3 ms·

Well, did they take him up on the offer? lol

• Animats 6y ago
  No.
  • dylan604 6y ago
    Congress, collectively, is not often referred to as "smart". If I'm a senator and a guy sitting in front of me makes that offer, I take him up on it and hold his feet to the fire. How do you explain that to your constituents? I was offered free, and I said no. Re-elect Me!!! To be fair, the building of the actual carrier is just part of the price of a carrier. What's the cost to also fit that carrier out with all of the various aircraft required to make the carrier worth having? Didn't we see an example of this when the NSA donated Hubble equivalent satellites to NASA, but NASA had to politely say no since they had no budget to operate them?
    • smorephism 6y ago
      >What's the cost to also fit that carrier out with all of the various aircraft required to make the carrier worth having? Right idea! The answer is "hardly anything, relative to crewing it for its useful lifetime", but you're barking up the correct tree.
      • kevinpet 6y ago
        DOD budget is about $350K per employee. A typical E5 (sergeant or PO2 in the navy) makes $3K/mo, or 1/10 of that.
    • jbay808 6y ago
      You could always sell the bare-bones carrier to an ally, the way Russia sold their extra carrier to China.
    • akiselev 6y ago
      > Didn't we see an example of this when the NSA donated Hubble equivalent satellites to NASA, but NASA had to politely say no since they had no budget to operate them? It was the NRO not the NSA and NASA did accept the donation. They announced the mission schedule for one of the satellites in 2016 [1] [1] https://spaceflightnow.com/2016/02/18/nasa-moves-forward-with-mission-using-spy-satellite-telescope/ https://spaceflightnow.com/2016/02/18/nasa-moves-forward-wit...
• willvarfar 6y ago
  Details https://news.usni.org/2018/04/16/newport-news-save-1-6-billion-maintain-stable-workforce-25000-2-proposed-carrier-buy https://news.usni.org/2018/04/16/newport-news-save-1-6-billi...
  • rkagerer 6y ago
    I don't see any "throw a third carrier in for free" mentioned in that article. The link says the savings from Newport would be $1.6B. It also quotes the Navy acquisitions chief pointing out "about a third of the cost of a carrier comes from government-furnished equipment that the Navy would contract for separately" and that he previously said the overall savings of ordering two at once would be around $2.5B after considering similar efficiencies of "scale" from those vendors. Considering the cost[1] of these Ford-class carriers is around $13B this represents a savings of about 10% overall, at least according to my crude, back-of-the-napkin math [ 2.5B/(2x13B) or 1.6B/(2/3x2x13B) ]. So it might be closer to "buy 10, get one free". [1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gerald_R._Ford-class_aircraft_carrier https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gerald_R._Ford-class_aircraf...
    • jessaustin 6y ago
      Please don't give them any ideas...