Kearsarge is fully capable of amphibious assault, advance force and special purpose operations, as well as non-combatant evacuation and other humanitarian missions. Since her commissioning, she has performed these missions the world over, including evacuating non-combatants from Freetown, Sierra Leone, on 31 May 1997 and rescuing Air Force Captain Scott O'Grady from Serb-controlled territory in Bosnia on 8 June 1995. Additionally, Kearsarge is fully equipped with state of the art command and control (C4I) systems for flagship command duty, and her medical facilities are second in capability only to the Navy's hospital ships, USNS Comfort and Mercy.
In carrying out her mission, Kearsarge not only transports and lands ashore troops, but also tanks, trucks, artillery, and the complete logistic support needed to supply an assault.
The assault support system aboard ship coordinates horizontal and vertical movement of troops, cargo and vehicles. Monorail trains, moving at speeds up to 600-feet-per-minute, transport cargo and supplies from storage and staging areas throughout the ship to a 13,600-square foot well deck which opens to the sea through huge gates in the ship's stern. There, the cargo, troops and vehicles are loaded aboard landing craft for transit to the beach. The air cushion landing craft can fly out of the dry well deck, or the well deck can be flooded so conventional landing craft can float out on their way to the beach.
Simultaneously, helicopters are brought from the hanger deck to the flight deck by two deck-edge elevators and loaded with supplies from three massive cargo elevators.
Kearsarge's armament suite includes the NATO Sea Sparrow point defense system for anti-air warfare protection, the Rolling Airframe missile defense systems, 25mm chain guns and the Phalanx close-in weapon system to counter threats from low-flying aircraft and close-in small craft. Missile decoy launchers augment the anti-ship missile defenses.
Ingalls Shipbuilding in Pascagoula, Mississippi, built Kearsarge using efficient pre-outfitting and modular construction techniques. Hundreds of smaller subassemblies, containing piping, ventilation ducting and other hardware, as well as major machinery equipment, generators, and electrical panels were constructed. The subassemblies were then joined with others to form assemblies, which were in turn welded together to form five completed hull and superstructure modules. These giant modules, each weighing thousands of tons, were joined together on land to form the completed ship's hull. The result of this early outfitting was a ship that was over 70 percent complete at launch.
General Characteristics