I attempted to visit Hornet while in the Bay Area as part of the DSL meetup in May 2025. Unfortunately, when we arrived, there was a long line to get onto the ship, as they were hosting a furry convention¹ that day. Now, I have nothing against museum ships doing unusual things for money, and I'd heard of CarrierCon, a more general fandom convention hosted aboard Hornet, but that was a few months ago.² The real problem was threefold. First, one member of our party had checked their website that morning, and not seen anything about this, so it was a unpleasant surprise to find the ship full of people, with an hour-long line. Second, upon arrival we were told that admission would require a con pass, which was $50 instead of the normal $25. Third, it was Memorial Day weekend, and while I'm sure that this wasn't one of their busier weekends,³ doing a convention of any sort⁴ on that weekend feels tacky and a bit disrespectful.

That said, I do want to zero in on the second of the three issues. My basic problem is that because the ship was hosting a con, the experience onboard would be much worse than it would normally have been. I got a look at their map, and pretty much every large public space aboard was being used for panels and the like, which is going to make talking about them much harder, even with the relatively small group (8 people) I had. The only open area on the ship looked to be the flight deck, which is fun, but not $50 worth of fun. And while I am sympathetic to the operational difficulties of trying to separate the general public from con guests, charging people who actually want to see your ship (instead of the thing on it) more for a worse experience isn't a great look. Read more...

While in LA for the Naval Gazing meetup, the group went to the Western Museum of Flight in Torrance. It's a small, obscure museum that I hadn't even known about until a friend recommended it during the last LA meetup, but it seemed like a good thing to do on Friday as an appetizer before the battleship on Saturday.

The museum's party piece

Website

The museum is at the Torrance Airport, which is somewhat irritating to get to, given its distance from the freeways. And while it makes some attempt to chronicle the rich history of airplane production in greater LA, it started as Northrop's house museum, and that very much shows in the planes they have and what part of the story they are most interested in telling. The site is absurdly small, with only five jets on display and not really room for any more: a rather pretty F-86, a two-seat Harrier trainer (which may not be there long, but I'm sure they can find something to replace it), an early A4D-1 Skyhawk, and two Northrop products, an ex-Norwegian F-5 and one of two YF-23 prototypes, the other one of which is at Dayton. (Various places talk about an F-14 and a YF-17, but these appear to be parked elsewhere on the airport.) They did have a fairly large collection of models, engines, and so on to pad the museum out, including an R-4360 that was on Spruce Goose at one point. Read more...

Recently, Brian Potter of Construction Physics (whose work I am generally a fan of) and Austin Vernon (who I met in person two days ago and liked) have released a a blueprint for fixing US naval shipbuilding. I have mixed thoughts on their three points:

1. Instead of complex, multi-role ships which have expensive and often unnecessary features, the Navy should focus on simpler ships with narrower use cases.

2. Rather than outsourcing design to third parties, ship design should be brought in-house, and NAVSEA should expand its staff of Naval Architects from around 300 to closer to 1200.

3. Production on ships should not begin until design is substantially completed.

Now, 2 is a position I've held for a long time, and really should write about more. I think they do a decent job of arguing for it, and I believe this is the thing they emphasized most in their policy paper, so I have no quibble at all here. 3 is patently obvious to everyone, and has been since forever. Unfortunately, this means that we'll need to go beyond simply pointing out that the problem exists, because if it was that easy to solve, someone would have solved it. The people who do this work are not stupid. I suspect political pressures are to blame here, but actually tracking down the drivers and providing solutions for them is not something I'm going to get into here. Read more...

I recently watched Pentagon Wars, a 1998 comedy that purports to portray the development of the Bradley Fighting Vehicle. I came away from it extremely irritated. It's a story based on a fundamental misunderstanding of the problems with defense procurement, treating complicated, difficult issues as things that would be simple if not for the interests of those with power. This is entirely contrary to my views on such things, and as a lot of people's best reference for military procurement, I think it has had a corrosive impact on the public discourse.

Now, for those who don't follow this, the Bradley is the US Army's main Infantry Fighting Vehicle, designed to move a small squad of infantrymen about and provide them with the bulk of their firepower in combat. The movie is based on a book by Air Force Colonel James Burton, who during a tour at the Pentagon had gotten into a fight with the Army about appropriate testing methodology for the Bradley. Things got so heated that Burton retired early and took his case to the public. Read more...

It's time once again for our Open Thread. Talk about whatever you want, so long as it isn't Culture War.

Also, for those of you who missed the Naval Gazing meetup in LA, you can have a second chance at a ship tour in two weeks. I will be at the DSL meetup in San Jose, and we are touring Hornet on Saturday, starting at 1 PM. Feel free to just show up, although it would be nice to know if you are planning to come. I will be wearing an Iowa hat.

Overhauls are Main Guns Part 2, SYWTBABB Construction Part 3, my review of Ft. Sill, O'Callahan and the Franklin, Coastal Defenses Part 2, Oil Tankers and for 2024, Air Attack on Ships Parts three and four, Thoughts on the Iranian Missile Attack and the Fatherly One's review of Cod.

During WWI, the Royal Navy had worked out the basic mechanics of operating airplanes from ships, but the absorption of its aviation units into the Royal Air Force in 1918 saw British naval aviation stagnate in the years after the war. Progress would instead come from the United States, which commissioned its first carrier, Langley, in 1922. Langley had been built as collier Jupiter, and was converted as simply as possible, with a deck built over the existing ship and the coal holds converted to carry aviation supplies, except the one that had machinery for the single lift. There was no hangar as such, with planes being stored under the open-sided flight deck on what had been the upper deck of Jupiter. Moving them about was the work of a pair of overhead cranes, which meant that early operations, where each plane had to be struck down before the next could land, were even slower than aboard Argus.

Langley, known as the "Covered Wagon"

This was clearly unacceptable for an operational carrier, and Langley might have been simply an experiment if not for Joseph Reeves. Reeves was a career surface officer, and had been Jupiter's first captain, but became interested in aviation as it started to demonstrate its potential in the 20s. The Billy Mitchell-driven imbroglio over military aviation a few years earlier had seen Congress require that all aviation units be commanded by aviators, which was also a problem for the Navy, as virtually none of its pilots had the rank to fill senior posts. The solution was the naval aviation observer's course, set up to teach senior officers about flying and qualify them under the law, even if they were not rated to actually fly planes. Reeves passed in 1925, and became Commander, Aircraft Squadron, Battle Fleet, the senior aviation officer afloat. As an outsider who had just completed a stint at the Naval War College, Reeves began his tenure with a lecture. "First of all, from what I have seen, this command lacks a coordinated set of tactics and has no conception of the capabilities and limitations of the air force" was not a sentence designed to endear him to his pilots, but he swiftly laid out a number of questions about how best to turn a ship and a group of planes into an effective part of the fleet, and set about answering them. Read more...

Operating planes off of a ship is tricky. Planes only work well when flying at speed, and unlike on land, there isn't a lot of space for a runway. It turned out that while flying planes off ships was relatively straightforward, landing them back aboard was very difficult. The solution was to attach floats the plane, which allowed it to not only land on the open sea, but also take off while the carrier was anchored, a common condition in the early days of naval aviation.

Seaplane carrier Engadine

But while using the sea as a runway worked well for anchored ships, it was far less suitable for operations with the fleet. The carrier would have to stop and hoist the plane in or out, costing it ground relative to the rest of the fleet, and all of the ships suitable for carrier conversion were too slow to regain position reliably. Also, while an anchored carrier would generally be somewhere protected from the worst of the ocean's waves, this was definitely not the case for a seaplane carrier operating in support of the fleet. In particular, taking off from the open ocean in any sort of sea is extremely tricky, to the point that the wakes of nearby ships might disrupt the operation. These problems were dramatically illustrated by the first serious attempt to use airplanes in concert with the fleet during the Battle of Jutland. Read more...

Before we get into the theory of operating aircraft from a ship, we need to cover some basics of aviation. Fixed-wing aircraft work by moving through the air, and using that movement to create higher pressure on the bottom of their wings, creating a force we call lift.⁵ To stay in the air, the plane needs to generate lift to match its weight. The faster the plane moves, the more lift is created,⁶ so there is a speed below which the plane will fall out of the sky, known as the "stall speed".⁷ One of the key tasks of the pilot involves making sure it never goes below stall speed, at least when you are close to things you don't want to hit, like the ground or the sea.

Forces on an aircraft, a graphic I am legally required to use at this point

For land-based aircraft, this means the task of taking off and landing is simple enough. Get a long, flat piece of ground, put some asphalt on it, and make sure you have a safe margin above stall speed when you don't have wheels on it. Because there's a lot of ground, it doesn't matter too much if the required distance is several thousand feet. But it's annoying to build a ship much over a thousand feet long, so if you want to fly fixed-wing aircraft from ships, you'll need to be clever. First, it's important to realize that the airplane can't tell the difference between air moving past the wings because it's moving through the air, and air moving past the wings because the air is moving past it. If you had an airplane with a stall speed of, say, 30 kts, and there was a 30 kt wind, you could simply point it into the wind and take off straight up without using the engine.⁸ Now, land-based aircraft can take advantage of this, but it would take a lot of land to be able to align with the local winds no matter which way they were blowing, so the people building airports generally just figure out which way they usually blow and build the runways accordingly, with some acceptance of crosswinds.⁹ But ships can move, and thus can both align their runways with the prevailing winds and use their speed to add to the natural wind. This is important because every knot of what is known as "wind over deck" is a knot of airspeed the plane doesn't need to gain before it runs out of deck and falls into the ocean. Read more...

36 years ago today, while conducting gunnery exercises off the coast of Puerto Rico, Turret II exploded aboard Iowa. 47 members of her crew were killed. Every year, a memorial ceremony is held for them, and I was able to attend in 2019 and honor the men who died.

• Tung Thanh Adams - Fire Controlman 3rd class (FC3) Alexandria, VA
• Robert Wallace Backherms - Gunner's Mate 3rd class (GM3) Ravenna, OH
• Dwayne Collier Battle - Electrician's Mate, Fireman Apprentice (EMFA) Rocky Mount, NC
• Walter Scot Blakey - Gunner's Mate 3rd class (GM3) Eaton Rapids, MI
• Pete Edward Bopp - Gunner's Mate 3rd class (GM3) Levittown, NY
• Ramon Jarel Bradshaw - Seaman Recruit (SR) Tampa, FL
• Philip Edward Buch - Lieutenant, Junior Grade (LTjg) Las Cruces, NM
• Eric Ellis Casey - Seaman Apprentice (SA) Mt. Airy, NC
• John Peter Cramer - Gunners Mate 2nd class (GM2) Uniontown, PA
• Milton Francis Devaul Jr. - Gunners Mate 3rd class (GM3) Solvay, NY
• Leslie Allen Everhart Jr. - Seaman Apprentice (SA) Cary, NC
• Gary John Fisk - Boatswains Mate 2nd class (BM2) Oneida, NY
• Tyrone Dwayne Foley - Seaman (SN) Bullard, TX
• Robert James Gedeon III - Seaman Apprentice (SA) Lakewood, OH
• Brian Wayne Gendron - Seaman Apprentice (SA) Madera, CA
• John Leonard Goins - Seaman Recruit (SR) Columbus, OH
• David L. Hanson - Electricians Mate 3rd class (EM3) Perkins, SD
• Ernest Edward Hanyecz - Gunners Mate 1st class (GM1) Bordentown, NJ
• Clayton Michael Hartwig - Gunners Mate 2nd class (GM2) Cleveland, OH
• Michael William Helton - Legalman 1st class (LN1) Louisville, KY
• Scott Alan Holt - Seaman Apprentice (SA) Fort Meyers, FL
• Reginald L. Johnson Jr. - Seaman Recruit (SR) Warrensville Heights, OH
• Nathaniel Clifford Jones Jr. - Seaman Apprentice (SA) Buffalo, NY
• Brian Robert Jones - Seaman (SN) Kennesaw, GA
• Michael Shannon Justice - Seaman (SN) Matewan, WV
• Edward J. Kimble - Seaman (SN) Ft. Stockton, TX
• Richard E. Lawrence - Gunners Mate 3rd class (GM3) Springfield, OH
• Richard John Lewis - Fire Controlman, Seaman Apprentice (FCSA) Northville, MI
• Jose Luis Martinez Jr. - Seaman Apprentice (SA) Hidalgo, TX
• Todd Christopher McMullen - Boatswains Mate 3rd class (BM3) Manheim, PA
• Todd Edward Miller - Seaman Recruit (SR) Ligonier, PA
• Robert Kenneth Morrison - Legalman 1st class (LN1) Jacksonville, FL
• Otis Levance Moses - Seaman (SN) Bridgeport, CN
• Darin Andrew Ogden - Gunners Mate 3rd class (GM3) Shelbyville, IN
• Ricky Ronald Peterson - Seaman (SN) Houston, MN
• Mathew Ray Price - Gunners Mate 3rd class (GM3) Burnside, PA
• Harold Earl Romine Jr. - Seaman Recruit (SR) Brandenton, FL
• Geoffrey Scott Schelin - Gunners Mate 3rd class (GMG3) Costa Mesa, CA
• Heath Eugene Stillwagon - Gunners Mate 3rd class (GM3) Connellsville, PA
• Todd Thomas Tatham - Seaman Recruit (SR) Wolcott, NY
• Jack Ernest Thompson - Gunners Mate 3rd class (GM3) Greeneville, TN
• Stephen J. Welden - Gunners Mate 2nd class (GM2) Yukon, OK
• James Darrell White - Gunners Mate 3rd class (GM3) Norwalk, CA
• Rodney Maurice White - Seaman Recruit (SR) Louisville, KY
• Michael Robert Williams - Boatswains Mate 2nd class (BM2) South Shore, KY
• John Rodney Young - Seaman (SN) Rockhill, SC
• Reginald Owen Ziegler - Senior Chief Gunners Mate (GMCS) Port Gibson, NY

They came to the Navy as strangers. Served the Navy as shipmates and friends and left the Navy as brothers in eternity. - George H.W. Bush

One aspect of military space warfare that I haven't previously covered is space-based missile defense, an omission that has become important as President Trump has floated a proposal to build just such a system as an "Iron Dome for America", although it's since been renamed "Golden Dome". It's worth taking a brief overview of the history of such plans before we get into the weeds of how such a plan would work.

Missile defense is generally divided into three phases: boost, midcourse, and terminal. Boost-phase is actions taken before the missile burns out and/or releases its warheads, while midcourse defense is targeted at warheads before they enter the atmosphere and terminal defense takes place afterwards, although the line between the two is somewhat fuzzy. Obviously, boost-phase defense is the best option if it can be arranged. A single interceptor can take out multiple warheads and the thrusting ICBM is a lot more vulnerable than a warhead. But it is also the most difficult, because there's a narrow window in which to act and people tend to object if you try to put interceptors next to their ICBM silos. Read more...