Pentagon honors USS Gerald R. Ford carrier group after record deployment

Nearly 4,500 sailors came home to Norfolk on board the USS Gerald R. Ford Carrier Strike Group on Friday, capping a 326-day run that Navy officials said was the longest U.S. aircraft carrier deployment since the Vietnam War. The Pentagon also awarded the group the Presidential Unit Citation, one of the military’s highest unit honors, for extraordinary heroism in action.

The Ford returned to Naval Station Norfolk with the destroyers USS Bainbridge and USS Mahan, while USS Winston Churchill arrived at Naval Station Mayport. The homecoming ended an 11-month deployment that began when the Gerald R. Ford left Norfolk on June 24, 2025, and sent the strike group across the U.S. 4th, 5th and 6th Fleet areas of responsibility.

The mission stretched from the North Sea and Mediterranean Sea to the Caribbean Sea and Red Sea, a global operating tempo that Navy leaders said showed the carrier group’s value in deterrence and power projection. Before the return, the Ford crew completed 23 replenishments at sea and sailed more than 57,713 nautical miles. Carrier Air Wing 8 added more than 5,760 flight hours and 12,200 flight launches.

The deployment surpassed the previous post-Vietnam carrier record, set by USS Abraham Lincoln with a roughly 295-day deployment in 2020. Navy officials said the Ford strike group stayed fully mission capable throughout the tour, a measure of readiness that matters as carrier groups are asked to cover multiple theaters at once.

Secretary of War Pete Hegseth greeted the crew at Norfolk with his wife, Jennifer, and senior Navy leaders. The ceremony underscored the human cost behind the numbers: months away from home, repeated underway replenishments, and the strain that extended deployments place on military families.

The Gerald R. Ford is the lead ship of the Ford class, the first new U.S. aircraft carrier class in more than 40 years. It is the world’s largest aircraft carrier and the Navy’s most advanced, with upgraded flight-deck systems, improved launch and recovery gear, greater electrical capacity and features built for long missions. That combination of scale and technology has made the ship central to the Navy’s effort to sustain global presence, even as the length of the latest deployment raised the stakes for the sailors who carried it out.