SixZero Daily Bullet: A Conventional Midway Sized Carrier Would Have Some Big Advantages in Bang for the Buck vs. Overpriced Ford Class Carriers
We can only build one Ford or Nimitz Sized Nuclear Carrier at time, but we can build up to 4 Midway Sized Carriers
The new Ford Class Carrier Program Acquisition Unit Cost (PAUC) is $15 billion and due to critical/unforgivable design flaws it may never equal the performance of a Nimitz Class Carrier. Put bluntly it costs way too much and has critical design flaws that could put its very survival at risk.
For these reasons, and a number of other reasons, former Reagan Secretary of the Navy John Lehman believes that it does not make sense to build more Ford Class Carrier but that instead the US Navy could get more bang for the buck from a USS Midway CV-41 sized carrier, about 67,000 tons.
During the Gulf War the Midway had the highest sortie generation rate per number of planes carried of any carrier, nuclear or conventional, at 1.59 sorties per day per aircraft. The closest nuclear powered carrier was the USS Theodore M. Roosevelt (CVN-71), with 1.36 sorties per day per aircraft. However, the Roosevelt, with 22 more strike craft than the Midway’s 56, was able to generate 106 total sorties per day vs. the Midway's 89.
Still for a carrier about 2/3 the displacement with 3 catapults vs. the Roosevelt's 4 catapults the Midway more than held its own. Even today, if the USS Midway had been kept current with new threat upgrades only a Nimitz Class Carrier could match or exceed its ability to generate sorties over an extended deployment.
One of the very practical advantages to building conventional carriers in the 65,000-to-70,000-ton range is that while we only have one shipyard capable of building 100,000-ton nuclear carriers, we have 4 shipyards that can build conventional carriers of the size for which Lehman is advocating.
Shipyard availability and cost are just a couple of the reasons a smaller super carrier makes sense. For more reasons and details click on: THE ADVANTAGES OF NEW MIDWAY-SIZED CARRIER CLASS?
‘https://mikesdefensetalk.substack.com/p/the-advantages-of-new-midway-sized
Sorry, but you can no longer have your Whopper your way. Overpriced and critically flawed are the only options until the procurement system collapses of its own weight.
You've clearly thought of this more deeply than I, but I would question the premise that what we say is the cost of a Midway carrier when we consider it as a procurement option is going to remain aligned with the final cost for build and delivery. I would also imagine that there would be a great many systems on a Midway carrier that are no longer capable of being manufactured because no company has been asked to manufacture them in decades, so the lower cost is partly illusory.
We could ditch the Fords as lemons and go back to building Midways, but at a minimum that would take a few years to retool the defense industrial base to produce a different standard carrier.
Hmmm. I would still prefer nuclear power. More space for aviation fuel and ordinance, plus not tanking for ship fuel is a big plus in some corners of the globe. Thing is, if we build a smaller carrier, chances are we get the same number of smaller carriers, not more smaller carriers. The outgoing administration already slow-walked follow on Ford class carriers for some good and bad reasons - it bought time to fix some of the problems, but it also means that the first Nimitz class ships are getting very long in the tooth. The decisive argument, though, is this question: "Does anyone believe NAVSEA can design a 21st century Midway class without making a complete Charlie-Foxtrot of it?"