Veteran's Day
2013 is one of those rare years where the Veteran's Day holiday actually falls on 11/11. The Navy sent quite a contingent to NYC to celebrate Veteran's Week. Thanks to all veterans and those who love us for all that you've done.
How do you celebrate Veteran's Day?
(If you'd like a more substantive discussion, we can discuss this article which wrongly calls for the U.S. Navy to invest in non-nuclear submarines because Europeans are better than Americans or some such hogwash.)
posted by Bubblehead at 12:34 PM
26 Comments:
And, for sure, don't miss the "Rubber" sub-note to the article:
My thanks to Captain John L. Byron, USN (Ret.), Winslow T. Wheeler, Dave Foster, and Chuck Spinney for their assistance in researching this article.
11/09/2013 1:17 PM
P.S. Joel: BZ on the MSM.
11/09/2013 1:18 PM
The stupid idea of an American SSK comes up every year or so.
When the DoD procurement process demonstrates the ability to build a small surface combatant for less than 10X what it should cost, then we can start to talk about all the other reasons this is a stupid idea.
Would be fun though. Imagine a sub with zero NR influence.
11/09/2013 3:51 PM
A few of us are planning a squirrel hunt. If you think that has nothing to do with Veterans Day, there is some history you have apparently been missing all these years.
11/09/2013 5:44 PM
Mids at NPTU Charleston.
11/09/2013 6:01 PM
Damn Joel, didn't know you were a prior enlisted scum! No wonder you were a good ENG. We'll be BBQ'ing tomorrow.
hagar
11/09/2013 10:17 PM
Veteran's day is always on Nov 11, there was only a brief period during the 70's that it was a "monday' holiday.
11/10/2013 8:14 AM
Mids at NPTU Charleston.
You have my sympathies. I will be enjoying a free Veterans' Day meal courtesy of NRF.
11/10/2013 2:17 PM
A few of us are planning a squirrel hunt.
Rubbing another one out, courtesy of this Vaginus "anonymous" self-promotion!
11/10/2013 5:43 PM
Just another day working to keep the lights on.
11/11/2013 7:30 AM
Cheap can be good. PT boats and B-17s are examples. The key point is that they suited their mission well enough. SSKs work for Norway because their mission is coastal defence, not a distant blockade of Chinese ports.
I'd be in favour of a US SSK class that was intended for coastal defence, but is that a real US Navy mission? I might be able to envision a heavy lift ship carrying a half dozen SSKs to the Persian Gulf and another half dozen to the South China Sea. 4 boats out and 2 working up can cover a lot more territory than a single SSN.
But.
There needs to be a mission for them. Cheap for the sake of cheap is never a good idea, not the least reason being that the SSN can do coastal defence AND long range offence. SSKs are hobbled far from home.
11/11/2013 2:09 PM
Number three under his suggestions for reform certainly has merit. Working up against small SSK's would give subs a real world scenario that they are likely to face in the future. I am sure they could program the simulators for this but we all know the limitations of that sort of exercise. Get two or three on each coast and make all the nuc boats get home without being detected and sunk.
11/11/2013 3:53 PM
This is not what I did today, but what happened 11/11/80. I was on my twilight tour at NAS Key West. I was CDO that day, and we had 22 3/4 inches of rain in 24 hours, and it was not a hurricane.
11/11/2013 6:03 PM
Lots of gays down there in Key West, but be a great place for sailors to retire?
11/11/2013 8:57 PM
Kinda funny.... whoever wrote BO's speech, didn't realize Section #60 was over 2 miles away.... when he said, " This past April, Sara was laid to rest here, in Section #60." ...when the speech was given in Section #2 of Arlington Cemetery. I bet-cha, the staffer who wrote the speech, built the Obama-Care website... :(
11/11/2013 8:58 PM
Congratz on your vast knowledge of Arlington. Your mama must be proud.
11/12/2013 10:09 AM
It could actually work. We have forward bases in all AOR's. Forward deploy the crews in the same manner as mine sweepers. Never ask a nuke if we should build something non-nuclear, the answer will always be the same "no". What would the Navy do if we didn't have all these nuclear check lists creeping forward. Probably some great skippers that would know more about driving a ship than running a reactor. I'm not saying that we should completely get rid of nukes, but in an age where we are going to let the number of submarines dip to a dangerously low level, we should think "out of the box".
11/13/2013 8:34 AM
SSK's, bad idea. 'Nuff said there.
But I do like the idea of letting engineering take care of the teakettle as the Brits put it and let the CO command and fight the ship. Of course NR would have arm waving hysterics over that idea.
11/13/2013 10:01 AM
Nuke = visiting team
Non-nuke = home team
We need to keep the "F" in VFW.
ex-EM1(SS)
11/13/2013 1:39 PM
If another full-scale Naval war breaks out, I don't think Naval nuclear power has a future. When we need to crank out 50-100 subs and 10 carriers in a year, we will not be doing it while also worrying about properly handling a nuclear reactor and training crews for a year and a half to operate them.
But for now, they're optimal for the peacetime submarine force mission.
11/14/2013 12:45 AM
Optimal for the peacetime submarine force mission - which, by the way, has PREVENTED a full-scale Naval war from breaking out since 1945.
11/14/2013 6:11 AM
Also, we have technology now. We don't have to send out 8 PBY's to search for convoys - Satellites take care of that now. The planes of today go much further on a tank of gas than the propeller predecessor.
Submarines have passive sonar, comms out the ying-yang, torpedoes that search for targets, and most of all, an unlimited fuel supply.
None of this was invented before Pearl Harbor. They had to do everything the hard way. . . Dumbass.
If we ever have to build 100 submarines to win a war, in this day and age, we are fucked anyway. Politics alone will kill us.
11/14/2013 12:22 PM
The only thought I agree with in Roger Thompson's article is the one advocating a more British style of officer career tracks for US officers.
Oh, I spent 11/11 working on my house, chasing my 1 year-old around, and thanking God for all my fellow veterans, especially the ones with fish.
11/15/2013 2:02 PM
Optimal for the peacetime submarine force mission - which, by the way, has PREVENTED a full-scale Naval war from breaking out since 1945.
Really? You think that the submarine force is what has prevented a full-scale Naval war in the latter half of the 20th century? You don't think it has anything to do with the fact that all previous large Naval powers are our allies, or that the threat of nuclear destruction deters full-scale aggression between major powers? It's the SSNs that prevent it?
Also, we have technology now. We don't have to send out 8 PBY's to search for convoys - Satellites take care of that now. The planes of today go much further on a tank of gas than the propeller predecessor.
Submarines have passive sonar, comms out the ying-yang, torpedoes that search for targets, and most of all, an unlimited fuel supply.
None of this was invented before Pearl Harbor. They had to do everything the hard way. . . Dumbass.
If we ever have to build 100 submarines to win a war, in this day and age, we are fucked anyway. Politics alone will kill us.
They will still sink when hit with a torpedo. If you think the US could go to war with another Naval power and not lose any submarines, you're delusional.
11/15/2013 4:14 PM
The issue is not that we need an SSK to maintain our peacetime commitments, but rather that we need to acknowledge that the notion of a quick war is illusory. If we want to go there and be there for years, the realities of maintenance and attrition will not mesh with the fact that it takes 5 years to build each SSN. Every history of the submarine force in World War II recognizes the fortuitousness of achieving the fleet boat design prior to the demands of the war. Just as an tested but unused arsenal of nuclear weapons may have been the deterrent last the Cold War, it may be that keeping a rarely-used SSK design on hand for the industrial base is the deterrent for the next.
11/17/2013 4:59 AM
To pile onto that, the onset of war in most cases isn't sudden, either. The way WWII is taught, it gives the impression that the U.S. had no idea it was going to go to war with Japan, when it had started preparing for it as early as the 1920s.
11/17/2013 9:44 AM
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