I just read this:
So 10 in active service, 4 in reserve, 2 more being built and 8 more planned: why?
I guess folks understand the cost of what goes on those vessels i.e. the planes, the insane cost of manning and supporting ship like that?
For comparison, as best I understand, the Chinese finally have one, and the Russians also have a 25-year old carrier.
Isn’t it all a bit irrational and maybe aggressive, and at what cost to public finances?
It may be excessive, but it does make very good strategic sense.
Sure, the U.S. could completely alter its strategy. We could back away from a forward defense, substantially reduce our ability to project force, simply walk away from certain of our alliances.
I’d like to see the U.S. back down somewhat from our strong military posture. We could be fine if our navy were only as big as the next five navies combined. But others disagree, and the decision is made by Congress…whom we elect. A big shift in U.S. strategy could only follow a big shift in the popular perception and will.
Being the toughest m…f… on the planet isn’t the most foolish thing in the world. I’d feel very uncomfortable if nearly any other country was as dominant. Britain, maybe, but Russia, China, India?
I would venture to guess that the US has a lot of coastline. On two oceans. Australia probably has close to twice as much coastline, on more than two oceans, but with one fifteenth the population. And quite frankly, there is just not as much international antipathy toward Australia. No other nation has nearly as much coast, and on two-ish oceans, so that is probably the justification for having so many dinghies.
Presumably the new ones are replacements for the active ones.
The Navy is surely one of the biggest wastes of money in human history. We still maintain scores of submarines, even though they haven’t torpedoed a ship underwater since World War 2.
Or to put it another way, the Navy is government at its most governmental.
Our economy and the world economy is dependent on the ability to move goods around the world in safety. Without our navy every ship at sea would be easy prey for pirates and unsavory foreign governments. We do it because if we don’t we’ll be dependent on other countries to do it and we don’t want those countries building up huge navies. This system sucks, but it’s better than the alternatives.
It’s really all just a dingy measuring contest
“Force projection” is synonymous with hegemony.
It’s a question that can only be answered after the next World War.
You seem to have forgotten the nuclear missiles.
W/regard to the number of aircraft carriers, ten is considered the minimum necessary for protecting our interests. This includes the function if simply discouraging bad things from happening. On the subject of new construction, many of the current/Nimitz Class ships are approaching their 50 year life expectancy. The USS Nimitz was commissioned in 1975 and the USS Eisenhower in 1977. Three others were commissioned in 1982, 86 and 89. Considering how long it takes to build a carrier, it’s not imprudent to plan for replacements.
A concern is that an enemy potent enough to require our carriers for attack, might be potent enough to destroy them. This report discusses that. I didn’t study it but it “concludes that carriers are likely to be highly survivable for many years to come (barring major tactical blunders), and that carriers are becoming more resilient over time.” Let’s hope they’re right.
Partly because it’s a insanely and unneeded high bar to reach. If it were smaller it may be reasonable for a country to build up to rival it. But keeping it so built up, well beyond what actually makes sense prevents others from even trying.
I am under the impression that the protracted building cycles are to keep the skilled workers busy; if they build too fast those workers would be laid off and every carrier would require at least a partially new crew to build.
While I’ve never heard that, there certainly is a national interest in maintaining an industry (private companies and their workers) capable of building such complex ships. Just take a look back at the mobilization of private industry to build war materials during WWII.
This is really the answer; we’re sort of the heir to the British role as policemen of the seas, now that we’re the world’s economic power. And as the last superpower standing, we’re sort of the world’s policemen, and that requires a power projection capability.
And yeah, a lot of the Nimitz-class ships are getting long in the tooth- a new one was commissioned every 3.5 years on average from 1975 through 2009. So they’re going to be hitting their life expectancies at about that interval starting in another 10 years or so.
In a sadly cynical way, it does make sense - the U.S. Navy isn’t optimally designed to just fight the navies of other major powers like Russia and China, it’s designed to fight lots of little developing world conflicts - look at the places we’ve fought since world war 2:
Korea
Vietnam
Grenada
Panama
Iraq
Kuwait
Bosnia
Serbia
Kosovo
Afghanistan
and including other uses of military force, but not necessarily wars
Somalia
Iran
Syria
Libya
Lebanon
Haiti
Yemen
Most of these places are vulnerable to, and unable to retaliate against, someone driving a big multi-billion dollar airbase up to a nearby shore and bombing.
I’d say less than the practicality of building the carriers, the morality of using them so frequently is a bit more of a problem.
It isn’t that there isn’t the antipathy towards Australia, we are afraid they will deploy their wildlife if we attack them … 
In the same sadly cynical way, we make for really, really good allies.
Classically, carriers are meant for 2 roles: defeating the enemy’s fleet at sea (Coral Sea, Midway, Leyte Gulf, Taranto, etc…) and for providing air support to the USMC/Army during amphibious operations, like Iwo Jima, Saipan, Peleliu, etc…
The role of being able to beat up on smaller, less capable nations sort of grew out of that; if you have a modern carrier air wing that you can sail around the world, you basically have a portable air force that is more powerful than many smaller nations’ air forces. The US has 10 of them; so it’s pretty easy to use them, either in an intimidatory way, for air strikes, or in support of ground troops.
Against a more powerful foe, the carrier air wings wouldn’t be great choices for strike missions; the fact that the carrier would have to stay fairly far offshore would reduce their effective range significantly. But they’d be great for sinking civilian shipping and helping the USMC capture bases to fly land-based planes from.