Posted on 10/09/2018 10:16:24 AM PDT by topher
The proposal may be nonsense, but a lot of people don’t know anything about it, so I don’t think it should be dismissed and deleted. I think the discussion has good educational value, which is one of the things I love about FR.
The discussion has value, IMO, just for discussion purposes alone so more people than a few of us understand the issues...it is a defense related issue, and it involves over a billion dollars, so it is good to have a conversant understanding. I can envision one of our fellow Freepers with a group of people at a dinner or party, and someone says “My God, I just read an article that says it costs over a billion dollars to get rid of a ship!!!! That is clearly and example of governmental waste and inefficiency!” and our fellow Freeper says “Well, if you take into account, the age of the ship, the cost of maintaining it, (fill-in other tidbits they got from this thread) it is easy to understand why it is a real problem, and an expensive one.”
I think it is easy for someone who might not know better to ask “Why don’t we put her in the reserve fleet for later use?” You three (and I do too) know that it is an expense and maintenance issue, and that as time goes by, things on an old vessel like that need more and more maintenance to not only keep safe, but to simply keep operational. Plus, it wasn’t a class of ships, it was unique.
I have always been interested in the scrapping process, and watching the scrapping of the USS Coral Sea was a real eye-opener some years back, as it was one of the largest military ships to be scrapped to that point. In the past, they didn’t have all the environmentalists involved, and the hazardous waste disposal issues, they just tore the old cruisers and battleships apart and sold the scrap, throwing the asbestos in landfills, the toxic chemicals from the ship leaching into the water and mud...you get the idea. They were completely befuddled, and realized in todays world, there was no cost effective way to scrap it.
In the past, you could make a profit out of scrapping it, as they did with poor old USS Enterprise (that Admiral Halsey spearheaded a movement to try to save her as a museum) that was cut up “for razor blades”. Now, that is impossible to make a profit out of it, unless you have the thing towed halfway around the world to Bangladesh where they would beach her and have a bunch of barefoot poor people tear her apart, piece by piece.
Can you imagine the uproar if they said they were going to do a SinkEx on her? Even if her reactors are gone, the environmentalists would go absolutely apeshit. I was all for the USS America being sunk as it was...I think it not only provided good data, but...she rests on the bottom, having served her country well.
I know people say that ships don’t have personality, but...I have always felt there IS something to a ship, more than just a hunk of metal. Men lived their lives on a given ship, they did jobs, they ate and socialized, they were sometimes frightened, traumatized and killed, they watch sunrises, saw the stars wheel overhead from the middle of the ocean, and came back to a bunk after a night of liberty. I think there is something to a ship, it was home to men.
I saw a book a long time ago, a big picture book I have never been able to find again, that had pictures of US Navy ships being broken up in the years after WWII and being sold for scrap. I can’t remember which ship it was, but it was a heavy cruiser from WWII. She was in a dry dock, and they had removed her bow all the way up to the #2 turret. You could see all the decks below.
There was something about that ship that was incredibly sad to me. It resembled a human face that had the nose cut off. I had a sense that...it wasn’t right, it looked...desecrated...somehow, it made me feel It deserved better. I know it is only a hunk of steel, but...I guess I am sentimental about those things.
I spent a week or two on the USS Lexington back in the 70’s, and it sucked.
It was one of the worst experiences I ever had on a ship...the ventilation wasn’t working, so it was hot as hell, and I think there was bunker fuel venting into the compartment...it made me sick...I felt nauseous, couldn’t sleep, I could taste it in my mouth.
Man, just the memory...I remember lying in that rack, tossing and turning, having bad dreams when I did fall asleep for short intervals.
I was never so happy to get off a ship.
Thanks for the ping, bud!
if an inanimate object can have a soul, it’s a ship of the fleet...
I agree, but that is the sentimentalist in me, and...I am sentimental to a fault.
Odd. With the USS Enterprise (CVN65) it did somehow seem to keep a spirit of CV-6 in it.
That was reportedly about the experience (sans bunker fuel, plus jet fuel in some cases) of most sailors on the last few cruises of Enterprise.
Ugh. I cannot imagine that. At least on the Lexington, I knew I was only going to be on board a few more days, but...a deployment to the Indian Ocean????
I spent a week on the USS Franklin D. Roosevelt, and that was nasty, but nothing like the Lexington.
Makes sense (to an Army guy ;).
The cost of operations alone is too much for most countries, even rich European nations. Besides, they could build their own carriers if they wanted them, and they obviously don’t (save for Britain, France, Spain and Italy).
Apparently, the US Navy assumed a Soviet sub could not keep up with a Carriet Task Force, and in particular, a CVN like the USS Enterprise.
The United States found out the hardward way that a Soviet nuclear powered sub could make 31 knots and keep up with the USS Enterprise when 'a game' was set up to see if the Soviet sub could keep up...
When the Soviet sub was still keeping up with the USS Enterprise when the carrier was making 31 knots, the game was over. US Navy had egg on its face, and some folks in the Pentagon and elsewhere had to change their thinking...
The Soviet navy had become a serious threat to the US Navy.
Part of the legacy of CVN 65 is that it helped the US Navy re-assess what should be done with US Attack submarines.
Suppose a foreign power wanted to play chicken with the US Navy.
If the ship the foreign power was trying to play chicken had a hull as think as the USS Iowa class (BB-61), unless it is a supertanker, the other side would lose.
I am not so sure that builing ships with thicker hulls is a bad idea. It was reported in one of the threads I listed that some of our cruisers have to be retired because the hulls have become razor thin...
But as someone posted on this thread, you would have to deal with 'rust' (as well as barnacles) if you keep 60 year ships in service. I guess some of the World War II era ships will be approaching 80 years since they were launched...
B52's were designed and built before the 1960s. They are still flying.
The other example is the F22. This jet is now 'obsolete' because parts cannot be obtained for it. F22's cannot be built anymore and some spare parts for the F22 cannot be obtained.
The USS John F Kennedy and USS Enterprise were both uniquely built CV and CVN's for the US Navy.
As was pointed out in the thread, if it costs over $1 billion for an 'oil change', then the ship should be scrapped.
On the other hand, the B52 is still in service and is a pretty good 'mule' for the US Air Force...
The B52 doesn’t sit in salt water, the manufacturer and suppliers are still around and they made so many that there are plenty of mothballed ones to snag parts off of if for some reason Boeing can’t come up with one. Due to how Boeing developed aircraft after the B-52, there’s plenty of airliner parts that can either be bolted on or be adapted to the plane to keep it flying.
The F22 is an artificial situation and not the Pentagon’s fault. The Obama administration took all the tooling and information ‘to preserve it’ as part of how they got approval of the program cancellation through Congress. And then it “mysteriously disappeared.” And we didn’t build enough of them to start.
Kennedy (CV-67) was the most expensive carrier in the fleet to maintain in 2005 with Enterprise being the second most expensive. It was originally supposed to be nuclear but they changed to conventional partway through construction, with all the problems that entails.
Modern naval combat basically precludes ramming as a viable tactic. A vessel with a hull as thick as the Iowas would simply be taken out long before ramming distance by a swarm of Silkworms or Exocets or Sunburns in pop-up, top down attack mode. These shipkillers are much cheaper than a BB and sometimes are nuclear tipped - which is why the BBs were all retired even though they had recently been overhauled and could have served for many more years; modern naval combat means that they were just horribly outmatched and vulnerable expensive targets.
FYI: https://www.wired.com/2011/08/china-builds-warships/
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Type_22_missile_boat
https://nationalinterest.org/blog/the-buzz/the-us-navys-greatest-fear-chinas-killer-missile-swarms-19984
China has built a fleet of these and similar small, fast, disposable capital-ship-killer-missile carrying boats. So far they have 83 of them, each carrying eight shipkillers. Reports are that China intends to eventually build a few *hundred* of them, each with an over-the-horizon datalinked launch capability. Thick hulls are no defense against a 1600 missile swarm that all have multiple modes of attack that end in a top-down attack where a ship’s armor is by necessity the thinnest. The answer to Western-style point defense systems is a saturation attack and the Chinese have definitely figured that one out.
Bingo! We have a winner.
I understand that some token parts of CV-6 were incorporated in CV(N)-65. I wonder if they are using at least some of that for building the new birdfarm? Would be cool, no?
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