You are correct.
Bush 41 issued orders to mothball all the BB's and start retiring other ships. He also ordered the heavy corps stationed in Germany demobilized.
Poppy was rudely interrupted in his "peace dividend" tax-cutting/demobilization orgy by Saddam Hussein, who demonstrated precisely why Bush and his successors would need the ships and formations he was demobilizing, but, showing where Dubya got his stubborn streak, Poppy learned nothing from the object lesson, and went right back to mothballing and demobbing as soon as Desert Storm was over.
In addition, during his incumbency, SecDef Dick Cheney ordered the jigs and dies for the F-14 Tomcat cut up, to "prove something" to Grumman during a contract tiff.
In addition, one of the gung-ho soldiers whom Poppy and Big Dick demobbed -- who'd be a sergeant-major or a warrant officer today if he'd stayed in and hadn't been RIF'ed -- was Timothy McVeigh.
It'll be ironic if a Chinese Su-30 gets to the USS Poppy Bush precisely because the Bush won't have the new Tomcats aboard that Poppy and Dick cancelled, along with their AIM-54B/C Phoenix LRAAM's.
That all said, let me note that I hate this business of naming our capital ships after politicians -- especially politicians who haven't shown us the courtesy of dying first.
Names like Princeton and Yorktown and Essex were good enough for the aircraft carriers that brought us victory in World War II. The old tradition ought to continue. If you want to name a ship after a Navy secretary or an admiral, make it a tin can or, better, a DE, and name the destroyers with the traditional names that were used during the Big Show, especially the names of the Pearl Harbor squadrons -- like Dale, Blue, Cassin, Downes, and Helm -- and the destroyers that fought in Ironbottom Sound, Leyte Gulf, and the Coral Sea.
I saw the USS Farenholt being towed out in 1971 to be expended as a target for NAVAIRLANT, which was holding trials for the air-launched Harpoon. She looked beaten-up, but her name was familiar and I wondered why......I was reading Japanese Destroyer Captain at the time, and pretty soon I found a reference to the Farenholt. That little ship had taken a beating from the IJNS Kirishima, a 30,000-ton battlecruiser, in one of the night battles off Guadalcanal, and had survived somehow to bring most of her crew home. Where's her successor and namesake in the Fleet?
I'm sick of naming ships after politicians and admirals who died in their beds. Or, in this case, who haven't even died.
As a Grumman employee I was directly affected by Cheney's decision, with which I vehemently disagreed, and still do to this day. It took the Slick Willy presidency to make me so fearful for the continuance of the Republic that I would overlook that blunder on Cheney's part and vote for the man for VP.I hate this business of naming our capital ships after politicians -- especially politicians who haven't shown us the courtesy of dying first.But as to the statement I quote above, I recall no contract tiff at that time worth mentioning (early in the F-14 program is another matter entirely). And as to the destruction of the tools, which I can confirm, I ruefully note that whenever an aircraft program is cancelled its opponents will drive a stake through its heart it that way. They never are content to allow for the possibility that it might ever be prudent to change that decision in light of future events.
That's a scandal, of course - but there it is. Politics 101.
- Ronald Reagan's funeral was in '04 because that's when he stopped breathing - but in the operative political sense he gave a whole new meaning to the term "committing political suicide" when he wrote his famous letter revealing that he had Alzheimer's Disease. So I think that the naming of the good ship Gipper was entirely justifiable.
- However, it did give cover for the incumbent president to name a carrier after his father, whose place in history should be political heir of Ronald Reagan and one of only three sitting VPs to be elected POTUS. But he abandoned that legacy with "read my hips" and has the place in history that he lost to the most venal president in US history. A mediocrity, other than for raising a successor president and a governor of Florida who may never be president but who is in fact worth serious mention for the 08 Republican nomination.
- It has to be said that there is also the precedent of the nuclear sub Carter, named for a living former POTUS who was formerly as submariner as George H.W. Bush was formerly a crewman on an aircraft carrier (but I'm not sure whether that is a precedent for or a result of the naming of the GHW Bush).