Is our 12 carrier fleet a bad thing RD. 2

[GATOR MONROE]

or are the 2 more new ones over the next 5 years OVERKILL????

[Florida_Geek]

1. IMHO, and this was BEFORE Bush 2000, I like it

you are able to move your "Air Force" to any place in the world without stationing troops there for years on end just in case they are needed.

[Placebo]

2. More Aircraft Carriers! MORE!

I demand more.

[fairfaxvadem]

3. I'm sure some of those 12 are getting on in years...

And, we need to keep the technology up to date, so building the occassional one or two new carriers will contribute to that immensely and permit us to retire any if necessary.

The real problem is that the US govt has been leasing some naval ships from other countries, and are considering extending those leases. They were only supposed to be short-term. This is really not good because we then rely on others for our "national security", we lose high-tech, high-skilled jobs at our few shipyards along with the knowledge, and back to the high tech issue, we end up falling behind by not building our own ships. If there is a need for these ships in the fleet, then we need to build them here and not borrow them.

Sorry, off my soapbox now.

[lenidog]

5. You are right

The USS Nimitz is now at least 30 years old with the couple of conventional carriers we have left being 40 years old. These next couple are going to replace the last conventional carriers and we are going to start all over again and start replacing the oldest nukes.

[lenidog]

6. I hadn't heard of this

what ships are we actually leasing?

[Cuban_Liberal]

4. It's a good thing.

Our Navy needs to be larger than it is, frankly.

[newblewtoo]

7. Merchant Marine

Do we still have a viable merchant marine (USNS) or is that all leased now too? How do we get supplies and troops overseas?