Pentagon To Retire USS Truman Early, Shrinking Carrier Fleet To 10

https://breakingdefense.com/2019/02/pentagon-to-retire-uss-truman-early-shrinking-carrier-fleet-to-10/

Pentagon To Retire USS Truman Early, Shrinking Carrier Fleet To 10

By Sydney J. Freedberg Jr.
on February 27, 2019 at 1:39 PM

UPDATED with additional comment WASHINGTON: Amidst rising anxiety over whether the US Navy’s thousand-foot-long flagships could evade Chinese missiles in a future war, the Pentagon has decided to cut the aircraft carrier fleet from 11 today to 10. By retiring the Nimitz-class supercarrier USS Truman at least two decades early, rather than refueling its nuclear reactor core in 2024 as planned, the military would save tens of billions on overhaul and operations costs that it could invest in other priorities. But the proposal, part of the 2020-2024 budget plan due out mid-March, is sure to inspire outrage on Capitol Hill.
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The decision to cancel the mid-life overhaul was first reported by Washington Post columnist David Ignatius yesterday evening, as a one-sentence aside in a larger story, without naming the carrier. Breaking Defense has confirmed the ship is the Truman and that cancelling the overhaul would effectively retire the ship 20 to 25 years early, shrinking the carrier fleet from 11 to 10 in the mid-2020s.

Over time, the Hill source said, as retirements outpace new construction, “not only would the fleet not reach 12 any time over the next 30 years, the carrier force would number nine ships for a majority of the 2040s.”

UPDATE “The decision to skip the Truman’s RCOH [Refueling & Complex Overhaul] was part of the deal to fund two new carriers,” said former deputy defense secretary Robert Work. “We would end up with a smaller, but younger fleet…. Secretary [Bob] Gates made a decision to move to five-year [gaps between carriers], which would ultimately result in a 10-carrier fleet around 2040. So we are still on that path.”

UPDATE CONTINUES “A 10-carrier, nine Carrier Air Wing force sounds about right to me,” said Work, who pushed for the Pentagon to embrace new strategies and technologies against high-end threats, “as technological uncertainty over the carrier’s vulnerability continues to be high.” (More on that debate below).
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