Hasty Ruminations

The U.S. Navy, as it does every year, sent 2% of its world wide fleet of commissioned war ships into New York harbor yesterday, for Fleet Week.

An amphibious helicopter carrier, two cruisers, and two guided missile destroyers. Five ships. That’s 2% of the fleet of 276 ships.

The fleet is so small because the politicians are in love with nuclear aircraft cariers, which cost $4.5 billion each plus $160 million per year operating costs, plus the cost of the airplanes (a couple of billion, I guess.) The cost of a new guided missile destroyer of the Arleigh Burke class is $1.1 billion, including the weapons systems, plus $20 million per year operating costs. So, we can buy six DDG’s for one CVN, and those six can operate cheaper than the birdfarm.

No doubt, carriers are very capable and very impressive, and enemies view them very warily. But we also need more ships, for responsiveness, agility and crew rotations.

Besides, we had an alternate acronym to “CVN”. We called them “HVT’s”.

“High Value Targets”.