USS Ford Strike Group Earns Presidential Unit Citation After Historic Cruise

NORFOLK, Va. — America’s newest commissioned aircraft carrier USS Gerald R. Ford (CVN-78) tied up at Pier 11 this morning after 326 days at sea, completing one of the longest deployment by a U.S. warship since the Vietnam War. Thousands of families crowded the pier. Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth was waiting pierside with a rare commendation for the entire strike group, Presidential Unit Citation, the first PUC of the Iran War, and a decoration the Navy doesn’t handed out lightly

Rear Adm. Gavin Duff, commander of Carrier Strike Group 12, told the crowd that 80 sailors held newborn children for the first time this morning. That number alone tells you almost everything you need to know about what this deployment cost the families who made it possible. Honor them first. Honor them loudly. Then ask the harder question. Ask why ship deployments need to be streched so long? Ask why we can’t build a larger fleet to take up the slack?

The Mission Was Real. So Was the Combat.

This deployment to fight a war in the sky aboave Iran has been controversal but let’s be clear, the destroyers Bainbridge, Mahan, Mitscher, Forrest Sherman, and Winston S. Churchill, certainly earned the recognition. They operated in three combatant commands. According to Stars and Stripes, Carrier Air Wing 8 ran more than 11,800 launches and recoveries. Between February 28 and May 1, the strike group flew over 1,700 sorties into Operation Epic Fury, the combined U.S.-Israeli campaign against Iran, while absorbing what the citation politely calls “persistent threat from enemy missiles and one-way attack drones.”

Before that, the same crew ran Task Force Southern Spear in the Caribbean, provided the deck space for Operation Absolute Resolve, and supported the special operations raid in January that scooped Nicolás Maduro and his wife out of Caracas. Then they reversed course across the Atlantic to relieve pressure on the Lincoln and Bush strike groups in the Red Sea.

This is not a routine deployment. This is the most operationally active carrier deployment in a generation. The PUC is earned. Acting Secretary of the Navy Hung Cao signed the citation; Adm. Daryl Caudle, the CNO, stood on the pier today and acknowledged what every CO already knows — “We thought it would be a seven-month deployment.” It wasn’t.

The Background Story Is Hull Count

Seven months stretched to eleven because there was nobody else to send.

The Navy is fielding roughly 295 battle-force ships against a PLA Navy that the Office of Naval Intellegnce now puts north of 370 and growing. Of America’s 11 nominal carriers, only a handful are deployable on any given day; the rest are in RCOH, in maintenance, or in post-deployment availabilities that almost never finish on schedule. When the National Command Authority surged three carriers into CENTCOM for the first time in two decades, the Ford was left holding the line because nothing else was ready to relieve her.

This is the cost of the US Navy’s shipbuilding crisis. The Navy delivers presence with the inventory Congress chose to fund at the rate yards are capable of building them. The four public repair yards are short thousands of skilled workers. HII Newport News, the only yard on Earth that can build a Ford-class, has had the next carriers USS John F. Kennedy (CVN-79), under construction for seventeen years. Virginia-class submarine production is stuck near 1.2 boats a year against a 2.0 requirement.

The Laundry Room

While we’re talking honestly: it was not all smooth sailing for the Ford. She spent part of her deployment alongside a pier in Souda Bay because the laundry caught fire in March. Three sailors hurt, one medevac’d, 600 displaced from berthing, several compartments charred. Toilets overflowed and flooded compartments at multiple points in the cruise.

The Ford-class is supposed to be the platform that carries American airpower across the next 50 years. Kennedy, Enterprise (CVN-80), and Doris Miller (CVN-81) are coming, but even the best ships in the world run into problems if you push them far beyond the operational periods they were designed for.

The Crew Did Everything Right

Alexis Burgess of Hampton told a reporter for Stars and Stripes this morning that it felt unreal, that she’d thought her sailor would get extended again. She was right to think it. The system that sent her husband to sea has been telling Navy families that for years now, one extension at a time, one fatigued maintenance cycle at a time, one delayed replacement hull at a time.

Navy shipbuilding efforts are failing and the war in Iran is controversal but the Ford Carrier Strike Group did the impossible thing this country asked of them, and they did it well enough to bring home the highest unit decoration the United States gives. The thousands of sailors who pulled it off, not just on the Ford but aboard the smaller escort ships too (not to mention the Military Sealift Command oilers and support ships, some of which are still forward deployed) deserve the thanks of a grateful nation regardless of your thoughts on the war or politics.

Welcome home.

Editorial Standards · Corrections · About gCaptain

Subscribe for Daily Maritime Insights

Sign up for gCaptain’s newsletter and never miss an update

— trusted by our 105,985 members