When I first visited Alabama 9 years ago, I was a neophyte as a battleship professional. I had officially started as a tour guide on Iowa a couple of weeks earlier, and still thought it would be a short-term thing till I saw the engines and fire-control system. I came away distinctly unimpressed, on two grounds. First, there was nobody to talk to, and second, I didn't think that much of the museum aspects. This time around, I solved the first problem by dragging the Fatherly One and some other friends to the ship for the visit,¹ and they seem to have worked quite a bit on the second side themselves. Either that, or my taste has improved, which might be some of it, but there was a lot of stuff I think I would have remembered had it been there last time.

A battleship in fog²

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Since my last visit predates this blog by a couple of years³ I am going to do this pretty much de novo. On the whole, I had a great time, and owe Alabama an apology. I don't think she's quite as good as Massachusetts, but she's very close, and the decision of which one to go to should be made based mostly on logistics. Both ships are set up with a couple of tour routes, one through the upper decks and superstructure and a couple down below, and I think Alabama's layout was better, as I never really got turned around. Signage throughout was very competent, and Alabama is the most accessible battleship I've been to. All three turrets were open, and although Turret 3 was still pretty dim, Turret 1 was well-lit, and you could go up to the 08 level, versus 05 on Iowa and 04 on Massachusetts. They had also cut into the 2nd barbette, although unlike on her sister, you can't go into the powder flat. I think they did a better job of doing the "city at sea" aspect than Massachusetts did, at least in part because they'd cleared out less space for various onboard museums although most of it was just how well they'd dressed a lot of the spaces. Read more...

The Fatherly One and I went to visit the National Naval Aviation Museum in Pensacola, as it was the last of the big air museums neither of us had been to. I had high hopes, as all of the official museums I had been to were quite good, and it more than lived up to them.

An SBD, survivor of Midway⁴

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Now, the first and most important thing I look for in a really good air museum is a lot of planes that are rare or have an interesting history, and Pensacola delivered in spades. Everything from the first plane ever to fly across the Atlantic in 1919 (an NC-4 flying boat) to the first plane to land at the South Pole (an R4D) to the only survivor of the Battle of Midway (an SBD that they fished out of Lake Michigan after it crashed during training). Plus a lot of very rare planes from both the early days of naval aviation or the dawn of the jet age. I would have put it very high on my list just from the airplanes alone, even if they had been presented like the planes at Pima. Read more...

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

Overhauls are my review of Top Gun: Maverick and from last year, RAM and The Small Carrier Problem.

Reader Alexander, who has previously reviewed the Newark Air Museum is back with another British air museum, this time the RAF Museum in Cosford.

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The RAF runs its own museum, split over two sites. I've visited their Midlands museum at Cosford a couple of times now and it's a good one. There are a great number of aircraft, missiles, engines and vehicles spread across four halls. The largest is the Cold War exhibition, where you can see all three V bombers under one roof. Two are veterans of the Black Buck raids, and their Valiant is notable for dropped Britain's first H-bomb. Amongst other artifacts here is a collection of missiles, including ballistic missiles, early ATGMs, land and naval SAMs and a range of air launched weapons. There are a couple of open cockpits with staff on hand, keen to explain the extent to which ejecting will reduce your height. Read more...

One of my hobbyhorses, which I have generally tried not to go on about here, is the proper naming of ships. Unfortunately, the recent activities of now-former Secretary of the Navy Carlos Del Toro, who used his last few days in office to go on a naming binge, have forced my hand.

Names for USN ships are selected by the Secretary of the Navy,⁵ but for a long time, the traditional naming scheme was more or less adhered to. Specifically, battleships were to be named after states (a requirement that was only removed in 2023) while cruisers were named for cities, destroyers for naval heroes and carriers after ships from the early American Navy, and later for battles, while submarines were named for fish. This began to break down after WWII, the first obvious breach being the carrier Franklin D. Roosevelt, named after the recently-deceased president.⁶ This was the beginning of an interleaved set of "great person" names for the carriers, with Forrestal and John F. Kennedy popping up in the 50s and 60s before the naming scheme switched fully with the Nimitz class. At the same time, the submarine scheme began to switch from fish to, first, "Congressional supporters of the Navy's nuclear program" and then to cities, as, according to Admiral Rickover, "fish don't vote". Read more...

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

A reminder that signups are open for the Naval Gazing meetup at Iowa in May. It's going to be a great time, and you should come.

Overhauls are Carrier Doom Part 3, the King George V Class, German Guided Bombs Part 1, Hornet Part 3 and for 2024, Fuzes parts three and four.

I recently read Gary Sheffield's book Forgotten Victory about WWI, and on the whole, very much liked it. It's not really intended as a complete overview of the war so much as a corrective to false narratives (mostly "lions led by donkeys") that have grown up around it, so it's mostly about the BEF on the Western Front, but it also covers the start and end of the war and some other topics (including a brief section on the role of sea power that I completely endorse). I didn't learn a ton, having absorbed most of the thesis by osmosis over the years, but if you're interested in WWI, it's a good corrective to broader works like Keegan or A World Undone, both of which lean into "lions led by donkeys" quite a bit.

By this point, the Naval Gazing Meetup is an annual tradition, and this year, we're going back to the spiritual home of the blog, Iowa, on May 8th-May 11th. As the meetup is only two weeks away, I've closed signups, although if you're a local and still want to come, email me and we'll see what we can do.

Why should you come?

1. Seeing cool stuff. Iowa is amazing, and you'll get to see parts of the ship that not a lot of people get to visit. For Friday, I'm also planning a trip to the Western Museum of Flight in Torrence, although that won't take more than a couple of hours. Read more...

2024 is behind us, which means it is time for that most prestigious of awards given out by Naval Gazing, the William D Brown Memorial Award for the biggest naval screwup that didn't kill anybody.

As the Brown Award's prestige increases, more and more navies go to greater lengths to take home the trophy:

• Military Sealift Command ran the oiler Big Horn aground off Oman
• The People's Liberation Army Navy sank a new nuclear submarine pierside.
• The Baltic Navies allowed vital cables to be repeatedly disrupted.
• And the Iranian Navy, seeking a second award, flipped a frigate in drydock, then sank it completely while attempting to salvage it.

Read more...

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

Overhauls are Carrier Doom Parts one and two, Reactivation, Bringing Back the Battleships, The Ticonderoga Class and for 2024, Fuzes Parts one and two.

Abstractions are important for thinking about the world, and particularly for STEM types, taking a thing, putting it in a box and thinking about the box is basically what we do. If we had to reckon with the full complexity of everything at all times, nothing would ever get built. But as Joel Spolsky famously said, all abstractions are leaky, and the leakage can easily mess up any analysis if the person doing it doesn't know when things are likely to leak and how to deal with it.

I bring this up because outsiders attempting to analyze defense problems often make this mistake, particularly in the tech-adjacent sectors that I tend to see a lot of stuff from. Ideas go in the box, and then the box is folded, spindled and mutilated in complete ignorance of the gusher of complexity this produces. An excellent example of this is Austin Vernon's post on shipbuilding, where he attempts to diagnose the problems the USN is facing from a position of knowing very little about warships.⁷ Read more...