Strain on Navy resources will cause Mideast carrier gap | HamptonRoads.com | PilotOnline.com: A year after Navy aircraft carriers launched an ongoing U.S. air assault against Islamic State fighters in Iraq and Syria, the Navy plans to pull its carrier presence from the Middle East this fall for as long as two months.
That gap - between when the current carrier leaves the Arabian Gulf and its replacement arrives - is part of the Navy's effort to regroup after years of what officials say was an unsustainable pace of operations that has worn down resources.
A Navy spokesman said the increased tempo of recent years has been compounded by the impacts of budget cuts and a fleet of 10 carriers instead of 11. That combination means the fleet has been overextending for years without the ability to catch up on maintenance and training, said Lt. Timothy Hawkins, a Navy spokesman at the Pentagon.
"When we responded to increased combatant commander demand for carrier strike groups in 2011, 2012 and 2013, we said we would have to recover our readiness in subsequent years," Hawkins said. This kind of gap between deployments will continue until 2020 to achieve that full readiness, he said.
