Space Cruiser Yamato
Posted on 12/05/2005 12:55:30 AM PST by txradioguy
WASHINGTON -- U.S. Marines, while fighting valiantly in Iraq, are on the verge of serious defeat on Capitol Hill. A Senate-House conference on the Armed Services authorization bill convening this week is considering turning the Navy's last two battleships, the Iowa and Wisconsin, into museums. Marine officers fear that deprives them of vital fire support in an uncertain future.
Gen. Michael W. Hagee, the current commandant of the Marine Corps, testified on April 1, 2003, that loss of naval surface fire support from battleships would place his troops "at considerable risk." On July 29 this year, Hagee asserted: "Our aviation is really quite good, but it can, in fact, be weathered." Nevertheless, Marine leaders have given up a public fight for fear of alienating Navy colleagues.
The Navy high command is determined to get rid of the battleships, relying for support on an expensive new destroyer at least 10 years in the future. This is how Washington works. Defense contractors, Pentagon bureaucrats, congressional staffers and career-minded officers make this decision that may ultimately be paid for by Marine and Army infantrymen.
Marine desire to reactivate the Iowa and Wisconsin runs counter to the DD(X) destroyer of the future. It will not be ready before 2015, costing between $4.7 billion and $7 billion. Keeping the battleships in reserve costs only $250,000 a year, with reactivation estimated at $500 million (taking six months to a year) and full modernization more than $1.5 billion (less than two years).
On the modernized battleships, 18 big (16-inch) guns could fire 460 projectiles in nine minutes and take out hardened targets in North Korea. In contrast, the DD(X) will fire only 70 long-range attack projectiles at $1 million a minute. Therefore, the new destroyer will rely on conventional 155-millimeter rounds that Marines say cannot reach the shore. Former longtime National Security Council staffer William L. Stearman, now executive director of the U.S. Naval Fire Support Association, told me, "In short, this enormously expensive ship cannot fulfill its primary mission: provide naval surface fire support for the Marine Corps."
Read the rest here:
http://www.townhall.com/opinion/columns/robertnovak/2005/12/05/177720.html
Weren't the BB's used in the Strait of Hormuz to pretect the Oil Tankers in the 80's?
We could use them in the Phillipenes where we are helping that countries forces fight the terrorists that have set up shop there.
And of course the growing threat of China and the continued threat from the guys just North of me.
Bleah. Read the rest of it. Ronnie and Barry were my guys. More fight in either of those two than in a roomful of Bushes.
You've got to get it through your head that the GOP has a big, fat problem with the manorial politics of the Bush dynasty and their hangers-on, and most of all with their real audience, the Old Money up East. Their priorities aren't Main Street Republican priorities, no more now than they were in 1952, when they screwed Bob Taft out of the GOP nomination by getting Eisenhower to come out of retirement and front for them, then nailed down the nomination for Ike by offering the Chief Justiceship of the Supreme Court to Gov. Earl Warren of California (which is where Dick Nixon came in: he got the Veepship nod for delivering Warren). So figure it out: how many GOP disasters flowed from that one dirty deal in 1952 -- Watergate, Warren's infernal Supreme Court, losing to Jack Kennedy in 1960 (and thus => Vietnam)? Keep counting.
That's what Old Money has done for the GOP, and the Bushes are the Servants of Old Money.
I'm the "real" Republican. Bush is a plutocrat, not a Republican, much less a conservative.
Sell it to someone that believes it.
For someone who claims to be a Goldwater Republican...you whine more like a McCain RINO.
If you want to complain about tax cuts...go start your own thread...and let the adults talk about the stuff that requires critical thinking.
You can't even stay on the topic of the OP.
"I'm the "real" Republican. Bush is a plutocrat, not a Republican, much less a conservative."
Oh spare me the hilier than thou routine. Whipping out your internet wang like that impresses no one.
Your arrogance is only matched by your bloviating stupidity.
Go cry amongst your buddies at LP. You sound like you're perfect for that bunch of twits.
Wherever sea lanes are constricted, making attacks on the international energy-transport grid attractive to terrorists and terrorist-minded states. Places like the Malacca Straits, the Florida Straits, the Straits of Gibraltar, Suez, Panama, the North Sea and English Channel, the Med , the Red Sea, the Formosa Straits, the Tsushima Straits between Korea and Japan.
And anywhere U.S. Marines might be called to serve ashore, adjacent to a beach. Because their real base is always the Navy, look for them on a beach, and only then inland.
Give us a call when you feel better.
I started the thread you ingrant twit.
I'm waiting for you to say something relavent to this thread.
Give us a call when you get a clue.
And I would like to have a 2nd summer home, a Lambroginini and vacation villa in the Crimea. However, since I cannot afford such LUXURIES, I will have to do with out. The battleships are nice to have, they are not vital to the current or short term missions the Marines are likely to face.
Yeah, sure---the battleship "big guns" are going to provide "close action support" by firing into Baghdad from the Persian Gulf.
The answer is carriers---not battleships.
I don't care for it because I can see a dozen different ways to accomplish the mission quicker, easier, and cheaper. But go ahead and push for them. You always did have a soft spot for lost causes, didn't you?
What will the pathetic libs do next! We can't afford to strip our military like this. If we let them have their way, the next thing they will be doing is cutting out the budget for the dirigibles and the gatling guns. this lunacy has to stop.
Both Poppy Bush and Slick cut the defense budget so they could use their "peace dividend". Bush almost got hosed by Saddam -- if Saddam had held off for a year and a half, the BB's and Warthogs would have been in mothballs and the heavy Army divisions brought home from Germany and disbanded, their equipment dispersed, stored, or disposed of.
Poppy was a budget-cutter: the BB's were already on the block. Slick was a budget-cutter. Look what 15 years of that got us, when we had to take on Saddam again. We couldn't have put together anything like the force we had in being in Desert Shield -- fact. That's why we went in light. That's what we had.
Get the message, pal. Democrats hate the DoD budget because they hate DoD and its values. Bushly Republicrats hate the DoD budget because they hate paying taxes. Outcomes are remarkably similar: DoD has to do with less, and if things go south, it's their fault.
If memory serves we were busy invading hundreds of miles away from the coast in April 2003. And the battleships would have accomplished what?
[Wonder Warthog] Yeah, sure---the battleship "big guns" are going to provide "close action support" by firing into Baghdad from the Persian Gulf.
The answer is carriers---not battleships.
If we have to jump ugly on the North Koreans or oppose a Chinese vertical-envelopment assault on Taiwan, we'll need BB's as much as CV's, because we'll need literally everything we've got, and then some.
I answered the question originally put to your interlocutor. Concede that first.
My questions are based on 25 years experience as a naval officer. What are you opinions based on?
Especially the one about LPD's. Those ships can't provide the artillery support required by Marines going ashore.
Which is why God invented attack aircraft and aircraft carriers. And if conditions are too poor for their use then the marines have no business going ashore in those conditions to begin with.
I guess you missed their 500 mile inland drive in the opening weeks of OEF.
Nope. I also didn't miss that the opening weeks of Operation Enduring Freedom were in Afganistan. In cas you hadn't noticed you have Pakistan between you and the battleships. And they would have accomplished what exactly?
And in Iraq the U.S. forces staged from Saudi Arabia and were well supported with attack aircraft, attack helicopters, division artillery. Again, where was the need for the battleships?
They BB's could patrol the Gulf area between Iraq and Iran and ensure the Oil Tankers go about their business unmolested...not to mention stop potential smuggling vessels bringing supplies to the terrorists.
As can cruisers and destroyers and submarines.
If anything that right there would relieve the USCG assets that are doing that now over there and bring them back here to perfom their primary mission of Homeland Security.
There is, I believe, 1 port security unit and five or six small patrol boats in the Iraq theater. And you propose replacing them with a battleship? Never mind for a moment that the battleship would be totally ineffective in the mission that the Coast Guard is doing there, wouldn't it be cheaper and more effective to just build 5 more patrol boats for the Coast Guard to do replace the ones over there?
You are exactly right. The only areas with in range of the battleships were the British held areas around Basra. It's a flawed scenario anyway because they would of never risked the Battleships in such narrow seas as the limited Iraq Gulf coast. It also totally ignores the problem of SPOTTING. You have to SPOT for a battleship. If you cannot fly in the weather, you are ALSO not going to be able to fly the drones the Battleships use for observation AND in a sandstorm, there is going to be no way to spot from the ground. So if weather grounds the air, it pretty much prohibits most combat operations as well. Battleships, nice to have, NOT a necessity.
Then let the marines fund them. Let them come up with the manpower and the money and the facilities. We'll rename them Camp Iowa and Camp Wisconsin, let some marine colonel drive them and they'll be happy.
I have an idea, throw a nuke plant inside the battleship, modernize and automate as many functions as possible, replace most of the gun turrets with ATS & ATA missle batteries and rail guns, keep one conventional 16" turret for shore bombardment and throw in a couple phalanx anti-missle defense turrets. Besides, the armor plating on the Iowa class battleship is well beyond anything currently in service in the navy today. These ships were designed extrodinarily tough and can take one hell of a beating and still make it home. In fact, I heard at times that the armor is so thick on its sides that a harpoon anti-ship missles would'nt even do any serious damage.
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