The Ford carrier: the most expensive warship ever built...

The United States Navy accepted delivery of its newest aircraft carrier, USS Gerald R. Ford (CVN-78), on 31 May 2017 and commissioned it on 22 July 2017. On paper the ship was the most capable carrier ever built. In practice, the systems that make a carrier a carrier, the catapults that launch aircraft, the gear that recovers them, and the elevators that move bombs to the flight deck, were either failing far below their reliability requirements or were not finished at all. The last of the ship's eleven weapons elevators was not declared fully functional until December 2021, roughly four and a half years after the Navy took the ship. Ford did not conduct a real operational deployment until the autumn of 2022, and its first full-length deployment did not begin until May 2023.

That gap, between a ship the taxpayer had already paid for and a ship that could actually go to war, is the story of CVN-78. It is also the most expensive single object the United States has ever bought as a warship: about $13.3 billion. This entry follows the money, keeps the distinct cost figures straight, and sets the honest failure critique next to the honest mission defense.

What CVN-78 is, and what the $13.3 billion buys

Gerald R. Ford is the lead ship of the Ford class, the first new US carrier design in roughly forty years, intended to replace the Nimitz-class carriers that have been the core of American naval power since the 1970s. The design bundled a set of new technologies onto one hull at the same time:

The Electromagnetic Aircraft Launch System (EMALS), a linear electric catapult replacing the steam catapults used since the 1950s.
The Advanced Arresting Gear (AAG), an electromagnetic system for recovering landing aircraft, replacing legacy hydraulic gear.
The Dual Band Radar.
Eleven Advanced Weapons Elevators (AWEs), electromagnetic elevators replacing cable-hauled ones, which carry ordnance from the magazines up toward the flight deck.
A new reactor plant (the A1B design) generating substantially more electrical power than a Nimitz plant.

One point matters before any dollar figure is quoted, because it is where most public discussion of the Ford goes wrong. The roughly $13.3 billion is the cost of CVN-78, the first ship. A lead ship carries the non-recurring engineering for the entire class: the design work, the tooling, the first-time integration, and the testing that every later ship benefits from. So the $13.3 billion is not the price of a later Ford-class carrier, and it is not the roughly $120 billion figure that appears in some 2026 commentary, which refers to the entire multi-ship Ford program spread across about two decades. Three different numbers, three different things. This entry is about the lead ship.

The money, dated and sourced

The Congressional Research Service (CRS report RS20643, by naval analyst Ronald O'Rourke) puts CVN-78's final procurement cost at $13,316.5 million in then-year dollars. Independent snapshots of the same ship at earlier dates line up with that trajectory rather than competing with it: Wikipedia, aggregating CRS and Navy budget documents, reports about $13.027 billion of construction cost as of March 2018, and the Government Accountability Office reported the lead-ship cost at $12.8 billion as of 2013. Those are the same ship measured at different points, not separate cost buckets.

Against that, the original lead-ship estimate was roughly $10.5 billion. GAO framed the growth plainly: in its 2013 report the lead-ship cost had risen more than 22 percent since the FY2008 authorization. Congress had by then imposed statutory cost caps on CVN-78, a legislative acknowledgement that the program was running over. As will become clear, the cost cap is not a footnote. It shaped what the Navy chose to accept in 2017.

A caution on attribution. Some secondary summaries claim GAO pinned about $2.4 billion of the overrun specifically on the new technologies. That specific dollar breakdown does not appear in the primary GAO text and is not printed here. What GAO did document is the mechanism: the Navy committed to producing immature systems concurrently, before their maturity had been demonstrated, and that concurrency drove cost and schedule growth.

The timeline

The dates tell the story more clearly than any single number.

August 2007. GAO publishes GAO-07-866, "Defense Acquisitions: Navy Faces Challenges Constructing the Aircraft Carrier Gerald R. Ford within Budget." This is the early warning, before most of the reliability problems had surfaced: the budget was at risk.
September 2013. GAO publishes GAO-13-396, "Ford-Class Carriers: Lead Ship Testing and Reliability Shortfalls Will Limit Initial Fleet Capabilities." By now the concern is not just money. GAO reports lead-ship cost up more than 22 percent since FY2008 to $12.8 billion, and warns that testing and reliability shortfalls in the new systems will limit what the ship can do when it joins the fleet.
31 May 2017. The Navy takes delivery of CVN-78.
22 July 2017. The ship is commissioned. It is accepted with the weapons elevators incomplete and the launch and recovery systems still short of their reliability requirements.
2019 to 2020. During this testing window EMALS is measured at about 181 launches between operational failures, far below its design requirement of 4,166 cycles.
December 2021. The eleventh and final Advanced Weapons Elevator is turned over to the crew on 22 December 2021 (announced 23 December), roughly four and a half years after delivery. Only now does the ship have all the elevators it was designed with.
4 October to 26 November 2022. Ford conducts a short "service-retained" Atlantic deployment of about 53 days, with roughly 80 percent of its air wing and a NATO transfer of authority. This is the ship's first deployment, but a limited one.
3 May 2023. Ford departs Norfolk on its first traditional full-length deployment, about six years after delivery.

The systems that did not work

EMALS. The Pentagon's Director, Operational Test and Evaluation (DOT&E), in its FY2020 report issued in January 2021, measured EMALS at about 181 mean cycles between operational mission failures across 3,975 launches during testing from November 2019 to September 2020. The system's requirement was 4,166 cycles. GAO's June 2021 Weapon Systems Annual Assessment (GAO-21-222) and defense press relayed the figure. Two numbers there must stay distinct: the measured reliability of about 181 cycles is what the system actually delivered in that window, and 4,166 is the design requirement it was supposed to meet. It is fair to add that this was 2019 to 2020 testing and that reliability improved in later evaluation; it is not fair to present 181 as the requirement or 4,166 as an achieved result.

AAG. The Advanced Arresting Gear, a separate system, recovery rather than launch, was flagged alongside EMALS in GAO's 2020 to 2021 weapon-systems assessments as a reliability concern. Its specific cycle figures differ from the EMALS numbers and are not the same 181 value; the two systems should not be blended.

The Advanced Weapons Elevators. This is the most concrete illustration of accepting an unfinished ship. A carrier cannot sustain combat air operations without moving ordnance from its magazines to its flight deck, and on CVN-78 that job belongs to eleven electromagnetic elevators. All eleven were delivered non-functional. The Navy took the ship in 2017 with none of them certified. The Chief of Naval Operations at the time, Admiral Michael Gilday, set a public deadline to have them all working by the end of 2021, and the final one was handed over on 22 December 2021. Huntington Ingalls Industries and the Navy announced the milestone, and it was corroborated by USNI News, Defense News, Naval News, and others. Until that date the newest and most expensive carrier in the world could not use its full designed ability to arm its aircraft.

The honest critique and the honest defense, side by side

The critique

At about $13.3 billion, CVN-78 is the most expensive warship ever built, and the Navy accepted it in 2017 years before its core new systems worked. GAO had warned about exactly this pattern twice, in 2007 (GAO-07-866, on budget) and in 2013 (GAO-13-396, on testing and reliability), and its central finding was structural: putting too many unproven technologies onto one lead ship at the same time drove cost growth and schedule slip. Congress responded to the cost growth with statutory cost caps, and one documented consequence of pressing to meet cost and schedule was that the ship was delivered incomplete: EMALS averaging about 181 launches between failures against a 4,166-cycle requirement in 2019 to 2020 testing (DOT&E FY2020), AAG with parallel reliability problems, and all eleven weapons elevators non-functional at delivery, the last not certified until December 2021. A capital ship the taxpayer had fully funded could not conduct a real deployment until 2022, and not a full-length one until 2023. That is a long stretch of paid-for, non-deployable capability, and it is documented in the government's own oversight record.

The defense

Aircraft carriers are the centerpiece of US power projection, and the Ford design delivers measurable gains over the Nimitz class it replaces: a higher sortie-generation rate, substantially more electrical generating capacity from the A1B reactor plant to support future systems such as directed-energy weapons, and a smaller crew that lowers lifetime operating cost. First-of-class warships have always absorbed the risk of maturing new technology on behalf of every ship that follows. That is what "lead ship" means. EMALS, AAG, and the electromagnetic elevators, once debugged on CVN-78, transfer to CVN-79 (the future USS John F. Kennedy) and later hulls at lower cost and lower risk. By late 2021 the elevators were certified, by 2022 the ship had deployed, and later Ford-class ships are budgeted well below the lead ship's price precisely because CVN-78 paid the non-recurring engineering bill up front. The concurrency GAO criticised is the same concurrency the Navy argues bought a generational capability jump on a compressed schedule.

Both readings rest on the same facts. The ship was extraordinarily expensive, was accepted before it worked, and was warned about in advance; and it is also a genuinely more capable warship whose first-of-class costs and risks were, by design, front-loaded so that the ships behind it would be cheaper. The record supports keeping both in view at once rather than collapsing to either.

Fact-check notes and sources

CVN-78 is the most expensive warship ever built, procurement cost about $13.3 billion (lead ship, not per-ship price of follow-ons and not the multi-ship program total). Wikipedia, aggregating CRS and US Navy budget documents, reports $13.027 billion construction cost as of March 2018 and states it is "the most expensive warship ever built." USS Gerald R. Ford, Wikipedia
CRS reports final procurement of $13,316.5 million (then-year dollars) against an original lead-ship estimate of roughly $10.5 billion. CRS RS20643, Navy Ford (CVN-78) Class Aircraft Carrier Program
GAO warned in 2007 that the Navy faced challenges building CVN-78 within budget. GAO-07-866 (23 August 2007). GAO-07-866
GAO documented in 2013 that CVN-78 introduced multiple immature technologies (EMALS, AAG, Dual Band Radar, Advanced Weapons Elevators) with testing and reliability shortfalls, with lead-ship cost up more than 22 percent since FY2008 to $12.8 billion. GAO-13-396 (5 September 2013), "Ford-Class Carriers: Lead Ship Testing and Reliability Shortfalls Will Limit Initial Fleet Capabilities." GAO-13-396
EMALS measured about 181 launches between operational failures across 3,975 launches (November 2019 to September 2020) against a 4,166-cycle requirement. The figure originates in the Pentagon's DOT&E FY2020 report (issued January 2021) and is relayed by GAO's June 2021 Weapon Systems Annual Assessment. GAO-21-222; reporting relaying DOT&E via Task & Purpose
The Advanced Arresting Gear was flagged alongside EMALS as a reliability concern in GAO's 2020 to 2021 weapon-systems assessments; AAG (recovery) and EMALS (launch) are distinct systems with distinct figures. GAO-21-222
CVN-78 had eleven Advanced Weapons Elevators delivered non-functional; the eleventh and final one was turned over on 22 December 2021 (announced 23 December), roughly four and a half years after delivery. USNI News, HII Delivers Final Advanced Weapons Elevator Aboard USS Gerald R. Ford; background at The War Zone
USS Gerald R. Ford was delivered 31 May 2017 and commissioned 22 July 2017, two distinct milestones. USS Gerald R. Ford, Wikipedia
The first deployment was a short service-retained Atlantic deployment of about 53 days (4 October to 26 November 2022); the first full-length deployment departed 3 May 2023. USNI News, Nov 2022; Navy Times, May 2023

The Ford carrier: the most expensive warship ever built, and the elevators that would not work