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McCain wasn't an American patriot. He was a globalist. Read his address to the Naval cadets. He calls for them to go forth and be enforcers for the corporatist state.

McCain: The Most Reprehensible of the Keating Five. Remember when he ran for President and the same people worshipping him today were calling him a Nazi? Are you wearing your "Sarah Palin is a Cunt" tee-shirt today? The Reclusive Leftist blogged in 2009 that it was a "major shock" to discover "the extent to which so many self-described liberals actually despise working people."

Seriously, the idea that there are people working behind the scenes to keep the country running on a relatively straight course, and that these people actually hate the public, is absurd.

""Just went to a southern Virginia Walmart. l could SMELL the Trump support."

"Yup. Out to lunch with -------- We both hate everyone and everything."

"Finally, and related to nothing, but I just saw my first Bernie Sanders bumper sticker. Made me want to key the car."

"I would recommend everybody go out and get an academic book published last year called "What Washington Gets Wrong," and it's two scholars from Johns Hopkins University who do a massive survey of senior unelected executives in government, basically the deep state, and asks them a bunch of questions. And as the authors describe the deep state has contemptuous attitudes towards the average American."

"They think they're far less educated than they actually are," he continued. "They think they are far more dependent than they actually are. They're arrogant, they believe, and say in the surveys if the American people want one thing, and they think it's wrong, they're going to push something else. There's a massive disconnect, and the deep state is real, and it's a threat to our republic form of government."

http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/30027384-what-washington-gets-wrong

Problem is, 1) your logic is applicable to any other torpedo, and 2) this one is submarine-launched, too, apparently.

One of the issues that has been highlighted is how little bridge watchkeeping experience US Navy officers(including CO's) can rack up in their careers, hour counts that wouldn't even qualify them as a 3rd mate on a commercial coast freighter, much less anything really big:

https://www.usni.org/magazines...

And from another article, published more recently:

"Mitch McGuffie, a former U.S. surface warfare officer who served in an exchange with the U.K. Royal Navy for two years as a bridge officer, said that other navies place a higher value on navigation and ship handling than Americans.

âoeI was the go-to office of the deck on my first tour, and I thought I knew a lot of stuff. And then I went to the Royal Navy and I went through their navigator school, and it was the hardest class that I have ever gone through, with a 50-percent attrition rate,â he said.

British sailors specialize in a specific discipline at sea, unlike the U.S. surface warfare officers that are generalists. As a result, narrow specialties like navigation or bridge watches maybe given short shrift.

âoePeople squeak through the system. They may be great officers and they may great engineers, but they might not have had a lot of time handling ships in busy waterways,â McGuffie told USNI News in an interview.
âoeWe have guys that are commanding ships right now that have 400, 500 hours of bridge watchkeeping time in their career.â

In contrast, as the bridge officer on a Royal Navy frigate for a six-month deployment, McGuffie stood watch for more than 2,000 hours â" all of them logged."

-we have more allies than just Israel. and most of them were alienated by bush the lesser, and those relationships repaired by Obama.

W put together a coalition of 48 countries for the Iraq war. Most of those contributed little but they were signed on.

I'm really interested to hear which countries were alienated by W and when the alienation occurred. I Googled for "George W Bush alienated" and found this, which is an article saying that President Obama's administration is doing such a horrible job that it makes the W administration look good.

-our military is in NO WAY in shambles

http://www.ibtimes.com/us-navy-doesnt-have-enough-ships-send-marines-crisis-zones-may-borrow-foreign-vessels-1990659

https://news.usni.org/2015/11/04/navy-half-the-carrier-fleet-tied-up-in-maintenance-other-5-strained-to-meet-demands

https://news.usni.org/2015/11/19/report-navy-and-marine-corps-strained-to-breaking-point-second-forward-carrier-in-the-pacific-could-help

https://military.id.me/aircraft/marines-forced-raid-military-museum-aircraft-parts/

"The U.S. Air Force is now short 4,000 airmen to maintain its fleet, short 700 pilots to fly them and short vital spare parts necessary to keep their jets in the air. The shortage is so dire that some have even been forced to scrounge for parts in a remote desert scrapheap known as 'The Boneyard.'"

http://www.foxnews.com/politics/2016/05/14/wiped-out-air-force-losing-pilots-and-planes-to-cuts-scrounging-for-spare-parts.html

http://dailysignal.com/2015/12/04/is-the-obama-administration-trying-to-wreck-the-military/

-labor participation is dropping regardless of anything any one does. it has to do with the boomers retiring, not the economy.

http://www.forbes.com/sites/louisefron/2014/08/20/tackling-the-real-unemployment-rate-12-6/

http://www.investors.com/politics/editorials/sorry-but-the-real-unemployment-rate-is-9-8-not-5/

-inequality is horrible, but its not thanks to the current occupant, but rather the past several decades of structural issues in the economy

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/04/11/income-inequality-obama-bush_n_1419008.html

-maybe you forgot, but the economy crashed a few years ago. of course stamps are up, and will remain up until people get back to where they were. that's what they are for

As a candidate, and then as President, Mr. Obama was quite willing to blame W for the economy. Mr. Obama didn't cut W any slack on the economy; why should I be more forgiving toward Mr. Obama than he was toward his predecessor?

And a robust economy helps people... "a rising tide lifts all boats." The Obama recovery is the worst economy recorded in modern times. It's nearly flatline.

-we have more allies than just Israel. and most of them were alienated by bush the lesser, and those relationships repaired by Obama.

W put together a coalition of 48 countries for the Iraq war. Most of those contributed little but they were signed on.

I'm really interested to hear which countries were alienated by W and when the alienation occurred. I Googled for "George W Bush alienated" and found this, which is an article saying that President Obama's administration is doing such a horrible job that it makes the W administration look good.

-our military is in NO WAY in shambles

http://www.ibtimes.com/us-navy-doesnt-have-enough-ships-send-marines-crisis-zones-may-borrow-foreign-vessels-1990659

https://news.usni.org/2015/11/04/navy-half-the-carrier-fleet-tied-up-in-maintenance-other-5-strained-to-meet-demands

https://news.usni.org/2015/11/19/report-navy-and-marine-corps-strained-to-breaking-point-second-forward-carrier-in-the-pacific-could-help

https://military.id.me/aircraft/marines-forced-raid-military-museum-aircraft-parts/

"The U.S. Air Force is now short 4,000 airmen to maintain its fleet, short 700 pilots to fly them and short vital spare parts necessary to keep their jets in the air. The shortage is so dire that some have even been forced to scrounge for parts in a remote desert scrapheap known as 'The Boneyard.'"

http://www.foxnews.com/politics/2016/05/14/wiped-out-air-force-losing-pilots-and-planes-to-cuts-scrounging-for-spare-parts.html

http://dailysignal.com/2015/12/04/is-the-obama-administration-trying-to-wreck-the-military/

-labor participation is dropping regardless of anything any one does. it has to do with the boomers retiring, not the economy.

http://www.forbes.com/sites/louisefron/2014/08/20/tackling-the-real-unemployment-rate-12-6/

http://www.investors.com/politics/editorials/sorry-but-the-real-unemployment-rate-is-9-8-not-5/

-inequality is horrible, but its not thanks to the current occupant, but rather the past several decades of structural issues in the economy

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/04/11/income-inequality-obama-bush_n_1419008.html

-maybe you forgot, but the economy crashed a few years ago. of course stamps are up, and will remain up until people get back to where they were. that's what they are for

As a candidate, and then as President, Mr. Obama was quite willing to blame W for the economy. Mr. Obama didn't cut W any slack on the economy; why should I be more forgiving toward Mr. Obama than he was toward his predecessor?

And a robust economy helps people... "a rising tide lifts all boats." The Obama recovery is the worst economy recorded in modern times. It's nearly flatline.

no one's working on any type of dedicated air to air drone

Sure they are. That's one of the proposals for the Unmanned Carrier-Launched Airborne Surveillance and Strike program. Here's some more background on the air-to-air concept for UCLASS. The drones would be commanded from a piloted F-35. Boeing is even experimenting with using the F-16 as a drone.

I typed up a nice long reply that just vanished because my browser crashed, and Pale Moon doesn't deign to backup form data. So you know what? You're gonna get the reply you deserve. For starters, you're wrong. The SM-3 missile is an ABM missile launchable from US Navy warships, which means we can - and have - posted ABM capability offshore anywhere we can park a destroyer, including, most recently the Med. Secondly, we can put this weaponry in shore installations, like the one we are building right now in Romania, which is pretty much at Russia's doorstep when it comes to them threatening the area with nukes: http://news.usni.org/2015/12/1... Furthermore, it's no longer the 80s. Terminal intercept is a licked problem, as the Army's Terminal High Altitude Air Defense system's track record demonstrates: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... Just in case the continued excellent track record of Iron Dome didn't clue you in. Furthermore, hitting a missile does not make its nuclear payload detonate, as evidenced by multiple Broken Arrow incidents where the conventional plastique in the bomb detonated without causing a nuclear blast.

Anyhow, thanks for revealing your fearful nature.

Maybe I'm just a poor lonely neocon nutcase clinging to my guns and religion, but in a world where China - which has developed extensive CONVENTIONAL ballistic missile weapons - is drawing closer to a seemingly inevitable confrontation with the US: http://www.theatlantic.com/int... and a newly aggressive Russia (currently invading the Ukraine) currently threatening to use their nukes to counter any tactical, conventional defeats: http://news.usni.org/2016/01/2... and sending nuclear-cruise missile armed subs to patrol right off the US East coast, http://www.nytimes.com/2009/08... I think I'm entitled to some moderate level of concern. In fact, you'd have to be a god damned idiot to not feel some concern.

I typed up a nice long reply that just vanished because my browser crashed, and Pale Moon doesn't deign to backup form data. So you know what? You're gonna get the reply you deserve. For starters, you're wrong. The SM-3 missile is an ABM missile launchable from US Navy warships, which means we can - and have - posted ABM capability offshore anywhere we can park a destroyer, including, most recently the Med. Secondly, we can put this weaponry in shore installations, like the one we are building right now in Romania, which is pretty much at Russia's doorstep when it comes to them threatening the area with nukes: http://news.usni.org/2015/12/1... Furthermore, it's no longer the 80s. Terminal intercept is a licked problem, as the Army's Terminal High Altitude Air Defense system's track record demonstrates: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... Just in case the continued excellent track record of Iron Dome didn't clue you in. Furthermore, hitting a missile does not make its nuclear payload detonate, as evidenced by multiple Broken Arrow incidents where the conventional plastique in the bomb detonated without causing a nuclear blast.

Anyhow, thanks for revealing your fearful nature.

Maybe I'm just a poor lonely neocon nutcase clinging to my guns and religion, but in a world where China - which has developed extensive CONVENTIONAL ballistic missile weapons - is drawing closer to a seemingly inevitable confrontation with the US: http://www.theatlantic.com/int... and a newly aggressive Russia (currently invading the Ukraine) currently threatening to use their nukes to counter any tactical, conventional defeats: http://news.usni.org/2016/01/2... and sending nuclear-cruise missile armed subs to patrol right off the US East coast, http://www.nytimes.com/2009/08... I think I'm entitled to some moderate level of concern. In fact, you'd have to be a god damned idiot to not feel some concern.

Thank you, whoever you are. I wrote my whole long post because I was hoping that a more-informed person would write a follow-up post and I would learn something.

I had read that the Osprey is a success. I was surprised to read your comments. Part of making the "short-deck carrier" idea work, the marines are going to try using Ospreys for mid-air refuelling. Do you have any opinions on how well that would work?

http://news.usni.org/2015/07/29/davis-v-22-aerial-refueling-system-should-be-ready-for-early-f-35-operations-despite-1-year-delay#more-14106

I am not any kind of expert on military stuff, so I could be completely wrong, but isn't the vertical landing capability of an F-35B a lot better for emergency recovery than normal carrier operations? With normal carrier operations, you absolutely have to get each plane off the deck before another plane can land; but with the vertical landing, in a pinch you should be able to land several planes in rapid succession (biggest worry is whether they melt the deck).

Or see if the Chinese will sell their Shenyang J-31 stealth fighter since they seem to be lining it up for potential export sales. Depending on who you listen to early indications are that the Chinese have not only managed to successfully rip off the F-35 (yay for industrial espionage!) but have also fixed some of the more glaring design flaws in the F-35, like dumping the much maligned VTOL capability and the compromises it entails in order to add in a second engine and a central bomb bay.

As soon as you fire anything you give your position away and the hunter becomes the hunted. Even surface ships can have a rocket delivered ASW torpedo your position less than a minute after firing (VL ASROC or similar, many exist).

Have you ever played one of the many naval warfare simulators that let you take a stab at target motion analysis? Hint: It's a royal pain in the ass, it takes forever to develop a usable fire control solution, even with computer assistance. You can't pinpoint a submarine based solely on the noise of a launch transient, even assuming you hear it, which you probably won't.

A modern naval task force is a tough nut to crack but the submarine is the best nutcracker there is. They're also historically the greatest threat there is to aircraft carriers. The United States lost four fleet carriers in WW2; two of them were claimed by submarines. One (USS Wasp) was claimed outright by a submarine, the other (USS Yorktown) received the coup de grâce from a sub.

We've got groups fighting the idea that maybe airborne polution is affecting our environment ... most likely because it affects their corporate profits.

If you say that shift work is hazardous to worker's health, no matter what you do (easiest might be to consider it hazardous, and therefore suitable for hazard pay and/or require some monitoring of the employees), it's going to affect corporate profits and therefore, people are going to fight against it.

I'm guessing that the group likely to study this further will be the military ... you can't have people making bad decisions because they're keeping abnormal shifts when it might affect starting World War 3. For all we know, this might've been a factor in the nuclear cheating scandal ... either the need to cheat on the test (because the folks had gotten stupid after working shifts), or the stupid decision to cheat on the test.

Considering the many thousands that have been killed by ISIS, including thousands of Iraqi soldiers, I don't think a "fruit fly" is an apt comparison. And ISIS has access to anti-air weaponry too.

Many large drones are capable of aerial refueling.

Name one.

No current drones are capable of aerial refueling: RQ-4 (Global Hawk) flew in trail, but never executed a plug and never passed gas, and X-47B isn't on contract to fly the demonstration yet

Please don't conflate unproven plans and desires with demonstrated capability

Snowden has offered to help Brazil investigate US intelligence. Is that the patriotism you were referring to?

Why, yes, Yes it is.
Any spying on Brazil was for economic reasons, probably at the behest of corporations, not due to any threat to the US.

Smug AND clueless. Nice. Nice.

THE NEW CHINA-BRAZIL AXIS
http://prospect.org/article/new-china-brazil-axis
"Last week, an interview at a Brazilian defense website revealed that China and Brazil had come to an agreement regarding the training of Chinese naval personnel on board the Sao Paulo, Brazil's only aircraft carrier. Brazil is one of the only four countries in the world to possess an aircraft carrier capable of launching and recovering conventional aircraft; the others are France, Russia, and the United States."

China Carrier Starts Second Round of Jet Tests
http://news.usni.org/2013/06/19/china-carrier-starts-second-round-of-jet-tests
"The People’s Liberation Army Navy has conducted a second round of jet tests aboard its aircraft carrier with its J-15 carrier-based fighter on Wednesday, according to a report from the Xinhua news agency.
The Chinese are being trained in carrier aviation —the most complicated military aviation operations — by a cadre of Brazilian carrier pilots."

Brazilian Nuclear Cooperation with the People's Republic of China
http://www.wilsoncenter.org/publication/brazilian-nuclear-cooperation-the-peoples-republic-china

Brazil, China build military industry ties
http://www.upi.com/Business_News/Security-Industry/2009/11/17/Brazil-China-build-military-industry-ties/UPI-86341258474208/

Brazil builds Russian defense ties with missile plan
http://www.reuters.com/article/2013/10/16/brazil-russia-idUSL1N0I61NC20131016

Brazil’s Iran Diplomacy Worries U.S. Officials
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/05/15/world/americas/15lula.html?_r=0

Proposed Russian-Cuba-Venezuela Space Cooperation Raises Many Questions
http://jasonpoblete.com/2008/09/22/proposed-russian-cuba-venezuela-space-cooperation-raises-many-questions/

Yep, nooooo reason at all to be interested there.

This laser with its 1.5km range would be of little use against a maneuverable DF-21D traveling at Mach 10. SM3 is the missile being tapped to for that duty but the kill vehicle is not the big challenge.

The software and network vulnerability issues are the least of the problems for this Water Turkey.

The LCS is not expected to be survivable in a hostile combat environment
From the Congressional Research Service: "The LCS is not expected to be survivable in a hostile combat environment as evidenced by the limited shock hardened design and results of full scale testing of representative hull structures completed in December 2006."

"So, we have a warship design that is not expected to fight and survive in the very environment in which it was produced to do so. Poorly-armed, poorly-protected, with an over-abundance of speed that will eat through a fuel supply in half a day."

This New $350 Million Combat Ship Has Nearly Two Equipment Failures For Every Million Bucks

"The Project on Government Oversight (POGO) researches Pentagon weapons procurement and has published its April 23 letter to members of the House Armed Services Committee, who have themselves 'repeatedly questioned the utility and effectiveness of the Littoral Combat Ship program' in the past.... From the time the Navy accepted LCS-1 from Lockheed Martin on September 18, 2008, until the ship went into dry dock in the summer of 2011 - not even 1,000 days later - there were 640 chargeable equipment failures on the ship. On average then, something on the ship failed on two out of every three days."

Hello US Navy! Thanks for accelerating climate-change, while subverting your mission and betraying the tax payer. I guess your next job, at Lockheed or General Dynamics will be worth all the criminal fraud and needless deaths.

If you're going to read this in an English translation, rather than the original French, be sure to spring for the nifty new translation published by the Naval Institute Press:

http://www.usni.org/store/books/fiction/20000-leagues-under-sea

restores almost a quarter of the book which was cut, and fixes all the numerical errors which distract from the science.

Thanks for the comment, and you make several good points. Still, the fictional character "Atticus Finch" said in "To Kill a Mockingbird", "The easiest way to get shot is to carry a gun". These days, the easiest way to get nuked (or invaded or quarantined) is to have a nuclear ICBM or start building one. With one ICBM, you'd be the world's next North Korea. I know you were probably just saying that to make a point, but as a counter-point, is nuclear blackmail really the way you would want to get your liveliehood if you could do it? Do you want to be the next tin-pot dictator always waiting for the assassin's blow? Do you want to preside over a land where people are starving to death (like North Korea in the past) because you care more about power than the people? Here you are using the most advanced communications system for sharing knowledge the world has ever known (the internet, and sites like slashdot) and what you have shared right now is a strategy for nuclear blackmail. It also sounds a bit like you are trying to dissuade others from trying to make the world a more joyful and healthy and more secure place (by over-emphasizing the point that there are some anti-social people out there)?

As I write in that essay, there are new ways of thinking about security.
http://www.pdfernhout.net/recognizing-irony-is-a-key-to-transcending-militarism.html
"The big problem is that all these new war machines and the surrounding infrastructure are created with the tools of abundance. The irony is that these tools of abundance are being wielded by people still obsessed with fighting over scarcity. So, the scarcity-based political mindset driving the military uses the technologies of abundance to create artificial scarcity. That is a tremendously deep irony that remains so far unappreciated by the mainstream. We the people need to redefine security in a sustainable and resilient way. Much current US military doctrine is based around unilateral security ("I'm safe because you are nervous") and extrinsic security ("I'm safe despite long supply lines because I have a bunch of soldiers to defend them"), which both lead to expensive arms races. We need as a society to move to other paradigms like Morton Deutsch's mutual security ("We're all looking out for each other's safety") and Amory Lovin's intrinsic security ("Our redundant decentralized local systems can take a lot of pounding whether from storm, earthquake, or bombs and would still would keep working")."

I am advocating for mutual security and intrinsic security. It sounds to me like you are re-affirming the old ways towards security, like unilateral dominance through a big military, which will be ultimately self-defeating with modern technology. What good is a US aircraft carrier in battle when one small smart missile could sink it?
http://exiledonline.com/the-war-nerd-this-is-how-the-carriers-will-die/
http://www.usni.org/news-and-features/chinese-kill-weapon
Or where it could someday be infiltrated by a nanotech-based rust monster? :-)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rust_monster
What good is your nuclear ICBM when someone (or something) figures out how to explode it in the silo or retarget it at your home city to make you the slave?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Colossus:_The_Forbin_Project

The balance is changing. The world is a smaller place. I don't like to use "overpopulation" to describe the process because that implies the solution is to get rid of lots of people. I better term might be "under-resourced" or "under-landed" or "under-expanded".
http://www.juliansimon.com

The F-22 production line should be restarted, with limited exports allowed to Japan and Australia. Also, some portion (probably about 1/4) of F-35 production should be replaced by F-22 production.

Absolutely not. Neither the F-22 nor the F-35 are a "bargain" at close to a quarter billion dollars apiece, flyaway. As an aviation writer put it 30 years ago, "building a fighter with all the electronics of the starship Enterprise will do you no good if you can only afford two of them". We're at that point, budget-wise. We need a fighter that we can affordably build in quantity, or it's useless. Admiral Greenert was right. It's time to ditch the luxury car aircraft acquisition idea and go to flexible, cheaper "trucks" that we can build relatively quickly and in higher quantities. And as there is no proof that either the Russian Pak-Fa nor the Chinese J-20 are anything other technology demonstrators or outright Potemkin frauds to convince the West that "hey, we can do stealth too", we should probably just continue to build teen-series fighter with AESA radars. Nothing that the Russians or Chinese have that are in actual production are any better.

The military has now also gone "corporate" (and been infested with Bible Thumpers) such that the old "work hard, fight hard, play hard" attitudes are muted.

I guess you don't keep up with the news: Military Chaplains Mull End of Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell

I'm pretty sure that "Bible thumpers" weren't involved in the normalization of open homosexuality in the Armed Forces. I think the phrase you are looking for is "political correctness".

Now our opponents AND clients are religious fanatics who BOTH hate "freedom".

Try reading Bin Laden's Letter to America. His demands before his followers would stop trying to slaughter Americans are that Americans convert to Islam, and that the Constitution be replaced by Sharia law. Most Americans would consider forced religious conversion on pain of death, loss of the Bill of Rights, including the 1st Amendment, the treatment of women, the fact that a woman's testimony in court could only be treated as at most half that of a man's, the execution of homosexuals, the prohibition of alcohol in addition to all drugs, and many other consequences of Sharia to be a significant loss of freedom. The Islamists literally do hate American's freedoms as an offence to their values. There is no corresponding movement of any significance to impose that type of law in America by Americans, all fantasies and polemics aside.

Maybe letting homosexuals serve openly will chase off some of the religionists. It should improve Sub Sailor recruiting! (I kid! I kid!)

I'm sure, I'm sure.

Homosexuals constitute approximately 1.7% of the general population. Something like 80-90% of Americans are religious. You would have to work that gay 1.7% pretty hard to make up for any significant loss of religious Americans due to institutional hostility to their faith. But cheer up! I'm sure that the Omama administration finally putting women on nuclear submarines, the navy's diversity policy, and open homosexuality can only combine to make the independant launch capable nuclear submarine force ever more capable and reliable in the hands of its diverse, navy chosen future leadership.
  .

Not quite yet, the cuts are supposed to happen over time. I don't dispute the need for a military, and I am glad ours is the most technologically advanced. I'm not very happy with how its used, but that's a different issue. I actually have quite a bit of respect for soldiers, as I am pretty sure I couldn't do it as I don't believe in the afterlife and I'd rather not die. Its not that I am incapable of killing or out of shape or something, just not really willing to put my life on the line, call me selfish. However, its pretty sick that we spend more than any other nation in the world, yet our carriers, missiles and armored vehicles can get shot down by technology based on decades old technology, our UAV's can get infected with viruses, our APC's and Humvee's can get taken out by improvised devices, or http://www.usni.org/news-and-features/chinese-kill-weapon. This pretty much points out the flaw with just throwing money at a objective rather than thinking it through. People need to think outside the box so to speak and come up with innovative solutions rather than paying mega-corps billions of dollars for something that can get taken out by something that costs a few thousand to a hundred thousand dollars. The AK-47 is still the #1 weapon used in the world because it just fucking works. The M-16 has gotten better, in fact I really love shooting that weapon, but you can't just bury it in the sand and expect it to work. One reason the MIG's were such great aircraft was that they wouldn't be taken down by EMP due to a reliance of vacuum tube technology. Anyway, rant over.

I spent my time under Clinton and Bush Jr as a 4067. That's a Computer Programmer in the Marine Corps.

Allow me to segue for just a moment, and bitch a little. The fact that you were a programmer in Marines is indicative of the larger problem of mega-growth in government. Why the hell did the Marines have programmers? Why do they still have guys slicing hams in a mess hall, or changing tires on an F/A-18? Why do they HAVE F/A-18's, when you come right down to it? The Marines are supposed to be a small, elite amphibious light infantry force. Marines should have two jobs, period: storming beaches and guarding ships. That's it. The Navy should be doing any other support tasks.

The fact that we have a Marine Corps that's larger than the entire British armed forces illustrates the problem well. All government entities... civilian and military alike... are constantly seeking to grow themselves to the contrary of any real needs, missions, or resources, and at the expense of rivals, if necessary. There's no justification for the Army to have ships (which they do... Air Force does too), or for the Marines to have C-130's and M1 tanks. I'm not just picking on the Marines here, I just think they're an obvious example of my argument: that not only is government too big, it's also crammed full of rivals that are duplicating each other for budget and prestige reasons. This is why we have over a dozen federal law enforcement agencies that are doing much of the same thing.

Look up an excellent essay in Proceedings magazine from 1956, by a man named Lt. Col. Robert Heinl called Special Trust and Confidence". One of his fears was that keeping standing military forces huge was in and of itself a detriment to those forces. I think history has since proven him right. I'd bet that big budget or no, if the government (civilian, military both) wasn't so freaking big, it'd be easier to deal with problems like integrating a unified IT strategy. Heinl was right, bigness really is a problem.

If the US Government is going to build 12 submarines anyways, I think they should be multi-purpose.

A powerplant that can quickly go anywhere in the world could be really useful. I imagined using the navy's nuclear reactors to power bubblers to help the bacteria break down oil in the Gulf of Mexico. The catchy title was To Save the Gulf, Send the Enterprise.

Now the Enterprise isn't outfitted with bubblers, or much else besides the equipment needed for its usual duties of launching airplanes to dogfight with Soviets and bomb stuff, so the proposal wasn't exactly feasible. But some guys at the Naval Research Institute said the idea had merit. Selected comment from the link is blockquoted below...

If the Government is going to spend a billion dollars on new submarines to fight the soviet menace, at the very least they could design in features that would be useful for disaster response... I imagine steam vents that could be attached to external electrical generators, or bubble generators.

Because we don't know when or where the next offshore oil rig is going to blow out...

I think the idea of a large aviation-capable logistics support / humanitarian assistance ship has merit, but do not believe CVN 65 would be the solution, for the reasons stated above, as well as the need to consider that we do not need to spend money on reactor-trained personnel and the Nuclear Propulsion Program overhead unless that capability is truly needed for war-fighting reasons. For this application, I don’t think it is.

If we are going to do this, it probably should be new construction. Such a ship needs, off the top of my head, command facilities, aviation capabilities, a well-deck (to load boats with both supplies *and* with trucks to deliver those supplies in disaster areas), a hospital, and a large storage capability for supplies. The Wasp-class has all this to some extent, so with some rejiggering an addition to that class may be prudent. The America class also has potential, though the well-deck is a really nice-to-have item for disasters (where port facilities may not be in existence and landing supplies across the beach is needed).

If we think the ship during peacetime would be too big to be out there just waiting for the need for a Japan/Indonesia-type rescue capability, just put some oceanography gear on it and map the bottom when it has nothing else to do, so we don’t have another submarine run into a uncharted seamount. I joke, but not overly much. There is potential there. With the well-deck it can also serve as mothership for small PT-type boats for piracy patrols/engagement. It would still perhaps be considered too big, so maybe increased scope for education and scientific research things are also players–as well as helping friendly nations enforce and study their EEZs. Add the Seabees, and we have something else it can do–build things in Africa or Asia or South America as it shows the flag. All these items have been mentioned in the previous post on the subject.

There is no doubt in my mind the ship could be a potent item of statecraft. Especially if we have more than one so that we have a steadily reoccurring presence in South America, Asia, and Africa. Though we may want to rethink the size again. And maybe one would be better, so it was seen as a genuine effort and not “imperialist propaganda”. But then disaster response time becomes an issue. All these are trade items.

In wartime it could serve as a fleet command ship to replace existing units when they decommission, as an aviation-capable escort for the fleet logistics train (in the tradition of CVEs), as an ASW platform, as a logistics ship capable of long range VERTREPs, as well as whatever capabilities it can bring as a dedicated amphibious assault ship augmenting the capabilities of the ARGs (or whatever they are called now). The only debate would be ab

Hi again,

I meant to email you about some feedback I received, but I didn't get around to it & then I forgot. Sorry about that.

A few weeks back I sent an email to a blog with a post about an aircraft carrier being used to power a city. He too thought it was a horrible idea, but said it was original so he put it out for discussion. The responders agreed that Enterprise was not appropriate. But many felt that a "dedicated disaster response ship" could be useful, and that either something purpose-built, or a retired LHA would be good. One of the posters at the USNI said LHA-1 is currently awaiting it's fate as a target.

Ideas of every type have to be marketed before they can be implemented, and "Send the USS Tarawa" doesn't market like Enterprise. :)

Here's those links:
http://conflicthealth.com/send-the-enterprise/
http://blog.usni.org/2011/03/19/send-the-enterprise/

I have a comment at each of those two links. I'll appreciate your response here.

Among other suggestions, a near-ship defense which most ships can make: Gravity-powered anti-pirate missile Best to have guns on board too. They might get a little mad.

True, and after the Yorktown was such a disaster, the programme was scrapped.

However, it looks like you're right - the Yorktown sank any chance of getting Windows on any warship, the COTS concept of making advanced software cheap enough to be ubiquitous on all warships turned out to be a poor idea. (though, maybe it was the contractor selling it at fault)

The navy still wants (and perhaps needs?) a better technology in their ships, so maybe they'll get it, but I think that it won't be running Windows after all.

This report says Potential candidates for the basis of an eventual common open-architecture combat
system for Navy surface ships include (but are not necessarily limited to) a modularized
version of Lockheed's Aegis system, Raytheon's Total Ship Computing Environment
Infrastructure, or TSCEI (the core of the combat system being developed for the DDG-
1000 destroyers), and the Core Mission System developed by General Dynamics and
Northrop for the General Dynamics version of the LCS.

Note: the Raytheon system runs Red Hat and a 'custom' real-time Linux, General Dynamics system runs Concurrent Corp.'s RedHawk Linux. source

... one of the links you offered is dead ...

Well thank goodness I provided the relevant text and didn't rely 100% on the link. Did you think that quotes from the Chief Engineer and software developer were fraudulent? In any case the link worked in 1998 and the quotes were thoroughly vetted at the time. The publisher now seems to want to sell the article. The article didn't go into the detail you desire, it was only slightly more detailed than the original even vaguer article that started the controversy and suspicion regarding WinNT. The publisher of that original article quickly backed away from their own work and began characterizing it as "early speculation". The Unix consultant portrayed as the chief critic even admitted he was taken out of context and things were exaggerated.

... the other is a forum with mostly entries defending the smart ship concept ...

Even if true, it is irrelevant. The forum participants were not being quoted or reference. The person being referenced was the Captain of the ship at the time: "In a letter to the "Comment and Discussion" department, published in the Aug 98 _Naval_Institute_Proceedings_, page 22, Captain Richard T. Rushton, then-CO of _Yorktown_, categorically states ...". "Proceedings" is a quite authoritative magazine, http://www.usni.org/PROCEEDINGS/proceedings.html.

Some sources for the documented foreknowledge that Pearl Harbor was about to be attacked and it was allowed to happen:

http://www.usni.org/NavalHistory/Articles99/NHborg quist6.htm
http://www.jbs.org/node/58

As a side note, I would like to point out the the US Marine Corps Reserves sponsors the Toys For Tots program. This is the biggest holiday charity in America.

Here's a nice article that was published on the 50th anniversary of this program.

So? Not all of us are into reading military porn. Besides, the Navy's plans were previously described in a fully buzzword compliant series called "Sea Power 21" in the Naval Institute Proceedings Magazine back in 2002--2003.

You obviously have never learned the notion of a carrier battle group

All carriers have many different escorts, including subs.

Probably a little too late for a lot of people to see this. But there is a bit of misinformation in your post explained here

Carter served on a diesel sub and left the navy before working on a nuke. The article gives some good insight into the naming of Naval vessels and Carter's record as funding the Navy goes.