Thread: The Most Expensive Military Weapon Ever Made: Navy’s USS Gerald Ford Carrier

Saudi-born US naval engineer allegedly gave undercover agent info on how to sink carrier

Published December 06, 2014 FoxNews.com

Mostafa Ahmed Awwad, 35, of Yorktown, Va., a civilian with the U.S. Navy, leaves the federal courthouse in Norfolk, Va. on Friday, Dec. 5, 2014 after he was arrested on charges he tried to steal schematics for the under construction Gerald R. Ford aircraft carrier for Egypt. (AP Photo/The Virginian-Pilot, Steve Earley)


A Naval engineer is facing charges that he gave an FBI undercover agent posing as an Egyptian intelligence officer secret documents about the new Gerald R. Ford aircraft carrier while discussing how to sink the vessel with a missile.

Mostafa Ahmed Awwad, 35, of Yorktown, Va., was arrested Friday on an FBI affidavit that reads like it came from a Tom Clancy novel.

Federal prosecutors in Virginia say that during his conversations with the undercover, Awwad arranged to use a dead-drop location along a secluded hiking trail to pass secrets about the Ford, which is being built in Virginia for delivery to the Navy in 2016.

The affidavit says that at a hotel meeting on Oct. 9 Awwad gave the undercover drawings of the aircraft carrier that he said were top secret.

During the meeting, "Awwad discussed where to strike the vessel with a missile in order to sink it," the affidavit says.

The FBI undercover was posing as an Egyptian spy named "Yousef" and spoke to Awwad in Arabic.

The Virginian Pilot said Saturday that Awwad cried as he was led into the courtroom for a brief hearing before a federal magistrate judge in Norfolk.

He wore a pink collared shirts, sweater vest and tan pants, the paper said.

The judge ordered Awwad detained until a hearing Wednesday.

The indictment accuses Awwad of two counts of attempted exportation of defense articles and technical data. Each count is punishable by 20 years in prison.

The affidavit says Awwad was born in Saudia Arabia and married a U.S. citizen in Cairo in 2007. After his marriage he took steps to become an American citizen.

The court papers also say the Navy hired Awwad to work in the Norfolk Naval Shipyard’s nuclear engineering and planning department in February and that he got a security clearance in August.

The FBI sting began in September when the undercover contacted Awwad.

The court papers do not say why Awwad became a target.

During their first meeting in a park in Hampton, Va., Awwad explained to "Yousef" that he intended to use his position to obtain military technology for use by the Egyptian government, including but not limited to, the designs of the USS Gerald Ford nuclear aircraft carrier.

"Awwad agreed to conduct clandestine communications with the undercover FBI agent by email and unattributable telephones and to conduct 'dead drops' in a concealed location in the park," the Justice Department said in a press release, cited by the Navy Times.

At the Oct. 9 meeting Awwad asked for $1,500 to buy a tiny camera to enable him to photograph restricted material around the shipyard, according to the affidavit.

On Oct. 23, Awwad retrieved $3,000 in cash left at the dead-drop location.

He left behind a container with an external hard drive and two passport photos. The FBI later collected the containers.

The day after Thanksgiving Awwad was observed in his Navy office holding what appeared to be aircraft design schematics which he placed on the floor and photographed.

The Pilot said the USS Ford is the lead ship in the Navy’s new class of carriers. The Ford stands 25 stories high and is three football fields long.

Retired rear admiral Fred Metz, head of the Navy’s carrier and air station program until 1991, told the paper its bad enough for the schematics of any Navy vessel to be given away.

"But it’s worse to give away the Ford's," he said. "There is a whole lot of new technology on it we haven't seen before."

http://www.foxnews.com/us/2014/12/06...nfo-on-how-to/

US Carriers: More than the rest of the world combined

Posted on August 30, 2013 by The Helpful Engineer


US carrier ref. usmilitary.com

The US are moving naval forces into position for a possible strike against Syria. So it is a good time to remind ourselves just how much more striking power its aircraft carriers have compared to the rest of the world. In total there are 22 aircraft carriers in service around the world. This excludes amphibious assault ships, as although they might carry aircraft they have a different role, see more here. Of these 22 carriers in the world, the US operate 12.It would seem then that the US Navy has a little over 50% of the Worlds naval carrier strike power. But in fact the US superiority is even more than this.This is because US carriers are vastly superior in size and capability to any of the others ships.

Therefore using the number of ships is misleading. We need to use different measurements.To help to show the difference in capability, we have used charts below to show the comparison based on performance measures. The first shows the worlds navies who operate carriers along with their carriers aircraft capacity. This is to try and measure the power or strike capability of the Navies carrier force. See below:
So based on the above, the US have approximately 76% of the Worlds carrier launched aircraft. This is an incredible superiority.

Note: The UK have an aircraft carrier at present but they no longer have planes for it. Instead it is used to launch helicopters.But if we compare total aircraft carrier tonnage, the dominance of the US Navy’s carrier force increases to 80% of the worlds total. See below:80% of the worlds total is an incredible superiority for one country to have in any area, but particularly with aircraft carriers. Put another way, the US Navy have 4 times more carriers, in tonnage terms, than all the countries in the world combined.

The UK’s Royal Navy prior to World War one tried to maintain what it called the ‘two power standard’. This meant that the Royal Navy would always aim to have as many battleships as the combined total of the next two biggest navies. This was to try to ensure ensure victory if a war broke out.The US Navy seem to now have a ‘one power standard’ i.e. they are maintaining more aircraft carriers then the rest of the world combined. But despite of all this naval hardware, the advent of nuclear bombs/ missiles mean that the US is a lot less secure then the UK was when its navy ruled the waves.In the photograph below, taken in Norfolk in the US, there are nearly as many aircraft carriers in that one harbour as there are in the rest of the world combined (ex. US).

http://thehelpfulengineer.com/index....orld-combined/

US Navy Aircraft Carriers in Norfolk.
Picture from http://blogs.defensenews.com, click address for more

No, Russia isn’t building a giant new aircraft carrier

By David Axe
February 18, 2015

Russian Aircraft Carrier “Kuznetsov,” January 1996. WIKIMEDIA/Commons

The Kremlin is preparing blueprints for a huge new aircraft carrier, Russian media reported in early February, to replace its navy’s current flattop, the relatively small and aged Admiral Kuznetsov.

Moscow’s new carrier, however, is likely to remain a paper concept. A quarter-century after the Soviet Union’s collapse, Russia lacks the money, expertise and industrial capacity to build aircraft carriers.

A new flattop could boost Moscow’s military power by providing air cover to warships sailing far from Russian shores and giving the Kremlin another option for launching air strikes on distant enemies. Both are now particular concerns for the West because President Vladimir Putin’s Russia has become far more aggressive along its borders.

But the Kremlin has failed to maintain its expensive shipyard facilities and perishable worker skills. So it can’t actually complete the new vessel any time soon.

The Krylov State Research Center in St. Petersburg, which brainstorms most of Moscow’s warships, is doing the design work for the carrier, according to Russia’s TV Zvezda. The TV network featured a scale model of the new flattop earlier this month.

“Admiral Kuznetsov” aircraft carrier, October 29, 2011. WIKIMEDIA/Commons

The model is revealing, however. It underscores the Kremlin’s narrow chance of ever building the warship. Based on the model planes on the scale ship’s deck, the proposed flattop appears to be huge — at least as big as the U.S. Navy’s nuclear-powered supercarriers, which can exceed 1,000 feet in length.

The United States operates 10 such nuclear carriers, each with an air wing of 60 or more planes, plus 10 smaller, non-nuclear amphibious assault ships that can launch small numbers of vertical-landing Harrier attack planes.

Russia’s Kuznetsov is bigger than the U.S. assault ships but smaller than the nuclear flattops. When jets take off from the deck of Kuznetsov, which isn’t often, they rarely number more than a dozen. The new carrier that Krylov is reportedly developing would represent a significant upgrade. That’s why Moscow probably can’t build this new ship.

When the Soviet Union launched Kuznetsov in 1985, it was a major technical accomplishment for the then-superpower.

Moscow began assembling Varyag, a sister ship ofKuznetsov, around the same time. It also started work on a true full-size carrier, as big as anything the United States builds.

But the Soviet Union’s collapse in 1991 abruptly halted the carrier program. One emerging problem was logistics. The Krylov design agency is in Russia, but the Soviet Union’s main carrier-building shipyard was on the Black Sea in Ukraine, which became an independent country that year. (It has not been subjected to the recent fighting.)

Ukraine scrapped the big carrier then under construction and, in 1998, sold the half-completed Varyag to China. Beijing spent 13 years finishing and upgrading Varyag to turn it into China’s first-ever flattop. The rechristened Lianoning now conducts sea trials to help the Chinese navy prepare for future homebuilt carriers and to train a cadre of naval aviators.

Russia was left with Kuznetsov as its sole flattop and, deprived of funds and Ukraine’s assistance, has struggled to keep the vessel in working condition. Since the ship was commissioned into frontline service in the early 1990s, Kuznetsov has deployed just five times. Each deployment, lasting between three and six months, saw the flattop sail from its home port in northern Russia around Europe and into the Mediterranean as a show of force and to demonstrate support for Russia’s allies in the region, including Syria.

The aircraft carriers USS “George H.W. Bush” (front) and USS “Harry S. Truman” conduct an ordnance transfer in the Atlantic Ocean, February 17, 2011. REUTERS/U.S. Navy/Mass Communication Specialist 2nd Class Matthew D. Williams/Handout

By contrast, the U.S. Navy deploys its carriers once every two years for cruises lasting between six and nine months. At any given time, the United States has two or three big carriers and an equal number of small carriers on station in the world’s hot spots.

Russia, however, is lucky if its flattop is available for combat for a few months every few years.

U.S. aircraft carriers have engaged in almost all America’s conflicts since World War Two.Kuznetsov hasn’t launched a single combat sortie.

The carrier is clearly inadequate as a reliable instrument of Russian foreign policy. This says as much about the poor state of Russia’s arms industry, military planning and overall economy as it does about the ship itself. Eager to improve its ability to build reliable flattops, in recent years Moscow undertook two parallel initiatives. Neither worked out as the Kremlin had hoped it would.

Building the Indian Navy’s Vikramaditya at Sevmash Shipyard in Russia. WIKIMEDIA/Indian Navy handout

First, in 2004, Russia and India struck a deal whereby Moscow would pull a small, Soviet-era carrier — the Admiral Gorshkov — out of mothballs, rebuild it to enhance its ability to support jet fighters and sell it to India to replace one of New Delhi’s aged British-built carriers or flattops.

The roughly $1-billion deal was supposed to be a win-win. India would get a reasonably up-to-date carrier for a fraction of the cost of building a new one. (Today, a new large U.S. carrier costs as much as $14 billion.) Meanwhile, Russia’s defense industry would gain fresh experience in carrier construction that should prove useful when it came time to replace Kuznetsov.

But the carrier sale quickly turned into a disaster for both countries. Moscow had underestimated the deficiencies of its main Sevmash shipyard on the White Sea. Costs more than doubled when workers fell behind schedule. Sevmash finally finished the refurbished flattop in late 2013 — five years late.

Then on its maiden voyage from Russia to India, the carrier’s engines broke down, an unsurprising development considering Kuznetsov‘s tarnished record. The Indian deal was supposed to reinvigorate Russian shipbuilding. Instead it only underscored the industry’s weakness. Russia inked a similar deal with France in 2010 to acquire two French-made assault ships for $2 billion. Russian companies would contribute to the vessels’ construction and, at some later date, might build a few more of the ships on their own.

The Mistral-class helicopter carrier “Vladivostok” at the STX Les Chantiers de l’Atlantique shipyard in Saint-Nazaire, western France, April 24, 2014. REUTERS/Stephane Mahe

The Mistral-class vessels can carry only helicopters, not fixed-wing planes. Still, Russian officials hoped that co-producing the ships with France would do what the Indian deal was supposed to — help restore Russia’s ability to construct big warships.

“The purchase of Mistralshipbuilding technology will help Russia to grasp large-capacity shipbuilding,” Russian Admiral Vladimir Vysotsky said. “It is important for construction of ships like the future ocean-going class destroyer and later an aircraft carrier.”

But the French program failed in even more dramatic fashion than the Indian effort. Paris suspended the Mistral deal after Russian troops invaded Ukraine’s Crimean peninsula in early 2014. Notably, when Russia annexed Crimea, it failed to seize Kiev’s main shipyards just north of the peninsula — the same yards that had assembled the Soviet carriers, including Kuznetsov.

For at least 11 years, Moscow has been trying to restore its ability to build aircraft carriers but has made little progress. And with the Russian economy in free fall, owing in large part to sanctions that other countries have imposed over the war in eastern Ukraine, even that modest progress could grind to a halt.

Major General Igor Kozhin, the Russian navy’s chief of naval aviation, said a carrier could be ready before 2025. But one expert doubts if even that is possible. “The earliest that Russia could build a new aircraft carrier is 2027,” estimated Dmitry Gorenburg, a research scientist who is an associate at the Davis Center for Russian and Eurasian Studies at Harvard University.

So any concept for a new Russian flattop will, for now, remain just that — a concept.

http://blogs.reuters.com/great-debat...craft-carrier/

Nation's largest destroyer sets sail to join US Navy