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Post by quincannon on Jul 5, 2017 13:35:59 GMT
All of the Freedom Class Littoral Combat Ships are being built there on a one source contract basis.
You will notice how Billings is launched (sideways) which is the same method used to launch submarines in Wisconsin during WWII. The side launch method eliminates the possibility of hogging (bending or breaking the keel upon launch)and allows a ship to be built alongside relatively shallow water. You will also note that they are built in a building, which means weather is not a factor that can/will delay construction.
The other LCS class is built in Alabama, also inside, but the method of launch is quite different. The ship is taken out of the building shed and placed on a purposely designed barge, taken upriver a ways to a dry dock. The barge with the ship aboard is put in the dry dock. The dry dock is then drained, the barge fastened to the bottom of the dry dock, then the dry dock is refilled and the ship floats off the barge.
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Post by yanmacca on Jul 5, 2017 19:31:34 GMT
I forgot about posting this, it is probably old news now, but never mind; link
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Post by quincannon on Jul 5, 2017 20:09:37 GMT
I like the way you guys build those basins around your dry docks. You see one in the bottom Google Earth photo.
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Post by Beth on Jul 5, 2017 20:34:02 GMT
Interesting.
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dave
Brigadier General
Posts: 1,679
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Post by dave on Jul 5, 2017 20:56:36 GMT
Does Britain need an aircraft carrier? The HMS Queen Elizabeth would be vital if the UK ever went back to the Falklands or some other distant location. Regards Dave
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Post by quincannon on Jul 6, 2017 3:49:24 GMT
That Dave is something only the Royal Navy and the Defense Ministry can decide.
If the Royal Navy is meant to be strategically relevant only in waters within three hundred miles of their homeland there is absolutely no need for an aircraft carrier or in fact the planned sister which will be along in another couple of years. It is the same with us. If we find that strategically we need to only extend power three hundred miles west of San Francisco, and three hundred miles east of New York City we don't need them either. If that is not the case for either the US or UK then we must have them.
What I find remarkable about the Queen Lizzie and Prince of Wales is that they seem to be the right size for both navies going forward in this century. We must ask ourselves the question do we need carriers to execute a strike from the sea, or do we need them only to dominate the air above the sea. We have many other means to execute a strike anywhere on the planet, and that capability far exceeds anything that can be launched from a carrier.
We must get over this notion, in my opinion, that each of the services must have multi faceted, thus cross over duplication capabilities. We just cannot afford that kind of thinking. What we can afford though is a completely integrated "purple suit" approach, where each of the services furnishes the piece of the pie they are best suited to do.
Carl will probably remember this well. The Army to maintain what they thought to be relevance in the dawning nuclear age of the 50's, 60's and 70's deployed nuclear capable weapons like Atomic Annie, Davy Crockett, Honest John, Little John, Pershing and a bunch of others. None of them were worth a shit, other than the Pershing, and your taxpayers money was spent on things that were only meant to keep the Army relevant in the eyes of Congress. The Davy Crockett for instance was a nuke launched off the back of a Jeep that would kill a target with precision, but it would also, being so short range, inflict as many friendly casualties as it would on the enemy. If anyone ever tells you the Army ain't so bright, believe them most of the time.
Why do you think we have the Stryker. Army relevance. We don't want to get all our boys blown up by those nasty terrorists. Now I ask you, when you put eleven men in an armored vehicle with severe limitations to its armor, would you not think it a hell of a lot easier to kill all of those eleven with one shot, that it would be to kill eleven well armed dismounts well spread out in the battlespace, who can detect you and kill you before you can kill them. Stupid is as stupid does.
So to answer your question, don't ask if Britain needs an aircraft carrier. Ask the one that should be asked before that one. What does Britain intend their Navy to do.
If you ever wonder if we have any service that gets it mostly right, you need look no further than the Marine Corps. They have not had any great modification of their organizational construct since 1941. They do everything they do up to standard. They do not go in for whiz bang du jour. They are the greatest combined arms force on Planet Earth, and everyone hates them for it so they must be doing it right.
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dave
Brigadier General
Posts: 1,679
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Post by dave on Jul 6, 2017 14:23:57 GMT
I am not so sure about the 300 miles from San Francisco as it I believe it is 12 miles for Territorial Waters, correct?. Is San Francisco part of the US or is it a separate nation? I have a couple of neighbors from Frisco who are university professors and are not comfortable living away from the Golden Gate. They are great people and we enjoy each others company but they feel isolated. Naively I thought it was the weather and scenery they missed but it was the atmosphere and ambience. They have been exiled for 2 years and are going home for a few weeks this month to be rejuvenated, bless their hearts. Regards Dave
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Post by yanmacca on Jul 6, 2017 14:28:32 GMT
I think the specifics of war change as time goes on, although the basic methods stay the same, what I mean is the way all armies have to adapt not only their weapon systems but training systems too. We are fighting a very dangerous opponent with these insurgents, as they are lightly armed but capable of knocking down a helicopter and taking out a tank with ease. But we must be doing something right because the training we are giving the forces who are combating IS on the ground are winning. I know we have given them plenty of air support but they are the guys who have to clear each building in every street.
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Post by quincannon on Jul 6, 2017 15:19:02 GMT
If you can knock out a helicopter or tank with ease Ian, the pilot or tanker is doing something wrong and it speaks to their training.
We are not winning. We may win battles and take territory. We may destroy ISIL in the field, but we are not winning, because we have no defined strategy to win. It is a complete waste of time to talk about operations, tactics, techniques, procedures and weaponry, if one does not first talk, clearly define, then set about implementing strategy based upon the principles of DIME.
The strategy must be to remove the causal factors of war. If you don't do that, you may destroy ISIL but the survivors will just pop up someplace else and it will start all over again.
All we have seen in the past forty years is "same old shit - different day". That is not a strategy. It is nothing more that a recipe for getting young men killed for no purposeful gain.
Perhaps SOSDD is all our leaders are capable of dreaming up. If that is the case, we should get new leaders, both political and military. Maybe we should find some professor of Middle East history, put four stars on that bastard's shoulders and say have at it. Maybe we should find a Westernized Muslim Professor of Middle East History to lead us. He would certainly understand what the culture needs to bring it into the 21st Century. But hell we would not go that far, because we all know that all Muslims are sneaking underhanded bastards that put their religious beliefs above everything else. Well if you want to win that is exactly what you must do, but our prejudice would rather us lose that do something like that with those who many of us feel is not worthy of our company.
We are making the same mistakes, driven by our western prejudices, that we made during the cold war with communism. All communism is monolithic. All Muslims are monolithic. All communists are bad. All Muslims are bad. Communists don't put national interests above communism. Muslims don't put national interests above their religion. The hell they don't
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Post by deadwoodgultch on Jul 6, 2017 20:33:08 GMT
We are not fighting all Muslims.
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Post by quincannon on Jul 6, 2017 21:01:55 GMT
That is exactly the point Tom, we are not fighting all Muslims, but when the rhetoric becomes heated, as it has for the last twenty years it becomes pretty damned hard to convince them of that.
Chairman Mao remarked that the guerilla swims in the sea of the people. Updating that, the Muslim extremist swims in the sea of Islam. You beat them by turning Islam against the extremist, not by turning the west against Islam.
If I were tasked with waging war against fundamental Baptists in Mississippi, and using the principles of DIME to do it, then it would go something like this.
1) I would first find myself a backslidden Baptist to tell me everything he knows about the Baptist religion, all of it, all the down in the weeds stuff.
2) The next thing I would do is use diplomacy (The D) cut off Mississippi from Alabama, Tennessee, and Louisiana, lest there are some fundamentalist Baptist leakers who wish to cross over.
3) I would then blockade their ports and mine their harbors to the point where a row boat could not sail.
4) Using information (The I) I would flood Mississippi with propaganda honoring the Baptist religion, with the hidden message that 17th century fundamentalism is not the Baptist religion of today. Adams name was Biff and Eve was Buffy, the Ark was a motor yacht etc. Separate the mind of the average Baptist from the mindset of the fundamentalist.
5) The military (The M) would be used sparingly and focused on securing the populace, thereby separating them from the fundamentalist. My soldiers would do back flips to honor all cultural norms and customs. Failing to do so would bring immediate and public punishment. It would become widespread knowledge that I was not there to harm or persecute, but rather to preserve and protect.
6) The economics (The E) would open the flood gates of funds to revive business, shelter those made homeless, rebuild that old bridge over the swamp, take nothing, spend much, enter into long term agreements, spread prosperity.
Fifteen or twenty years of that and there would nary be a fundamentalist Baptist in Mississippi, and all the other Baptists would have found a friend who they know respects them and their interpretation of God's word.
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Post by yanmacca on Jul 7, 2017 13:18:32 GMT
I don’t see it as a war against Islam or against Muslims in general, but the groups who fight under the guise of Islam, for me there are four groups that need to be eradicated, not because they are Muslims, but because they are a bunch of murdering bastards who what to bully the population and live the life of rulers, with people under their control giving them the life of kings. They are;
Islamic State Boko Haram Hezbollah Al Shabaab
The world must never take their foot off the pedal while they fight these groups, they have to be beaten and then beaten again until they are gone.
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Post by quincannon on Jul 7, 2017 13:42:18 GMT
The point is Ian, you can't eradicate them any more than you can eradicate the Mafia or the band of street thugs that may be in your town or mine. We (the human race) will always have these people among us. That does not mean you don't go after them with everything you have at your disposal, but your primary objective must be to separate them from the people they need to survive in. Cut them off from their financial and other means of support, make neighborhoods, regions and countries themselves safe from their schemes of evil, make them more concerned with their own survival, and you will greatly mitigate their influence, but you will never eradicate them altogether.
They are no more Muslim than those so called Baptists out in Kansas which disrupt our soldiers funerals, and claim our soldiers are all, in their words "fags", are Baptists. The problem is that when the adorn their names with the symbols and words of Islam that the world will soon come to believe that they are the face of Islam, in the same way that those "Kansas Baptists" are the proper face of the Baptist Religion or Christianity itself.
We have a difficult time with running these perverters of a decent religion out of business in this country because of our First Amendment. All we can do is call them out for what they are, and shun them. If we don't call them out and shun them though, they become a haven for every disgruntled bastard who thinks he never got a fair shake and that it is everyone's fault but their own. That is a small scale problem here as of now, but it is a microscopic look at what motivates people to join those organizations you list, and do the things they do.
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