There’s nothing worse than getting a $2,500 transmission bill at the mechanic. Well, unless you’re the Navy.
The Navy recently dropped a ship off for service and was told the bill was $5.1 billion. Oh, and it won’t be ready until November 2031. At least there’s time to pay it off…
The ship is the USS Harry S. Truman, a 1,092-foot nuclear aircraft carrier that’s been in the fleet since 1998. On Wednesday, she left her pier at Naval Station Norfolk, Virginia, and made the short run over to Newport News Shipbuilding, the same yard that built her. HII confirmed her arrival on September 30. As commutes go, it’s basically nothing.
And yet, she won’t be back for five years.
The job is called a Refueling and Complex Overhaul, or RCOH, and the Navy describes it as a “once-in-a-carrier-lifetime” maintenance period. Every Nimitz-class carrier gets exactly one at midlife, setting the ship up for the back half of its service life, which runs past 50 years.
The contract, awarded to the yard a day before the ship arrived, totals $5,099,973,132, with options that would push it to about $5.2 billion.
So what do you get for that kind of money?
The fuel only comes out once
The Truman is powered by two Westinghouse A4W nuclear reactors. They boil water into steam, the steam spins turbines, and the turbines turn the shafts that push 103,900 tons of ship along at better than 30 knots. The cores are loaded with enough fuel to cover half of a 50-year service life, which is why a carrier never pulls into a gas station.
It’s also why, once in that life, the whole ship has to go into the shop at once.
The catch is there’s no fuel cap. Instead, the reactor compartments sit deep in the hull, sealed behind heavy shielding, so getting at the cores means going through the ship itself. The yard cuts its way in, lifts the spent cores out, loads fresh ones, and seals everything back up. That’s the “refueling” half of the name, and it’s a job on the scale of stripping a land-based reactor.
Except this one has to run for another 25 years afterward.
The “complex overhaul” half is pretty much everything else. According to HII, the yard will blast and repaint the hull and freeboard, repair the propellers, shafts, rudders, and sea chests (the openings in the hull where the ship pulls in seawater for cooling), and work through thousands of compartments and tanks.
The propulsion plant and combat systems get major upgrades on top of that. HII says this one visit packs in about a third of all the maintenance and modernization the ship will ever get. For scale, we recently covered a 200-ton valve in Tennessee that gets touched once a decade, and that visit took a 60-day shutdown. The Truman’s stay runs about 30 times longer.
And you thought that engine swap on your classic muscle car was complex.
Bryan Caccavale, Newport News Shipbuilding’s vice president of program management, said the yard spent years getting ready, “from ordering long lead-time materials to conducting thousands of inspections and preliminary work.” I want to believe him, because there should be a lot of learning after what happened with previous ships in the fleet…
Ask the carrier next door how five years goes
The Truman is the eighth of 10 Nimitz-class carriers to go through an RCOH at Newport News, so there’s plenty of history to check. I went looking. It isn’t reassuring…
The USS John C. Stennis arrived there in May 2021 for what was planned as a five-and-a-half-year overhaul… That schedule is long gone. USNI News reported in June that the job had slipped by around 14 months. She’s now scheduled to depart shortly, with more than 25 million man-hours of work in her, according to the Navy.
The carrier before that, the USS George Washington, needed nearly six years to be handed back in 2023. That’s two overhauls in a row running long.
Which brings me to a small wrinkle in Truman’s own paperwork. Stars and Stripes calls it a three-year overhaul right next to the November 2031 finish date, and September 2026 to November 2031 is five years and change. I’m going with the date, since that’s the one the Navy attached to the schedule. But c’mon guys, make up your minds.
Either way, you shouldn’t plan on seeing this ship at sea before the 2030s.
The sailors are getting out of the painting business
For decades, sailors assigned to a carrier in overhaul got handed the grunt work: painting, insulating, and hauling material around an industrial yard.
The Navy decided to stop doing that with the Truman. It awarded five contracts to commercial contractors to take over those jobs, returning an estimated 690,000 labor-hours to the crew for training and actual Navy work, reported USNI News.
The push came after years of complaints about what a long overhaul does to a crew. This became especially noticeable during the George Washington’s stay, forcing the issue. A ship in RCOH is a construction site, not a warship, and her crew stays assigned to her through it.
The Truman, for her part, has earned the five-plus-year break. She got back to Norfolk in June 2025 from a 251-day deployment. Along the way, she collided with a merchant ship near the northern entrance to the Suez Canal in February 2025, taking damage to her starboard aft section.
The Navy said at the time that the damage would be repaired during this overhaul, so the fix would be handled during the stay. (In my mind, this means we may see another delay like with the previous ships, but maybe I’m too much of a cynic.)
When she comes out the other side, the Navy says she’ll be the most advanced carrier in the Nimitz class, with fuel and upgrades enough to serve into the 2050s. The yard, meanwhile, gets to swap one flattop for another: the Stennis, in since May 2021, heads out with her 25 million man-hours as the Truman settles in for a redelivery the Navy has scheduled for November 2031.
