A salute to the USS Nimitz’s 11-month tour, crucial role

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A salute to the USS Nimitz’s 11-month tour, crucial role
March 5, 2021 at 3:17 pm Updated March 5, 2021 at 4:17 pm
Sailors aboard the aircraft carrier USS Nimitz stand at attention as USS
Theodore Roosevelt departs Naval Air Station North Island in San Diego
for deployment in January 2020. (Navy handout photo by Petty Officer 2nd
Class Chelsea Meiller)
The aircraft carrier USS Nimitz passes Mount Rainier while transiting
the Puget Sound. (U.S. Navy photo by Mass Communication Specialist
Seaman Olivia Banmally Nichols)

Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin speaks to reporters after arriving on the
aircraft carrier USS Nimitz, Thursday, Feb. 25, 2021, at sea. (AP Photo
/ Lolita Baldor, File)
1 of 3 | Sailors aboard the aircraft carrier USS Nimitz stand at
attention as USS Theodore Roosevelt... (Navy handout photo by Petty
Officer 2nd Class Chelsea Meiller) More
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By Ed Offley
Special to The Times
The aircraft carrier USS Nimitz returns to its home port at Naval Base
Kitsap Sunday, ending a record-setting, 11-month overseas deployment
during the worst of the coronavirus pandemic. As its crew disembarks in
Bremerton for the first time in 340 days — the longest overseas mission
by an aircraft carrier since World War II — the sailors and Marines can
be proud of both their victory over COVID-19 and their ship’s operations
from the South China Sea to the Persian Gulf and back.

However, the 99,000-mile voyage of the Nimitz and its four escort ships
also conveys a somber warning over the uncertain state of the U.S.
Navy’s aging carrier fleet in a time of enduring volatility in the
Middle East and rising tensions with China.

The eruption of COVID-19 aboard sister ship USS Theodore Roosevelt last
March infected nearly 700 of its crewmen and derailed that carrier’s
ongoing western Pacific deployment. In response, Navy officials ordered
a quarantine of the Nimitz’s crew beginning April 1 that effectively
added a month to the deployment before the ship got underway. The
combination of crew isolation before departure, strict social distancing
measures throughout the cruise and severely controlled “pier visits” in
lieu of traditional liberty ashore in three safe ports — Guam, Bahrain
and Oman — led the carrier strike group to remain COVID-free for the
entire mission.

“These young men and women worked tirelessly to incorporate mitigations
that ensured the health, safety and readiness of the crews,” Rear
Admiral James A. Kirk, commander of the Nimitz strike group, told
reporters on Feb. 26. “They made important contributions to the security
and stability in both the Middle East, Africa, and Western Pacific
during a period of tension and transitions. I am immensely proud of this
team and all that they accomplished during this unprecedented deployment.”

Kirk spoke after the Nimitz and its four escorts reached San Diego,
where the 1,700 members of Carrier Air Wing 17 disembarked to return to
their shore bases. This included Electronic Attack Squadron 139 based at
Naval Air Station Whidbey Island. The Nimitz then traveled up the West
Coast and moored at Indian Island near Port Hadlock on Thursday for
several days to offload ordnance.

In addition to being a testament to the steadfast performance of its
combined ship and air wing crew of 4,500 amid the pandemic, the Nimitz’s
2020-21 deployment underscored the continuing central role of the
aircraft carrier in projecting U.S. naval power overseas. Operating both
in the western Pacific and in the Middle East, the Nimitz’s performance
added a new chapter to the 46-year-old warship’s storied history. But
three decades after the end of the Cold War, that deployment also
confirmed the seemingly intractable tensions that have confronted the
United States in several overseas hot spots since then.


A spike in tensions with Iran following the U.S. drone strike killing of
Iranian Quds Force commander Qassem Soleimani on Jan. 3, 2020, prompted
the dispatch of the carrier to the Persian Gulf. While operating in that
restricted waterway, aircrews of Carrier Air Wing 17 also carried out
266 combat sorties against the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria. Also,
with tensions steadily rising with China over Beijing’s claim to the
South China Sea, the Nimitz on both the outbound and return legs of this
cruise conducted multiple “dual carrier” operations in the South China
Sea, first with the Theodore Roosevelt and then with the Japan-based
carrier USS Ronald Reagan. Navy officials described the moves as routine
training — but left unsaid was the message to Beijing that the Navy is
prepared to operate in those contested waters in full strength.

For the Navy in general and the Nimitz in particular, neither of those
two missions signaled the opening of a new area of operations. The
carrier has been no stranger to the north Arabian Sea or the South China
Sea. The Nimitz returned to Norfolk after a much-extended third overseas
deployment aimed at tensions with Iran — 41 years ago on May 26, 1980.
When a flare-up in tensions between Taiwan and mainland China prompted
the Pentagon to shift the carrier from the Middle East to the South
China Sea, the Nimitz became the first aircraft carrier to transit the
Taiwan Strait in two decades — 25 years ago this month in 1996.

Finally, two aspects of this latest deployment serve as a stark warning
to the U.S. Navy at the dawn of a troubling decade.

First, the extended Nimitz deployment occurred in large part because the
Navy’s fleet of 11 aircraft carriers has been stretched to the breaking
point from a decade of overuse, a situation that has worsened in the
last three years. Maintenance delays due to the spike in carrier
operations overseas have further exacerbated the situation to the point
that a Nov. 11 report by the U.S. Naval Institute News Service revealed
only five of the eleven flattops could be available for response to an
overseas emergency.

Cap. Max Clark, Nimitz’s commanding officer, bluntly confirmed the
shortage of available carriers in an interview last month with The
Kitsap Sun: “The crew knew from the beginning how important it was to
stay healthy, because for a while there was Nimitz, and that was it,”
Clark said. “For a while there, we said, ‘If it’s not Nimitz, it’s
nobody.’ ” While COVID-19 added a month to the Nimitz’s scheduled
deployment, the shortage of available replacements drove the service to
extend the mission by two more.

Second, a growing number of naval strategists are warning that rising
tensions with Beijing in the South China Sea could easily spark a war
that — they warn — the U.S. Navy today may be ill-prepared to fight.
Instead of solely confronting the U.S. Pacific Fleet with a mirror-image
navy, China over the past several decades has armed itself with advanced
anti-ship ballistic and cruise missiles and is thought by some experts
to be preparing offensive cyberwar capabilities that could overwhelm the
matrix of sensors and communications networks essential to American sea
power.

For sailors seeing the end of their deployment at long last, their
thoughts were far removed from the debate over naval shipbuilding
priorities and emerging foreign threats. When Secretary of Defense Lloyd
J. Austin III visited the carrier off California on Feb. 25, Nimitz
crewman Petty Officer 2nd Class Fidel Hart told a New York Times
reporter of his plans: “I will take a walk in the forest,” Hart said. “I
want to hear birds chirp. I want to smell flowers. I want to hear a
river flow.”

Ed Offley has covered the U.S. military for more than four decades. His
first assignment, on May 26, 1980, was the return of the USS Nimitz from
an eight-month extended deployment during the Iran hostage crisis.