Carrier going to Mayport

By Bull Nav

Folks have been waiting for this announcement for a while.

A nuclear-powered aircraft carrier will be based at Naval Station Mayport, Fla., Navy officials announced Monday.

“We have selected a preferred alternative, which is to homeport a CVN in Mayport,” Navy Secretary Donald Winter said in a speech at the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington, D.C. “The principal rationale for that has to do with the vulnerability of the concentration [of carriers] we have right now in the Tidewater [Va.] area and the desirability to be able to have an additional resource for homeport operations and support.”

Since the JFK was decommissioned, there has been no carrier stationed there. This ends the idle speculation.

But it's not without cost and is not going to be anytime soon.

But the move will require at least $426 million and five years to complete before any carrier will call Mayport home.

“We do not anticipate having the required military construction completed until 2014,” said Lt. Sean Robertson, spokesman for the Navy at the Pentagon. “We will not homeport a nuclear carrier in Mayport until all the necessary infrastructure is in place.”

Good idea? I think so. Having all the East Coast carriers in one port (i.e., Norfolk) makes sense from a logistical standpoint, but from a strategic standpoint it is somewhat lacking.

There are two major tunnels that ships must cross when entering or leaving Norfolk (or the Norfolk International Terminals). These are the Hampton Roads Bridge Tunnel and the Chesapeake Bay Bridge Tunnel. If a terrorist group disabled or sunk one of the large container ships that ply Hampton Roads at one of these locations when several of the carriers (not to mention the big deck amphibs) were in port, we would be in trouble (like during the Christmas standdown).

Moving a carrier down to Mayport will ensure we have at least one that won't get stuck. It kind of makes sense to move perhaps another one down there.

Of course the folks in Hampton Roads are not too happy.

Virginia officials immediately criticized the decision as costly, inefficient and politically motivated. They vowed to fight the proposal.

So we will have to see what happens in the new year.

Should get interesting.

November 18, 2008 08:36 AM Navy

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Comments

Carrier in Mayport. Some FA squadrons at NAS Jacksonville. I can feel my real estate going up in value.

As a London School of Economics grad once told me when I asked him to sum up his education.

"Buy Low. Sell High. Keep it on the Downlow."

I think I will start looking for property in Jax Beach. Shsss

Thomas · November 18, 2008 04:05 PM

A couple of things before Thomas rushes off to buy land:

The cost estimates on upgrading Mayport to support CVN home porting are all over the place. The latest Navy figure is $564 million, but by completion the total cost will probably exceed $1 billion when dredging, infrastructure, and force protection improvements (to protect a nuclear facility) are finished.

Any discussion of whether home porting several carriers in one port creates an opsec risk must include three points you leave out:
--wherever they call home, training and deployment cycles keep CVNs dispersed. The four carriers currently in Norfolk are never there at once, and Norfolk generally sees more than two in port simultaneously when one is in a maintenance cycle (basically all the time). We will always have "at least one that won't get stuck."
--closing Mayport by sinking a ship in the channel would be easier than closing Norfolk, because the channel is narrower, shorter, and shallower.
--the concentration of military and intelligence activity in the Hampton Roads area provides synergistic security efforts. Suspected terrorists and the incoming container ships they would try to sink outside Norfolk recieve much closer scrutiny than similar activity in Jacksonville just because so many eyes are on them there.
--a terrorist organization or enemy sophisticated enough to implement a plan to attack or bottle up one of these ports could probably execute the plan in two places at once. Home port dispersal probably only helps if each carrier gets its own separate home--a logic the Navy accepted when it studied strategic homeporting during the 1980s in the face of possible Soviet attack on a US continental naval base.

We have to ask whether the marginal increase in operational security justifies the huge cost of upgrading Mayport facilities and subsequent underutilization of Norfolk berths. I would argue that it does not.

FBL · November 19, 2008 11:24 AM

Speaking from a fiscal standpoint I understand why the Navy would homeport most (or all) of it's ships in one location. However, tactically it's not a sound idea.

Paul · November 19, 2008 05:01 PM