A third of the airstrikes pummeling the Islamic State originate from the USS Theodore Roosevelt (CVN-71) aircraft carrier slated to leave the Persian Gulf this fall. Reports indicate that it may be several months until another carrier arrives in the region, but a group a group of naval experts said today that this potential “carrier gap” may not be such a big deal—in fact, it might not even happen.

CVN-71 Theodore Roosevelt
CVN-71 Theodore Roosevelt

Navy Times first reported in June that the USS Harry S. Truman (CVN-75) would move into the Central Command area of responsibility in the early winter, leaving a one- to two-month void after the Roosevelt leaves.

However, Peter H. Daly, a retired vice admiral and CEO of the U.S. Naval Institute, believes the Navy will likely extend the Roosevelt’s deployment until the Truman’s arrival.

“There’s no guarantee defense leaders won’t extend the Roosevelt‘s deployment and close this gap. They’ve done it before,” he said in a panel discussion hosted by the Navy League. Daly pointed to President Barack Obama’s comments yesterday on the continued emphasis of airstrikes in the fight against the Islamic State terrorist group. “It’s pretty obvious where the pressure’s going to be, and it’s going to be on increased use of air power and avoiding boots on the ground,” he added.

Navy aircraft carriers have held an important place in the military’s strategy to fight the Islamic State. During the first 54 days of the U.S. campaign, all airstrikes were flown from the USS George H.W. Bush (CVN-77) because foreign nations had not yet given the United States permission to fly from their airfields.

Now that the Air Force can fly sorties from bases on the ground, the U.S. military does not have to be quite as reliant on having a carrier in the region 24/7, said Robert Farley, a senior lecturer at University of Kentucky’s Patterson School of Diplomacy and International Commerce. Additionally, the Essex amphibious ready group is in the region and could provide relief.

“Things would have looked different if we had not had a carrier available in the beginning of Operation Inherent Resolve,” he said, using the military’s term for the conflict against the Islamic State. “It’s obviously a different situation now, where we have a set of coalition partners, where we have a variety of land-based options, where we have the Essex group.”

But Daly warned that foreign nations could always impose new limitations on how often the U.S. military is allowed to take off.

“For a planned, maturing theater, could you use more land-based air and back the carrier out? The answer is yes, for the thing you know,” he said. “But it’s the next thing you don’t know.”

The carrier gap in the Middle East is emblematic of a larger problem that the Navy has been grappling with for years: The supply simply cannot meet demands for seapower.

After 9/11, the service surged to accommodate combatant commander requirements in Iraq and Afghanistan, with deployments sometimes lasting as much as 10 months, Daly said. Any extra money in the budget was funneled to operations, not maintenance and modernization, leaving the Navy with a fleet badly in need of recapitalization.

Daly pointed to the deployment of the Bush, which had already been deployed for six months when it began counter-ISIL operations. “They were at the point where, back in the day, we’d be ending the deployment,” he said. Instead, the Bush stayed out another two months in Central Command before traveling home in October 2014.  

Although the Navy is trying to move away from long deployments and get back to a normalized maintenance schedule, it will be hard for the service to break with its cultural inclination to keep ships underway if needed, he said.

“I think it’s almost irresistible,” he said. “We have a history where we get right up to a gap… and then we say, okay we’re going to just go one more time…Then you really don’t catch up.”

Daly likened it to pushing out scheduled maintenance on a car past the 15,000-mile and 30,000-mile check-up and waiting to 60,000 miles before bringing the vehicle in for repairs. By then, doing that work takes longer and is more expensive, and when you absolutely can’t go on without repairs “it will be at a time when it’s inconvenient.”

Farley said that a carrier gap in the Asia-Pacific region would be a far more pressing dilemma than the potential one in the Middle East.

“If people begin talking about the serious threats proposed by the carrier gap in the Pacific, I think this would be a much more serious problem, where there are sort of a different array of allied capabilities, a different array of partners, where there are substantial geographic differences that limit the ability of land-based air,” he said.