There's a corollary to that statement. "If anything even minorly bad happens on my watch, I will get canned without benefit of a way to clear my name." People forget that Chester Nimitz ran a ship aground. He survived that mistake to lead the whole Pacific Theater in WW2. Have some of your crew get caught doing something stupid on the boat in peace-time these days, and you will get canned, even though you may have been asleep in your bunk.
We get the leadership we create with the environment we foster. Today's 0-tolerance environment creates risk-averse bureaucrats who just want to collect their pensions.
I was truly blessed with awesome commanders. Almost to the man they all said out loud to the command, and EXEMPLIFIED by their actions . . . "you cannot make omelets without cracking eggs." There are no such thing as perfect people save one in HiStory. "None are righteous no not one" (Romans 3:10). Those (DEEP STATE actors) who think otherwise . . . have more than a problem with God. They think they ARE GOD!
At least as sobering is the total bill to the Navy at Okinawa - more ships sunk or damaged than are currently in the fleet. We currently have a 'show the flag' navy, not one ready for combat against a near peer. And we lack any of the infrastructure or preparation for a 1940s style building and repair surge.
CDR Sal, great question. What captured their minds? You get more of what you reward, less of what you punish. People act in their own, individualized self-interest, which can vary widely. The incentive structures that currently exist in the DoW(D) represent the last 40 years or so. Writ large, the relationship between the congress, the senior DoW(D) staff, and the Military Industrial Complex (MIC*TM) has become such a self-licking ice cream cone of "self-interest" that health of the force and logistic supportability barely register. When people are "rewarded" for enhancing profit margins, maximizing jobs and campaign donations to political campaigns, and supporting senior officer decisions that focus on picking the "right" weapon systems developed and manufacture by the "right" defense contractors...this is what you get. Immediate gratification, self over service, and the revolving door from active duty to board membership. Eisenhower warned of this, but not sure he foresaw how bad it could get. Changing the "incentive structure" is the Augean Stables of national defense policy. We need a really big flood before we lose a war...
The modern US Navy's approach to ship building since the Cold War seems a wee bit like the Wehrmacht's approach to tank building in WWII.
The Wehrmacht's handful of exquisite and over-engineered Tigers & Panthers ended up steamrolled by a flood tide of relatively basic Sherman & T-34 tanks backed up by a smothering blanket of air cover.
I actually disagree with the comparison . . . for there is no DEFILADE on the high seas. The constant supply of the ubiquitous M4 Shermans (pick your flavor) and indirect attacks from the flanks along with artillery support (a Surface Warfare topic that has some SIMILARITY to ground combat) apply. The U.S. Navy's M4 Sherman is the new FF(X) Flt I (units 1&2), and FFG(X) Flt IIs for the balance. Build, BUILD, BUILD . . . and bring on more shipyards as quickly as possible. We should be building five (5) per year.
I actually looked at the Eisenhower School webpage. The faculty consists of O6s and a few PhDs all with impressive credentials but not the type needed to build nuclear powered battleships. Maybe I missed something. If I ran the school the students would be spending time in factories, labs and mines.
I'm always fascinated by the exotic locales of the Pacific War, in this case I had never heard of the Ulithi Anchorage before. I scrolled through the 37 pictures on this Wikipedia article and it really hammered home all the points CDR Salamander and others make about the resources necessary to fight a Pacific war. The vastness of the Pacific. The foreignness of the locations and geography to the average landbound American (me). Throw in a couple of sea plane pictures for good measure. Take a look if you haven't already:
My cutter visited Ulithi in the mid-1990s as part of PROJECT HANDCLASP, when I was fresh out of the Academy. The place seemed like a snapshot out of the 1950s, frozen in time. No motorized vehicles, no Internet, no electricity, no usable runway, nothing but old concrete buildings with corrugated metal roofs (or thatched huts) and sandy dirt roads.
Master Chief Ronny German, reminiscing on trips to Ulithi in this story, was our helmsman as a young Seaman at the time:
Primitive though Ulithi was, the size of its lagoon was breathtaking all the same. Photos don't do it justice. It stretches ~20 miles from north to south, and typically ~5 miles across from east to west (sometimes over 10).
For reference, if your eye is six feet above the water, the horizon is ~3 miles away. Want to glimpse the other side of the lagoon 5 miles away? Shimmy up a coconut palm until your height of eye is 16'8". Want to see 20 miles? Grow a mutant coconut palm that's 267 feet tall.
You can quite literally stuff a whole fleet in there and keep it squirreled away, if you can keep a channel dredged and have somewhere to land airlifted supplies.
Saw that one of the FORD class carriers is projected to take 16 years to complete. Using Sal’s standard metric, that’s four WWII’s, just to finish one. In what world could that timeline ever work?
Since no Chinese citizen can legally own land, the CCP would simply seize what they wanted and knock down whatever's there. Then they'd build a shipyard.
Pretty convenient to not have private property rights standing in your way, if you're a tyrannical regime.
Except Charleston and Mare Island. They are trying to build a new green field yard out past Mare in Solano county. Amazingly, there is still a green field for it. (It is not actually green)
At first glance I thought that would be an easy one to reclaim compared to most. It's still essentially a waterfront, had piers, no significant population or commercial encroachment.
And then I looked closer. Looks like condos or apartments between the two main piers and then more to the landward side.
Would it be possible to play eminent domain and take that for national security? Probably. But the howls from several dozen families that would have to be relocated would stir up quite a scene. Add in a few hundred boat owners and suddenly you have a small mob.
There are few politicians, short of the far progressive left, who would even float such a thing. And even the left would have to invoke the "billionaire" clause. Though there seem to be plenty of "yachts" there so maybe they all deserve some redistribution.
There's a host of residents there, plus boat owners, plus marina owners, a brewery, and all the associated support that sprouts up nearby (grocery stores, yacht repair shops, etc.) in reliance on the current residents. Want to uproot the shoreline and plant a shipyard? They'll try to skin you alive, metaphorically. I grew up in N. Olmsted, 12 miles east of there. The Lake Erie shore in NE Ohio is no bastion of conservatives eager to sacrifice for national defense.
Another problem: the skilled shipyard workers aren't there anymore. They all retired, moved away, or found other work. There are no large shipyards left on Ohio's shores.
But hey, at least the railroad still exists nearby, so that won't be a major hurdle. Hooray for small victories, right?
With our munitions shortages and no quick fixes in sight, rare earth minerals shortages and lack of processing capabilities, manpower and shipbuilding limitations, I do not envision any conflict with China lasting too long. Training is another bottleneck. Even if we had a draft, how long would it take to train new pilots, sailors, Marines and officers to replace those lost or to man new assets, and how long after pipeline training before they were qualified and proficient in their wartime assignments?
I wonder what % of the population can be considered patriotic instead of "likely to protest and riot against America during a war?"
For that matter, what % of the people currently living here are actually Americans? Do we even know how many people are drawing breath inside our borders?
I am starting to believe that our grand strategists believe that a war with China over Taiwan will go nuclear so quickly that we won't need to replace conventional forces lost in the opening conflict. Therefore, we aren't really, truly putting the effort into a maritime industrial base required to build and maintain a fleet sufficient for protracted war with the CCP over Taiwan.
Nuclear, or massive cyber attacks that would totally paralyze all of our and probably their infrastructure and economy. They a would likely make an extended war impossible to wage after first 30-60-90 days. Certainly impossible to continue to wage through new construction of weapons, aircraft or ships.
The paraphrase the Good CDR " . . . the hard math of heavy industrial POLICY." IMO, we as a Society have always left the Big Issues, mostly, (excepting Public Schools, Libraries, Health Care for the old & indigent, Passenger Trains and a few others) to the "Magic of the Market Place.'" Much of the country buys into the idea of Small Government, Less Regulation, etc., etc." Remember all that talk about "The Government is the Problem" and "The worst news being him saying 'I'm from the government and I'm here to help?" Just who do you think amoung us promotes all that FOR THEIR OWN BENEFIT! There are some good, recent books out on Capitalism -- read up if you're wondering why we have so few shipyards, so many retired Admirals/Generals working for Defense Contractors and so many billionaires. YMMV.
And to what extent has Congress done its duty? Well, Sect'y Ray Mabus advised Congress on a name for T-AO-206 and we ended up with USNS Harvey Milk. :(
One frigate properly maintained satisfies that requirement. Please site the section of the U.S. Constitution that defines what a navy is, its size and composition.
There is no definition, it was expected that Congress and the War Department would be sufficiently competent to manage the size of the fleet. The fleet was allowed to decline several times to the point that it could not simultaneously perform tasks such as protecting the merchant fleet in the Mediterranean and conducting anti-piracy patrols in the Caribbean. It wasn't until the 1850's that Congress really did their job, and they lapsed again after the Civil War. We no longer have the luxury of time provided by the age of sail while burdened by both civilian and uniformed bureaucracies that are failing to perform their duties. Marshall purged the Army of “deadwood” officers in 1940. Perhaps it's time for a redux within the USN both uniformed and civilian.
The overwhelming majority of the civilians should be shown the door. Frankly, every branch needs a complete house cleaning. We can also combine the Coast Guard with the Navy as the Coasties can't even tell the difference between a QM and a BM these days. That faux USAF uniform needs to go as well. 😁
Nope. My analogy is that capitalism is the goose that lays the golden eggs. In our case we let the goose keep most of the eggs. Defense is an example of what is called a public good -- there is no way to exclude non-payers so markets won't provide it. Many may disagree but IMO our political system runs on private money. Holders of private money want keep it so they try to keep their taxes low, and they find a good return on contributions to political candidates who keep their taxes low by running large government debt to pay for large govenment expenditures (defense industries et.al.) and loose regulations (Crypto, AI, et al) that benefit them. Letting capitalism choose the direction and priorities of our government is a mistake, in my view. YMMV.
I suspect you might be confusing America's current gov't-infested economic system with the previous system of free market capitalism in a republic of enumerated powers.
We used to have the latter, but we don't anymore. It's unjust to blame the previous system for what our ancestors and contemporaries warped it into.
The Intrepid was a carrier I missed...and missing from the pic as she was headed to Hunters Point...to repair severe damage by a kamikaze on 25 November 44....
November was absolutely brutal as the carriers were obliged to continue air support for MacArthur longer than expected as he was having trouble establishing viable fields ashore.
Nimitz and Halsey had to reluctantly admit that the pending attacks again the Japan Home Islands would have to be postponed. TF-58 under McCain, and the stood out from Ulithi on 11 Dec., now with three TF's instead of four, for more Philippine ops.
And into the teeth of Typhoon Cobra a week later...
Served aboard USS Hancock (CVA-19) 1973-75: stood watch in CIC just 20 feet away from visible battle damage repairs on a Kamikaze hit during the Okinawa campaign in 1945. It was a constant reminder and helped us focus on our job: early warning by way of electronic warfare intercept/search watches. Also:
In January 1945, Hancock helped prepare for landings
on Luzon and took part in Task Force 38's raid into the South
China sea. A tragic aircraft accident on her flight deck killed
50 of her men and injured many more on 21 January, but did not
prevent her from sending planes to attack Okinawa on the following
day. The carrier hit targets in the Japanese home islands in February
and March, plus lending aerial assistance to the invasions of
Iwo Jima and Okinawa. On 20 March, Hancock was lightly
damaged when a "Kamikaze" crashed nearby. She was much
more seriously hurt by a suicide plane on 7 April, while supporting
the Okinawa operation, suffering the loss of 62 crewmen killed
and requiring shipyard repairs in the United States. Returning
to the western Pacific in July and attacking Wake Island while
en route, Hancock struck targets in Japan during the final
weeks of World War II. After Japan's August 1945 capitulation,
she supported initial occupation efforts, then went back to the
It has always been true that elected officials are more interested in reelection than in doing the right thing. The trick is to impose incentives that reward scumbag politicians for doing the right thing, despite their scummy & corrupt motives.
Those incentives once existed, in a culture with its roots in Christendom and the Protestant work ethic.
When you have elected officials more interested in reelection than doing the right thing
You end up with a Senate that will not pass legislation 85% of citizens want to make elections more secure and restore faith in the system. This irrefutably proves that whether in fact our elections are fixed, the Senators think they would not be elected if they were secure, auditable, and valid.
Further thought: Every day that Mare Island remains in bankruptcy court is a crime against future readiness. If we aren't going to pull it back in as a Navy Yard, then someone needs to be thinking about how we can use Defense Production Act and any other relevant authorities to get investment and improvement flowing into the yard again.
What captured the leadership? "Anything really bad won't happen on my watch".
"And I will be retired by the time it does." Pensions and building maintenance work the same way.
There's a corollary to that statement. "If anything even minorly bad happens on my watch, I will get canned without benefit of a way to clear my name." People forget that Chester Nimitz ran a ship aground. He survived that mistake to lead the whole Pacific Theater in WW2. Have some of your crew get caught doing something stupid on the boat in peace-time these days, and you will get canned, even though you may have been asleep in your bunk.
We get the leadership we create with the environment we foster. Today's 0-tolerance environment creates risk-averse bureaucrats who just want to collect their pensions.
I was truly blessed with awesome commanders. Almost to the man they all said out loud to the command, and EXEMPLIFIED by their actions . . . "you cannot make omelets without cracking eggs." There are no such thing as perfect people save one in HiStory. "None are righteous no not one" (Romans 3:10). Those (DEEP STATE actors) who think otherwise . . . have more than a problem with God. They think they ARE GOD!
Amen!
At least as sobering is the total bill to the Navy at Okinawa - more ships sunk or damaged than are currently in the fleet. We currently have a 'show the flag' navy, not one ready for combat against a near peer. And we lack any of the infrastructure or preparation for a 1940s style building and repair surge.
Any fight with China today would have more in common with Okinawa 1945 than we want to contemplate.... but contemplate it we must.
And that flag is flying over a rust-streaked hull with peeling paint. But hey, at least the paint was low-VOC, right?
CDR Sal, great question. What captured their minds? You get more of what you reward, less of what you punish. People act in their own, individualized self-interest, which can vary widely. The incentive structures that currently exist in the DoW(D) represent the last 40 years or so. Writ large, the relationship between the congress, the senior DoW(D) staff, and the Military Industrial Complex (MIC*TM) has become such a self-licking ice cream cone of "self-interest" that health of the force and logistic supportability barely register. When people are "rewarded" for enhancing profit margins, maximizing jobs and campaign donations to political campaigns, and supporting senior officer decisions that focus on picking the "right" weapon systems developed and manufacture by the "right" defense contractors...this is what you get. Immediate gratification, self over service, and the revolving door from active duty to board membership. Eisenhower warned of this, but not sure he foresaw how bad it could get. Changing the "incentive structure" is the Augean Stables of national defense policy. We need a really big flood before we lose a war...
Steps are being taken in that direction - the country has to be at least somewhat convinced of the need before the need is obvious.
Russia’s invasion is doing some of the convincing.
The modern US Navy's approach to ship building since the Cold War seems a wee bit like the Wehrmacht's approach to tank building in WWII.
The Wehrmacht's handful of exquisite and over-engineered Tigers & Panthers ended up steamrolled by a flood tide of relatively basic Sherman & T-34 tanks backed up by a smothering blanket of air cover.
Great comparison!!!
I actually disagree with the comparison . . . for there is no DEFILADE on the high seas. The constant supply of the ubiquitous M4 Shermans (pick your flavor) and indirect attacks from the flanks along with artillery support (a Surface Warfare topic that has some SIMILARITY to ground combat) apply. The U.S. Navy's M4 Sherman is the new FF(X) Flt I (units 1&2), and FFG(X) Flt IIs for the balance. Build, BUILD, BUILD . . . and bring on more shipyards as quickly as possible. We should be building five (5) per year.
At least the German tanks made it to the battlefield, as opposed to LCS, Constellation-class, Zumwalt-class, USS Ford,.
We also have an Industrial College of the Armed Forces now called the Eisenhower School of National Security and Resource Strategy.
What exactly are they teaching? Credit Default Swaps?
The school should have been named after Henry Ford or William Boeing or Henry Kaiser.
I actually looked at the Eisenhower School webpage. The faculty consists of O6s and a few PhDs all with impressive credentials but not the type needed to build nuclear powered battleships. Maybe I missed something. If I ran the school the students would be spending time in factories, labs and mines.
This school may satisfy JPME Phase II requirements but I don’t think it will produce another Bill Knudsen or Hymen Rickover.
I'm always fascinated by the exotic locales of the Pacific War, in this case I had never heard of the Ulithi Anchorage before. I scrolled through the 37 pictures on this Wikipedia article and it really hammered home all the points CDR Salamander and others make about the resources necessary to fight a Pacific war. The vastness of the Pacific. The foreignness of the locations and geography to the average landbound American (me). Throw in a couple of sea plane pictures for good measure. Take a look if you haven't already:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Naval_Base_Ulithi#/media/File:Ulithi_north_anchorage_and_Sorlen_Island.jpg
My cutter visited Ulithi in the mid-1990s as part of PROJECT HANDCLASP, when I was fresh out of the Academy. The place seemed like a snapshot out of the 1950s, frozen in time. No motorized vehicles, no Internet, no electricity, no usable runway, nothing but old concrete buildings with corrugated metal roofs (or thatched huts) and sandy dirt roads.
Master Chief Ronny German, reminiscing on trips to Ulithi in this story, was our helmsman as a young Seaman at the time:
https://www.airuniversity.af.edu/News/Display/Article/920807/photo-prompts-coast-guard-members-memory-of-long-ago-meeting/
Primitive though Ulithi was, the size of its lagoon was breathtaking all the same. Photos don't do it justice. It stretches ~20 miles from north to south, and typically ~5 miles across from east to west (sometimes over 10).
For reference, if your eye is six feet above the water, the horizon is ~3 miles away. Want to glimpse the other side of the lagoon 5 miles away? Shimmy up a coconut palm until your height of eye is 16'8". Want to see 20 miles? Grow a mutant coconut palm that's 267 feet tall.
You can quite literally stuff a whole fleet in there and keep it squirreled away, if you can keep a channel dredged and have somewhere to land airlifted supplies.
Saw that one of the FORD class carriers is projected to take 16 years to complete. Using Sal’s standard metric, that’s four WWII’s, just to finish one. In what world could that timeline ever work?
Is there a role for AI, robotics (including the likes of Optimus "androids") in increasing American ship building capacity?
When do we reopen BRAC'd shipyards, build new dry / graving docks?
BRAC'd shipyards will not reopen. By and large they are now residential, commercial, and entertainment venues.
True. But what would China do?
You mean if they were suddenly switched with us?
That or they perceived a national security need for a particular section of coastline, port acreage etc.
Since no Chinese citizen can legally own land, the CCP would simply seize what they wanted and knock down whatever's there. Then they'd build a shipyard.
Pretty convenient to not have private property rights standing in your way, if you're a tyrannical regime.
There's a middle ground between doing nothing and full tyranny.
Our government may not own the land, but we have "eminent domain", which ends up about the same. See, for example, Kelo vs. New London.
Except Charleston and Mare Island. They are trying to build a new green field yard out past Mare in Solano county. Amazingly, there is still a green field for it. (It is not actually green)
That surprises me. But it gives at least two places to start the ball rolling.
They will have to be rebuilt. The result of the non-thinking clowns making decisons.
First you'll need to seize shoreline through eminent domain. Then you'll have to build the shipyards from scratch.
They no longer exist. Plug this into your favorite mapping app:
41.466409°N 82.168531°W
That was once a shipyard that built 1000' freighters. It closed up shop in 1983.
At first glance I thought that would be an easy one to reclaim compared to most. It's still essentially a waterfront, had piers, no significant population or commercial encroachment.
And then I looked closer. Looks like condos or apartments between the two main piers and then more to the landward side.
Would it be possible to play eminent domain and take that for national security? Probably. But the howls from several dozen families that would have to be relocated would stir up quite a scene. Add in a few hundred boat owners and suddenly you have a small mob.
There are few politicians, short of the far progressive left, who would even float such a thing. And even the left would have to invoke the "billionaire" clause. Though there seem to be plenty of "yachts" there so maybe they all deserve some redistribution.
There's a host of residents there, plus boat owners, plus marina owners, a brewery, and all the associated support that sprouts up nearby (grocery stores, yacht repair shops, etc.) in reliance on the current residents. Want to uproot the shoreline and plant a shipyard? They'll try to skin you alive, metaphorically. I grew up in N. Olmsted, 12 miles east of there. The Lake Erie shore in NE Ohio is no bastion of conservatives eager to sacrifice for national defense.
Another problem: the skilled shipyard workers aren't there anymore. They all retired, moved away, or found other work. There are no large shipyards left on Ohio's shores.
But hey, at least the railroad still exists nearby, so that won't be a major hurdle. Hooray for small victories, right?
Maybe we could pay the shipyard folks enough to displace the current occupants and live close to work (probably /s)
Hahaha. It all depends on who's the "we" that you refer to.
We'll have the Coast Guard remove them. They don't have much to do anyway. 😁
With our munitions shortages and no quick fixes in sight, rare earth minerals shortages and lack of processing capabilities, manpower and shipbuilding limitations, I do not envision any conflict with China lasting too long. Training is another bottleneck. Even if we had a draft, how long would it take to train new pilots, sailors, Marines and officers to replace those lost or to man new assets, and how long after pipeline training before they were qualified and proficient in their wartime assignments?
If we are still fighting after 90 days we could take a lesson from the Ukrainians. How much training does a man need to dig a hole and hide in it?
"If?" 😬
Depends on if you are digging that hole on land or at sea.
Can we do that again?
Do we have the native raw materials? The ability to make the machines to make the machines that make the machines that make the parts?
The people? a~250% increase, but what does that get us?
I wonder what % of the population can be considered patriotic instead of "likely to protest and riot against America during a war?"
For that matter, what % of the people currently living here are actually Americans? Do we even know how many people are drawing breath inside our borders?
The majority will fight for their favorite sports team but never lift a finger for their freedom.
70% tops, and they trend upwards of retirement
I am starting to believe that our grand strategists believe that a war with China over Taiwan will go nuclear so quickly that we won't need to replace conventional forces lost in the opening conflict. Therefore, we aren't really, truly putting the effort into a maritime industrial base required to build and maintain a fleet sufficient for protracted war with the CCP over Taiwan.
Nuclear, or massive cyber attacks that would totally paralyze all of our and probably their infrastructure and economy. They a would likely make an extended war impossible to wage after first 30-60-90 days. Certainly impossible to continue to wage through new construction of weapons, aircraft or ships.
That was some of the logic with the Soviets. I think optimists of a conservative nature should be the planners.
The paraphrase the Good CDR " . . . the hard math of heavy industrial POLICY." IMO, we as a Society have always left the Big Issues, mostly, (excepting Public Schools, Libraries, Health Care for the old & indigent, Passenger Trains and a few others) to the "Magic of the Market Place.'" Much of the country buys into the idea of Small Government, Less Regulation, etc., etc." Remember all that talk about "The Government is the Problem" and "The worst news being him saying 'I'm from the government and I'm here to help?" Just who do you think amoung us promotes all that FOR THEIR OWN BENEFIT! There are some good, recent books out on Capitalism -- read up if you're wondering why we have so few shipyards, so many retired Admirals/Generals working for Defense Contractors and so many billionaires. YMMV.
Article I, Section 8, Clause 13 of the U.S. Constitution.
And to what extent has Congress done its duty? Well, Sect'y Ray Mabus advised Congress on a name for T-AO-206 and we ended up with USNS Harvey Milk. :(
One frigate properly maintained satisfies that requirement. Please site the section of the U.S. Constitution that defines what a navy is, its size and composition.
There is no definition, it was expected that Congress and the War Department would be sufficiently competent to manage the size of the fleet. The fleet was allowed to decline several times to the point that it could not simultaneously perform tasks such as protecting the merchant fleet in the Mediterranean and conducting anti-piracy patrols in the Caribbean. It wasn't until the 1850's that Congress really did their job, and they lapsed again after the Civil War. We no longer have the luxury of time provided by the age of sail while burdened by both civilian and uniformed bureaucracies that are failing to perform their duties. Marshall purged the Army of “deadwood” officers in 1940. Perhaps it's time for a redux within the USN both uniformed and civilian.
The overwhelming majority of the civilians should be shown the door. Frankly, every branch needs a complete house cleaning. We can also combine the Coast Guard with the Navy as the Coasties can't even tell the difference between a QM and a BM these days. That faux USAF uniform needs to go as well. 😁
Hilary, are you advocating for socialism and against capitalism? For increased centrally-planned economics and against market forces?
Nope. My analogy is that capitalism is the goose that lays the golden eggs. In our case we let the goose keep most of the eggs. Defense is an example of what is called a public good -- there is no way to exclude non-payers so markets won't provide it. Many may disagree but IMO our political system runs on private money. Holders of private money want keep it so they try to keep their taxes low, and they find a good return on contributions to political candidates who keep their taxes low by running large government debt to pay for large govenment expenditures (defense industries et.al.) and loose regulations (Crypto, AI, et al) that benefit them. Letting capitalism choose the direction and priorities of our government is a mistake, in my view. YMMV.
I suspect you might be confusing America's current gov't-infested economic system with the previous system of free market capitalism in a republic of enumerated powers.
We used to have the latter, but we don't anymore. It's unjust to blame the previous system for what our ancestors and contemporaries warped it into.
"Public Schools, Libraries, Health Care for the old & indigent, Passenger Trains and a few others"
all of these are disasters
can I take issue or understand the timelines?
"All were laid down and took from a bit under three to a bit under four years to build."
Is that from keel laid down to launch or laid down to commission?
cause I think most were 15-27 months depending on definition.
cause the oldest, Yorktown was laid down in Dec 41 and 4 years would be Dec 45...
it can't be "under 4 years" (well 1 month is under 4 years, but u know of what I mean)
Some errata from what I wrote...
The Intrepid was a carrier I missed...and missing from the pic as she was headed to Hunters Point...to repair severe damage by a kamikaze on 25 November 44....
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6LZHMr-yof0
November was absolutely brutal as the carriers were obliged to continue air support for MacArthur longer than expected as he was having trouble establishing viable fields ashore.
Nimitz and Halsey had to reluctantly admit that the pending attacks again the Japan Home Islands would have to be postponed. TF-58 under McCain, and the stood out from Ulithi on 11 Dec., now with three TF's instead of four, for more Philippine ops.
And into the teeth of Typhoon Cobra a week later...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bEQyXh8_3aQ
Served aboard USS Hancock (CVA-19) 1973-75: stood watch in CIC just 20 feet away from visible battle damage repairs on a Kamikaze hit during the Okinawa campaign in 1945. It was a constant reminder and helped us focus on our job: early warning by way of electronic warfare intercept/search watches. Also:
In January 1945, Hancock helped prepare for landings
on Luzon and took part in Task Force 38's raid into the South
China sea. A tragic aircraft accident on her flight deck killed
50 of her men and injured many more on 21 January, but did not
prevent her from sending planes to attack Okinawa on the following
day. The carrier hit targets in the Japanese home islands in February
and March, plus lending aerial assistance to the invasions of
Iwo Jima and Okinawa. On 20 March, Hancock was lightly
damaged when a "Kamikaze" crashed nearby. She was much
more seriously hurt by a suicide plane on 7 April, while supporting
the Okinawa operation, suffering the loss of 62 crewmen killed
and requiring shipyard repairs in the United States. Returning
to the western Pacific in July and attacking Wake Island while
en route, Hancock struck targets in Japan during the final
weeks of World War II. After Japan's August 1945 capitulation,
she supported initial occupation efforts, then went back to the
U.S. in October.
https://www.ibiblio.org/hyperwar/OnlineLibrary/photos/sh-usn/usnsh-h/cv19.htm
The Essex-class carrier USS Hancock burns after being struck by
a Japanese suicide plane off Okinawa, April 7, 1945. A TBM Avenger is
visible above the ship. The ship survived.
https://warfarehistorynetwork.com/wp-content/uploads/80-G-344876.jpg
Yep. She got nailed after the ships in the pic sortied from Ulithi on 11 Dec.
Recently read a book called "Days of Steel Rain" that focused on this period in the war
Every war starts with two false assumptions: (1) the war will be short. (2) the war will be relatively painless.
And in 50% of cases a third: "the war will be won."
- When you have elected officials more interested in reelection than doing the right thing
- When you have elected officials more interested in pushing their party politics
- When you feed bureaucracy continuously for 70 years
- When you use the new bureaucracy to generate new regulations daily
- When you have a population focused on buying as much stuff as possible for cheap
you get to where the US is now. None of the above things gets undone voluntarily because self interest rules to the end.
Heavy sigh.
It has always been true that elected officials are more interested in reelection than in doing the right thing. The trick is to impose incentives that reward scumbag politicians for doing the right thing, despite their scummy & corrupt motives.
Those incentives once existed, in a culture with its roots in Christendom and the Protestant work ethic.
When you have elected officials more interested in reelection than doing the right thing
You end up with a Senate that will not pass legislation 85% of citizens want to make elections more secure and restore faith in the system. This irrefutably proves that whether in fact our elections are fixed, the Senators think they would not be elected if they were secure, auditable, and valid.
Needs one more graphic: ships under repair October 1944 versus now. Comparison of time in yard hands.
Further thought: Every day that Mare Island remains in bankruptcy court is a crime against future readiness. If we aren't going to pull it back in as a Navy Yard, then someone needs to be thinking about how we can use Defense Production Act and any other relevant authorities to get investment and improvement flowing into the yard again.