[Onkel Neal]

http://www.fool.com/investing/genera...an-have-a.aspx

You Can Have an Aircraft Carrier. Or You Can Have a Navy. Pick One.

Hendrix explained, a 94,000-ton Nimitz-class carrier (as pictured above) costs $5 billion to build. That's about a third of the Navy's annual shipbuilding budget. But the new 100,000-ton Gerald R. Ford-class carriers will cost $14 billion each -- nearly one full year's worth of shipbuilding dollars.

That same money, if differently deployed, could buy the Navy "seven missile-laden destroyers, or seven submarines, or 28 frigates, or 100 joint high-speed vessels," according to Hendrix. Or the Navy could mix and match, and build an entire war fleet for the cost of just one new aircraft carrier.

Hendrix's most damning critique of today's aircraft carriers is that they might not be as useful as we think. As he pointed out, "Americans are willing to risk their lives for important reasons, but they have also become increasingly averse to casualties." Each Ford-class aircraft carrier carries a crew of 4,800, yet is vulnerable to just one lucky strike by an opposing force.

In illustration of which, a recent Navy war game pitted U.S. Carrier Strike Group 12, including the USS Theodore Roosevelt and its several escorting cruisers, destroyers, and submarines, against a French navy Saphir-class submarine. In the course of the exercise, the French submarine simulated an attack on the group, successfully "eliminating" first the aircraft carrier, then most of its escort.