn’t yet ready to add Lockheed Martin F-35Cs.
For instance, the Kennedy (CVN 79) was christened in December 2019 and is scheduled for delivery in 2025-a year later than its previous delivery date. Likewise, the second ship of its class was affected by labor and supply chain delays that forced its delivery to be pushed back to 2028.
The midlife servicing of the ships has also presented problems for the Navy. The USS George Washington, CVN 73, was released from its Refueling and Complex Overhaul process in May, about two years later than estimated. As a remedy to such delayed processes, the Navy has been working through the execution of a performance-based contract on the USS John C. Stennis process. In a new build, the service would look at the extension of advance procurement contracts to have more lead time in the supply chain, thus switching to three years from the two-year annual cycle that it is having at the moment.
Demand for carriers is unlikely to abate soon. The Navy has been strained in fulfilling its post-Cold War plan for a permanent carrier presence in three hubs-the Western Pacific, the wider Middle East, and Europe. To maintain that presence, the service needs 15 carriers, a 3:1 ratio due to requirements stemming from the process of maintenance and deployment. The current fleet size of 11 strains this model, and, with reactor time left on the ships, multiple extensions are possible.
In a certain way, it might be easier to preserve the carriers in service than to decommission them. Decommissioning a large nuclear-powered aircraft carrier is a trying, expensive long process. Only three companies quoted on a request for proposals to dismantle the USS Enterprise, which must be stripped of its nuclear reactor before shipping to a nuclear waste storage facility.
The Navy has some work to do with its air wings as it figures out how many carriers it will have in its future fleet. The service now has nine air wings to man 11 carriers so each air wing is being worked at max availability. Not all air wings are filled with sufficient numbers of strike fighters and the Navy isn’t going shopping for any more. Current F-35C production is constrained both by issues facing the development of new capabilities and by current firm capacity within Lockheed Martin. Early Super Hornets are at their service life caps, for as much as Boeing’s Block III upgrade process has been much more laborious than forecasted, the Navy wants an end to new production.
The Navy is considering how it might compensate for shortfalls in some aircraft numbers. It has slated carrier air wings to be 60 percent unmanned and 40 percent crewed in the 2022 Navigation Mainly depending on Boeing’s MQ-25 Stingray, which will be the company’s first production aircraft to operate off carriers before new programs like the Collaborative Combat Aircraft.