[dylan604]

Congress, collectively, is not often referred to as "smart". If I'm a senator and a guy sitting in front of me makes that offer, I take him up on it and hold his feet to the fire. How do you explain that to your constituents? I was offered free, and I said no. Re-elect Me!!!

To be fair, the building of the actual carrier is just part of the price of a carrier. What's the cost to also fit that carrier out with all of the various aircraft required to make the carrier worth having? Didn't we see an example of this when the NSA donated Hubble equivalent satellites to NASA, but NASA had to politely say no since they had no budget to operate them?

[akiselev]

> Didn't we see an example of this when the NSA donated Hubble equivalent satellites to NASA, but NASA had to politely say no since they had no budget to operate them?

It was the NRO not the NSA and NASA did accept the donation. They announced the mission schedule for one of the satellites in 2016 [1]

[1] https://spaceflightnow.com/2016/02/18/nasa-moves-forward-wit...

[smorephism]

>What's the cost to also fit that carrier out with all of the various aircraft required to make the carrier worth having?

Right idea! The answer is "hardly anything, relative to crewing it for its useful lifetime", but you're barking up the correct tree.

[kevinpet]

DOD budget is about $350K per employee. A typical E5 (sergeant or PO2 in the navy) makes $3K/mo, or 1/10 of that.

[jbay808]

You could always sell the bare-bones carrier to an ally, the way Russia sold their extra carrier to China.