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USS Ronald Reagan Commissioning Tomorrow
wessman writes "Being an employee at Northrop Grumman's Newport News shipyard, I cannot help but be proud to see one of our products commissioned by the U.S. Navy, especially considering how long it takes to build a $5 billion Nimitz-class nuclear-powered aircraft carrier. And I'm sure the other 18,000 workers here feel the same way. The ship is being commissioned Saturday, July 12 at the Norfolk naval base. It is obviously the most technically advanced carrier in the fleet, taking the term "hardware" to new levels. Pick a local story. From the Hampton Roads Daily Press: Anchors Aweigh, Changes Abound Aboard Carrier, Some Wanted CVN-76 Named after Daredevil Flier, 20,000 Expected for Reagan's Rite, USS Constellation Retiring Too Soon?. From the Virginia Pilot: The Carrier Reagan - Ahead of Its Class, Carrier Construction is All in the Family, Former President's Son Michael Reagan Excited about Commissioning."
Whew, at least it's not the U.S.S. Gerald Ford, or the U.S. Navy would be in big trouble. I mean, Gerald Ford tumbling while getting out of a helicopter is one thing, but I can only imagine what kind of manuever problems the U.S.S. Gerald Ford would have. It could potentially destroy half a sea port while attempting to dock.
"We are all in the gutter, but some of us are looking at the stars." - Oscar Wilde
So, what's the deal? Why are we honoring a man who destroyed America by naming the most expensive carrier ever built after him?
He was a president, and whatever his domestic failings, he does get the credit for ending the Cold War without WWIII.
Plus, I suspect that the darn things are just named after the president when they were first proposed.
It'll just lose all the data stored in its memory systems after every mission. Particularly secret CIA ones.
My journal has hot
Does that make it the U.S.S.R. Regan? :)
Anthropic principle: We see the universe the way it is because if it were different we would not be here to see it.
Space for rent, inquire within
The list from "Changes Abound Aboard Carrier" includes:
* More space for women
* New island house
* Bulbous bow
* New arresting gear
One can't help but think it should have been named the USS Bill Clinton instead....
It may, however, very well send weapons to Iran.
Finding God in a Dog
How come so many things are being named after this guy when he's not even dead yet? It used to be that you had to be dead to get public objects named after you. But for some odd reason, RWR is getting airports, federal buildings and warships named after him without the traditional respectful pause. This pause was there to prevent overly partisan hysteria from hijacking the public name space. And of course, Conservatives (who ought to know better) are the principal forces behind this flushing of tradition.
In Reagan's case, he is not really a factor, but his partisans (and detractors) are still pretty rabid. If he is really a great as his adherents say he is, why not wait a bit longer until a consensus emerges?
You will not drink with us, but you would taste our steel? - Walter Matthau, The Pirates
Directed energy weapons! what does that mean? High powered lasers? Something else that's super-secret?
after reading that I half-expected a description of how the next carriers will transform into a gi-normous humanoid robot.
It is simply wrong, indeed, dangerous, to name anything after a living personage, especially a politician. And double especially a President.
This is cult-of-personality gone extreme. It's a small step from this to granting titles to retired Presidents, to granting titles to current Presidents. Rather than an occasion for a solemn acknowledgement of a person's contributions -- as validated by the sweep of history -- we get partisanship, triumphialism, and politicking.
It might sound morbid but they should have waited until he was dead.
The Mongrel Dogs Who Teach
I served on the U.S.S. Carl Vinson (CVN-70). I also spent a little time on the Nimitz after I came off active duty and was in the reserves.
What always impressed me about carriers- beyond the obvious, was that all that high tech is backed up by very simple means of getting the job done.
I worked in the V-2 division, arresting gear. We had electric motors that set the weight on an arresting gear engine for each trap. But each of those motors had a crank and they could be set by hand if power was not available.
Sound powered phones are still another slick- no power needed tool that impress the heck out of me.
But what everyone should remember - the single thing that make carriers so effective- are the people that run it.
.
It's hard to believe that's how Micronians are made. Why don't we see it right now by having you both kiss one another?
Obviously nobody else read the article, or was too busy flaming the US for trying to impose a Pax Americana. The new series of ship (after this one) will have a separate reactor for powering electromagnetic catapults and directed energy weapons. Talk about the ultimate missle defense system:
Detect incoming missle with integrated helicopter radar
Point maser at incoming missle
Destroy incoming missle
Profit!
Piloting the planes off the deck via an electromagnetic catapule will give new meaning to the old Quake 2 'so-and-so rides so-and-so's rail'.
I want to delete my account but Slashdot doesn't allow it.
Yeah, it would have been so much better for the world if the US had just turned a blind eye to the Soviet Union's goals of conquering Europe.
Considering the US has the most power, it's not surprising that we are involved in most of the war actions. The difference is that the US never starts anything, we just usually end up finishing them. And "start" does NOT necessarily mean dropping the first bomb.
As for me, I'm proud to live in a country that gives a damn and is willing to do something to back it up.
"Peace Through Strength" -- Ronald Reagan.
Sometimes it's best to just let stupid people be stupid.
Believe it or not it takes more than a few days to plan and build one of these things. We were still in an economic boom (bubble, but who knew) at the time.
Plus, these things don't last forever and you don't wait until one of your existing carriers is toast to start thinking of buying another one. The defense of the country is an ongoing investment.
Ronald Reagan's pro-spending, pro-big-government, anti-labor policies are undoubtedly going to lead my beloved country to her death.
Wow, you take the cake. A liberal that can blame today's problems on a president from two decades ago. Nevermind that social spending far exceeds military spending, but blame the military spending for the deficit. Whatever.
I'm sorry, but Ronald Regan was the greatest president, and probably the greatest leader, of all time.
Individual systems on Navy vessels run many diferent operating systems. Many systems run NT or Win2k, others run Unixes, and most are firmware driven. So to ask what OS a freakin' aircraft carrier (read: floating city) runs, is just as vauge as asking what OS IBM uses.
-ET2
I wish there was some there was some way that I could be outside playing basketball, in the rain, and not get wet.
I think Mr Reagan was a second rate President. He was surrounded by a bunch of shady characters.
But, Mr Reagan was an exceptionally decent human being, who cared deeply about the welfare of his nation, and for 8 years did the best he knew how to make this world a better place. That is more than can be said for many Presidents.
He is also a human being, and deserving of more respect than that.
HenryJamesFeltus.com
Yeah! He's up there with Washington, Jefferson, Lincoln, and Roosevelt! I mean look at everything he did! Saved the economy while he was in office only to put the country into a huge debt after he left! What other leader could do a great thing like that???
Oh yeah, forgot the [/sarcasm]
Heh, a coworker once called me a socialist for saying that Reagan wasn't the greatest president that ever lived. So I guess if you don't like Reagan, you must be a socialist! I love the logic of Republicans.
I dunno who it is
but it prolly is fhqwhgads.
Reagan was pro-defense (USSR hadn't fallen yet) but not really pro-big-goverment.
True, but remember that the concept of trickle-down economics was invented in the Reagan era as a faux-conservative justification for massive deficit spending. The idea was that heavy government purchasing would boost the economy without involving direct meddling. I guess it worked, sort of, at least better than whatever the Commies were doing (not that this wsa difficult) but it did lead us with that pesky deficit.
Reagan did also slash quite a bit of government spending in other areas, but he certainly didn't set much of an example for fiscal moderation. It remains to be seen whether Bush will surpass Reagan's record of bloat (or Clinton's record of lying. . . heh).
As far as Vietnam is concerned, remember that Reagan first became politically prominent campaigning for Goldwater, who didn't think JFK was tough enough. And NASA isn't exactly cheap, but it's nowhere in the neighborhood of military spending over the past few decades.
Sincerely,
Osama
I did better. I watched the Iran-Contra hearings. To anyone but the most militant partisan, Iran-Contra was simply an attempt by administration officials to legally get around the pro-Communist Boland amendment. They didn't inform the President about what they were doing.
Reagan's first words on hearing about it were, and I quote: Ah, shit. Followed up, I believe, by: Those fools.
If Reagan had any shortcoming, it was that he put too much faith in the goodness and integrity of the people he appointed.
You can tell a great deal about the character of a man by observing those who hate him.
Did the thought ever cross your feeble little mind that perhaps some people love the country and its ideals but hate the leaders and their methods? Suddenly if you point out the problems you're un-patriotic, if you call for people to look at the problems in the system you're a commie, and if (God forbid!) you'd actually like to do something about the problems you see in the country you love, you should just shut up and leave.
Yeah, smart thinking. That Jefferson didn't like the British taxes? Then he should have left! The Northern states didn't like the South keeping slaves? They should all have left! Yeah, right on!
> A $5 billion aircraft carrier probably took nearly 5 years to build. During that 5 years, 18,000 jobs were created (from the /. article) and those 18,000 families had food on the table and contributed large portions of that $5 billion back into our economy, thus helping it greatly. Do you really think that even half of the $5 billion was on materials as opposed to labor? Labor is nearly _ALWAYS_ the most expensive cost in any production.
Woah, listen to the economics professor everyone. You have a point, but you could have got the same benefit to the economy by building a $5 billion gigantic rotating barbie doll. Just how big a barbie could you build with $5 billion. I don't know, but I bet I could figure it out with $1 million. Plus, this would provide lasting employment because you would need to make clothes for it. Include tourist money and we have a winner.
http://rareformnewmedia.com/
Love him or hate him, any compassionate person would not make fun of Ronald Reagan (or anyone for that matter) for suffering from Alzheimer's disease. Anyone with an ounce of civility would realize that its just crude. Its not funny whatsoever.
Its odd that so many liberals, so eager to tell everyone who compassionate they are, are so quick to make jokes about such topics.
[FromTheMorning]
As you can see here , it's lower (as a % of GDP) than it was when Reagan left office.
So I guess it's doing just fine.
More concerning is the massive amount of consumer debt that we have piled up over the last 15 years.
How 'bout letting us know which country you are from so we can ask you some smarmy, ill-informed questions?
BTW, mothballing old ships is standard Navy practice, just in case a big war causes them to need more ships. For example, in Gulf War I, many of the transportion ships used to move supplies to the Gulf were pulled out of mothballs.
The point of a carrier is not necessarily firepower. There's a reason they call it "100,000 tons of diplomacy." True, the Air Force can bomb anywhere in the world with their long-range bombers, but the fear of a plane that could fly over is a lot less than fear of a big ship parked off your coast. I can't believe there is even an argument over whether a new carrier is needed to replace the aging carriers. The USS Constellation is in really terrible shape, USS Kitty Hawk is almost as bad, USS John F Kennedy is worse, and even USS Enterprise, which was the first nuc carrier, is in really bad shape. I should know, I spend all day on one. What the Navy is trying to do with their new, automated systems is reduce the manning required. It costs well over half a billion dollars each year to maintain and operate a nuclear carrier. If they can automate systems, they will reduce the manning required to operate those systems, and their preventive maintenance through use of these systems (ICAN) will save A LOT of money. If it works. The server architecture is archaic, and runs Win2k. I can attest that other ships have had serious problems with the servers running these systems. And still do. They run Windows because the private companies providing a lot of these systems employ software that only runs on Windows. Its not a very good solution, but now that the Navy has started down a path, they are committed. Maybe the CVN-21 will have a chance...
He boosted military funding in an effort to stay ahead of the Soviet Union. However, Democrats insisted that if military spending was to jump that much, then social spending needed to jump a lot, too. He gave in and let it happen. If you go back and look at how much has been spent historically in different government sectors, you'll see the same huge leaps in social spending that make up 75% or more of the budget, and that is part of what led to the massive deficits even at a time of skyrocketing revenues (through lower taxes, I might add).
You can never go home again... but I guess you can shop there.
The thing is is that the technology has moved on - the carriers are now the obsolete weapon. One small atomic bomb, whether it's delivered on a ship-to-ship missile or a torpedo will not only wipe out the carrier but take out its support group as well.
You are echoing a 1950's argument. With nukes [insert technology here] is obsolete. Yet Korea, Vietnam, Iraq, Afghanistan, and Irag again were all conventional and carriers were invaluable. Also consider Cold War and other near-shooting incidents where carriers helped keep things calm, Cuban Missle Crisis for example. One of the various flaws in the argument you echo is that nukes are not like any other weapon. There is an extreme reluctance to use them. Use some conventional weapon on our carrier and we respond with conventional weapons on your military. Use nuclear weapon on our carrier and we respond with nukes on all your industrial and population centers, make an example of you. The preceeding Cold War policy has not been renounced as far as I know.
The US has to be prepared to fight a wide range of wars and carriers are invaluable in many scenarios. Many technologies, some quite ancient, are still valuable in this nuclear age. The spear for example. During the Iraq war I recall Marines clearing some marshy area with dense vegetation, bayonets fixed on their M16s.
Ignoring world domination for the moment, it may also come in handy when nobody wants to let us use there territory as a staging point. Sail the staging point to where it's "needed."
The living have better things to do than to continue hating the dead.
Unfortunately for the Iranians, the missiles will have used up all their propellant getting there...
I was in G3 and G4 on Enterprise, back in the late 80's. You'd be surprised what's moved by pulleys, steel cables, and compressed air on the same carrier with 4 to 8 nuclear reactors. Ships are a balance of high tech, and simple + reliable, like the sound powered phones. When jets got too heavy to take off of decks under their own power, the Navy started looking for ways to catapult them off. After examining various complicated mechanical measures, the Navy settled on a simple system where steam...that's right, hot water to steam, propels them off the deck.
Life is hard, and the world is cruel
On the issue of Reagan convincing Congress to increase spending you are demonstrably mistaken.
From Fiscal Year 1981 through Fiscal Year 1981, only once did the Reagan administration propose more spending than Congress approved; for the other eight years, Congress spent more money than Reagan proposed. Here are the actual figures Reagan proposed, and the actual amount Congress authorized (in billions of dollars):
FY1981 Reagan: $655.2 Congress: $678.2
FY1982 Reagan: $695.3 Congress: $745.8
FY1983 Reagan: $773.3 Congress: $808.4
FY1984 Reagan: $862.5 Congress: $851.8
FY1985 Reagan: $940.3 Congress: $946.4
FY1986 Reagan: $873.7 Congress: $990.3
FY1987 Reagan: $994.0 Congress: $1003.9
FY1988 Reagan: $1024.3 Congress: $1064.1
FY1989 Reagan: $1094.2 Congress: $1144.2
Note that the Democratic party controlled the House all eight years of Reagan's presidency, and the Senate the last two. Had it not been for excessive spending by Congress (which also increased the amount of "locked in" spending for each successive budget), the budget deficit would have disappeared by the end of Reagan's term.
Source: Edwin S. Rubenstein, The Right Data, P. 235.
Lawrence Person (lawrencepersonh@gmailh.com (remove all "h"s to mail)
http://www.lawrenceperson.com/
Who in the hell asked the US to "be the world's policeman?
Recently?
Liberia.
Within the last few years?
Mozambique (Operation Atlas Response).
Timor (USGET and UNTAET).
Venezuala (Operation Fundamental Response).
Turkey (Operation Avid Response).
Kosovar (Operation Allied Harbour).
Central America (Operation Strong Support).
Kenya & Tanzania (Operation Resolute Response).
That just takes us back 5 years to the middle of 1998. Do some research of your own.
I like you, Stuart. You're not like everyone else, here, at Slashdot.
OK, I've read all the sarcastic/scathing/vitriolic typical /. comments here. Some people seem very caught up in their own self-importance, others just in ignorance. I'm sure this post will fall to the bottom of the heap. That's not really my concern.
Having spent four years aboard another carrier (USS Theodore Roosevelt CVN-71) and being a member of the commissioning crew, I thought I'd interject some of my own self-importance/ignorance here.
The ocean is wide. Ours is an island nation even though it doesn't appear to be. This fact has kept us insulated from two world wars and many other conflicts. Having borders that are largely water requires us to have a naval presence to protect/defend those borders.
Bullies. Whether any of us like it or not and whether it is logical or not, people use force to get what they want in this world. Unfortunately, it seems to be in our base nature. Logic, compassion, and reason don't have any bearing on it. The only way to prevent being overrun by bullies is to be strong yourself. Having 4.5 acres of sovereign US territory that you can move anywher on the ocean allows you to keep those bullies at bay. Whether the politicians are capapble of using that force in a way we all agree with is a matter of much disagreement. Being able to place a force in the vicinity of an ally quickly is also a tangible show of support in a tense situation.
Technology changes. The basic design for the Forrestal-class aircraft carrier was laid down in the mid 50's. Experience since then has shown that conventionally-powered aircraft carriers are hard-pressed to perform operations that are relatively simple for their nuclear-powered counterparts. There's simply not enough steam produced by the boilers to drive the ship and operate the catapults. In addition, fuel-storage requirements of the carrier mean that there is less fuel aboard for aircraft operations and to support other ships in the battle group. This makes the CVN not only more capable but more self-sufficient.
If you don't use it, you lose it. The skills necessary to produce a 100,000 ton 1100ft long, 300 ft wide, nuclear-powered aircraft carrier don't really transfer well to civil shipbuilding. Continuous building projects not only provide new, improved ships, but keep the skills necessary to produce them alive.
Salt water is a bitch. Rust starts the moment you lay down the keel to the day the last chunk of scrap goes off to make more razor blades. Naval hardware gets put to hard use through its lifetime.
Pride. An aircraft carrier is something to see. It's hard to believe that something that big can move at all. Even after having lived on one for four years, I'm still in awe.
Ok.. enough said. Getting down off soapbox.
"Well Ranger Brad, I'm a scientist. I don't believe in anything." - Dr. Roger Fleming
Quotes ... The Goliath of totalitarianism will be brought down by the David of the microchip." [1]
j html?articleID=10300367
In June 1989, Ronald Reagan said, "Information is the oxygen of the modern age. It seeps through the walls topped by barbed wire, it wafts across the electrified borders.
[1] http://www.informationweek.com/story/showArticle.
Very few people understand the pure detterant force that us a Navy Carrier Group tho. Imagine Hitler trying to take the Rhine if a full air wing with enough power to wipe the force off the map was hanging around. Carrier groups are not designed to be subltle, or designed to kill a lot of people. They are just reminders that we can reach out and touch someone if they start misbehaving (ie, China and Taiwan, North Korea and South Korea and Japan, etc).
Sorry to be a realist, but people have been misbeahving since the dawn of time. Sometimes the only thing that works to avoid violence is the threat that you will get beat up more then your opponent.