Key Points and Summary – The Ford-class aimed to transform carrier aviation with EMALS, AAG, automated elevators, and a powerful electrical architecture to boost sortie rates and enable future systems.
-Integrating all of this at once—while ships were already under construction—drove reliability problems, costly retrofits, and schedule slips.
-A single nuclear-carrier yard, specialty suppliers, labor constraints, and shifting design orders compounded delays; cost caps encouraged deferrals that later hurt timelines.
-GAO and DOT&E have repeatedly flagged EMALS/AAG and elevator maturity as pacing issues.
-The Navy is now stabilizing designs and oversight, but the takeaway is clear: avoid concurrency with immature tech and strengthen the industrial base to deliver on the Ford vision.
Why the Ford-Class Aircraft Carriers Are So Behind
The U.S. Navy’s latest generation of supercarriers, the Gerald R. Ford (CVN-78) class, was intended to leap well ahead of its Nimitz-class predecessors – but the program is years behind schedule and billions over budget. The new class of aircraft carrier, which is more capable, efficient, and lethal, is still wrestling with core system reliability.
And what accounts for the gap between vision and delivery? A combination of technical problems, industrial constraints, and institutional matters.
The Ford-Class Vision
The Ford class was conceived to modernize American carrier strike capability in an era of growing competition, most notably China’s rapidly expanding naval power.
Its design promised several significant advances, including a higher sortie generation rate, which meant more aircraft launches and recoveries per day. The Ford class offers a reduced crew size and improved automation, as well as new systems, including the Electromagnetic Aircraft Launch System (EMALs), Advanced Arresting Gear (AAG), and advanced weapons elevators.
A redesigned electrical and power plant architecture also means that the Ford class can support future systems more easily – a trend seen across the entirety of the U.S. military’s newest procurements. From aircraft carriers to stealth fighters, upgradeability is a key component of modernizing the nation’s forces, ensuring that new systems can be more easily upgraded with new hardware and software.
These features are not incremental adaptations but fundamental changes to how a long-deck nuclear carrier is built and operated.
However, adopting so many new subsystems in the lead ship, the CVN-78, which is now operating in the Mediterranean Sea, has had a cascading effect on follow-on units, meaning the full fleet may not be ready until the early 2040s. The last of the six Ford-class carriers, expected to be built, is the CVN-83, which is estimated to be completed by around 2043.
Technical and Integration Hurdles
Arguably, the most well-known issues the Ford class has faced so far are the development and implementation of EMALS and AAG. The two systems repeatedly struggled to meet reliability targets, with the Department of Defense’s testing and operational reports citing the reliability and maintenance demands of the systems as a reason for delayed progress.
“The reliability and maintainability of CVN 78’s EMALS and AAG continue to adversely affect sortie generation and flight operations, which remains the greatest risk to demonstrating operational effectiveness and suitability in IOT&E,” one report reads.
Congressional and Government Accountability Office (GAO) oversight also flagged the decision to move equipment into ship construction before land-based testing was completed, forcing retrofits across the ship. During the construction of CVN-79 (USS John F. Kennedy), elevator issues are among the primary reasons the planned July 2025 delivery is now considered at risk. GAO reports attribute roughly half of the $480 million cost increase in the Kennedy build to schedule slippages tied to elevator integration.
While the new systems offer significant performance potential and improvements, their complexity and interdependence make them brittle in practice – and particularly difficult to fix when failures occur, with remedial work on one system often affecting others.
Industry and Workforce Problems
Shipyard capacity and skilled labor shortages are also contributing to delays. Newport News Shipbuilding, a division of Huntington Ingalls, is the only U.S. yard currently capable of building large-deck nuclear carriers. That single yard is a major bottleneck because, in the event of any capacity stress – whether that’s labour turbulence, facility constraints, or otherwise – it will be magnified by the fact that the shipyard can only handle so many projects at any one time. The Ford program spans decades and overlaps with other major naval builds, creating competition within the yard and putting pressure on both staff and infrastructure.
Supplier fragility is rough, too; many of Ford’s subsystems, spanning nuclear components and power systems, depend on several niche suppliers, some of which are the only suppliers of elements required by the shipyard to complete the build.
Big Lessons Learned?
The Ford-class delays stem as much from policy as from engineering and supply chains, too. The program’s concurrent construction and testing, whereby the ships are built while systems are still in development, was intended to save time but instead resulted in cascading rework and cost growth. Frequent design change orders during construction also compounded the problem, forcing schedule resets and hardware retrofits halfway through the build.
Congressional cost caps, intended to limit spending overruns, had the opposite effect, pushing builders to meet deadlines by deferring non-critical work. And, political pressure to maintain visible naval power risks encouraging overly optimistic deadlines – a problem pervasive across all branches of the U.S. military.
While the USS Enterprise (CVN-80) is already delayed by years, the Navy has begun tightening oversight and stabilizing designs to prevent further slippage.
However, the lesson is clear: building and developing simultaneously, while setting tight deadlines with only one shipyard available to deliver the project, has only served to delay progress, rather than speed it up.
About the Author:
Jack Buckby is a British author, counter-extremism researcher, and journalist based in New York who writes frequently for National Security Journal. Reporting on the U.K., Europe, and the U.S., he works to analyze and understand left-wing and right-wing radicalization, and reports on Western governments’ approaches to the pressing issues of today. His books and research papers explore these themes and propose pragmatic solutions to our increasingly polarized society. His latest book is The Truth Teller: RFK Jr. and the Case for a Post-Partisan Presidency.
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