In this episode of The House of Wolverine Lt. Donny James, Ford’s advanced weapons elevator officer, talks about the ship’s advanced weapons elevators and differences between Ford-class and Nimitz-class weapons handling.
ATLANTIC OCEAN
06.06.2020
Video by Chief Petty Officer RJ Stratchko
USS Gerald R. Ford (CVN 78)
In an article by Megan Eckstein published on June 1, 2020 by USNI News, the progress of USS Gerald R. Ford was highlighted:
If the Navy has spent the last three years taking USS Gerald R. Ford (CVN-78) from a construction project to a platform that can launch and recover jets, the service is now taking steps to turn the ship into one that can fight in maritime combat.
Carrier Air Wing 8 embarked Ford and began cyclic operations on May 30, and some of the Carrier Strike Group 12 staff will embark this week for the first time as well, to start assembling “the basic building blocks of putting the entire strike group package together,” CSG 12 Commander Rear Adm. Craig Clapperton told reporters today.
Clapperton said he will embark some of his staff to the carrier on Wednesday for the first time ever, with the goal of permanently moving aboard the carrier by the end of the year. CVW 8 is still technically assigned to another carrier strike group for now, he noted, but by the fall it will officially become Ford’s associated air wing….
Rather than wait to learn those lessons until Ford is ready to begin pre-deployment training in a couple years, “the idea right now is to get out onboard the ship as a strike group, begin bringing in various pieces of our assets – really every single one of these underways that are going on between now and next March, we’re going to bring an increasing number of strike group players out there and then increase the complexity of our operations and our integration each time, with the specific goal of trying to figure out how is it we want to fight a Ford strike group. How is it similar and how is it dissimilar to a Nimitz strike group, and make sure we’re smart on that.”