Bryan Clark, senior fellow at the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments, told Inside Defense that when he was working on the Navy staff in the early 2010s, there was talk of reactivating the John F. Kennedy (CV-67). The estimates of getting the aircraft carrier back into service were about $1 billion.
"If you reactivated it, it would take some of the pressure off the carriers in the fleet," he said. "The problem though is, it's steam powered. We don't have any steam plants in the Navy so we would have to create" maintenance and training infrastructure to support the ship.
The Navy would need about 3,000 sailors to operate the ship, including boiler technicians and other specialties that are no longer in the service. Moreover, the Navy determined the cost was not worth the less than 10 years the service would get out of the aircraft carrier. It would also take three to five years before the Kennedy would be ready to deploy, according to Clark.
"The Navy would be better off funding and doing these cruiser modernizations than in bringing in any ships out of mothballs," he added.
Reaching the 'magic number'
Clark also said simply adding ships won't mean a more capable Navy. "You could reach your magic number, but really have no better Navy than you have today," he said.
Clark said the most important metric for the Navy is the combination of presence and capability it achieves once the ships are deployed. Traditionally, the service has had a small number of "highly capable" ships in its inventory, he said.
"But maybe that's not as effective in the future because [the ships are] targets. An enemy can just keep raining weapons down on and suppress [the ships] while they conduct an operation elsewhere," Clark said. "The number doesn't really directly relate to the ability of the fleet to do its job, which is primarily deterrence."
Additionally, he pointed out that unmanned systems provide an affordable way to do a number of tasks, including mining, mine clearing, surveillance and survey missions, at an affordable price.