Carrier costs as a SWAG unit

According to an AP story, the maintenance currently underway for the USS Enterprise(CVN 65), intended to allow her to continue to serve at least until the completion of her next deployment in 2012-2013, has gotten more expensive.  The 16-month process is currently slated to cost (after this latest rise) around $480 million.

That sounds like an awful lot for a three to four year capability.  Bear in mind that this does not include the normal operating costs of the Enterprise; this is purely capital expense work done to make the ship able to deploy.  It also sounds like a lot given that we have been arguing on this blog over ship costs ranging from $500 million to $2 billion in total, and calling them 'expensive' in a lot of cases.

I just wanted to post this and add a small bit of perspective, because I know I needed the sanity check when I saw it.  The latest (and probably last) Nimitz class carrier, the CVN 77 USS George W. Bush, is reported (also by the AP) as costing around $6.3 billion current dollars to procure.  The Enterprise is looking at a usable life of around 50 years if she retires around 2012, having made her maiden shakedown cruise in January 1962.  If you divide it out, that means we're paying $120 million per year for the continuation of Enterprise.  Dividing out the cost of the GWB, if she serves fifty years, she'll cost us $126 million per year in original capital expense.  

I'm no finance person, but those numbers are pretty darn close. If they are reliable, it means that refurbishing a 50-year-old carrier carries roughly the same cost as building one new in terms of usable ship-years.  Now I know I'm just using Kentucky windage; I haven't addressed the fact that the maintenance is required to get 4 of those original fifty years which were (theoretically) already paid for, and that the ship has had several maintenance cycles in the past.  None of this is solid in terms of actual cost calculations.  But it does indicate that the 'rule of thumb' numbers that are sometimes used (productively) for shipbuilding and maintenance are actually fairly consistent.

When I was actively doing research on this stuff in the 1990s, we used to call a carrier a $5 billion expense, with another $5 billion for the airwing (which you would buy twice over the carrier's lifespan what with new models, attrition, etc). and another $5 billion for the escorts.  Although the Enterprise may cost more in terms of her operational expenses due to her unique reactor configuration and the fact that she's a single-ship class, it looks like the SWAG number for a 'carrier year' is around $120-130 million exclusive of operations costs.  Potentially useful as we argue over carrier fleet sizes in 10 or 20 year increments.

Photo of the Enterprise under construction at Newport News via Navsource.org