Aircraft Carriers - What is their future?

[Bengalzona]

(07-19-2017, 04:52 PM)TheLeonardLeap Wrote: Honestly, I would rather up those 21 carriers to 30-40 and just pull out of Germany, England, Italy, Spain, etc.

If the excuse for us having to pay massive sums of money to defend other countries is so we can be anywhere and everywhere in the world, I would rather just up our carrier game and shut down those bases.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_military_deployments
58,500 troops in those four countries, plus their dependents, plus private contractors. All need housing and food, and if you need to send new people there, they have to fly across the Atlantic, etc.

We could also massively scale back our presence in Japan if not leave outright, with another 40k troops, plus dependents and private contractors.

Consolidate and downscale our bases around the world, probably also down-scaling the size of our military, while still maintaining our ability to bring force anywhere.


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EDIT: Some stuff I forgot to add....

This is from 2012... http://security.blogs.cnn.com/2012/02/28/one-soldier-one-year-850000-and-rising/
It says $850k-1.4m/year in Afghanistan per soldier.
This is from 2013... https://www.yahoo.com/news/it-costs--2-1-million-per-year-for-each-soldier-deployed-in-afghanistan--report-133150602.html
It raised to $2.1m/year in Afghanistan per soldier, costing more as the total number dropped.

Did the math, so that would make 1 carrier group's cost even at the increased number including overhauls and such cost less than 1,129 troops in Afghanistan in 2013. I would rather have the carrier, 5 or so ships, and 1 submarine, capable of going anywhere in the world than those 1,129 troops in Afghanistan.

Then get rid of some stupid crap, like the F-35 program.

There are quire a few people who feel that way. 

My concern about carriers isn't their usefulness in peacetime or during conflicts with minor countries, but more of their usefulness against someone like China and Russia. 

Afghanistan may be one of the most expensive places for us to send troops on the planet. We have had to secure overland supply routes through Pakistan and air support bases in places like Uzbekistan. Of course, that is one of the reasons why terror organizations choose hard to get places like that. They fester in the armpits of the world. Naval aviation can't help us a whole lot there because of how far inland it is.

Not sure about the $2.1 million figure, but the lower figures ($850K to $1.4 million) don't surprise me.  Plus our nation-building experiment efforts are massively expensive. Not sure if it is worth it. But by the same token, as soon as we move out, the cockroaches move back in.