USS Ronald Reagan Commissioning Tomorrow

wessman writes "Being an employee at Northrop Grumman's Newport News shipyard, I cannot help but be proud to see one of our products commissioned by the U.S. Navy, especially considering how long it takes to build a $5 billion Nimitz-class nuclear-powered aircraft carrier. And I'm sure the other 18,000 workers here feel the same way. The ship is being commissioned Saturday, July 12 at the Norfolk naval base. It is obviously the most technically advanced carrier in the fleet, taking the term "hardware" to new levels. Pick a local story. From the Hampton Roads Daily Press: Anchors Aweigh, Changes Abound Aboard Carrier, Some Wanted CVN-76 Named after Daredevil Flier, 20,000 Expected for Reagan's Rite, USS Constellation Retiring Too Soon?. From the Virginia Pilot: The Carrier Reagan - Ahead of Its Class, Carrier Construction is All in the Family, Former President's Son Michael Reagan Excited about Commissioning."

How appropriate...

[sting3r]

...that a $5 billion aircraft carrier that we really don't need during this time of budget crunches and economic weakness bears the name of the man who invented modern deficit spending in America.

Ronald Reagan's pro-spending, pro-big-government, anti-labor policies are undoubtedly going to lead my beloved country to her death. But with our large military, at least we will make a hell of a lot of noise when everything finally collapses.

Re:One question.

[gowen]

The ship is named after Ronald Reagan and he has alzheimers so he has memory loss.

Reagan's memory loss occured long before he suffered from Alzheimers. I suggest you read his testimony to the Iran-Contra affair, in which he (somewhat conveniently) "failed to recall" how much he knew about the deal. He also "forgot" many other facets of it, such as his requirement to inform Congress...

Screenshots of Nimitzes

[SpaceRook]

Here is a hell of a lot of images of these things:

Pictures [fas.org]

Re:WTF?

[CommieLib]

the man who increased our national debt more blah...blah...blah..

Ugh. This stuff drives me crazy.

Crack a book. Congress does the budget. Maybe the phrase "Congressional Budget" rings a bell?

Re:I wonder

[Mother Gibber]

From the Daily Press: The Reagan's skipper, Capt. John W. "Bill" Goodwin, looked at the model and suggested some changes. The program allowed the shipyard to save millions of dollars by catching problems earlier in the process, Gunter said.

Re:Way too many articles

[WTFmonkey]

You correct. There are 10 Nimitz-class, and several other carriers of other classes.

From your link:
Nimitz-class ships:
USS Nimitz (CVN 68), San Diego, Calif.
USS Dwight D. Eisenhower (CVN 69), Newport News, Va.
USS Carl Vinson (CVN 70), Bremerton, Wash.
USS Theodore Roosevelt (CVN 71), Norfolk, Va.
USS Abraham Lincoln (CVN 72), Everett, Wash.
USS George Washington (CVN 73), Norfolk, Va.
USS John C. Stennis (CVN 74), San Diego, Calif.
USS Harry S. Truman (CVN 75), Norfolk, Va.
Ronald Reagan (CVN 76) (under construction)
George H.W. Bush (CVN 77) (under construction)

Enterprise, JFK, Kitty Hawk, and Constellation are of a different class. Right?

It doesn't "run" on any OS.

[qwijibrumm]

Individual systems on Navy vessels run many diferent operating systems. Many systems run NT or Win2k, others run Unixes, and most are firmware driven. So to ask what OS a freakin' aircraft carrier (read: floating city) runs, is just as vauge as asking what OS IBM uses.

-ET2

Re:Bah.

[Surak]

It's NOT an Alzheimer's joke. Read your history books. Reagan had "convenient" memory problems well before he contracted Alzheimer's, during the Iran-Contra hearings in which Reagan couldn't recall answers to important questions that would have indicated his level of involvement in the Iran-Contra arms-for-hostages scandal.

Re:Star Wars

[gantrep]

I recommend that you read Daniel Quinn's Ishmael [amazon.com] and stop worrying about all the dying children in Africa, etc.

Re:great...

[hexcentric1]

Actually, the server software is Win2k. Third-party database software (can't say which) does most of the work, though. The Navy's SmartShip program is behind this (try a Google search); the reason everything else is so old is simple. The Navy is very, very slow to adopt technology. Even on a ship as new as the Reagan, there are components with designs nearly 100 years old. Its just how they think. If the technology isn't proven, and then aged a bit, the Navy simply won't adopt it.

Hi Res Pics from PCU

[stoolpigeon]

USS Reagan Carrier Pic 1 [navy.mil]
USS Reagan Carrier Pic 2 [navy.mil]
USS Reagan Carrier Pic 3 [navy.mil]
USS Reagan Carrier Pic 4 [navy.mil]
USS Reagan Carrier Pic 5 [navy.mil]
USS Reagan Carrier Pic 6 [navy.mil]
USS Reagan Carrier Pic 7 [navy.mil]
USS Reagan Carrier Pic 8 [navy.mil]
USS Reagan Carrier Pic 9 [navy.mil]
USS Reagan Carrier Pic 10 [navy.mil]
USS Reagan Carrier Pic 11 [navy.mil]
USS Reagan Carrier Pic 12 [navy.mil]
USS Reagan Carrier Pic 13 [navy.mil]

Re:Simply wrong

[Dan the Control Guy]

Chester Nimitz died in 1966, ~10 years before the Nimitz was commisioned.

You've oversimplified the question...

[MyNameIsFred]

The Constellation is old for a Navy ship. It has been ridden hard, and needs a lot of work. But some of the things the Navy wants to do, can never been done on Connie, for example installing new, more capable radars. The underlying structure of the ship will not support such changes. Why would the Navy want to upgrade systems? Well when radars, electrical motors, computers etc. get too old you can't buy parts. At some point, it actually becomes cheaper to start all over again.Its a little like telling someone with an original IBM AT to install a new ATI Radeon graphics card. By the time they upgraded everything for the new graphics card, they could have had a whole new machine.

BTW, mothballing old ships is standard Navy practice, just in case a big war causes them to need more ships. For example, in Gulf War I, many of the transportion ships used to move supplies to the Gulf were pulled out of mothballs.

Re:One question.

[gowen]

"I never had sex with that woman"

If you think floating mines into foreign harbours [issues2000.org] and selling guns to dictators [fas.org] to fund terrorists bent on overthrowing a democratic government (and lying about it to Congress) is morally equivalent to fucking your intern [therealmonica.com] and lying about it, you have a weird set of morals...

Rose Lawfirm was bad, but no one was indicted.

Number of Clinton officials indicted or convicted in Whitewater, Travel Office, FBI files, Monica Lewinsky, Bruce Babbit, Michael Espy investigations: 0 (none, zero, zip, nada)
(Asst. Attorney-General Webster Hubbell was convicted of embezzlement, a crime he committed before joining Clinton Administration.)

Number of Reagan appointees convicted (not just indicted, but actually convicted) during his time in office: 29!
Caspar Weinberger was indicted 5 times, but pardoned by his old boss.

Presence, cost, and Microsoft

[hexcentric1]

The point of a carrier is not necessarily firepower. There's a reason they call it "100,000 tons of diplomacy." True, the Air Force can bomb anywhere in the world with their long-range bombers, but the fear of a plane that could fly over is a lot less than fear of a big ship parked off your coast. I can't believe there is even an argument over whether a new carrier is needed to replace the aging carriers. The USS Constellation is in really terrible shape, USS Kitty Hawk is almost as bad, USS John F Kennedy is worse, and even USS Enterprise, which was the first nuc carrier, is in really bad shape. I should know, I spend all day on one. What the Navy is trying to do with their new, automated systems is reduce the manning required. It costs well over half a billion dollars each year to maintain and operate a nuclear carrier. If they can automate systems, they will reduce the manning required to operate those systems, and their preventive maintenance through use of these systems (ICAN) will save A LOT of money. If it works. The server architecture is archaic, and runs Win2k. I can attest that other ships have had serious problems with the servers running these systems. And still do. They run Windows because the private companies providing a lot of these systems employ software that only runs on Windows. Its not a very good solution, but now that the Navy has started down a path, they are committed. Maybe the CVN-21 will have a chance...

Re:Cue...

[Martin Blank]

He boosted military funding in an effort to stay ahead of the Soviet Union. However, Democrats insisted that if military spending was to jump that much, then social spending needed to jump a lot, too. He gave in and let it happen. If you go back and look at how much has been spent historically in different government sectors, you'll see the same huge leaps in social spending that make up 75% or more of the budget, and that is part of what led to the massive deficits even at a time of skyrocketing revenues (through lower taxes, I might add).

U.S.S. Grace Hopper

[jhines]

Anybody serve aboard her? That is a ship named after one of the Navy's formost geeks, way before being geeky was cool. (if it ever is)

Just a small ship in a big navy, but they are important to.

Re:more than meets the eye

[confused one]

It's called a Laser... The navy's been funding free electron laser (FEL) research for about a decade now; and, it's hitting the MW range. It wouldn't be too much of a leap to push it high enough for weapons use.

Re:How appropriate...

[letxa2000]

Ok, let's try again. And let's keep it simple: From the 1040 tax "book" (on the back of the front cover) that I assume you were sent to do this year's taxes:

Outlays:

Soc. security, Medicare, retirement, social programs, physical, human, community development: 64%
National Defense, Veterans, and foreign affairs: 18%
Interest on the debt: 10%
Law enforcement & general government: 2%

So... There you have it. 64% of the budget is spent on social programs and, no, that doesn't include interest on the debt or veteran's benefits.

And again, if 64% of the budget is social programs then saying that the past debt was incurred by military spending is less than honest. In reality, you can't say what caused the debt other than "total spending." And of that total spending social programs makes up 64%, so social programs have caused more debt than military spending.

Glad I could help.

Reagan didn't create deficit spending Congress did

[Nova Express]

He convinced Congress to increase spending and lower taxes.

On the issue of Reagan convincing Congress to increase spending you are demonstrably mistaken.

From Fiscal Year 1981 through Fiscal Year 1981, only once did the Reagan administration propose more spending than Congress approved; for the other eight years, Congress spent more money than Reagan proposed. Here are the actual figures Reagan proposed, and the actual amount Congress authorized (in billions of dollars):

FY1981 Reagan: $655.2 Congress: $678.2

FY1982 Reagan: $695.3 Congress: $745.8

FY1983 Reagan: $773.3 Congress: $808.4

FY1984 Reagan: $862.5 Congress: $851.8

FY1985 Reagan: $940.3 Congress: $946.4

FY1986 Reagan: $873.7 Congress: $990.3

FY1987 Reagan: $994.0 Congress: $1003.9

FY1988 Reagan: $1024.3 Congress: $1064.1

FY1989 Reagan: $1094.2 Congress: $1144.2

Note that the Democratic party controlled the House all eight years of Reagan's presidency, and the Senate the last two. Had it not been for excessive spending by Congress (which also increased the amount of "locked in" spending for each successive budget), the budget deficit would have disappeared by the end of Reagan's term.

Source: Edwin S. Rubenstein, The Right Data, P. 235.

Re:Stop with the flamebait political posts, michae

[An Onerous Coward]

Umm, excuse me? "No memory of those events" refers to the Iran-Contra hearings, not to Reagan's Alzheimers. I guess many Republicans have scrubbed their brains of those events.

The whole goddamn story is actually a call for us to lust after spiffy new military hardware. Though the choice in naming is just one of an inordinate number of projects being named after our fortieth president. Some have called it "the Reaganization of America."

If you don't like Michael's stories, Slashdot has made it very easy to block stories on a per-editor basis. This was a great story, and the worst that can be said is that the "from the * department" comment was unnecessarily distracting. It wasn't even in poor taste.

Re: USS Jimmy Carter

[scb147]

Funny you mention the USS Jimmy Carter, people always tell me it would shoot off hammers, nails and leaflets instead of tomahawks and torpedos.

BTW, the USS Jimmy Carter (SSN23) is the last of the Seawolf class submarine. I believe it is to be commissioned later this year.

Re:I second that

[Anonymous Coward]

Actually, I think the British invented the steam catapult. In fact, they invented most of what became the aircraft carrier (I think the U.S.'s major innovations were nuclear power and the angled flight deck).

Of course, the British never had the werewithal to build them as big as we do. :)

The next generation carriers are supposed to get EM catapults, which are supposed to reduce the strain on launching aircraft (and their crews, although I don't suppose the bean counters care too much about them). The whole idea is that you get a much more constant and controlled acceleration compared to a steam system. Rummy is trying to push up their deployment to CVX-1 (it was originally scheduled for CVX-2).

I like Rummy, and I'd have thought most /.'s would, too. After all, he's a gadget freak like the rest of us. :)

Re:Way too many articles

[Anonymous Coward]

We (The US) DO NOT NEGOTIATE with terrorist. Diplomacy is worth trying with other countries. That is the route we have been taking with North Korea. However if you ever let a terrorist think that his actions have ANY bargaining power all you do is invite more terror. The only way to handle it is to make the price of terrorism too high. Nothing to gain and everything to lose. And that goes for anyone aiding, funding, or supporting those activities.

Re:I wonder

[urbazewski]

SWITCHEROO: the original post said "Iran contra" but the reply list starts with "Iran Hostage Crisis".

The hostages were indeed taken under Carter, but the illegal unconstitutional deal that traded arms for hostages and used the revenue to fund the Contras (which Congress had repeatedly voted against) was 100% a Reagan/Bush Sr. affair.

And yes, they both knew.

Re:Reagan didn't create deficit spending Congress

[Nova Express]

1. You comments display a fundamental misunderstanding of how federal government budgeting works. Once an appropriation for a Fiscal Year has been passed, budget rules stipulate that those spending levels, plus increases for inflation, plus population increase, beceoms the baseline for next year's budget. Thus each amount that Congress increases spending each year has a cumulative effect by raising the baseline each year. And keep in mind that liberals and the press screamed bloody murder anytime Reagan tried to actually cut spending (see Stockman's The Triumph of Politics for how hard Washington's poltical elites fight against budget cutting, and how budgeting rules rig the system in favor of higher spending); just imagine what they would have said if Reagan tried to "change the ground rules" of baseline budgeting. Taking out those cumulative increases, and it would indeed have erased the budget deficit. Could Reagan have vetoed those budgets? Yes, and he should have, but the political and media firestorm for doing so ("Ronald Reagan is killing our babies!" said Senator Kennedy today) would have dwarfed Monicagate. Just look at the fallout from the brief closure of some federal offices during the Gingrich-Clinton budget showdown.

2. The Carter figures are misleading because they are not inflation-adjusted dollars. After 1982, inflation was a very minor factor in increasing budgets and revenues, but during the hyperinflation of the Carter years they were a major factor. Subtract the rate of inflation from the Carter revenue increases and you're left with very little. (I would calculate the exact figure, but my Almanac doesn't go back that far, and I don't have a copy of Statistical Abstract of the United States handy.)

Re:Yes, but he *did* allow 90% of it

[Nova Express]

The Reagan years increased the deficit from ~$1000 billion to ~$4000 billion.

1, Your figures are demonstrable incorrect. By deficit I assume you mean "the National Debt," otherwise your figures are an order of magnitude too large. The National Debt in 1981 was $997.9 billion; in 1989 it was $2857.4 billion, not $4000 billion. (Source: The World Almanac and Book of Facts: 1999, p. 110.)

2. Go upthread and read my comments on the cumulative effect of baseline budgeting procedures. Almost every increase made by Congress gets passed down (and actually slightly increased for inflation and population growth) in each year of budget outlays. The cumulative effect is much larger than merely adding up the differences year to year.

3. I never said the difference was enough to erase the National Debt (though holding the line from Reagan's initial FY82 budget with only increases for inflation certainly would have by now), only the federal Budget Deficit by the end of Reagan's term.

3rd Wire!

[genomancer]

Ack! I know this is gonna get swallowed up by the political spam, but a kinda cool piece of geek news slipped past when I was reading some of the news about the new carrier.. In particular, it's ONLY GOT 3 WIRES!! Ok, so who cares? Well, it used to be a tradition among veteran carrier pilots (don't know if it still is.. anyone here in the know?) to "catch the 3rd wire".. which is to say, prove (show off :) their competance/skills by aiming for the 3rd arresting wire on the deck. I guess they'll have to go for 2nd of 3 now or something. Anyway, it was just a neat piece of military culture I heard somewhere :)

G

Re:I wonder

[Dr. Blue]

Don't know where they're getting their numbers from, but they sure don't match any real numbers I've seen. In fact, the numbers from the OMB in the White House show a much more dismal picture of debt as a percentage of GDP. According to the chart in your link, the debt in 2002 looks like about 35% (eyeballing the chart). But according to the White House it's 60.0%

Furthermore, the White House's own projections show that the debt, as a percentage of GDP, will be 67.6% by 2007, which is the highest rate since 1955. The 1955 debt was the tail end of the WWII debt, which was high from 1943 to 1955.

Gee, thank you Mr. Bush -- I love having the highest debt since the last World War...

None of these figures are secret -- they're all public data available in the President's budget (look at the 'historical tables').

Re:Bah.

[Ian Bicking]

You're right, not all republicans are bastards. However, unlike some stupid perjury claim, Iran-Contra was about the government selling arms to a terrorists (Iran) to fund other terrorists (the Contras). Iran-Contra was about doing evil things, which is a hell of a lot worse than dishonest.

The Reagan administration supported Mujahideen, the Afghani group that before its militarization was notable for throwing acid in the faces of women who did not wear veils. The Reagan administration supported Saddam, even as he was using chemical weapons. And (in Iran-Contra) was supporting Saddam's opponent, just to try to keep things bloodier for longer. That's just a short list of things that are particularly notable in light of recent events.

Okay, you can give Reagan the benefit of the doubt -- he was a fool and a figurehead for a bunch of immoral people. Or he was a immoral person himself.