There's a wonk idea about retiring them into civilian service as floating hospitals. Load it up with search and rescue equipment and send it to disaster areas and you could have a Nimitz-class mutual aid project.
The only two Navy ships I like are the USS Mercy and USS Comfort. Both are 1000 bed floating hospitals that do all of that minus the additional power/water-pumping capabilities that come with the nuclear reactor. Most of the hospital corpsmen I knew wanted to work on either because you just sail up and down coasts doing humanitarian medical work. If we insist on buying the things we may as well use them for something other than losing another war. A Nimitz-class solely dedicated to mutual aid of some kind would have so much utility if they can get it to that staging ground in a reasonable amount of time.
There's a wonk idea about retiring them into civilian service as floating hospitals. Load it up with search and rescue equipment and send it to disaster areas and you could have a Nimitz-class mutual aid project.
The only two Navy ships I like are the USS Mercy and USS Comfort. Both are 1000 bed floating hospitals that do all of that minus the additional power/water-pumping capabilities that come with the nuclear reactor. Most of the hospital corpsmen I knew wanted to work on either because you just sail up and down coasts doing humanitarian medical work. If we insist on buying the things we may as well use them for something other than losing another war. A Nimitz-class solely dedicated to mutual aid of some kind would have so much utility if they can get it to that staging ground in a reasonable amount of time.