Still, when you consider that these ships were only intended to be around for 30 or 40 years, they've had REALLY long lives.
Well what's impressive, or sad depending on how you at it, was the fact that the ships were so adaptable that they could have served between around 50 years.
When the first "Super-Carrier" i.e. aircraft carriers that were specifically designed to operate jet aircraft and were much larger than their predecessors and had reveolutionary design elements that made aircraft safer and more efficient (although some of these designs like the angled deck were retro fitted onto some WWII era carriers so they could operate some jets, albeit in smaller scale) was launched in 1955 (USS Forrestal) it was designed to have a service life of about 30 years, much of which was based on the assumption jets would continue to evolve so much that jets in 30 years would be too advanced for the ship to operate.
However the basic design of the Forrestal class was so successful that, with upgrades from time to time it could continue to operate each next generation of aircraft, which didn't advance as much as the military thought. In fact the Forrestal is essentially the same design that every aircraft carrier built since had been based on. There have been improvements and advances, the most notable being the switch to nuclear power, but in most ways the Forrestal, when she was decommissioned, was pretty much every bit as capable and powerful a warship as the most modern carriers are.
In the early 80's, when the the Cold War was still going and the Navy wanted to keep as many carriers active as possible, the Navy instituted a program called "Service Life Extention Program" or SLEP which was designed to add another 15-20 years of service life to the pre Nimitz class carriers, stretching their lives into 2005-2020 time span. Kind of like how they refitted the Enterprise in TMP, although the exterior of the carriers reamained more or less the same.
The program consisted of taking a ship or 2 out of service and, over a period of 2-3 years upgrading upgrading the ships in ways that couldn't be done during normal refit schedules. Then once they went back into the feet doing it to another ship or two.
When the program started there were 9 1950-60's era carriers in the fleet. Of these 6 received the SLEP program,a 7th the USS Enterprise, being the only nuclear powered one of the group received her own program called RCOH (Recoring and overhaul) which was a more extensive version that also included replacing her nuclear power cores. Due to the complex nature of the Enterprise, being the first nuclear carrier and one of a kind, her RCOH went way over budget to the point where it cost almost as much as the ship itself cost to build. Many speculate had she not been named ENTERPRISE and been historic in nature the RCOH would have been cancelled and she would have been decommissioned in the 90's.
But then the cold war ended and it wasn't necessary for the Navy to possess so many carriers. The natural and logical idea would have been to keep the ones in service, give the SLEP program to the two that hadn't had it yet and then replace them as they were retired. But the Navy was terrified they could cut the budget for future nuclear carriers and was so gung ho on an all nuclear fleet that they deliberately let these billion dollar assets breakdown.
The two carriers that didn't receive SLEP had it cancelled and were immediately decommissioned. One of which, the USS America, had barely been in service 30 years. The other non nuclear carriers had routine overhauls and maintainence cut drastically and only one, the Kitty Hawk, came close to it's 50 year life span (47) all the others were decommissioned anywhere between 8 and 20 years before the end of their useful service lives.
The Enterprise made it to 51 years of service before being retired in 2012 and probably only made it that long because of her iconic status. The Navy wanted all Nimitz class ships in it's fleet and the Enterprise was much more complex and costly to operate (It had 8 reactors as opposed to the Nimitz's 2. This was done because the engineers weren't totally sure how much power the reactor would be able to effectively generate at sea, so to be on the safe side they put in 8, which was the same number of generators on a conventional powered ship. As a result the Enterprise was so overpowered that the ship was never able to be opened up all the way speed wise because the hull structure couldn't take the stress. There's never been an official confirmination but street talk has it the Enterprise hit close to 50 MPH on a few occassions. By far faster than the Nimitz which could 35 and even faster than destroyers.
It's almost criminal in my mind how the nation let these ships breakdown early so they could protect their precious future builds. God knows how many billions this cost the taxpayers.
And they still haven't learned. On two occassions (Seawolf submarine and Zumwalt destroyer) the Navy has insisted on developing new ships, despite the fact the current ships we have are more advanced than any other navy in the world, that were so expensive that they couldn't be built in large numbers. Both have 3 completed or scheduled to be finished. And they're doing it with their carriers. Despite the fact no navy in the world has anything as advanced as the Nimitz class, despite it's 40 year old design, the navy insisted it wasn't enough and a new class was created. Only problem is each ship is going to cost AT LEAST $15 billion, where a Nimitz cost about $5 billion, and a Forrestal class would cost about $2 billion in todays dollars.
Yeah the new class is more advanced in many ways, but when you come down to it a newly built Forrestal class ship would be pretty close in almost every capacity and exactly the same in the amount of planes it could launch.
The Navy does their usual BS about how the cost will pay off over time., which there is no real way to measure. But Don't tell me it's so advanced that it's equal to 3 Nimitz class ships or 8 conventionally powered supercarriers.
In fact the program is already in trouble. The first ship the Ford is basically finished and will be commissioned in 2016, but it won't make it's first deployment until 2019!!!!! Three years between the date the Navy says it's operational until she goes on active combat patrol.....that's ridiculous. The second, John F. Kennedy is under construction and the 3rd the next Enterprise is supposed to start in 2020, but people are already starting to question whether that will happen.
I'm a former navy man and served proudly but this country is SERIOUSLY headed in the wrong direction with this we gotta have weapons 2 or 3 generations ahead of everyone else, despite they can only build a fraction of them because of cost.
We hear this how the US spends more on the military than any other country in the world and feel pretty smug. What people don't realize is we might spend 5 billion on a nuclear attack sub, while China spends 2 billion and gets 5 or 6 diesel electric attack subs out of it, which are still very good ships and are more than capable of taking on our super fancy subs and defeating them by sheer numbers, which is the way it's going.
We'd better hope China doesn't decide to start a conventional war with us because the way things are going we're going to be seriously outnumbered in such a way that our super sophisticated weapons won't be able to do anything about.
