Epic Fury has Navy rethinking carrier deployment tempo

With the aircraft carrier USS Gerald R. Ford en route home from what has become the longest U.S. Navy float since Vietnam, the service is reconsidering how to sustain a wartime fighting force.That’s according to Master Chief Petty Officer of the Navy John Perryman, who addressed service needs and quality of life concerns at a forum hosted by Military Officers Association of America this month.With the back-to-back operational demands of the military intervention to capture and extract Venezuelan president Nicolas Maduro in January, followed by the airstrikes on and subsequent naval blockade of Iran, and amid ongoing drug interdiction operations around South and Central America, older force generation models are proving less effective, he said.“So, one of the things we’ve learned is we’re going to have to come up with a different force generation model,” Perryman said. “... And so we think we can do better in our force generation model to generate the readiness that we know the department is going to consume. And so … let’s take a step back and really evaluate what that should look like.”Throughout his career, he said, the force generation model had largely been based on a peacetime mindset. “It’s like this conveyor belt that’s very prescriptive, and it executes on time,” he said.For example, Perryman said, carrier strike groups deploy on three-year centers, meaning they cycle through training, deployment and maintenance every three years. As recently as 2020, then-Chief of Naval Operations Adm. Michael Gilday defended this structure amid proposals for change from then-Defense Secretary Mark Esper, saying the Navy had “made and are projecting into the future to continue to meet every commitment, every deployment that we’ve been directed to do.”But the deployment of the Ford, which will have been deployed for more than 330 days when it’s slated to pull into port in Norfolk, Va., at the end of this month, has reopened the debate about how the Navy, which has historical