Carronade The Yankee Sailor Carronade

The Sea is a choosy mistress. She takes the men that come to her and weighs them and measures them. The ones she adores, she keeps; the ones she hates, she destroys. The rest she casts back to land. I count myself among the adored, for I am Her willing Captive.

FLASH TRAFFIC:
I've relocated to a new Yankee Sailor.

Wednesday, June 15, 2005

Observations on Shipbuilding

Chapomatic posts his thoughts today on U.S. Navy shipbuilding policy and process, and there are some priceless nuggets:
- 2003 was much like 1973 in that the number of surface ships are dwindling fast and nothing really new is coming out now. It’s also a great time to talk about high-low mix, but the “prisoner’s dilemma” logic of the low part of the high-low mix guarantees that the lower capability ship does not get love and dies on the vine.

- USN does relatively badly at small ships on the operational level. The ships get ignored until we need them desperately, they don’t get the attention of the bigger ships, et cetera. Look at PGM, PC, you name it; look at the maintenance pipelines and how much attention gets paid to them.

- The current world environment requires us to be everywhere at once. If you buy only high mix ships you do not have enough ships to be everywhere at once and you don’t get effective use of resources when you send a cruiser to operate with the Maldives navy.
This is just a taste, and the whole thing is not to be missed. Go read it. Now.