"With the Ford class aircraft carrier running around $14 billion to procure the first ship, and the Joint Strike Fighter running around $3 billion just to procure the aircraft for two squadrons for the carrier, not to mention the remarkably high per-hour flight cost of the JSF, nor to mention the coming UCAS addition to the air wing, and stack on costs for the loss of efficiencies that occur when supporting multiple types of aircraft instead of 1 type (F-18), and before you get to other operational costs and organizational costs you find that the cost of building and fielding a single big deck aircraft carrier is simply unaffordable by any metric."
Actually two as there is a big difference in supply chain items between the legacy and Super Hornet. However the point above is on the right track. And, the sleeping giant in charge of the purse is becoming more aware.
"To be perfectly honest, the costs on everything related to carrier strike groups has grown so high over the last few years that the Ford class carrier centric organizational model for US Navy forces is almost certainly a worse investment than other credible alternatives even if the money did exist. The budget challenges facing the Navy simply force the issue."
Chronic problems like this do not help either.
The budget cuts will happen. What will make them bad is the DOD has little or no sense of how to procure or sustain weapons systems. What makes it worse is after the Cold War, we down-sized a lot of tribal knowledge. Skills like, oh; I don't know; let us call them engineers.
I think when the debt has her coming out party--wearing of course, red--we will see parked ships and aircraft because there is no way to pay for anything.
And, outside this blog, I am always the guy trying to keep the team's spirits up. Der optimist. Hard to do on the topic of defense.
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