Navy decides to base carrier at Mayport - Navy News | News from Afghanistan & Iraq - Navy Times

Navy decides to base carrier at Mayport

The Navy has decided to make Naval Station Mayport, Fla., the homeport for a nuclear-powered carrier, Florida Sen. Mel Martinez announced Wednesday, only hours after praising the idea in a speech before a Navy group outside Washington.

Martinez’s office made the announcement and released a copy of the Navy’s decision paper, dated Wednesday and signed by B.J. Penn, assistant secretary of the Navy for installations and environment.

Just a few hours before, Martinez had hailed the Navy’s proposal to homeport an aircraft carrier at Mayport, citing the need for “dispersal” of the fleet’s capital ships and the convenience of having two East Coast ports equipped to repair flattops.

“Strategic dispersal is in the best interest of national security,” said Martinez, a Republican, in a speech at the Surface Navy Association’s annual national symposium. Not only would a Mayport carrier ensure all the ships weren’t together in the event of a Pearl Harbor-style attack, he said, but it would relieve what he called the “burden” carried by Naval Station Norfolk, Va., as the only East Coast port equipped to maintain nuclear-powered carriers.

All five East Coast carriers were in port together in the Hampton Roads area for 35 days last year, Martinez said, and two carriers were there together for about 81 percent of the time. Keeping the ships together makes them vulnerable, he said. Not only that, if there were an attack on Norfolk, and a carrier at sea off the East Coast couldn’t dock there for some reason, it would take three weeks to sail around to the West Coast and reach a nuclear-capable port, Martinez said.

Martinez’s remarks were the latest shot fired in an ongoing skirmish between Mayport boosters and Virginia’s governor and congressional delegation, who want all five of the Navy’s East Coast carriers to remain at Norfolk. Virginia Sen. Jim Webb, a Democrat, last week issued a report that detailed what he viewed were the problems with Martinez’s “strategic dispersal,” including the steep costs to dredge the channel at Mayport and upgrade equipment at the base so that it could maintain and repair nuclear warships.

“This is not a simple turf issue between competing interests in Virginia and Florida,” Webb said in a statement critical of the decision released Wednesday. “It is a matter of properly identifying strategic and fiscal priorities. ... Nuclear-powered aircraft carriers have been homeported in Norfolk since the USS Enterprise was commissioned 47 years ago. The Navy made no effort to duplicate Norfolk’s nuclear-support infrastructure in Mayport at the height of the Cold War, and it has made no compelling argument why it is necessary to do so today.”

Rep. Randy Forbes, R-Va., released a statement Wednesday afternoon blasting the Navy’s decision as a waste of money. Citing a presentation that same day at SNA in which the service’s top requirements official detailed the fiscal and operational challenges facing the Navy, Forbes said it had “nevertheless proceeded with a short-sighted, political decision inadequately justified by a supposed need for strategic dispersal.”

“I look forward to asking Navy officials in depth, as they present their budget, what other priorities were sacrificed for this unnecessary and costly decision,” Forbes said. “With the cost of the move estimated to be anywhere from $600 million to $1 billion — not including personnel relocation costs — the Navy has chosen to forgo significant impacts on critical unfinished priorities, including building one or possibly two LCS, funding over half of the cost of a destroyer, restoring aging infrastructure in our shipyards, or investing in over a dozen F/A-18s.”

After his speech, Martinez had acknowledged to Navy Times that the costs could be high, and he also acknowledged that it would likely take longer for Mayport to realize the economic benefits of a nuclear carrier than the benefits of the base instead just adding more conventional ships. But he said boosting the economy in the Jacksonville area was only half the equation; the other half had to work out in favor of the Navy. Martinez’s statement said he planned to request funding to begin the Mayport overhauls in the federal budget submitted to Congress at the beginning of February.

Click here to see the decision paper