Aircraft carriers didn’t cost $13 billion dollars either. The light carriers were built on cruiser hulls and the escort carriers were converted merchant ships. The Battle of Leyte Gulf showed that they could still pack a wallop.
LOL, in the Battle of Leyte Gulf, they very nearly became the ones that got walloped!
But they did throw back enough harassing planes (even though they didn’t have useful ordinance in the initial attack and were forced to try to drop depth charges on the ships and strafe them) at the oncoming Japanese heavyweights.
They even managed to score a few hits from their five inch guns on the pursuing cruisers.
But after the carrier planes refueled and reloaded with real weapons ashore on Leyte, they came back and pasted a few cruisers and by that time, Kurita lost his nerve and withdrew.
Pretty amazing all those carriers weren’t sent to the bottom, but...we hit back with everything but the kitchen sink that day in an effort to stave off disaster...and it worked.
And if you believe government inflation statistics, the best airplane of the war, the P-51 Mustang, cost approx $680,000 in today’s dollars and we built 15,000 of them.