Posted on 07/18/2016 5:12:43 PM PDT by Mariner
The United States Navy and its allies recently laid siege to a retired frigate in the middle of the Pacific Ocean. It was all part of a SINKEX, or sinking exercise, that tested the missiles and big guns of modern navies against an actual warship.
Every two years, as part of the multinational Rim of the Pacific (RIMPAC) exercises, the US Navy tows a retired warship out to sea. Then the U.S. military, along with allied forces, blow it to smithereens.
The USS Thach was an Oliver Hazard Perry-class frigate. Commissioned in 1979, it was named after Jimmy Thach, a World War II F4F Wildcat pilot who invented the famous "Thach Weave" fighter formation to counter the Japanese Zero fighter.
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What did the Navy do to the PT Boat squadrons in 1945? Beached them & burned them. What did they do to the Battleships (most of them) in the 40’s? Laid a few up, scrapped the rest. The Essex-class carriers went away as soon as the LPD/LHA’s came on-line. It’s a shame, but it’s about manpower & budgets.
The thing that killed the frigates was peace. Frigates are very useful as escorts during war. But without VLS cells they aren’t very efficient as a modern weapons platform. I would have designed a new frigate instead of the Littoral Combat Ship... but hey, that’s me.
I would have gifted a bunch of those frigates to the USCG. They’d have made excellent deep water cutters.
Every once in a while it pays to have the crews fire a live war-shot. The USAF and USN play laser tag in mock dogfights, but they will sometimes (if lucky) be selected to fire a live missile at an unmanned target aircraft. There’s a difference between a simulated engagement and the actual ‘envelope’ of a real weapon.
I was on her for the 1986 Med Cruise. I was berthed under the water brakes at the forward end of the catapults. Most of my squadron was under the wires, though. As for speed, 32 knots is all the navigation channel on the TV showed. She could have been going faster.
LOL! The water brakes!
On my first deployment, first day out of port, I was exploring the ship, and was all the way forward, on the level right under the flight deck, when they fired a cat shot. I had never experienced it before, and it scared the bejeezus out of me!
Yep, I got to where I would fall asleep between cat shots and would never hear another until I woke up 8 hours later.
LOL, I could sleep through an E-2 Hawkeye landing right on top of me...even now I can remember hearing as they approached:
hmmmmmmmmmmHMMMmmmmmmHMMMMMMM as the plane approached
WHAM as they hit
SCREEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEE as the cable played out
sssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssss as the cable slithered back across the deck
And click- - - - click- - -click as the cable ticked back and forth, becoming taut on top of the metal thingies that held the cable a few inches off the deck
Yep...funny. Could listen to that and fall asleep and sleep through it! I do remember the first time I heard the national anthem of another country being played in the early morning from the 1MC speaker right above my head in the overhead, made me sit up and I bashed my head.
I got a long wire and poked it through the holes in the metal to puncture the speaker until all it did was vibrate annoyingly. I know that was a bad thing to do, but it did teach me a lesson-on no deployment after that did I ever select the top bunk!!!!
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