Press TV
August 6, 2014
Not at war, but US to refurbish USS George Washington
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A political commentator says the US Navy has decided to refurbish its nuclear-powered aircraft carrier although it is not “technically at war against any formidable adversary at any rate.”
The Navy has awarded a $50 million contract to prepare the USS George Washington for nuclear defueling despite looming defense budget cuts.
“Plans by the US Navy to refurbish and re-launch the USS George Washington have to be seen in two contexts,” Rick Rozoff of the Stop NATO International Network told Press TV in a phone interview on Tuesday.
“One there is an economic component to this,” he said. “This is a potential boondoggle for the military-industrial complex which makes money off this.”
“And second of all it’s an indication that far from retreating the US will continue to expand its aggressive military deployments abroad,” Rozoff continued.
He added that US aircraft carriers have been rotating “regularly in very sensitive and also strategically important parts of the world – the Mediterranean Sea, the Arabian Sea and of course increasingly in Far East Asia right now, where the US has signaled its Asia-Pacific pivot where in 60 percent of US naval forces are now to be deployed to the Asia-Pacific region.”
“We are seeing an increased brinkmanship and aggressivity on the behalf of the United States internationally and military directly or through proxies and that a vital component of that is the fleet of US aircraft carriers which the USS George Washington evidently is going to be maintained and re-launched,” Rozoff said.
The aircraft carrier in question, Rozoff said, is one of 14 US aircraft carriers that are all nuclear-powered and they are all what are called super carriers.
“In theory the US has the ability to deploy somewhere in the neighborhood of a dozen or more aircraft carriers simultaneously,” he said. “So we have to get some idea of the unprecedented size, scope and intensity of US naval and general military operations globally.”
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