After operating in the contested South China Sea earlier this week, the United States Navy’s only forward-deployed nuclear-powered aircraft carrier, the USS George Washington (CVN-73), is now heading to Vietnam and is expected to arrive in Da Nang on Thursday. The port call will also likely last through Monday.
CVN-73 began its current
deployment in May, and spent much of the past month in the Philippine Sea
before it transited the Luzon Strait into the South China Sea.
First Visit to Vietnam
in Three Years
The USS George Washington
will be just the fourth U.S. Navy carrier to visit Vietnam in more than five
decades, and the first visit to the country since the USS Ronald Reagan (CVN-76) made another port call in June 2023, when it
served as the forward-deployed supercarrier in the U.S. 7th Fleet and based at
Yokosuka, Japan. During that visit, CVN-76 was accompanied by the Ticonderoga-class guided missile
cruisers USS Antietam (CG-54) and USS
Robert Smalls (CG-62).
There were only two other occasions in which the United States Navy’s aircraft carriers visited the Southeast Asian nation, including in March 2020, when the USS Theodore Roosevelt (CVN-71) docked at Da Nang; and two years earlier, in March 2018 when history was made by the port call of the USS Carl Vinson (CVN-70), with being the first U.S. Navy aircraft carrier to travel to Vietnam since 1975.
Still, the America-class amphibious assault ship USS Tripoli (LHA-7), also joined by CG-62, was the last flattop to make a high-profile port visit to the country just last December.
Da Nang Expanding Port Facilities
Da Nang is now home to the third largest port system in Vietnam, after just the Saigon Port in Ho Chi Minh City and the Port of Hai Phòng. Its port facility is now undergoing an extensive expansion costing more than $1.7 billion that includes automated cargo-handling technology.
Plans also call for stronger road and rail links with industrial centers in the region, including in neighboring Laos and Thailand.
However, the improvements aren’t part of a naval expansion in the Maritime Southeast Asian nation, even as it is the port that has been frequented by U.S. warships.
“Hanoi has no interest in turning Da Nang into an anti-China outpost, nor is Vietnam likely to abandon its longstanding reluctance to enter formal military alliances. Instead, Vietnam is building resilience,” the Asia Times reported. “Better ports strengthen supply chains.”
Carrier Deployments During The Vietnam War
Although USS George Washington will be just the fourth aircraft carrier – not counting the USS Tripoli – to make a port call to Da Nang, it is worth noting that this is still more flattops that visited Vietnam than during the Second Indo-China War in the late 1960s and early 1970s.
In total, 28 United States aircraft carriers operated off the coast of Vietnam, at either Yankee or Dixie Stations, during the war. Instead, the vessels remained offshore in the Gulf of Tonkin and the South China Sea rather than docking in Vietnamese ports.
Active combat operations precluded routine port visits during the conflict, and no carriers docked or made any official “visits” inside the country.
The United States Navy’s USS Enterprise (CVN-65) was the first and only nuclear-powered carrier to be deployed to the region during the conflict, with the conventionally powered flattops USS Midway (CVA-41) and USS Hancock (CVA-19) having the distinction of being among the warships stationed offshore of Vietnam and participating in Operation Frequent Wind.
Both of those two aircraft carriers served as landing and refuge sites for evacuating helicopters and the thousands of displaced personnel during the fall of Saigon (now Ho Chi Minh City).
The visits by the U.S. Navy warships are a sign of the strong and growing defense ties between the United States and Vietnam, signaling the strategic realignment in the Indo-Pacific region, and a shared concerns over China’s maritime claims.