Our *Very* Expensive Navy

[unhappycamper]

unhappycamper note: Since the ‘Pentagon’ (DoD? Gannett?) has ‘requested’ that I only post one paragraph from articles on Army Times, and Airforce Times, To keep in that same (new) tradition, I will also do the same for for articles on Navy Times, Marine Corps Times, stripes.com and military.com.
To read the article in the military's own words, you will need to click the link.

Read all about Fair Use here. It sure is beginning to smell like fascism.

unhappycamper summary of this article: Gates was correct about the expensive hardware.

Let's talk about our 11 existing carriers. They are all Nimitz-class ships. The last one, the G.H.W. Bush costs We The People $6.8 billion dollars - $2.3 billion dollars of that was overtime. (They wanted to make sure Poppy was around when the thing was christened.) Prior to that Nimitz-class carriers cost around $4.5 billion dollars to deliver, sans people and airplanes.

Our newest carrier, the USS Gerald R. Ford, is going to cost somewhere between $16 to $40 billion dollars to deliver, sans people and airplanes. (I'm betting on the $40 billion cost.)

Think about that for a minute. The USS Gerald R. Ford is going to cost slightly less than the oldest 10 Nimitz-class carriers we own.


$3 to $6 billion destroyers? Look to the DDG-1000 class destroyers - $5.3 to $5.9 billion dollars to deliver. We The People already own two of these. I guess We The People had a few extra bucks, so our congresscritters ordered another one. That rates a double WFT in my book, :wtf: :wtf:


$7 billion submarines? This is an interesting number because I thought Virginia-class submarines cost us around $2.8 billion dollars each. Guess not. :(


Do we really need to buy and build more of these things? Really?






Navy Secretary Ray Mabus stressed his support for an 11-carrier Navy during a breakfast meeting with reporters April 27.


SECNAV: 11 carriers ‘about right’
By Joshua Stewart - Staff writer
Posted : Saturday Apr 30, 2011 9:55:28 EDT

“Do we really need 11 carrier strike groups for another 30 years when no other country has more than one?” he said at the Navy League’s Sea Air Space Exposition. “At the end of the day we have to ask whether the nation can really afford a Navy that relies on $3 (billion) to $6 billion destroyers, $7 billion submarines and $11 billion carriers.”

[taterguy]

1. The most dubious of those expenditures is the 7 billion for attack subs

Those boats were designed for one thing: To sink another navy's ballistic missile boats.

Does anyone really think that's a likely threat anymore?

Now they're justified by saying they can insert Seal teams to fight terrorists, as if the terrorists can't simply move their training camps a couple hundred miles inland.

[Enthusiast]

2. There is simply

no justification for a U.S. military even 1/4 the size it is now. This is the military industrial complex Eisenhower warned us about. The cost of this MIC has bankrupted our nation.

[Mimosa]

3. MIC had offshored so much manufacturing that about all we have left is heavy arms manufacturing

The USA is still #1 in heavy arms manufacturing and everything related to supporting the cycle of warfare.

but now almost all the other jobs we used to have making things people used and bought every day are GONE, gone, gone. maybe some policies will change and we can get manufacturing jobs back. I knew those steady jobs making ceramics, car parts, tools, kitchen wares, clothing, textiles and the like were offshored so that corporations could increase profits.

I have come to believe the jobs were taken away so that the military would have plenty of younger able-bodied volunteers in the absence of a draft. Because of the decline of wages since the 1970s, most families can no longer afford to pay for their children to get higher education. Military enlistment offers the chance for higher educations which few can now afford.

[Bosso 63]

4. You just can't have too many carriers.

http://www.globalsecurity.org/military/world/carriers.htm

[formercia]

5. Supercavitating torpedoes

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/VA-111_Shkval

Apparently, the Iranians have armed speedboats with the export version. There is not much room to maneuver in the Persian Gulf for a Carrier.

Torpedoes are a lot cheaper than Carriers.