With the the world’s first nuclear aircraft carrier, USS Enterprise, set to retire tomorrow after 50 straight years of Navy service, Huntington-Ingalls Industries — which owns the Newport News Shipyard where all Navy carriers are built — has put together an eye-catching graphic that sums up the big ship’s size and history (click here for the humongous full-size version).
The strategic downside of this stirring saga is that the Enterprise‘s high-tech replacement, the USS Gerald Ford, won’t be finished until 2015. That means the Navy will be short a carrier even as tensions rise simultaneously in the Gulf, with Iran, and in the Western Pacific, with China, spreading the fleet thin. Enterprise, we’re really going to miss you.
Major trends and takeaways from the Defense Department’s Unfunded Priority Lists
Mark Cancian and Chris Park of CSIS break down what is in this year’s unfunded priority lists and what they say about the state of the US military.