The United States Department of Defense (Pentagon) has announced that the aircraft carrier USS Gerald R. Ford is returning to the United States after an 11-month mission. The US Secretary of Defense is preparing for the official welcome of the ship.<\/p>\n
According to the Pentagon, Pete Hegseth, the US Secretary of Defense, is set to travel to the Norfolk Naval Station in Virginia to greet approximately 4,500 sailors aboard the ship and their families. The carrier is returning to its home port after completing one of its longest deployments.<\/p>\n
Data published by the US Naval Institute’s news website indicates that the Gerald R. Ford has spent a total of 326 days at sea. This marks the longest deployment period for a US aircraft carrier in the past five decades and is the third-longest deployment period since the Vietnam War.<\/p>\n
However, the mission was not without challenges. On March 12, the US Fifth Fleet reported a fire on the carrier’s deck in the Red Sea, which resulted in two sailors being injured.<\/p>\n
Additionally, reports have stated that the carrier faced serious issues with its sanitary facilities during the mission, affecting nearly 650 toilets onboard. No further details have been released regarding the cause of these problems.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
USS Gerald R. Ford returns to the US after an 11-month deployment, facing challenges including a fire and major sanitary facility issues onboard.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":13139,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[6],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-13140","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-international"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/atlaspress.news\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13140","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/atlaspress.news\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/atlaspress.news\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/atlaspress.news\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/atlaspress.news\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=13140"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/atlaspress.news\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13140\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/atlaspress.news\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/13139"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/atlaspress.news\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=13140"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/atlaspress.news\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=13140"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/atlaspress.news\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=13140"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}