Why so many Carriers at home ports and not deployed?

originally posted by: Ahabstar
Those old outdated carriers that were very quickly repaired?

Yeah, those. You now, the ones that weren't even there for the false flag attack someone else thinks happened.

YAY another pearl harbor.
what port are they in?

at home for the revolution?

a reply to: buddha

Funny how they didn't do it when all 11 were in their home ports, but now that some are at sea working up they're going to.

a reply to: Zaphod58

Maybe aside from the ship’s guns, missiles, escorts and other countermeasures, that each carrier can have upwards of 82 various aircraft as its on board compliment? I mean it really is like going up against a small city. A very duly protected city. Perhaps even safer from an attack than DC is.

a reply to: Ahabstar

A lot of that isn't active in port, but can be brought up fairly quickly on active ships around them. Most of the carriers are currently manned with a skeleton crew.

a reply to: Zaphod58

I was thinking out at sea. But yes in dockyards/repairs they are rather vulnerable. Even sea trials after repairs are iffy security wise.

a reply to: Zaphod58

Where do all of the escort ships from todays Carrier Groups go when the Big Boys are tied up ?

Do our carriers have similar escorts to those of the Pearl Harbor era?

The Battleships were one of the primary focuses of the Pearl Harbor Shang-Hi.The JIN did not view Carriers as the same projection of power threat that todays Carriers rightfully own.

Someone who is trying to stir a non-existant pot is loosely making references to an earlier post where it was pointed out that the assets @ Pearl were left unusually vulnerable.....possibly indicating a False Flag type of dynamic....an "ass"umption was made on AugustusMasonicus that only the non-present Carriers were being referred to in the post he tried to flame.....when really it was the totality of the assets pooled together being referenced.

The Battleships of the PH era were quickly going obsolete as Air Power evolved at light speeds....I wonder how many Americans would have died had those ships all been at sea and fully manned and armed.

I also wonder why the Carriers were safely placed away from the main battle...what the generic reasoning was @ that time...the SOP behind the Military decision to place all assets where they were prior to the PH attacks.

Today it seems that it is logistics and upgrades and repairs and scheduled maintenance that have come together to put the American Carriers where they stand now.

I wonder what happens if the Carriers of today become obsolete quickly like the Battleships were doing back in the PH days.

a reply to: one4all

The escorts are either in port with the carriers, or are at sea doing their own missions until they're rotated into a CSG. Pearl Harbor would have happened no matter what. Everyone knew it couldn't be attacked by air, because the harbor was so shallow they couldn't use torpedoes, so they couldn't get subs in, and air dropped torpedoes would bottom out as soon as they hit the water. It was believed that bombs alone wouldn't do enough damage, despite Gen Mitchell proving that they could using a WWI German Battleship.

The ships at Pearl were always docked that way, because they didn't have enough dock space for the battleships to dock at the regular docks, as well as the escorts. Dock space at Pearl is at a premium, so the larger ships, outside the carriers, were docked at Ford Island along Battleship Row, with the battleships moored on the inside, and smaller ships outside them. They weren't put that way especially for December 7th, they were like that any time they were in port. I've seen frigates and destroyers, which use the regular docks, lined up three and occasionally four deep. You couldn't dock battleships in that area, because they're so big. Since the US wasn't involved in combat operations, they weren't at a higher ops tempo, so more ships were in port than were at sea. The only reason the carriers were gone was because one was delivering planes to Wake Island, in preparation for possible operations there, a second was training, and the third hadn't left the West Coast yet.

The current carrier dilema has been going on since 2014, without anything happening. This isn't something that just started happening last month, it's been going on for years, and we're actually on the back side of it as far as the carriers go. Once they work out the problems with the Ford class, and they start getting them rolling off the line, the problem with maintenance concerns will start to drop. They can start retiring the older Nimitz class hulls, and have new hulls online.

Carriers will eventually become obsolete, but it doesn't happen quickly. The battleship didn't become obsolete nearly as quickly as history records it. It began just after WWI, but the last new hulls were the Iowa class, which lasted until Desert Storm, and still had a mission even then, even though it was limited. Carriers will have their uses for decades to come. If they weren't going to be useful for awhile there wouldn't be so much new construction going on around the world, trying to build bigger carriers.

a reply to: one4all

Where do all of the escort ships from todays Carrier Groups go when the Big Boys are tied up ?

Normally the rest of the CVBG have roughly the same schedule for maintenance, training, and deployment phases.

Typically if a carrier is delayed by unscheduled or longer-than-anticipated maintenance, then another carrier will extend it's deployment and/or an other carrier will shorten it's training schedule and deploy early to cover the missing carrier deployment.


For the very first time, we recently had to send a large contingent of escorts alone on deployment as a surface action group. The USS Truman is stuck in maintenance indefinitely. Ike could probably go to replace Truman, but it's doing basic training after it's last prolonged maintenance period that was supposed to be 6 months and lasted 18 instead. When it was delayed last time, the Truman took it's place on deployment. Now Truman is down, and Ike is still preparing to get ready for deployment.

So they are stretched very thin at the moment.

originally posted by: Zaphod58
a reply to: Ahabstar

A lot of that isn't active in port, but can be brought up fairly quickly on active ships around them. Most of the carriers are currently manned with a skeleton crew.

None of the carriers operate with a skeleton crew. That’s just ships company. They don’t have their air wing. Truman is pretty much completely fixed,
stennis is picking up cq’s for us so we can get some last minute and deferred maintenance done in the plants on the Ike. The status of the carrier fleet
Isn’t as bad as this is making it sound.

However if we don’t hold shipyards accountable,
It will get really bad.

a reply to: truttseeker

Quite a few of the ones I've seen in port are in dock. I haven't seen a full crew on a ship in yard hands in a long time.

No, it's not that bad, but it's far worse than it ever should have been allowed to get.

a reply to: Zaphod58

So right now there are 2 carriers actively in maintenance on the east coast- like not deplorable. They downsize their manning a little bit but it is by no means a skeleton crew, just the regular ships force. The big difference is 2000 of our people are strike group, desron, or air wing, so the manning looks worse just due to how carriers operate.

I think we’re dealing with a big backlog of maintenance and the overuse of resources from our constant two carrier presence for 2 decades. Once the two fords come online and the Bush is done with her avail, the carrier fleet will be in a good spot. That’s just what I’m seeing.

a reply to: truttseeker

It used to be that when they were in yard hands they kept the bare minimum crew on board. If it was Navy crews doing the maintenance they kept the crew on board.

a reply to: Zaphod58

Yeah it’s weird now. Everything is navy run.
Guys who live on the ship live on a berthing barge, so we turn zones over to shipyard, but it’s still sailors leading. It’s like a weird triad of big navy,
The command, and shipyard. It’s a nightmare, where everyone plays a blame game.

a reply to: truttseeker

Which explains why maintenance periods are taking three times as long, and are pushed back months at a time.

a reply to: Zaphod58

Well, somebody needs to get in there and rip some arse.