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I agree. We are a few carriers short. On a thread a few months before this happened about the new carrier Ronald Reagan I reamed out a fellow Freeper for saying that aircraft carriers were a waste of money and relics from a bygone era.

That Freeper couldn't have been further from the truth. Aircraft carriers will carry us far into the 21st Century and probably even beyond. We need to make many more of them. A carrier is like a portable piece of U.S. territory. We can maneuver an entire "airport" with a full fleet of military jets anyplace in the world. Timid nations like France and Saudi Arabia won't let us use their military bases to attack our enemies? No problem. We just park a few carriers off the coast and we can go about our business.

Americans fail to appreciate just how incredible our military might is. Within 24 hours, we established complete air superiority over a land-locked nation like Afghanistan. And we did it with carriers! We are the only nation in the world who can deploy such a massive military presence globally and it is aircraft carriers that make this possible.

I do not think a fleet of 25 aircraft carriers is out of the question. Too expensive? Than close a bunch of bases on the U.S. mainland. Put the bases where they can be most useful to us. On the water where they can be moved wherever we need them to be!

I remember turning on the news to see pics of the burnt out chopper in the desert, and Jimmy and Zbig doing their best damage control spin possible.SNAFU is too polite a word to describe that mess, but it does describe Jimmy's Presidency.Carter was saved by Clinton, in that history won't regard him as the worst President of the 20th C after all.But is sure was a race to the bottom.

The one thing we need in the way of carriers is some replacement conventional powered ones built to replace the three remaining ones that will be gone by 2010. I know well the advantages of nukes. But a conventional power plant takes far less time and money to get qualified snipes in the engine rooms to a needed level of qualification. The conventional snipe will be a seasoned and qualified operator before the nuke ever gets out of school and must still qualify.

In the event of mass casuality getting the ship back into operation is a must. The fuel oil 1200 pound conventional plants allow for some very unconventional repairs that could not be an option with a nuke. In short we do not have an over abundance of persons who can cut nuke school. I know of many who didn't make it. It's a volunteer job and due to the nature of it's operation and should remain such to insure the programs integrity. I'm a conventional powered CV vet myself.