The US Navy spends approximately $60 billion per year operating and supporting its fleet
of 480 ships, that seems like a lot, right?
To put things in perspective, Americans spend about 100 billion dollars per year on lottery
tickets, 80 billion dollars on tobacco, and 70 billion dollars on beer as cited by Forbes.
This number is quite fantastic, isn’t it?
But then, how much does it actually cost to operate the warships?
Hello everyone, welcome back again with us on another episode at Military TV.
In today’s session, we will take a look on the operational budget spent for the aircraft
carriers, if you are curious to the answer, stay tune with us and don’t move anywhere!
The aircraft carriers are not just merely large vessels that can fight in warfare.
They are rather a symbol of prestige and power for fleets representing their countries.
Considered as the world's largest warships, the United States is the only country in history
to sustain 11-fleet of large-deck, nuclear-powered aircraft carriers.
The term "large-deck" refers to a carrier with a deck area of more than four acres,
large enough to support a carrier air wing of 75 or more aircraft.
Meanwhile the phrase "nuclear-powered" means that the carrier's unlimited range and endurance,
with just one refuelling required over its 50-year operational life cycle.
Moreover, large deck carriers refer to the Nimitz and Ford class with the capability
of delivering multiple smart bombs, disable and destroy hundreds of targets each day.
The Gerald R. Ford class is a class of nuclear-powered carriers constructed for the United States
Navy.
However, an aircraft carrier's capacity to protect itself is limited, there must rely
on other types of vessels or defence against projectiles, warplanes, and submarines.
A carrier strike group normally includes at least a cruiser, two destroyers, and possibly
a supply ship or a submarine.
Operating and maintaining carrier strike groups requires a greater sum of capital, which includes
military payment, maintenance, resupply, and midlife refuelling.
Additionally, as mentioned by the Loren Thompson Lexington Institute in their current report,
most of these costs will have to be covered whether the vessels are deployed, on training
missions or in port.
However, even if expenditures remain constant regardless of ship status, the annual cost
of owning and managing 11 carrier strike groups is less than $30 billion.
To be precise on the operational calculation, each vessel has a maximum of nearly 6700 personnel
on board, in which a yearly operating cost for this a super carrier's average is estimated
to be $1.18 billion.
In addition, the carrier air wing generally consists of 4860 crews with an annual operating
cost of $910 million per unit.
Considering a carrier including the air wing, its annual operating cost could reach $2.1
billion.
In other words, it can be estimated that a carrier strike group's operational cost ranges
from $6 million to $8 million per day.
This calculation also depends on the exact arrangement of a carrier group.
This notion is line to what has been mentioned by a retired Navy Captain Hendrix of Centre
for a New American Security (CNAS), operating a carrier strike group costs $6.5 million
each day, which covers payment for sailors as well as the cost of purchasing all of the
strike group's ships.
Lastly, calculating the financial burden of each carrier strike group seems to be challenging
because assumptions need to be made about things like the number of days deployed, the
rate at which expendables are consumed, and what other costs might be spent if other joint
force would also involve.
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