Long Carrier Deployment Projects Strength in U.S. Pressure Campaign on Venezuela, and Carries Costs

The U.S.S. Ford has been deployed for six months, now in the Caribbean as part of President Trump’s pressure campaign on Venezuela. Maintenance woes and strains on sailors will likely mount.

The men and women of the aircraft carrier Gerald R. Ford are spending Christmas Eve at sea instead of at home, as the sixth month of their deployment comes to a close on Wednesday.

What began for the roughly 4,500 sailors of the Ford as a European and Mediterranean cruise changed drastically on Oct. 24, when Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth ordered them to leave Split, Croatia, and steam directly for the Caribbean to add weight to President Trump’s pressure campaign on President Nicolás Maduro of Venezuela.

As their seventh month at sea begins, the sailors will get a rare treat of prime rib and lobster tails on Christmas Day. But neither the Navy nor the Pentagon has said when this deployment will end, nor whether there is another carrier being readied to take their place.

At stake is whether Mr. Hegseth further extends the deployment to keep his military options open. If so, that decision will probably increase costs down the road by delaying crucial maintenance for the Ford and putting strain on the crew's morale.

Although the Navy regularly kept carriers deployed for nine months at a time or longer during the post-9/11 wars, peacetime deployments typically do not go past six. Mr. Trump maintains that the United States is in a formal armed conflict with drug cartels in the region and cites that as justification for the substantial military deployment in the Caribbean.

Keeping not only the Ford strike group near Venezuela, but also an expeditionary strike group in the same region built around the amphibious assault ship U.S.S. Iwo Jima, is an extraordinary amount of conventional naval firepower for what began as an unconventional counternarcotics mission.

When asked about the service’s plans for the Ford, how long the ship would be extended and when the crew could expect to go home, a Navy spokeswoman, Lt. Cmdr. Kara Handley, said, “We don’t speak to future naval operations.”

From Dec. 1 to Dec. 5, the ship anchored off St. Thomas in the U.S. Virgin Islands for a port call — its first since coming under the control of U.S. Southern Command on Nov. 11. When the Ford and its crew will receive their next break is not publicly known.

The carrier is due for a major maintenance and refitting period at the Newport News Naval Shipyard in Virginia early next year.

One current service official, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to speak publicly, said the Ford was expected to receive necessary modifications to one of the systems used to land warplanes on its flight deck. Those modifications have been planned for the past eight years — among the ship’s many other planned upgrades that can be completed only while in an industrial repair facility.

That and other updates were identified as needed during the many years of testing since the Ford, a far more technologically advanced carrier than those that came before it, was commissioned in 2017. By comparison, the next two carriers of the Ford class, the John F. Kennedy and the Enterprise, are being built with these changes from the outset.

The Ford’s air wing of warplanes will continue to conduct operations — requiring the carrier to frequently pull alongside supply ships to take on more aviation fuel, spare parts and food — as drones and gunships flown by the Joint Special Operations Command continue to attack small motorboats in the region suspected of smuggling narcotics.

“They’re flying a lot of sorties,” Senator Mark Kelly, Democrat of Arizona and a retired career naval aviator, said of the Ford in an interview. “And now they’re at the six-month point, all kinds of stuff starts happening.”

The rough asphalt coating on the carrier’s flight deck, called nonskid, begins chipping off in larger amounts after such a long time at sea, the senator said. That requires a pause in flight operations of a couple days to resurface the deck so warplanes will not slide around when not held fast by chains.

During the 1991 Gulf War, Mr. Kelly was deployed aboard the carrier Midway, flying combat missions over Iraq. Keeping a carrier out past the six-month mark, as he experienced then, affects more than just the ship.

“It kind of wears on you,” he said. “And you start to see accidents start to happen — not just pilots crashing planes, necessarily, but accidents on the flight deck,” such as sailors walking too close to air intakes for jet engines or spinning propellers.

“All kinds of stuff starts to happen when you’re out there for an extended period of time,” said Mr. Kelly, who has clashed with Mr. Hegseth and the administration over other issues, including his participation in a video reminding military personnel that they do not have to follow illegal orders.

Neither the White House nor the Pentagon or Navy has informed the Senate Armed Services Committee, on which Mr. Kelly serves, of what the Ford and its escort ships will do, the senator said.

Representative Nick LaLota, Republican of New York, said in an interview that he was not concerned that Ford’s return date was not publicly known, and that the ship was doing important work to “eliminate narco-terrorists.”

“I recognize the impact that long deployments have on sailors and their families,” said Mr. LaLota, who served as a Navy surface warfare officer for more than seven years and deployed twice on warships. “Their sacrifice is appreciated by Congress, and by the nation. We appreciate that our sailors put the country and the country’s needs before themselves in many cases.”

Vice Adm. Mike Franken, who retired from the Navy in 2017 after a nearly 40-year career that began as an enlisted sailor on a carrier, said the type of maintenance period the Ford is scheduled for after this deployment would probably take four to six months in a shipyard. Delaying that maintenance by continually extending the carrier’s deployment, he said, would lead to spiraling costs that the president and defense secretary probably have not considered.

“You plan better for this,” Admiral Franken said in an interview.

Extending the Ford’s deployment will probably mean that other ships will be ordered to shipyards earlier and for shorter durations than planned, and will complete less of their required depot-level maintenance as a result, the admiral said.

“What dictates the availability of ships? Good ships and great crews?” Admiral Franken said. “Yeah, to a degree, but really it is maintenance.”

If supplemental equipment like the elevators that the Ford uses to bring warplanes up from the hangar bay to the flight deck begin to fail, he said, the president and defense secretary will eventually have a ship unable to fulfill its assigned mission.

Whether the costly and prolonged deployment of the Ford strike group and other U.S. personnel and equipment in the Caribbean will lead to changed behavior by Mr. Maduro or by a change in government in Venezuela remains an open question. The administration has in the past two weeks started sending the Coast Guard to intercept tankers going in and out of Venezuela, seeking to disrupt that nation’s oil trade.

“I think it’s undoubtedly the case that it’s gotten their attention,” Dan Restrepo, a former senior director of Western Hemisphere affairs on the National Security Council during the Obama administration, said in an interview.

“Operationally, seizing every tanker coming out of Venezuela seems that it would be quite the task, and sustaining that for any meaningful period of time would be quite the task, even with the assets that are deployed in the Caribbean,” Mr. Restrepo said.

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