She's afloat:
The Navy christened the USS Gerald Ford on Saturday with the traditional smashing of a bottle of sparkling wine across the bow of the ship — the most technologically advanced aircraft carrier the United States has built. ...
The Ford is about $2 billion over budget and is about 70 percent complete, with most of the remaining work occurring on its internal systems.
She'll be ready in 2015.
I'm sure Ford will be amazing. But in an age when our fleet could shrink in size significantly from lack of ship-building appropriations, spending this much on an expensive target at the expense of numbers is troubling to me.
And it won't do to argue how useful that sovereign piece of floating real estate is for generating air sorties against foes without anti-ship weapons. I'm talking the sea control mission.
Don't even get me started on the insanity of our Zumwalt class "destroyers" being touted as littoral warfare ships.
We really need an alternative to big carriers for naval aviation.
