Nimitz-class carriers use a hydraulically braked arresting system called the MK 7. When the hook on the landing aircraft catches one of the cables on the deck, the cables are braked by an engine inside the ship. This hydraulic arresting gear system has been in use since 1961, with several improvements over the years. But as a high-tech selling point, it’s a non-starter.

In part to secure increased development funding for the Ford program, the Navy replaced the proven hydraulic system with an entirely new electrical system, called the Advanced Arresting Gear (AAG). The original 2005 estimate for Advanced Arresting Gear development was $172 million. After work began, costs more than doubled to $364 million by 2009, and have since ballooned to well over $1.3 billion, an astounding 656% increase.

The Advanced Arresting Gear has the same failure rate as the EMALS, with 10 operational mission failures during the first 747 shipboard landings on the USS Ford. This makes it impossible for the Ford to meet its surge sortie rate requirements. And, in another design problem exactly like that of the EMALS, engineers made it impossible to repair Advanced Arresting Gear failures without shutting down flight operations because the power supply can’t be disconnected from the system components while flights continue.

Faulty Elevators

One of the most intractable problems with the Ford’s design has been the elevators used to move munitions between the ship’s decks. In keeping with the overall desire to use electrical rather than hydraulic or steam components, the Ford’s elevators are operated with large electromagnets, which were not fully developed before construction on the ship began. The carriers have 11 Advanced Weapon Elevators that—if they worked properly—are supposed to lift more than 20,000 pounds at 150 feet per minute as compared to the earlier generation hydraulic elevators that could lift 10,500 pounds at 100 feet per minute.

But as of the summer of 2020, only six of the 11 elevators have been certified as functional, with the rest expected to follow within the next year. Navy officials have blamed software problems as well as “tight tolerances,” or the precision fit of the elevator’s lifting mechanism, and “physical structures adjustments” for the faulty elevators.

The root of the problem is that the Navy pushed ahead with construction of the ship before developing a mature design for the new elevators, through a practice known as concurrency, or when manufacturers begin production before completing development.

F-35 Capabilities

For all of the time and money invested in the Ford program, taxpayers should be able to expect that the new aircraft carrier would be ready to handle every mission imaginable. But in perhaps the greatest example of acquisition malfeasance, the Navy did not build its latest aircraft carrier to launch and recover the latest aircraft. Under the original plan for the program, the Ford-class carriers would not be able to handle the F-35 Joint Strike Fighter. For a capability that should have been included in the original purchase price, the taxpayers will have to pay extra to have it added later.

You read that right. The latest $13.3 billion aircraft carrier can’t fully support the Navy’s newest aircraft. The USS Ford can launch and recover the F-35C, but the ship needs modifications on the flight deck like stronger jet blast deflectors to make the carrier “robust” enough to handle the extended F-35C launches and recoveries. The ship also lacks the necessary classified storage and work spaces to handle all of the data the F-35 collects and receives. Currently, only one of the Navy’s existing Nimitz-class carriers, the USS Abraham Lincoln, has been upgraded to handle a full F-35 deployment.

Navy leaders also originally intended for the second-in-class carrier, the CVN 79 USS John F. Kennedy, to be delivered without the F-35 modifications, but Congress had other plans. Lawmakers added language to the fiscal year 2020 National Defense Authorization Act to force the Navy to make the next carrier F-35 compatible. The Navy awarded a pair of contract modifications valued at a combined $315 million to Newport News Shipbuilding for F-35 modifications for the Kennedy.

The Kennedy is still under construction, which should make the modifications simpler to complete. The Ford was commissioned in 2017 and has spent a good deal of time at sea already, although it has yet to complete an operational deployment. Because construction on the first ship has already been completed, any modifications to it will likely be more difficult, and consequently more expensive. Once again, the taxpayers will face additional burdens due to the Pentagon’s short-sightedness.

The Navy Can’t Even Get the Toilets to Work

As if all of that wasn’t bad enough, the Ford-class carriers also have a plumbing problem. Rather than using a traditional sewage system, Navy leaders decided once again to reinvent the wheel and had the manufacturer install a new system similar to those used on a commercial airliner. According to the Government Accountability Office, the system suffers “unexpected and frequent clogging.” To deal with the problem, the Navy has to acid flush the sewage system on a regular basis, at a cost of $400,000 a pop.

The End of the Age of the Supercarrier?

The future of the program remains somewhat in doubt. The Navy’s original plan called for 11 ships, but former Navy Secretary Modly said in March 2020 the service is considering a new class of aircraft carriers beyond the four Ford-class carriers already on order.

A smaller carrier design would help avoid concentrating so much military force into a single target. But it would be better to explore different options altogether. Some of the missions provided by aircraft carriers could be reproduced by other, more survivable platforms. For example, carrier aircraft are often used to strike targets onshore. The same results can be achieved with cruise missiles launched from submarines. Future Navy force structure decisions should be made based on capabilities rather than rigid adherence to particular ship types.

The Littoral Combat Ship

Navy leaders announced in February 2020 that they want to retire the first four Littoral Combat Ships, signaling an admission of the program’s failure and the waste of billions of taxpayer dollars. The program’s shortcomings are legion and well-documented, including numerous engine failures, an unworkable modular design, and hulls too weak to survive combat.

The program began as part of an earlier Navy effort to grow the fleet by building a force of affordable “small surface combatant” ships. The LCS was envisioned as a ship with a modular design capable of being reconfigured for separate missions. At the program’s inception, Navy leaders projected each ship would cost taxpayers $220 million. To no one’s surprise, costs more than doubled to approximately $600 million per ship.

The program’s demise was all but inevitable due to its numerous conceptual flaws. One key flaw: The fleet is not uniform. Two competing designs were produced as prototypes; a single-hulled variant built by Lockheed Martin and a trimaran hull design originally built by an industry team lead by Austal. Navy leaders originally planned to select one for full-rate production but failed to do so. Instead, the Navy purchased two largely incompatible variants.

Neither hull design proved robust enough for the Navy’s purposes. The Austal-built USS Independence trimaran variant is made of aluminum, which is not an ideal material for a combat vessel, as the July 2020 fire aboard the amphibious assault ship USS Bonhomme Richard at the San Diego Naval Station proved. Testing on both LCS variants revealed that the designs lacked redundancy in key systems and that vital components were packed too close together and were vulnerable to damage by a single missile or torpedo strike. The Pentagon’s top testing official reported that “both LCS variants continue to demonstrate that neither LCS variant is survivable in high intensity combat.” High-intensity combat is exactly what the Navy expects if it is called to fight in the waters along China’s east coast, which are among the most heavily defended in the world.

Navy leaders abandoned the ship’s modular design when engineers couldn’t get the mission modules to work properly despite sinking $7.6 billion into the project. Had it worked, the mission module concept would have made the LCS a versatile class of ships capable of performing several critical combat and maritime support roles including mine countermeasures, surface warfare, and antisubmarine warfare missions using modular mission packages.

The LCS’s most important planned role was mine hunting. This is of particular importance because the Navy’s minesweeping capability has eroded significantly over the years. Sea mines remain one of the most serious threats the surface fleet faces. The Navy currently has only 11 Avenger-class minesweeping ships and 29 MH-53E Sea Dragon helicopters to protect a fleet of almost 300 commissioned warships and more than 250 support vessels.

In spite of the massive investment of time and money into the program, the Littoral Combat Ships have not made a corresponding contribution to the fleet. The ships deploy at a rate far below that of the other major surface combatants. And when at sea, they frequently suffer catastrophic mechanical breakdowns and then spend lengthy stays in repair facilities.

In late 2015 and 2016, four of the six LCSs then in service suffered engineering failures within a span of nine months. The USS Milwaukee and the USS Fort Worth had mechanical breakdowns within weeks of each other when metal shavings and debris got into their combining gear. The damage to the Milwaukee forced the Navy to have the ship towed into a Virginia port. The USS Freedom was damaged in July when seawater leaked into the diesel propulsion system through a faulty seal. The USS Coronado broke down in August when a defective coupling in an engine shaft failed.

The fleet’s mechanical issues were so bad that not one of the ships deployed in 2018.

Despite an overhaul of the program that included restructuring the command and manning plans for the fleet, the ships continue to be a burden on the Navy. The USS Little Rock ended up getting stuck in Montreal for three months right after its December 2017 commissioning when a broken steering cable forced the crew to stop to make repairs. Winter blew in and the ship and its crew had to wait until it was safe to steam through the icy St. Lawrence River. The USS Detroit lost electrical power in November 2020 while returning from a Latin American deployment and had to be towed back to Port Canaveral.

As the program’s problems mounted, lawmakers and Navy leaders slowly soured on the LCS. The original plan for the class called for 55 ships and a total program cost of $37.4 billion. When the development challenges and costs grew, officials began slashing the size of the planned fleet. Today the plan is a total of 35 ships at a total program cost of $30 billion.

Navy leaders are not only shrinking the total buy, but are also planning to begin retiring some of the LCSs they already have. The Navy included the first four Littoral Combat Ships produced—Freedom, Independence, Fort Worth, and Coronado—on its list of ships to be decommissioned in 2021. The Navy’s budgeteers determined the cost to retrofit these ships into something resembling a combat-ready configuration, $2 billion over five years, was simply too high. The Freedom entered service in November 2008 and the Coronado followed in April 2014. The Coronado completed its only operational deployment to the Pacific in 2017.