We're the Military and Airpower Guys of Jonah Goldberg of National Review Online + a stray we found wandering around looking lost. All original material JHD, BHD, JR, WT, and KA 2003-2007 http://www.thedonovan.com/archives/2007/04/more_on_ships_a.html Tue, 23 Sep 2008 17:52:33 Z Movable Type 4.12 en Copyright 2008 http://www.rssboard.org/rss-specification Having found another ship that looked odd to my taste, I thought I would continue with that meme for a bit, with this picture that tickled the historian in me. The French gunboat Fusee. What's really interesting about it to me? Not so much the ship, which is from the transitional era, this photo being 1886, but because of all those obsolete leviathans in the upper left - the old wooden ships of the line, that not very long before, had been the epitome of naval power, now just sitting there being recycled into roof beams for dark smoky old... http://www.thedonovan.com/archives/2007/04/more_on_ships_a.html http://www.thedonovan.com/archives/2007/04/more_on_ships_a.html Fri, 13 Apr 2007 08:02:58 -0600 Curiously, just about a hundred years ago the USN told GE and Westinghouse to go pound sand when they wouldn't meet cost and performance standards for turbines for Texas and New York. The Navy built vertical inverted triple expansion reciprocating engines for those ships, in their own shops. The contractors came around and were much nicer and more reasonable on the next class of BBs. I'm glad to see the Navy looking out for our national interest again. http://www.thedonovan.com/archives/2007/04/more_on_ships_a.html#comment-58909 http://www.thedonovan.com/archives/2007/04/more_on_ships_a.html#comment-58909 Sat, 14 Apr 2007 02:22:20 -0600 Much rather you post naval items that you find interesting then navel ones.... As for LCS CANX - good call by SECNAV. Very good call. http://www.thedonovan.com/archives/2007/04/more_on_ships_a.html#comment-58904 http://www.thedonovan.com/archives/2007/04/more_on_ships_a.html#comment-58904 Fri, 13 Apr 2007 23:18:37 -0600 What I find refreshing is that it's just unusual to see a DoD entity just terminate a contract on performance/cost issues. What I find curious is that DoD entities are still doing business under cost-plus, since the biggest killer of new items has usually been the unholy overruns associated with them. Take the late, sorta-kinda-unlamented Comanche, as a prime example. The original concept of a small, fast, agile, survivable, single-pilot killer scout that would (doctrinally) range the battlefield in flights of three to five morphed into a large (bigger than a Cobra), fast, agile, non-survivable, dual-pilot flying UHF radio. All the bells, whistles and pie-in-the-sky avionics added after the contract was awarded killed Comanche, and we didn't even get any proof-of-concept stuff for our bucks. Twenty years after project initiation, no software was written because no hardware was ever developed -- all the funding was spent developing the fragile-but-"stealthy" airframe. Putting a stealthy airframe on a helicopter is like putting a turbine engine in a jeep. Nobody has figured out how to make a main rotor system both efficient *and* invisible to a pulse-Doppler or synthetic-aperture radar system, and the biggest threat to a helicopter is still the bad guy on the ground who acquires it visually and has the firepower to knock it down: the French learned that in Algeria, we re-learned it in Vietnam, re-re-learned it again in Grenada, re-re-re-learned it again in Panama, re-re-re-re-learned it again in Gulf I, re-re-re-re-re-learned it again in Afghanistan and re-re-re-re-re-re-learned it again in Iraq. ]]> http://www.thedonovan.com/archives/2007/04/more_on_ships_a.html#comment-58867 http://www.thedonovan.com/archives/2007/04/more_on_ships_a.html#comment-58867 Fri, 13 Apr 2007 12:05:03 -0600