From: Ryan Gill (rmgill@mindspring.com)
Date: Sat May 15 2004 - 08:38:07 PDT
At 11:06 AM -0400 5/15/04, DDoyle9570@aol.com wrote:
> Their lack of a carrier
>force really hinders their ability to challenge
>us. You don't build a functional carrier force in
>a few years. It takes a decade or more.
>
>I dunno a bit over the sixty years ago the US
>went from about six carriers to dozens in less
>than 5 years....and they were terribly effective
>and functional. All it takes is unbridled
>determination and money. The US today is so
>accustomed to the entangled budgetary debates,
>political posturing and enviromental concerns
>that we have forgotten how much can be
>accomplished in a short period of time without
>those encumberances.
Ahh, but we had 5 carriers worth of NCOs and 10
years of practice to make a training cadre to get
the other carriers up and going. You don't just
build them, put sailors and planes on them and
tell the pilots to take off and land. We had
operations manuals, experience and the funds to
operate the suckers. They're not cheap either in
manpower or in material.
The single biggest thing needed to operate a
carrier is a large gaggle of NCOs and officers
that know how it all works and how not to kill
your ship, airwing or crew. Moving those planes
around on deck is hard dangerous work. Its a
bloody great ballet that can crush and kill men
or worse start fires and destroy the ship. The
USN knows all this. The Chinese don't.
>It is not unusual today for it to take 10-20
>years for the United States to field a new
>military vehicle. During WWII many designs went
>from designing board to battlefield between 1942
>and 1945-because it had to be done and the
>nation wanted to do it. Some parts of the world
>still have this shear determination-which
>coupled with an indifference to political
>fallout-presents a formidable force.
Its not the construction, it's the ramp up to an effective force.
Japan had years to practice and still had serious
failings in the 40's when it came to damage
control procedures. We were so old hat at it that
we turned vessels around in a few weeks that the
Japanese Navy Brass figured would take dry dock
in California to fix.
This training issue is one of the things that
would have doomed the German Carriers to death in
the North Atlantic against the British. They'd
have practiced in the Baltic, headed for the
North Atlantic and then suffered serious
casualties recovering their air wing in the North
Atlantic.
--
--
Ryan Gill rmgill@SPAMmindspring.com
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