What’s next for the USS Gerald R. Ford?

Family, friends and high profile guests – including many from MI – traveled to Naval Station Norfolk to see the vessel become an official part of the U.S. Navy.

The USS Gerald R. Ford measures about 1,100 feet long – which is roughly equivalent to 3.5 football fields.

They included former Vice President Dick Cheney and former Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, both of whom served in President Ford’s administration.

The USS Ford is named after the country’s 38th president, who rose to the rank of lieutenant commander in the Navy during World War II. The Navy blames the delays and budget overruns on the ship’s state-of-the-art systems.

A Government Accountability Office report released this month said the Navy could spend another $780 million preparing the carrier for battle.

President Trump officially commissioned the U.S. Navy’s newest and largest aircraft carrier, the USS Gerald R. Ford, in Norfolk, Virginia, on Saturday (July 22), applauding the military’s strength. “The USS Gerald R. Ford is really a quantum leap into the 21st century”.

The Navy’s newest vessel is the lead ship in a new class of aircraft carriers.

“This ship is the deterrent that keeps us from having to fight in the first place”, Trump said.

The commission is an appropriate cap to “Made in America Week” during which the President signed an Executive Order on Assessing and Strengthening the Manufacturing and Defense Industrial Base and Supply Chain Resiliency of the U.S.

She said: “There is no-one, absolutely no-one, who would be prouder of the commissioning of this mighty ship than the president of the United States, Gerald R Ford”. Hitting each other with burning logs, smashing breeze blocks across their stomachs with sledge hammers: are they the most terrifying soldiers in the world? He said changes in the defense acquisition process are needed to make sure the U.S. gets the best equipment at the best prices.

And in November 2014, we found that shifting construction work on the CVN 78 aircraft carrier to the post-delivery period could obscure the total cost of the ship and result in the need for additional funding to complete the ship during post-delivery. He also said that whatever convenience that is afforded to be able to quickly switch one gender’s bathroom to another, is lost, because of the amount of space that water closets and stalls take up.

The Ford class is the first new design for a carrier in more than 40 years and sets the stage for a phased replacement of the Nimitz class.

ABC News and other media were invited on a tour of the carrier 12 days before its commissioning on Saturday.

Former president of Newport News Shipbuilding Matthew Mulherin spoke about the construction and sea trials of the carrier, commenting on its magnificence. The carrier operates with a crew of just 2,600 sailors, which is 600 less than the Nimitz-class carriers. Moreover, unlike regular fleet carriers, the brand-new Ford is still in pristine condition and sports a gold-painted anchor-a badge of honor noting that she has an exceptionally high crew retention rate.

In speaking of her father, Ford Bales often says that nothing came easy for him.