USS Ronald Reagan Commissioning Tomorrow 1831
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."
Way too many articles (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:WTF? (Score:2, Interesting)
- A.P.
Not dead yet (Score:5, Interesting)
In Reagan's case, he is not really a factor, but his partisans (and detractors) are still pretty rabid. If he is really a great as his adherents say he is, why not wait a bit longer until a consensus emerges?
Put a submarine up against it any day (Score:4, Interesting)
They better make sure they commision at least two submarines to escort this thing. The only ship capable of really fighting a submarine is another submarine. The suface ship guys may say they can handle this role, but they can't. If this thing isn't escorted by at least two 688s it will never hear the modern diesel boat running on batteries that launches 4 torpodoes on it.
more than meets the eye (Score:5, Interesting)
Directed energy weapons! what does that mean? High powered lasers? Something else that's super-secret?
after reading that I half-expected a description of how the next carriers will transform into a gi-normous humanoid robot.
Re:Way too many articles (Score:3, Interesting)
10 aircraft carriers? There will be 12 in active service once the Reagan is out there and the Constellation is retired (there are 12 now). There are also several in reserve for quick activation if need be. See here [navy.mil].
Directed Energy Weapons?! (Score:5, Interesting)
Detect incoming missle with integrated helicopter radar
Point maser at incoming missle
Destroy incoming missle
Profit!
Piloting the planes off the deck via an electromagnetic catapule will give new meaning to the old Quake 2 'so-and-so rides so-and-so's rail'.
All Hail the Military! (Score:3, Interesting)
Probably runs M$ software anyway .... (Score:1, Interesting)
Re:more than meets the eye (Score:5, Interesting)
Isn't that just a really fancy term for... a gun?
It's directed (you aim it) and bullets have lots of... KINETIC ENERGY! America's enemies will read this thinking they need to blow their budgets on defenses against Laser beams and ion canons only to get pulverized because they're not defended against a good ol' fashioned shelling.
Ford served on an aircraft carrie in combat (Score:1, Interesting)
having a carrier named after him.
Reagan was a wimp in comparison.
In April 1942 Ford joined the U.S. Naval Reserve receiving a commission as an ensign. After an orientation program at Annapolis, he became a physical fitness instructor at a pre- flight school in Chapel Hill, North Carolina. In the spring of 1943 he began service in the light aircraft carrier USS MONTEREY. He was first assigned as athletic director and gunnery division officer, then as assistant navigator, with the MONTEREY which took part in most of the major operations in the South Pacific, including Truk, Saipan, and the Philippines.
Stop with the flamebait political posts, michael (Score:3, Interesting)
USS Ronald Reagan Commissioning Tomorrow
Posted by michael on Friday July 11, @11:20AM
from the no-memory-of-those-events dept.
Jebus. I know that most of the Slashdot audience probably agrees politically with Michael, but it's pretty clear to me that this whole goddamn story is just an excuse for people to make snide jokes about Ronald Reagan. I don't care whether you like Reagan or not (I didn't particularly), but when did Slashdot get into the business of just posting Republican-baiting stories?
If I wanted political nastiness, I'd go to a political site. I DON'T. I want actual news for nerds and stuff that matters, not Michael Sims making jokes about Reagan's Alzheimer's. HA HA MICHAEL YUO = TEH FUNNEYMAN!!!!!
Go ahead, mod me down. But I hope somebody else stands up and asks the Slashdot editors to get Michael to cut this political flamebait crap. Republican, Democrat, I don't care, I just don't want to hear it anymore.
Re:You said it! (Score:5, Interesting)
While you could say that the men and women of congress are adults who are responsible for their own actions, you can't ignore that it was the President who goaded/inspired them to do it.
These changes did accelerate the endgame of the Cold War; but the seeds of the endgame were planted much earlier. After all, the coup attempt on Gorbachev was about Perestroika and its attendant lessening of power for many in the system. Gorbachev's autobiography (though self-serving at times) is a good reference here.
You could, of course, say that the form of the Soviet government was flawed to begin with and could never succeed in the long run. But as far as the problem of spending so much on the military to keep up with the U.S., that began as soon as the Cold War itself. It also spiked after the Cuban Missile Crisis.
A weird sort of irony is that Khruschev put missiles in Cuba thinking they would be an easy way to appease his hard-liners, allowing him to spend more money on domestic issues. After all, the Americans had missiles closer than those to the USSR. Even the U.S. military acknowledged that while they weren't insignificant, the missiles posed less of a threat to the U.S. than did submarines. Beschloss' "The Crisis Years" is a good reference here.
The tough break for Khruschev was that unlike Eisenhower, who carried enough of the people's trust that he didn't need to respond bellicosely every time the Soviets did something, Kennedy did. He even did it proactively, making a statement that the placement of any offensive nuclear weapons in the region would not be allowed. He then was stuck backing it up to keep his own people happy.
After Khruschev backed down, any thoughts of increasing domestic spending went out the door. Khruschev was pushed from power, and the direct seeds of the USSR's dissolution were planted with the increase in military spending that resulted from the "defeat" in Cuba.
You can imagine that Castro was pissed off; but if you want a good scary story, read about relations between the USSR and China at the time.
Re:Put a submarine up against it any day (Score:1, Interesting)
Re:You said it! (Score:2, Interesting)
I'm hardly the only person to have doubts, as former US ambassador to the Soviet Union George Kennan wrote that "the general effect of cold war extremism was to delay rather than hasten the great change that overtook the Soviet Union by the end of the 1980s."
I second that (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Carriers A Dichotomy (Score:2, Interesting)
We actually sent a guy off looking for batteries for a sound powerd phone set. While this might seem like a normal "initiation" sort of thing, the real problem was that the guy was a second class Interior Comm Tech!
> But what everyone should remember - the single thing that make carriers so effective- are the people that run it.
Yeah, just like our captain that killed a poor guy because he was too impatiant to wait for the proper safety proceedures to be carried out, assholes that couldn't care less if a piece of equipment worked or not as long as it had a fresh coat of paint on it, etc. etc.
The real question is (Score:3, Interesting)
Budget Deficits: Blame Congress, Not Reagan (Score:3, Interesting)
You are demonstrably mistaken. It was not Ronald Reagan but Congress that was "pro-spending," and "pro-big-government." From Fiscal Year 1981 through Fiscal Year 1981, only once did the Reagan administration propose more spending than Congress approved; for the other 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, 1981 included as a baseline):
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.
(Posted this before, but evidently no one saw it...)
Funny how... (Score:2, Interesting)
My $.02 on this (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:I wonder (Score:3, Interesting)
Wrong. Here [cato.org] is the real Reagan economic record. During the Reagan years, 88.5% [cato.org] of the households in the poorest quantile were in a higher income quantile when Reagan left office. Blacks and Minorities saw the biggest gain in real income (11%) during the Reagan years. In fact, all income groups [cato.org] saw an income increase during the Reagan years of Trickle down/supply side economics. So much for the liberal "zero sum" theory.
- Star Wars (a massive waste)
Star Wars drove the soviets into the ground and was a major contribution to the end of the cold war.
- Iran hostage crisis
How can you blame Reagan for something that happened before he even took office?
- The (lost and wasteful) war on drugs
We are spending 40 times as much money on the War on Drugs today that we were when Reagan was in office, thanks to Bill Clinton.
- The biggest deficit in U.S. history
Actually, the national debt as a percentage to GDP [cato.org] was much higher under Clinton than it was under Reagan.
Why else would one of the biggest tax breaks ever go to the top 1% and not the middle class and poor
Maybe because the middle class and poor don't pay any taxes in the first place. 96.1% of the federal tax base is paid by the richest 50% of the country. [Source [ustreas.gov]]. Guess what that means? The poorest half of this country do not pay any taxes. In fact, the richest 1% pay 37% of the taxes even though they only make 20.8% of the money. The richest 5% pay 57% of all taxes even though their income only accounts for 35% in the country. Over half of all our taxes are paid by only 5% of the country. If you give a tax cut, why wouldn't you give it to the segment of the population that is burdened the most by the tax structure?
Lets see about your list (Score:3, Interesting)
Funded quite and pushed more than quite a bit by the Reagan administration. Somewhere on the order of tens of billions of dollars for what is essentially a pork project that wasn't capable of shooting down another plane let alone a hypersonic missile.
"Clinton did it too!!" Err, that righty tagline is meaningless. Two wrongs don't make a right and criticizing Reagan has nothing to do with criticizing Clinton. That's a topic for another day.
>Grenada
Ah yes, the grudge match between the US and Cuba in which a Marxist uprising was used as an excuse to invade a country the size of my neighborhood. There were no winners here.
>War on Drugs - The war is 'lost' because we (people and government) lost focus not because it could not be won.
Oh please. Receational drug use has been a part of human history since before any established culture. Putting kids in jail for possesing or growing pot isn't focus, its stupid and counterproductive. More right-wing Jesus-isms.
>Central America ---> What part?
El Salvador - 75,000 murdered
Nicaragua - 50,000 murdered
BTW, Slashdot favorite Admiral Poindexter had a hand in a lot of the Latin American interventions. I won't mention Panama as that was Bush Sr not Reagan, but Poindexter was there too.
navy ship tech (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:Presence, cost, and Microsoft (Score:2, Interesting)
They are pushing this pretty hard, even though I'm sure it'll take a few years before it is complete...
Bugging me (Score:4, Interesting)
Why is it ok to lie about motives, money and politics (see Reagan & the Contras, or W. & Nuclear (prounouced NukeClear) weapons) but NOT ok to lie about sex? (see Clinton and Monica).
I hate Clinton but I could honestly care less who he had sex with. I put him in the same category as Bush Jr. except maybe he was a little smarter.
Just a thought.
- If you wanna see what happens when the dumbest amonst us aspires to lead look no further than the Grand US of A
Carrier task force has formidable firepower. (Score:3, Interesting)
Today, a USN carrier task force will not only have the carrier, but also a number of destroyers armed with the Aegis defense system surrounding the ship to provide air defense and also launch longer range attacks using Harpoon and Tomahawk missiles. Also, about 2-3 attack submarines also operate with the task force, searching out for enemy submarines and also launching offensive operations using Tomahawks against distant targets and Harpoons against enemy surface surface ships.
When the USSR still existed, they spent a huge sum of rubles building special submarines armed with large cruise missiles and also flying specially-armed Tu-95 Bear bombers carrying large cruise missiles specifically to counter the USN carrier task forces. That also explains why the Soviets built and launched large nuclear-powered satellites whose sole purpose was to try to track the movements of our carriers. Today, with the USSR no longer extant, these Soviet-era anti-carrier forces no longer exist; today's military threats are no match for the USN carrier task force. The navy of Communist China don't have anywhere near the numbers, weapon systems, or tactics needed to take on our carriers.
Besides, carriers are actually a bargain when it comes to projecting power. It is very costly to set up and operate fixed military bases in foreign countries; a carrier can carry an extremely formidable strike force anywhere in the world easily. I think the Soviet Union's biggest blunder militarily was the fact they never really addressed the need to project power using an aircraft carrier until it was way too late; if they had aircraft carriers that could launch conventional aircraft operating by the early 1970's they could have been much more successful in projecting power, especially in Africa.
Re:You said it! (Score:3, Interesting)
This sounds like excelent advice. So excelent in fact that you should take it. Lets start with your first historical falacy.
No they didn't. The Soviet Union didn't even exist in 1918. The western powers participated in the Russian civil war in 1918-20 by allying with the forces opposed to the Communists. Small numbers of troops from western nations participated, but those were mostly British and French. The assertion that the the US invaded Russia in completely false.
Except they did. The Soviet Union is generaly dated from November or October of 1917 depending on the callender you're using. The Russian Civil war that followed, (1918-1920 as you correctly surmise) was fought between the then ruling party, the Bolshiveks, and their White Russian opponents.
The United States, along with several other powers that later helped form NATO, invaded the country and intervened on behalf of the insurgant forces. While the statement that the Soviet Union was never invaded is at least poorly defendable, when you say The assertion that the the US invaded Russia in completely false you get 0 points for accuracy.
Your later arguments about Versailles are fairly accurate. The Russians probably didn't feel terribly slighted by the treaty, especialy since it required Germany to give up most of her gains in the Eastern Theater. Poland, for the record, does not appear on a map shortly before WWI... thus giving something back to Poland (implying it was taken from Poland in the first place) is difficult.
Nonetheless, the Soviets did feel that the creation of all those little and totaly undefendable states in estern Europe following Versailles weakened their Western boarder, and made them easy targets for the German advances of WWII. The Soviet insistance of a Buffer Zone after WWII is ample evidence of this.
Further, Versailles was STRONGLY influenced by the Americans. Wilson burned every shread of political capitol he had on the treaty, forming the League of Nations (a dismal failure) and driving home the right of self determination and the ideal of the Nation-State in Eastern Europe. Both of which were dismal failures, and both of which ended up biting the USSR in the ass.
Of course, your last paragraph really sums it up. Claiming that the events that transpired after WWI directly affected Soviet attitudes towards the US 70 years later is a joke. That it kept the Communists in power longer even more so.
Are you insane? Lets map out the events after WWI.
1.) Stalin rises to power. This sets the stage for the rest of Soviet History. Stalin's policies fundamentaly changed the way the Soviet Union looked at the world. He pushed the country into economic overdrive at considerable cost (30 Million Russian Pesents to be exact). As most scholars of the Soviet Period are fond of saying "Stalin found Russia in birch-bark sandles, and left her with nuclear weapons." Yea... minor impact.
2.) The Gutting of the Red Army. With the Red Army hollowed out to a shadow of its former self, the Soviets were unprepared for the German Assault. This resulted in heavy Soviet losses and forced the Soviet Union into an agressive policy. This policy would carry into the Cold War, manifesting as a First Strike policy, which is what made the missiles in Cuba an OFFENSIVE weapon.
I can go on for days, but I think we've conclusively proven that the events following WWI had dramatic impact on Soviet foreign policy both during WWII and after. Further, had these policy changes not occured, the Soviet Union would have sought military expansion after WWII (as origionaly espoused by Lenin). Such a war was at that point unwinable, and could well have contributed to an early collapse.
Of course, all what ifs in history are speculation, and nothing more. Historians confine themselves to what happened... not what might have happened.
Re:Misnamed, I think (Score:3, Interesting)
That's standard Navy practise actually.. It's so bad on our ship they had to implement highschool style sex-ed where newbies carry around babies that cry and record how well they're attended to.
*When conflict breaks out, it makes port in a non-involved country.
Our ship went to Oz in the middle of Operation Enduring Freedom.
*Equiped with a double compliment of distress beacons and emergency signal flares.
Well actually, we don't have enough life rafts to save the entire crew were we to sink. There's a rotation set up so that, should everyone survive a sinking, X number of people take turns floating (hopefully) in the water while the others rest in the rafts.
*Flight deck lined with astroturf.
Our flight deck is lined with nonskid, which is debatably the same thing. Surely invented by the same evil genius.