I didn’t really understand the power of the US military until I saw a Nimitz-class carrier in San Diego. They’re such massive ships. 6000 sailors, a full hospital, an air detachment more powerful than some of the nations it sails past. We have 11 of them. Teachers buy their own supplies and our bridges aren’t safe to drive on.
The US has 11 aircraft carriers. The entire rest of the entire fucking planet has a combined total of 11.
The US has as many aircraft carriers as the entire fucking world combined. It’s incomprehensible.
That’s just the CVN’s. If you count the LHA’s and LHD’s as aircraft carriers (which, in order to count the rest of the world’s aircraft carriers as such, you really have to) , then the US has nearly twice what the whole rest of the world does.
But we can’t afford healthcare.
Right and how many of those other 11 aircraft carriers are owned by US vassal states allies?
6 additional CVs off the top of my head. If India and Thailand are considered allies (I sincerely don’t know anymore who is and isn’t), 8. Which yes, means 3 aircraft carriers (2 Chinese, 1 Russian) out of 22 int he entire world are not allied to the US.
Can you imagine how beautiful it would look as a Nimitz-class artificial reef?
There’s a wonk idea about retiring them into civilian service as floating hospitals. Load it up with search and rescue equipment and send it to disaster areas and you could have a Nimitz-class mutual aid project.
The only two Navy ships I like are the USS Mercy and USS Comfort. Both are 1000 bed floating hospitals that do all of that minus the additional power/water-pumping capabilities that come with the nuclear reactor. Most of the hospital corpsmen I knew wanted to work on either because you just sail up and down coasts doing humanitarian medical work. If we insist on buying the things we may as well use them for something other than losing another war. A Nimitz-class solely dedicated to mutual aid of some kind would have so much utility if they can get it to that staging ground in a reasonable amount of time.
