This is the USS Enterprise (CVN 65), the first nuclear aircraft carrier ever built. Its keel was laid just a few weeks before I was born and she was decommissioned half a century later. The Enterprise's inactivation was completed several years ago and it's now being stored at Hampton Roads, Virginia, where I shot this picture.
A better end (for now) than its namesade. The original carrier Enterprise served throughout WWII and in the vast majority of Pacific naval battles. At one point in the war it was the lone U.S. fleet carrier in service, till a plethora of the newer Essex class carriers started flowing out of the shipyards. After the war, the "Big E" was unceremoniously scrapped. Maybe the newer Enterprise's reactors are still too radioactive to allow it to be scrapped
Do you mean in the Pacific Theatre?
Was looking at Wikipedia article on aircraft carriers in WWII:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_aircraft_carriers_of_World_War_II
The US had seven fleet carriers at the start of WWII. One stayed in the Atlantic (Ranger, considered too slow for the Pacific theater). Four were lost in 1942 (Lexington, Wasp, Hornet and Yorktown). The Saratoga was torpedoed and in for repair in mid to late fall, leaving the Enterprise the sole active fleet carrier for a while.
At one point the Enterprise was supported by the USS Robin, which was a code name for the Royal Navy carrier HMS Victorious. The Royal Navy wanted to learn about carrier operations in the Pacific, and the US Navy was happy to get an extra ship. Policy required the pilots and planes to be able to operate off of either carrier. The US pilots liked being on the Victorious because they could get a shot of rum, the Brit pilots liked being on the Enterprise because they could get ice cream.
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I thought the USS Enterprise was NCC-1701.
Apparently it'll cost over half a billion dollars to scrap it for recycling. Maybe they should just give it to Ukraine.
My father-in-law did a tour on that ship.
My cousin did a tour on the Enterprise in the 60's. He stayed with us when the ship was birthed in Alameda CA.
Also, there's going to be a new USS Enterprise - CVN 80 - that will be finished in 2028.
My recollection is that the inflation adjusted cost of the USS Enterprise was around $4.4 billion. It was to be the lead ship of a class of ten. Usually follow on ships cost about 80% of what the lead ship does since most of the engineering is done and people find ways to reduce cost during the first build. So the expectation would have been for the follow-on ships to cost about $3.5B each.
Very big conventional powered carriers were being built for only about
$2.8B (inflation adjusted) so the follow on Enterprises were canceled. The public, the Congress, and the Navy couldn't accept the difference. And Vietnam came along.
Then we build the Nimitz class of ten ships. I've seen costs as high as $10B quoted for these, but Wikipedia puts it at $4.5B in 2000 dollars. Why a Billion more than the Enterprise class would have cost? Well we had 3 shipyards building giant carriers when the Enterprise was built. NY Shipbuilding in Camden, NJ and the Brooklyn Navy Yard offered competition to Newport News Shipbuilding and Dry Dock. Now only the latter exists. Maybe monopolies are bad.
At least the Big E and the Nimitz class pretty much worked out of the box with minimal delays in going into service. Now we have the $17.5B Gerald Ford which was laid down in 2009 and accepted for service in 2017. Does it work yet? Who knows? The follow on, possibly functional, sister ships are said to cost only $12B to $13B.
Possibly the Defense budget is bloated.
Maybe, but in this case it is a matter there not being enough business for more than one.
A fair argument, but I disagree. The Navy's official minimum requirement for aircraft carriers regularly shrinks to match the number they have. If they could get Congress to fund more, the minimum number needed would grow. (This is an interesting point: What is the actual purpose of aircraft carriers? Since WWII they've been used for close air support of troops ashore, tactical air strikes, and to threaten various other powers. The Navy seems to think their real purpose is to sink the Japanese Imperial Fleet when it rises from the icy waters of the Pacific.)
And a snarky comment not aimed at you Mr. Jones, but the US Navy: Since modern manufacturing techniques and designs necessitate three times the number of years that were needed to build a carrier sixty years ago, don't we need three times the number of yards?
Anyway, since these 90,000+ ton ships now are equipped with the same number of combat aircraft the 64,000 ton Midway class carried into the 1990s, why not build larger numbers of smaller carriers as Senator John McCain advocated?
NY Shipbuilding was killed by a drought of contracts due to the cancellation of follow-on Enterprise class carriers and the temporary suspension of nuclear sub construction following the USS Thresher disaster.
Closing the Brooklyn Navy Yard was another of the great brain farts of Robert McNamara.
That many shipyards con not exist solely on Navy contracts, and after WWII airplanes supplanted passenger ships for overseas travel.
Aircraft carriers are great for projecting air power via manned flights, but require a lot of ships to service and protect them. Guided missiles can render them obsolete, so missions must be chosen carefully.
The role of the Navy needs to be rethought. Guided missile destroyers, rail guns (if they ever start working), and subs may be the way to go. And we have to avoid the problem that is the littoral combat ships.
https://www.navytimes.com/news/your-navy/2022/05/10/the-littoral-combat-ships-latest-problem-class-wide-structural-defects-leading-to-hull-cracks/
While there may be an eggs in baskets argument to be made, quick web searching suggests the Nimitz class carries 90 aircraft and the Midway 65 to 70 in the final configuration.
Well this comment is probably too late for anyone to notice, but the point is that these enormous carriers are now armed with a load of aircraft that a much smaller carrier could handle. It is true that the nominal capacity of a Nimitz is 90+ aircraft, but as the Wikipedia article on Nimitz Carriers confirms, the actual load is much smaller: "An embarked carrier air wing consisting of around 64 aircraft is normally deployed on board. The air wings' strike fighters are primarily F/A-18E and F/A-18F Super Hornets."
There are probably also a handful of helicopters, a couple of little cargo planes, and a few E-2's.
Back in the 1950s to 1980s they filled the carriers up with planes and gave them multiple missions. By the 1990s the anti-sub mission was gone and the number of aircraft types supported were beginning to be whittled down. The aircraft used today are also smaller than their equivalents back then. (F/A-18 max takeoff weight 47,000 lbs; F-14 max takeoff weight 74,350 lbs)
The size of the big carriers was also dictated by the Navy's plans to use them in the nuclear strike role with planes like the A-5 Vigilante.
All that's gone and the Nimitz's and Ford carry an air wing no bigger than the USS Midway's in the 1990s. The nuclear strike mission is gone. Maybe the giant carriers are phallic symbols and that's why we can't build smaller ones.
A late member of our little community served abroad the WW2 Big E along with about 20,000 others. My father in law served aboard the USS Monterey along with Gerald Ford.
Didn't Captain Piccard have a model of "the Big E" in his collection of ships named "Enterprise"? Not all of them were NCC-1707...