American aircraft carriers remain essential to commanding the seas

The Daily Caller ^ | 09/16/2011 | Robert O'Brien

[RitchieAprile]

covered under the warranty? or does taking her into harms way invalidate it?

[Vroomfondel]

ping

[hosepipe]

[ 52% of Americans voted for Obama. That’s a majority. ]

Some of that could be voter fraud.. How Much?..
Nobody knows.. The FBI doesn’t investigate voter fraud..
Which is strange.. even suspicious..

[magslinger]

SONOBUOY PING!

Click on pic for past Navair pings. Post or FReepmail me if you wish to be enlisted in or discharged from the Navair Pinglist. The only requirement for inclusion in the Navair Pinglist is an interest in Naval Aviation. This is a medium to low volume pinglist.

[pabianice]

How? They can no longer do effective ASW. Chinese subs will sink our carriers in the first week of our next war with them.

[lentulusgracchus]

Obama: “Where are the carriers?” Aide: “At the piers, where you ordered them.”

Dick Cheney and Poppy Bush were almost as bad.

To generate a "peace dividend" for their Park Avenue taxpaying clients (the only people in the world, I swear, that old Poppy and Dick ever really cared about), they tried to demob all the big heavy divisions in Germany, they did demob the battleships, they called off the midlife SLEP rebuilds for several oil-burning carriers like the America and Saratoga and instead "ran them to death" in the testimony of some FReepers who were there and saw it happen, almost killed off the Seawolf SSN program (some Congressional advocates kept the program alive, fearing a loss of SSN-building capability Stateside), built down the Air Force fighter and ICBM wings, and killed the F-14 program, Cheney not only cancelling the program but actually ordering Grumman to cut up the jigs and dies for the airframe so the program could never be resuscitated, to "discipline" defense contractors by singling out Grumman for nonjudicial punishment.

There was much else that they did in the name of blue-haired Manhattan and Connecticut ladies, but that is about the guts of it.

Those guys were 1920's-style "wooden gun" defense-cutters, but nobody ever gave them a demerit for it (outside DoD) because the MSM liebots gave them a Red-ideological hall pass.

[CPOSharky]

USS Oriskany and USS Nimitz.

[NowApproachingMidnight]

“52% of Americans voted for Obama. That’s a majority.”

Well, since you rest your case on that, let me dissect it for you. Only approx. 40 pct of Americans voted. 52% of that would be around 21 pct of Americans that voted for Obama. Also, considering he got upwards of 90 pct of the black vote, the real number is far less. And, we all know the reasons people voted for him, not the least of which was white guilt.

You really need to be more considerate of you fellow patriot Americans with your broad brush strokes and attempts at revisionism.

[NowApproachingMidnight]

A shot from the deck:

[NowApproachingMidnight]

You’re an American, right? Are you and idiot too?
I’m not saying no Americans are idiots, he is saying ALL Americans are idiots. Pretty easy to say that is an over-generalization.

[SW6906]

Ping!

[sukhoi-30mki]

That’s probably the biggest picture that I’ve seen over here in ages.

[Qbert]

"Well, I don't want to be the Devil's advocate, but the almost one hundred fifty million people that did not vote (and who were able to) are even dummer..."

"Dummer" ?...

[tanknetter]

they did demob the battleships, they called off the midlife SLEP rebuilds for several oil-burning carriers like the America and Saratoga and instead "ran them to death" in the testimony of some FReepers who were there and saw it happen, almost killed off the Seawolf SSN program (some Congressional advocates kept the program alive, fearing a loss of SSN-building capability Stateside)

Ok, taking these on at a time.

The battleships were great, but were single mission platforms and with the advent of GPS-guided bombs their raison d'etre went away. B-1s, B-2s and B-52s that can strike targets with greater precision than their 16" rifles and in any weather, with cruisers, destroyers and submarines that can carry a LOT more Tomahawks than they could.

Saratoga was SLEP'd. Was the first carrier to be SLEP'd as a matter of fact. However, she also helped proved that the SLEP program (which was initiated under Reagan) was deeply flawed in the sense that it expected too much from ships that were still extremely geriatric. My understanding is that the only really successful SLEP was Independence ... and her because she was given a mini-SLEP by the Yokosuka yard workers (who were horrified by what they found) as soon as she became the forward-deployed deck.

There was a valid case to be made that pumping $$$ into getting the Connecticut and Jimmy Carter into service helped preserve the sub-building industrial base. However, it should also be noted that the Seawolf-class SSNs were not designed for the post-Cold War environment that we've faced and while incredibly quiet are are also pretty limited in capability - even more than the VLS 688i subs. As a result of the termination of the Seawolf program the US has gotten a MUCH superior submarine for current and projected threats ... the Virginia Class SSNs.

As to the other items, the longer maturation of systems like the F-22 and V-22 have arguably produced better and more consistent overall operational fleets of those aircraft. IOW instead of having multiple evolutionary subtypes (like the A and C versions of the Hornet, which then evolved into the night attack optimized F/A-18D and the E/F/G series, or the A/C/E versions of the F-15) we have an overall consistent fleet.

I'm drawn on the F-14. Yup, Dick Cheney was a flaming a**hat for what he did, and yes the F-14 had better individual aircraft performance than the SuperBug ... but the SuperBug is capable of generating a lot more sorties at a lower cost than even the projected follow-on Tomcat variants could have. (fewer maintenance hours per flight hour)

[KeyLargo]

Lehman rocks Navy with complaints about political correctness

http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2011/sep/18/lehman-rocks-navy-complaints-about-political-corre/print/

[ToxicMich]

"Dummer" ?...

Oh... Yeah... Bummer... :-)