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.”
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