Credo
"Sign on, young man, and sail with me. The stature of our homeland is no more than the measure of ourselves. Our job is to keep her free. Our will is to keep the torch of freedom burning for all. To this solemn purpose we call on the young, the brave, the strong, and the free. Heed my call, Come to the sea. Come Sail with me." -- John Paul Jones
"Pardon him, Theodotus; he is a barbarian, and thinks that the customs of his tribe and island are the laws of nature" --George Bernard Shaw, "Caesar and Cleopatra"
"And those who were seen dancing were thought to be insane by those who could not hear the music."--Friedrich Nietzsche
"A kind Providence has placed in our breasts a hatred of the unjust and cruel, in order that we may preserve ourselves from cruelty and injustice. They who bear cruelty, are accomplices in it. The pretended gentleness which excludes that charitable rancour, produces an indifference which is half an approbation. They never will love where they ought to love, who do not hate where they ought to hate."--Edmund Burke
"Μολὼν λαβέ" -- Leonidas
"Blogito Ergo Sum" -- Neptunus Lex
The sad part is that was my reaction when the sub establishment publicized the photos of the polar bear trying to eat the rudder of a boat at the North Pole.
Which photo in itself isn’t that big a deal–gotta go to the pole, it’s a hard mission to complete with real risk, nice to have a little fun after working hard–but it was right in the middle of the race to Baghdad in 2003. You know, Marines leapfrogging Army, and heavy fighting, and we were playing with polar bears in the press. A bit tone deaf we were.
Oh Lex
Ben there done that, I doubt there are many boats able to to do 90 north. Back in the day if your tube had an “ice suit” and you were a decent shot you got to wear a nice warm parka doing polar bear watch. Thry showed you this cool movie from the sixties or so where a team on the ice got totaly mun ched by a big white cuddly bear. Your job was to hang in the sail and bang a way at Algores best buddies if they happened to show up while the “weather techs” were putting there stuff on ice( my thought on this was that not a chance we would hit the bear but the guys on the ice would run home as soon as we started shooting). Did this a few times and never did see a bear, kinda wish I could have kept that nice fur parka though.
And the point is?
But then I’m Air Force, so the more esoteric Navy stuff is undoubtedly lost on me and my already challenged IQ.
I pretty much had the same question. If you ran your cruiser or destroyer up through an ice pack they’d actuate the explosive bolts on your command at sea pin. Submariners?
They seem, from this old brownshoe’s perspective, to do it because they can. Because it’s there.
…they’d actuate the explosive bolts on your command at sea pin.
Ha! How’d I miss that delightful phraseology the first time around?
The point is to show that our missiles can reach their targets even faster when they’re parked at the Pole. The Soviets spent a lot of time, money and effort on ASW in the far northern climes, so they obviously got the message.
Virg
At least this one didn’t run into anything. And after snapping the phot AW1 Tim was winging his way back to a cold beer.
“winging his way back to a cold beer”…
After trying to get back in to Kef, home of the eternal crosswind.
Silly me… who knew there was another sort of “Crab” out there? Made the ride so much more interesting.
The new Navy cammies wont work very well their either!
At least while wearing them sailors will fit in with the smurfs! The supplier must be having a field day making L, XL, XXL, XXXL, and XXXXL sized uniforms!
I think I’d rather wear Khakis! In fact, I know I would!
I just worry about the propeller catching ice.
Dem tings ain’t cheep!
But did the Tube Guy’s log the overhead time as actual sub contact time”?
Subj: Ice Ex’s
Actually one does these sort of things to teach the young’ns how.
Anybody who says he knows where, when, how, and with whom the war after next is going to be fought, doesn’t.
Colin Powell used to talk about having a full toolbox. The hat trick is to hang on to it once you’ve got it, keep it current and in working order, and teach the grandkids how to use it safely and well.
Torpedoist Emiritus has a good handle on this. Look at attempts to resurrect . . . well, almost anything, that hasn’t been made for a while. You know, stuff like missiles, or planes, or ships. Stuff that worked, and worked well. Only .gov didn’t buy enough of them when they were writing contracts. And now we need to buy just a few more.
So the skills that went into building them has moved on to other things, and all that precious knowledge that was once part of a team that could produce, is now part of a team producing something else. A drawing package does not capture institutional memory.
The relearning of the “lost” skills is a painful process, one that we can ill-afford when the product is national defense.
Mike
.. and even IF you can get those draftsmen and engineers and welders and technicians and electricians and ad infinitum assorted skilled tradesmen back from whence they went, the lost ability that would have to be relearned takes time. “use it (the skill) or lose it” is NOT just a saying, it is reality for all skilled trades. Just today I had to write from semi scratch a database maintenance script…one skill I hadn’t touched in years… and getting the fingers to hit the right keys even when the system was spitting out informative messages took time, and what I did was on the simple side. I can’t imaging trying to visualize bulkheads, wiring, piping, and and sundry other infrastructure in my head and be able to somewhat ‘know’ what ain’t right after being away from it for years….which is what the DOD is really asking the poor suckers to do when reviving these programs. Here “guess” is not an option, not if you want that design to survive some goat plucker in a speed boat with 500lbs of dynamite…. let alone a hyper speed sea skimmer missile.
JoeC/
Boy are you correct! And sometimes we in the services do it to ourselves without mis-guided SECDEFs. There are STILL some mission profiles we can’t fly since the F-111 went away–but if we wanted to reconstitute the force now and build new, improved variants, would be almost impossible–the AF big kids hated it so much they ordered all the jigs thrown away/destroyed when they closed the assembly lines!