How Much Is An Aircraft Carrier Worth?

It looks like our friends over in Brussels still aren't catching on too well. Javier Solona has made a speech in which he warns against a return to "cave-man" politics on the part of the US. It would seem to me that when you're trying to curry favor with someone, you don't do it by referring to them that way.

Mr. Solona is most certainly trying to curry favor for the EU. He complains about "cherry-picking" of allies from within the EU. He apparently feels that "The EU has capacities that it individual members lack." Since the EU only seems to have the capacity to be bureaucratic and obstructionist, we probably don't want to seek their "capacities;" we want to get things done rather than debating them until all parties involved are dead.

But along with all the EU diplo-speak in the article was this nugget:

But he defended Europe's peacekeeping approach. "How much additional security does an aircraft carrier bring? Is it more or less than spending the equivalent amount of money on peacekeeping or reconstruction of failed states?"

Let's see. A Nimitz carrier runs somewhere around $6 billion - we'll call it $10 billion with the aircraft and other assorted support stuff. We offered Turkey several billion more than that and what security did that buy us? How many nations are better off because we threw $10 billion at a kleptocratic government? How much of the money given to the Palestinian Authority has actually been spent on bettering their people's lives and how much has been stolen, spent on weapons, or used to teach racial hatred? Is the world really better off having suicide bombers and a couple of generations of people who believe that Israel will eventually be thrown back into the Med?

And certainly his implicit implication that our carriers don't provide security is accurate. In a crisis, we never ask "where are the carriers?" We always lead off "with how much money do we need to sink into this bottomless pit of hatred and despair before the world will be a happy place again?"

The carriers are, to this point in history, the ultimate tool for projecting power around the world. Is it really surprising that the two leading participants in the Iraq conflict are the two that actually put carriers to sea? Someone recently said (I wish I could remember where I saw this) that being able to put 1000 airplanes per day over Iraq is worth at least another armored division. The carriers in place are major contributors to that capability. And with them we can put up the same capacity over virtually any point on the globe in a very short time (certainly much less than is needed to get an actual armored division to the area and ready to fight).

When it's been necessary we have sent the carriers to various hotspots around the world, almost always with the same results. When the carriers went through the Straights of Taiwan, the mainland Chinese complained and blustered, but got the message and started behaving again. When a carrier parked itself off the Korean coast, the N.K.s complained and blustered, but they got the message and ratcheted down the rhetoric somewhat (although it is still at dangerous levels). The most fearsome sight for our enemy, even more so than the 16-inch gunned Iowas, is a Nimitz battle group steaming over the horizon towards them.

So would I rather spend $10 billion on a carrier or $10 billion trying to save a failing nation? I don't really see where there is any question. How much additional security does an aircraft carrier bring? Quite a bit.