China Sea Blues: A Thing Not to Do
Fred Reed
It appears that Washington, ever a
seething cauldron of bright ideas, is looking for a shooting war with
China, or perhaps trying to make the Chinese kowtow and back down, the
pretext being some rocks in the Pacific in which the United States
cannot possibly have a vital national interest. Or, really, any
interest. And if the Chinese do not back down?
The Vincennes. The boxy thing up front is the radar. It is not hardened.
Years back I went aboard the USS Vincennes, CG-49, a Tico class
Aegis boat, then the leading edge of naval technology. It was a
magnificent ship, fast, powered by a pair of airliner turbines, and
carrying the SPY-1 phased-array radar, very high-tech for its time. The
CIC was dark and air-conditioned, glowing with huge screens—impressive
for then—displaying all manner of information on targets in the air.
Below were Standard missiles, then on a sort of chain drive but in later
ships using the Vertical Launch System. It was, as they say in Laredo,
Muy Star Wars. (The Vincennes was the ship that later shot down the Iranian airliner.)
Being something of a technophile, I took all of this in with
admiration, but I thought—what if it gets hit? As a kid in my preteens I
had read about the battleships of WWII, the Carolinas but in particular
the Iowa class, fast, brutal ships with sixteen-inch belt armor and
turrets that an asteroid would bounce off of. The assumption was that
ships were going to get hit. They were built to survive and continue
fighting.
http://www.unz.com/freed/china-sea-blues-a-thing-not-to-do/
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The Vincennes. The boxy thing up front is the radar. It is not hardened.
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