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\nSECWAR Hegseth was down in Norfolk yesterday to meet the 5,000 members of the USS Gerald R. Ford (CVN-78) Strike Group that returned yesterday, completing a record-breaking 326-day deployment. The group conducted successful combat operations in two continents and four crossings of the Atlantic Ocean.<\/p>\n
That makes it sort of personal, since one of our old boats still holds the record. In 1973, the war in Vietnam had come unglued and USS Midway did 332 days on the line in the South China Sea to try to try to fix it.<\/p>\n
We do not have any vets from that one in the Creative Section, though Vic claims the 110-days out of sight of land on Midway in the north Arabian Sea in 1979 gave him a taste of what the crew of the Ford group is feeling today.<\/p>\n
During this 11-month deployment the group supported the war with Iran, the capture of Dictator Nicol\u00e1s Maduro in Venezuela and overcame shake-down fires and inoperable toilets.<\/p>\n
Ford’s 326-days-away-from-home brought questions to the fore we had not asked in a while. Those had been familiar in years past, shaping force structure, worrying about retention after long deployments for the highly-trained technicians and if the ships and crews can meet new challenges. There are eleven carriers in the inventory at present with Nimitz cruising into retirement and the new USS John F. Kennedy (CVN-79) scheduled for delivery next year.<\/p>\n
There is an argument about the proper number of carriers and aviation groups needed to control all the seas, if necessary. One number at odds with current planning is “thirteen.\u201d There is (of course) other thinking displayed in the ship-building program for the Golden Fleet.<\/p>\n
There will be more powerful attack submarines coming on line that can carry more missiles at lower cost than a modern carrier group. And they will become aviation platforms, with swarms of unmanned autonomous robots that can fly hundreds of miles to strike targets of interest. This development could make manned strike aviation a concept increasingly obsolete.<\/p>\n
That prospect makes the Boomer crowd that came up through Naval Aviation a little pensive. But we are clearly going to use the eleven boats we have for whatever mischief is required. The Iranians launched a cruise missile into the nuclear power plant in the UAE last night, so we’ll see if it is soon.<\/p>\n
Copyright 2026 Vic Socotra
\nwww.vicsocotra.com<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
SECWAR Hegseth was down in Norfolk yesterday to meet the 5,000 members of the USS Gerald R. Ford (CVN-78) Strike Group that returned yesterday, completing a record-breaking 326-day deployment. The group conducted successful combat operations in two continents and four crossings of the Atlantic Ocean. That makes it sort of personal, since one of our […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[8],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-33305","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-daily-socotra"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.vicsocotra.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/33305","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.vicsocotra.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.vicsocotra.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.vicsocotra.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.vicsocotra.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=33305"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/www.vicsocotra.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/33305\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":33309,"href":"https:\/\/www.vicsocotra.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/33305\/revisions\/33309"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.vicsocotra.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=33305"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.vicsocotra.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=33305"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.vicsocotra.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=33305"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}