The USS America (CV-66) has a rare history for an American carrier. Her tale is not just of the time she spent at sea, but of how her loss taught the Navy lessons it continues to learn today. Commissioned in 1965, she was a product of Cold War designs. She was originally envisioned as part of a nuclear-powered Enterprise class, but shifting defense budgets eventually made her part of the Kitty Hawk carriers.
For more than three decades, America carried her own weight across the globe. From Vietnam to the Persian Gulf, she was a flying airbase and collected eight battle stars in the bargain. More than 13,000 combat sorties launched from her decks, and not one was ever lost to enemy fire—a feat few carriers in history can claim.
When she was finally retired in 1996, much of her crew and fan base wished she’d be preserved as a museum ship. Instead, the Navy had other plans. In 2005, she was selected to be part of one of the Navy’s most ambitious experiments ever. It was dubbed a SinkEx, a live fire exercise designed not only to sink her, but to find out just how much abuse a contemporary supercarrier could take. As Admiral John Nathman then said, “America will make one final and vital contribution… her sacrifice will help build the carriers of tomorrow.”
The test itself was unprecedented. The ship, fueled down and armed down, was towed into the Atlantic. There she was pounded for weeks by the very ordnance she could have had to deal with in combat—bombs, torpedoes, and missiles. The point wasn’t to send her down as fast as possible, but to see how her construction and systems responded to the type of relentless barrage that no carrier had ever experienced.
What occurred stunned even the Navy’s own engineers. America took blow after blow and would not fall. Her staggered-hull construction enabled incoming rounds to tear through alternating layers of space and steel, distributing the damage again and again. Her size and mass made her incredibly difficult to cripple. In fact, engineers conceded later that she absorbed more punishment than many of the highly armored battleships of World War II could have tolerated.
But even a vessel as resilient as this has a breaking point. Weeks of unceasing pounding, and she still would not sink. Eventually, Navy demolition teams had to board her and place charges deep within her bowels to finish the job. Only then did the USS America sink, lying almost 17,000 feet below on the floor of the Atlantic. Today, she remains the only modern American carrier to have been deliberately sunk for trials—much of what was learned is still classified.
The shock trials were sobering and reassuring. Carriers are far tougher than they are perceived to be by people, but they are not entirely invincible. What was discovered from America’s final mission guided the subsequent carrier generation, the Ford class. Those newer carriers have since gone through their own brutal shock trials, enduring massive underwater explosions and proving that they could still fight the worst possible conditions.
As subsequently outlined by Captain Brian Metcalf, “We built these carriers to survive the worst,” citing the blend of cutting-edge engineering, computer simulation, and hard-won experience in the real world that went into building them.
But the test also proved what all Marines already knew—survivability is more than armor steel. The true strength of a carrier is the shield of defense encircling it: the destroyers, cruisers, submarines, and aircraft forming the strike group, backed by radar, electronic warfare, and even still-experimental new defenses like directed-energy weapons. A carrier is never a lone warrior—it is the hub of a much larger shield.
The sinking of the USS America was the wake-up call. It showed that supercarriers are harder to sink than almost anyone ever imagined, but it reminded the Navy that nothing afloat is invulnerable.
As one of the old salts who sailed on her once put it: given enough time and firepower, even the finest ship can be sunk. The lesson she teaches us is a lasting one—sea victory is never guaranteed. It’s a lesson that must be learned every day, by way of innovation, preparation, and vigilance.