2 ms·

Ah, for the Good Old Days, when the USN operated plenty of its very own shipyards, and was actually capable of Get Sh*t Done... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/N

Ah, for the Good Old Days, when the USN operated plenty of its very own shipyards, and was actually capable of Get Sh*t Done... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Navy_Yard https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Navy_Yard But you can't stand in the way of Progress. Especially not if you're a Congressman, and need some fat donations to help finance your next reelection campaign. Just another way in which Capitalism is superior a way of doing everything, I guess...

deleted 3y ago
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JumpCrisscross 3y ago
> you can't stand in the way of Progress It looks like we closed them after the end of the Cold War [1]. This wasn’t an idealistic pursuit, just banal cost cutting to disarm the nation. Given increased tensions, it would make sense to reverse and begin re-integrating Navy owned and operated shipyards. (I’m also noticing that most of the shipyards were on the Atlantic, with the Washington shipyard being one of the few that’s been maintained [2].) [1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/1993_Base_Realignment_and_Closure_Commission https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/1993_Base_Realignment_and_Cl... [2] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Puget_Sound_Naval_Shipyard https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Puget_Sound_Naval_Shipyard
- alephnerd 3y ago
  > This wasn’t an idealistic pursuit, just banal cost cutting to disarm the nation Specifically, it was Clinton's SecDef Perry's Last Supper meeting with defense contractors in 93 that destroyed the entire base we had in the US [0] "I asked [former SecDef] Les [Aspen] to call a meeting of the senior defense industry officials where we had a simple message to them: The first was that the budget was not only down, it was going to go down further. They should not look at it as a little dip here but as a new low plateau and adjust their plans accordingly, and in particular, if that meant they had too much capacity for the amount of business they were going to have, they should understand that we were not going to support that unused overhead. They had to do a scaling down and a consolidation to do that" It was this Last Supper that caused Boeing, Northrop Grumman, General Dynamics, etc to drastically deteriorate. I banged my head trying to tell everyone about how our current PPBE system is crap a decadeish ago but no one listened. Now we're doing too little too late. [0] - https://millercenter.org/the-presidency/presidential-oral-histories/william-perry-oral-history https://millercenter.org/the-presidency/presidential-oral-hi...
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  - istjohn 3y ago
    It's called a peace dividend
    - bell-cot 3y ago
      By the politicians, yes, it is. But if you look at the older history - the U.S. did not shut down & sell off its navel shipyards in response many previous outbreaks of peace - after the Revolutionary War, or the War of 1812, or the Civil War, or the Spanish-American War, or WWI, or WWII, or the Korean War, or ... But sadly, Wall Street was ascendant in the 90's, the proud old tradition of leading American families sending their sons server in the military was pretty well faded, and the Clinton Administration was a hot mess of noobs - convinced that the world was brand shiny new, that they were geniuses, and that smooth-talking Capitalists were perfectly competent and trustworthy. Edit: Okay, yes, some of the shipyards were closed (or effectively so) in the very late 1960's and 1970's.

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JumpCrisscross 3y ago

> you can't stand in the way of Progress It looks like we closed them after the end of the Cold War [1]. This wasn’t an idealistic pursuit, just banal cost cutting to disarm the nation. Given increased tensions, it would make sense to reverse and begin re-integrating Navy owned and operated shipyards. (I’m also noticing that most of the shipyards were on the Atlantic, with the Washington shipyard being one of the few that’s been maintained [2].) [1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/1993_Base_Realignment_and_Closure_Commission https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/1993_Base_Realignment_and_Cl... [2] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Puget_Sound_Naval_Shipyard https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Puget_Sound_Naval_Shipyard

alephnerd 3y ago
> This wasn’t an idealistic pursuit, just banal cost cutting to disarm the nation Specifically, it was Clinton's SecDef Perry's Last Supper meeting with defense contractors in 93 that destroyed the entire base we had in the US [0] "I asked [former SecDef] Les [Aspen] to call a meeting of the senior defense industry officials where we had a simple message to them: The first was that the budget was not only down, it was going to go down further. They should not look at it as a little dip here but as a new low plateau and adjust their plans accordingly, and in particular, if that meant they had too much capacity for the amount of business they were going to have, they should understand that we were not going to support that unused overhead. They had to do a scaling down and a consolidation to do that" It was this Last Supper that caused Boeing, Northrop Grumman, General Dynamics, etc to drastically deteriorate. I banged my head trying to tell everyone about how our current PPBE system is crap a decadeish ago but no one listened. Now we're doing too little too late. [0] - https://millercenter.org/the-presidency/presidential-oral-histories/william-perry-oral-history https://millercenter.org/the-presidency/presidential-oral-hi...
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
- istjohn 3y ago
  It's called a peace dividend
  - bell-cot 3y ago
    By the politicians, yes, it is. But if you look at the older history - the U.S. did not shut down & sell off its navel shipyards in response many previous outbreaks of peace - after the Revolutionary War, or the War of 1812, or the Civil War, or the Spanish-American War, or WWI, or WWII, or the Korean War, or ... But sadly, Wall Street was ascendant in the 90's, the proud old tradition of leading American families sending their sons server in the military was pretty well faded, and the Clinton Administration was a hot mess of noobs - convinced that the world was brand shiny new, that they were geniuses, and that smooth-talking Capitalists were perfectly competent and trustworthy. Edit: Okay, yes, some of the shipyards were closed (or effectively so) in the very late 1960's and 1970's.