RichVR
1613
I can come up with scenarios where you’d miss the early indications, but all of them involve dereliction of duty.
ShivaX
1615
Sounds like the Royal Navy needs to call Phil Swift.
jpinard
1616
I was thinking the same. Annoying alarms want to be ignored, especially when those attending think they’re too sensitive. Or the constant stream of emergency readiness tests, when most are just drills, gets tiresome. Not sure they’ll do it, but it would be fascinating to get an official report on how it got that bad.
Wanna bet it’ll be like Morton Thiokol, and the O-rings? Some engineer said, hey, this is terrible design, or hey, this is gonna blow. Some bean counter said, STFU, mission is a go!
Article says flood was because of a burst fire main, which basically ran for 24 hours.
I don’t think warships are supposed to be this shaky.
Is there a problem here of building navies on the cheap? It’s a numbers game — we have X number of ships! — in an era where the budgets are constrained and the ships don’t ever actually fight in the classic sense. And they’re undermanned, and the crews are all overworked, mostly for nothing but show. That’s surely the reason for the recent collisions with US ships.
The Elizabeth carriers have been a shitshow all along, from what I’ve read over the years. Infamously, they weren’t even able to launch planes when they were commissioned, because the Navy didn’t have any VTOLs/STOLs any more, and so much was spent on the carriers that there was barely any money left over for everything else you need in a carrier group, including the F35Bs that we’re buying to put on them.
All of the above? Navies are notoriously expensive. The UK also has the legacy of its traditional NATO role, which was primarily ASW and protecting the sea lanes between the USA and Europe, IIRC, which sort of conflicts with the older legacy of the globe-spanning Royal Navy. Now that the whole traditional NATO thing is passé, I’m wondering if the powers that be sort of consciously or unconsciously fell back to the older concept and is sort of muddling about trying to build a champagne navy on a PBR budget.
It’s not a new thing though, is it? I have some dim recollection of Reagan’s push for a 600-ship navy, build largely on the back of a bunch of cheap aluminum cans. Am I remembering it wrongly?
It’s certainly been popular at various times… The French “jeune ecole” approach in the late 19th/early 20th centuries called for a ton of cheap torpedo boats to counter the Royal Navy’s heavy forces. Quite a few countries in the 20th century and even now have relied on a lot of light, inexpensive forces, like Iran’s horde of gun/missile/god knows what boats. I’m not sure I’d put the US buildup of the 1980s in that category, though. The only ships of that era that really come close to fitting the “tin can” label might bee the Oliver Hazard Perry (FFG-7) class, and even those were fairly capable by international standards. The Aegis (CG-47) ships and their follow on evolutions were and are highly capable, if perhaps not super durable depending on who you ask. The Arleigh Burke (DDG-1) class is also capable. We never quite got to 600 ships, either, even counting a bunch of old stuff that lingered on from the sixties, like the old CGNs.
This sounds like a good story - more?
ShivaX
1627
Most of it is classified, but there are articles about it.
One thing is that the America was pretty much empty. No aviation fuel. No weapons. No planes full of aviation fuel and weapons. Pretty much cleaned out. Not a lot that could burn and explode. And as we saw earlier this year, fire can be disaster to a large ship.
Plus, they weren’t trying to sink her immediately. They had to make the opportunity last to get maximum testing time.
And the Navy won’t let that footage out ever, at least in our lifetimes. It’s not great imagery showing America being blasted oved and over and over again.
When I was at Ft Hood in the early 90’s, it was a real pit of crime. Lots of drug use and incidents of violence.
ln 1968, when my father returned from Vietnam, the Army wanted to send him to Ft. Hood. My father pushed back vigorously, using all of his contacts and calling in favors, and we went to Berlin instead. He hated the idea of going to Ft. Hood. While I don’t recall many specifics, he did say it was one of the only places he’d ever been where you could “be up to your ass in mud and dust at the same time.”
Of course, it’s in Texas, and as Phil Sheridan once said, “If I owned both Hell and Texas, I’d live in Hell and rent out Texas.”
I spent a couple of years in the 2AD at Fort Hood, and it was basically awful. Central Texas weather has to be experienced to be believed, and Killeen was a shithole of a town.
