The Navy says that the USS Port Royal suffered between $25 million and $40 million in damage when she ran aground last month off Pearl Harbor. The Navy says that the Navy Times got it wrong as to the level of damage. The article implies that all they have to fix the sonar dome, replace the screws, "refurbish the shafts" and repaint the bottom and she'll be good to go.
I think that is just bullshit. I have no current expertise in costing out ship repairs, if I ever did, but my sense of it is that $40 million is very low. My gut feeling is that if they are quoting $40 million in "damage," that figure only is the projected cost of all of things that will need to be replaced. It probably does not include the cost of drydocking the ship for months on end or the costs of labor.
The true cost of repairing the Port Royal will be spread out over a shitload of budgetary line items and categories and years and nobody, outside of a small handful of officers and engineers in NavSea, will really ever know how much the repairs will cost.
But if there are not three digits before the word "million," I'll be very much surprised.
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I'm not an expert, either, but I suspect you're right. Just having the ship in drydock while that repair is going on will undoubtedly cost a few million $. Sonar arrays like that can't be cheap, either. They aren't mass produced in any sense I normally think of the word.
How much did it cost to build the ship in the first place?
It is really hard to say. Procurement costs are spread out over thousands of budgetary line items and over a lot of years. Then there are the ongoing maintenance costs and upgrades and that stuff.
If I had to guess, I'd guess at $3 billion.
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