In the summer of 2021, the United States Navy did the unthinkable: it attacked one of its own warships. It anchored the brand-new aircraft carrier USS Gerald R. Ford off the East Coast and subjected it to a series of underwater explosions, culminating in a whopping 40,000 pounds of TNT hammering the ship’s hull. The tests were designed to ensure that Ford could protect its crew of 5,000 sailors—more than the total number of servicemen who died during the attack on Pearl Harbor.
For more than eighty years, the U.S. Navy has operated the world’s largest and most powerful fleet of aircraft carriers; its 11 ships carry more that 400 fighter jets and have a combined crew of more than 55,000 sailors. The bulk of the fleet consists of 10 Nimitz-class carriers built between the 1960s and 1990s. By the 2000s, it was clear Nimitz’s 50s-era design was holding back the adoption of modern technologies. Nimitz used steam catapults to launch aircraft, a system that involved routing steam through large, unwieldy pipes from the boilers to reservoirs just under the flight deck. And the ships used an older Westinghouse A4W nuclear reactor design that took up more room inside the ship than newer-generation reactors and could not support the growing power needs of carriers, especially as computers, sensors, and future directed energy weapons added additional energy demands.
In 2008, the Navy ordered the first new carrier class in forty years. The Ford class was designed to supplement, and eventually replace, the Nimitz carriers starting in 2026. The USS Gerald R. Ford is the first of the new type of carrier, called the Gerald R. Ford class. The ships are also designed for extraordinarily long lifespans: while the Nimitz carriers were designed to serve for forty years, the U.S. Navy hopes to get more than 90 years of service out of its new ships by making them easier to update as new technologies become available.
At 1,092 feet long and 252 wide in the beam, the Ford-class carriers are roughly the same size as their predecessors, but they are projected to weigh 4,000 tons less; that’s the equivalent of an entire Freedom-class littoral combat ship. The weight savings come primarily from the ships’ smaller reactors and increased number of automated functions—more automation reduces the crew by 20 percent and eliminates some of the equipment and supplies needed to sustain them. One significant visual difference is the placement of Ford’s island, where flight operations are controlled. The ship’s designers moved it further to the stern, making it easier for crew to move aircraft and munitions across the flight deck.
The ship’s insides, however, bear little resemblance to the Nimitz class. Ford carriers are packed with technological innovations designed to maximize efficiency now and enable future updates. The most consequential new tech is the Navy’s Electromagnetic Aircraft Launch System (EMALs), which uses electricity to charge a row of beams running the length of the flight deck. The beams create strong magnetic fields that can accelerate a shuttle, attached to a plane’s landing gear, rapidly down their length, launching it off the flight deck.
The new EMALS system creates a smoother takeoff, which reduces wear-and-tear on pilots and aircraft. EMALS is also faster than the old steam system, launching aircraft every 45 seconds. And it’s also more adaptable, allowing crew to configure it to aircraft or unmanned aerial vehicles.
Other new equipment includes a new multi-function radar system, the AN/SPY-3, designed to detect incoming low-flying anti-ship cruise missiles; a new advanced aircraft arresting gear (AAG) system to slow aircraft down when they land on the deck; and new weapon elevators to shuttle weapons from deep within the bowels of the ship to awaiting aircraft.
At their most basic level, aircraft carriers are big boats with runways; their true firepower resides in the ship’s air wing. USS Ford’s Carrier Air Wing Eight (CVW-8) is composed of more than 70 fixed-wing, tiltrotor, and helicopter aircraft. A modern air wing, like the one on the USS Gerald R. Ford, is made up of three squadrons of F/A-18E Super Hornet single-seat fighters and one squadron of F/A-18F Super Hornet two-seat fighters. Each is equally capable in air-to-air and air-to-ground combat roles. As the F-35C Lightning II joins the fleet, the newer fifth-generation fighters are replacing older Super Hornets; about half of the fighter squadrons will eventually operate the F-35C.
Ford’s Super Hornet fighters carry a wide variety of air-to-air missiles to target enemy aircraft, drones, and missiles. The AIM-9X Sidewinder short-range infrared missile is ideal against drones or in a dogfight against crewed fighters; the AIM-120 AMRAAM radar-guided missile can engage threats that are 90 miles away. An F/A-18E/F can be armed with up to nine air-to-air missiles at once, more than any other U.S. fighter jet. In 2024, the Navy officially nicknamed a Super Hornet armed with four AIM-9X and five AIM-120 missiles “Murder Hornet” after the giant hornet that was discovered in the Pacific Northwest in 2020.
At the same time, the Navy is testing its first new air-to-air missiles in forty years, the AIM-260 Joint Advanced Tactical Missile, which will eventually replace the AMRAAM. In 2024 it unveiled the AIM-174B, an air-to-air version of the shipborne SM-6 interceptor. It has a range of more than 200 miles, twice as far as previous missiles. Together, the two missiles will allow Navy fighters to “out-stick” Chinese and Russian jets, targeting them at extreme ranges.
Land- and sea-based threats should fare no better against Ford’s air wing. Super Hornets can target ships with the older AGM-84 Harpoon anti-ship missile and the new AGM-158C Long Range Anti-Ship Missile, which uses artificial intelligence to detect, classify, and then evade enemy defenses, homing in on targets such as aircraft carriers or troop ships. Ship-based fighters can also lay minefields with the Quicksink mine system, which turns a 2,000-pound high-explosive bomb into a smart mine that targets both surface warships and submarines. Against targets on land, the F/A-18E/F can carry a multitude of bombs and missiles, including general-purpose unguided high-explosive bombs, the Paveway series of laser-guided bombs, JDAM satellite-guided bombs, the AGM-154 Joint Standoff Weapon glide bomb, and SLAM-ER land attack cruise missiles.
An air wing also typically includes a squadron of five EA-18G Growler electronic attack aircraft. A variant of the Super Hornet, the Growler is designed to locate, identify, and then attack enemy ground-based radar systems. After its pilot locates an enemy installation, the Growler can jam the radar—rendering it unable to detect aircraft or launch a kinetic attack with the AARGM-ER anti-radiation missile.
The remainder of the air wing includes four E-2D Advanced Hawkeye—a flying radar that can also help direct pilots in an air battle at long ranges. Nineteen MH-60S and MH-60R Seahawk helicopters are assigned to the fleet of ships that sail with Ford, called the carrier strike group. Some fly directly from the carrier while others are assigned to cruisers, destroyers, and other warships. The Seahawks can conduct surface-strike missions, ferry Navy SEAL commandos, deliver supplies between ships, and hunt submarines. Finally, a pair of CMV-22B Osprey tiltrotor aircraft act as the ship’s long-range cargo carriers, transporting people, supplies, and even the mail from a nearby port to the carrier at sea.
Placing all of this firepower on a single vessel is a huge leap of faith. While a modern carrier is defended by a bodyguard of cruisers, destroyers, and even submarines, the ship itself can count on being targeted by anti-ship cruise missiles, hypersonic missiles, and even ballistic missiles. Some of these weapons might get through the carrier’s defenses, and while direct hits are hard to model, even a near miss can cause significant damage. The Gerald R. Ford survived the 2021 shock trials with only superficial damage, proving the big ship can take a near miss from a large weapon like China’s DF-21 anti-ship ballistic missile and still conduct flight operations.
With its size, power, crew, and massive air wing, Ford can conduct airstrikes against heavily defended targets one day, fend off a complex air-sea-submarine attack the next, and rescue civilians from a natural disaster the day after that. It’s the most versatile weapon ever created—there’s nothing else in the world like it.
Kyle Mizokami is a writer on defense and security issues and has been at Popular Mechanics since 2015. If it involves explosions or projectiles, he’s generally in favor of it. Kyle’s articles have appeared at The Daily Beast, U.S. Naval Institute News, The Diplomat, Foreign Policy, Combat Aircraft Monthly, VICE News, and others. He lives in San Francisco.
