The USS Gerald R. Ford has arrived in Caribbean waters to support the US deployment aimed at dismantling criminal organizations. It is the world's largest aircraft carrier, with a capacity for 4,500 crew members and 70 aircraft.
The United States Navy describes it as the “most capable, versatile, and lethal combat platform in the world.”
Its construction began in November 2009 and it was launched on November 9, 2013, at the Newport News Naval Shipyard in Virginia. It entered service on July 22, 2017, in a ceremony presided over by Donald Trump, who was in the early months of his first term.
The Gerald R. Ford, which is over 335 meters long and operates with nuclear power, is equipped with a pioneering electromagnetic takeoff catapult system, advanced radars and nuclear reactors that supply uninterrupted power to its engines.
The ship, weighing up to 100,000 tons, carries ESSM self-defense missiles and the CIWS short-range weapon system. Its construction cost approximately $13 billion.
During testing, the USS Gerald Ford withstood the impact of three underwater explosions in 2021, known as Ship-Level Shock Tests, confirming its ability to withstand severe impacts and continue operating in adverse conditions.
With this ship begins a new era in the design of American aircraft carriers, as it is the first of the Gerald Ford class, which succeeds the Nimitz class, active between 1975 and 2010.
The US Navy currently has eleven aircraft carriers: ten of the Nimitz class and the Gerald Ford.
The name honors Gerald R. Ford, the thirty-eighth president of the United States, a Republican who assumed the presidency after the resignation of Richard Nixon due to the Watergate scandal, whom he pardoned after taking office.
Ford was the only US vice president and president to hold both offices without being elected by the Electoral College. In 1976, he won the Republican nomination against Ronald Reagan, but lost the presidency to Democrat Jimmy Carter.
Gerald Ford was a lawyer, born in Omaha (Nebraska) on July 14, 1913 and died on December 26, 2006.
The US military presence in the area reaches historic levels
With the transfer of the US aircraft carrier to Latin American waters, more than 15,000 military personnel are added, the largest US military buildup in the region in decades.
In a statement, the U.S. Navy identified only the western Atlantic as the location of the Ford and its three accompanying warships. But a senior military official said the ships had moved to the Caribbean region, nearly three weeks after Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth abruptly ordered the aircraft carrier out of the eastern Mediterranean and into Latin American waters, representing a substantial escalation of U.S. military power in the area.
The news of the Ford's arrival came a day after Hegseth announced that six people had been killed on Sunday in two other attacks on vessels suspected of drug smuggling in the eastern Pacific Ocean. The most recent attacks raised the death toll in the offensive to 76 in 19 attacks in the Pacific and Caribbean Sea since the beginning of September.
Sean Parnell, the Pentagon's chief spokesman, said in a statement Tuesday that the"forces will bolster the United States' ability to detect, monitor, and disrupt illicit actors and activities that threaten the security and prosperity of the United States homeland and our security in the Western Hemisphere."
