Put Up Or Shut Up Time For America’s Troubled New Aircraft Carrier

As the Pentagon’s independent weapon tester, the Director of Operational Test and Evaluation (DOT&E), points out serious performance flaws aboard the U.S. Navy’s $13.3 billion USS Gerald R. Ford (CVN-78) aircraft carrier, the U.S. Navy wants observers to believe the new supercarrier is ready for combat.

The carrier, just entering the DOT&E’s Initial Operational Test and Evaluation (IOT&E) test-and-trials phase, is certainly capable of doing all the basic things carriers do—the ship can stay afloat, launch aircraft, and travel from port to port.

But there is a big difference between basic operations and true battle-readiness.

While the Navy puts on a brave face on the carrier’s well-publicized technical problems, balancing the drumbeat of bad news with morale-boosting press visits, credulous “gee-whiz” media coverage, and showpiece deployments, the IOT&E tests, when completed in late FY 2024, are likely to carry a far less positive message about the USS Ford’s warfighting capabilities—the ultimate business case for what will be, at a minimum, a class of four expensive vessels.

Right now, the Navy is just starting to march the new carrier through qualifications for a standard deployment. Getting through a Composite Training Unit Exercise workup is a great milestone, but the USS Ford still has a long way to go.

To be blunt, the USS Ford has yet to demonstrate the ability to operate at sea—uninterrupted and without a port call—for more than 35 days at a stretch. It also seems unable—or the Navy is simply unwilling—to even carry out a standard set of sortie-generation tests—allowing an easy “apples-to-apples” comparison with the Navy’s legacy Nimitz class carriers.

The fact remains that the USS Ford, 6 years after delivery, still appears unable to match the sortie generation performance a World War II-era carrier, USS Midway (CV-41) exhibited during Desert Storm.

It is a big problem—and it won’t go away anytime soon.

Failed Missions Versus Data Points:

DOT&E has been very clear about linking the carrier’s technical problems to concrete measures of carrier performance. The testing agency, in their 2023 annual report, did a great job of tying pilot certification challenges to the USS Ford’sunreliable flight deck systems. The message was clear—the Ford’s reliability challenges inflict real consequences on naval missions.

The Navy, obviously uncomfortable with DOT&E’s focus on mission accountability, grasped for a positive spin. It abruptly shifted gears on the media, introducing a reliability metric that it has never used before in public discussions of the aircraft carrier’s poor-performing electromagnetic launch (EMALS) and recovery systems (Advanced Arresting Gear, or AAG).

Tellingly, the Navy’s new reliability metric indicated “improvement in the reliability of the catapult and arresting gear systems” but it somehow lacked a direct tie to carrier performance.

The Navy, when pressed for clarification, said, it “has addressed EMALS and AAG issues via a reliability growth plan that has resulted in an average Operational Availability of ~ 0.98 for the last 5,500 (~45%) launches and recoveries across both systems.”

And yet, somehow, the carrier, despite great operational availability scores, struggled to qualify pilots.

This gets at the root of the problem. Essentially, the Navy seems content to merely field something that looks and acts like a carrier. And by introducing another metric, the Service is refusing to even acknowledge the launch-and-recovery problems exist, effectively discrediting Pentagon weapons testers by muddying their very real concerns about the USS Ford’s ability to accomplish the platform’s central mission—generating more aircraft sorties faster than any previous U.S. aircraft carrier.

The Pentagon’s independent testers simply want the pricey aircraft carrier to meet the Navy’s “as-advertised” performance expectations, or, barring that, they’d be glad to see the USS Ford just manage to fulfill the primary job of a carrier—getting aircraft on and off, rapidly and in large numbers over the course of a deployment.

Focus More On The Mission, Not The Statistics:

The Navy, in a statement that took nine days to generate, focused on the DOT&E’s primary measurement of EMALS and AAG reliability, or, in the technological lingo, “Mean cycles Between Operational Mission Failures”. The unsophisticated measure tallies the number of launches and recoveries that occur between system failures, and then averages them. As a mean, the Pentagon’s testing measure isn’t perfect, and can be overly influenced by outliers.

For the Navy, “the reliability requirements for EMALS and AAG are expressed in terms of ‘Operational Availability’, which is the measure of how often a system is available to perform a mission versus not.”

The Navy’s statement continued, explaining that “EMALS and AAG Operational Availability measures the amount of time the system is available for operational use and is a ratio of system uptime divided by total time uptime and downtime. Downtime is a result of failures which prevent the system from accomplishing its mission. Total downtime is a function of time required to diagnose the issue, complexity of repair, and availability of spare parts.”

DOT&E responded, issuing a statement saying that the organization will continue to “collect operationally representative effectiveness and suitability data from flight operations”.

The Pentagon said it focused on mean cycles between operational mission failure because the testing organization considers it “to be the most applicable metric during developmental test, and it remains applicable during operational test” and that “no combat representative scenarios have been scored to date” where operational availability might matter.

The Pentagon statement put the focus right back onto the mission, saying that “the ship and air wing have additional operational metrics” that add context to the measurements cited by both DOT&E and the Navy, cautioning that a “combination of all three are needed to best capture how reliability and availability may impact combat flight operations.”

In short, the Navy—unless it can get its act together—is soon going to face the music about their troubled aircraft carrier. It needs to show that the positive metrics it has proffered to the press can translate into the basic mission of launching and recovering aircraft.

The smart money is on DOT&E’s concerns over the Ford’s battle readiness. With a history of broken performance promises, public relations games, little accountability, and an active “revolving door” of high-level carrier decision-makers going to work for the carrier’s builder, America’s sea service hasn’t exactly covered itself in glory during the USS Ford’s acquisition process.

The only bright spots are the long-suffering captain and crew aboard, who are doing the thankless job of trying to fix the as-yet-unfixable. The Pentagon owes it to them to get the U.S. Navy to “get real and get better” about the USS Ford, fast. And that means taking data-based concerns about the carrier’s overall mission readiness to heart, and not trying to just hand-wave away justifiable calls for accountability with a toxic mix of resentment and relentless boosterism.