11 Carrier Navy

     It is a congressional mandate that the United States Navy have 11 aircraft carriers in service at any given time.  Yes there has been a modification of this to allow the retirement of the USS Enterprise in 2012, but the commissioning of the USS Gerald R. Ford in 2015 will return the Navy to a 11 Carrier Navy.

     What does the SecDEF Gates think of this?  In May 2010, at a  Navy League's Sea-Air-Space conference, Secretary Gates questioned the need of a 11 A/C Carrier Navy. He spoke of the considerable mismatch we hold over any other country's Navy, no other country has more than two operational A/C Carrier. Along with the over match, Gates joked that tracking down pirates with billion dollar vessels is a bit of over kill. He used that to lead into his desire to use smaller more capable brown water ships like the Littoral Combat Ship despite its current production problems.  He also questioned whether a multi-billion dollar carrier was in the countries best interest, especially when the Navy is about to take on the incredibly expensive task of replacing the ohio class ballistic missile submarines. So what is SecDEF getting to, obviously he does not want to get rid of carriers, but he does want to think of ways to more efficiently use our carrier force. 
     Now that Gates is on his way out and Panetta is in, does that mean that things will be different? Yes and no. Secretary of the Navy  Ray Mabus and Chief of Naval Operations Adm. Roughead are advocates of our current 11 carrier Navy and feel it is vital to our National security. Panetta will definitely listen to his top people in the Navy but his past history shows he is not afraid to cut military spending. He voted for a 5% cut across the board in military spending when he was a congressman and cuts in missile defense. Also, the president has asked for a 400 billion dollar reduction in military spending over the next decade and the majority of those reductions are going to be penned by Panetta. One of the obvious places to cut spending is to eliminate one or two of the carrier strike groups.