The Most Expensive Military Weapon Ever Made: Navy’s USS Gerald Ford

Question: What do you get when you combine a massive, super-advanced aircraft carrier with some of the best fighter planes on the planet?

Answer: 100,000 tons of U.S. diplomacy.

Meet the USS Gerald Ford.

The Gerald Ford will be the lead ship of the Gerald Ford Class, which is an update to the Nimitz Class Navy Aircraft Carriers that have given the U.S. sea and aerial dominance around the globe for decades. It’s also slated to be the most expensive weapon ever created at around $11.5 billion– far and away the Navy’s most expensive warship.

Given recent Iranian provocations regarding the Persian Gulf and its threat to close the Straits of Hormuz, the possibility of a deteriorating Iraq in the wake of the U.S. withdrawal, and the climate for another Arab-Israeli conflict, the need for “4.5 acres of mobile and sovereign U.S. territory” has perhaps never been more apparent.

Business Insider has put together some slides that show the design of the ship, and below you can also see  some of the state-of-the-art fighter planes and missiles that will make the USS Ford the most tactically dominant naval vessel ever built.