Bye Bye Public Broadcasting!
Another unnecessary parasitic, totalitarian-left government agency to close. 1,000 to go!
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And they are still at it, but since I am not paying for it I don't care. This is one of the best things that has been done since Trump took office, and it's not just a matter of revenge. It's a matter of the idea that there's NO reason for us to pay for news reporting as a matter of routine - or at all. EVER.
Public broadcasting , like propaganda is not about the public or its benefit,. It is about the political rulers and their bread and circuses pacification. My cousin's husband wrote songs for the CPB - Sesame Street and Barney. Did he reap any royalties or benefit for the songs they played every day for decades? Nothing, except his name on the credits and no further employment. Where did the money go? Miss Piggie?
Yeah, it is nice to stick to the subject, but I look at these Gulch threads like conversations in my parlor where sidetracking is just part of the family dialog.
We can't be indoctrinated anymore?
The horror! Oh. the horror!
What can all the poor sheeple do?
Hey, but don't worry. Baa-baa still got its heehaws.
The Jackass Party still choo-choos along,
Hopefully to its own train wreck and not ours.
It has been obvious (to anyone with at least half a brain) since the 1970's
that the CPB was a front for communist propaganda.
Funding it was effectively suicide for individual liberty.
Thank you to the current administration.
Now how about cutting the military budget by $500 billion a year?
Building big naval ships is a YUGE waste of money by the current
administration.
Our Navy protects the shipping lanes from Pirates.
Somali and otherwise.
This protection has guaranteed that ships could become HUGE and COSTS go way down per unit sold. The HUGE ships must move slower, but become far more cost effective.
When that Navy goes away. Shipping will have to start utilizing ships that move FASTER to be a target for a smaller amount of time. Those ships will have to charge more to protect themselves. All Prices go up. Availability of things drops.
It is a FAR more nuanced situation than you are giving it. Also, we've all but lost the ability to make these ships. We get to re-engineer the process, and the educations required as we become more self-sufficient. Welding jobs pay well, and there are a TON of welding jobs on ships. Yes machine welding will do a lot, AND SHOULD. But there are some places that only a guy might fit.
The world is NOT a safe place. Most countries are a LOT LIKE Democrat Cities. They talk nice, but will kill you without a second thought.
The solution. Reduce our sphere of influence (Monroe), Build Better tools for the future (being done now). And acquire Greenland already (Preferably with a check).
But I like building some of the new ships because the world has changed, but we will still need to be able to project force to protect what is important to us.
It is a FAR more nuanced situation than you are giving it. Also, we've all but lost the ability to make these ships. "
No, we have not we still make them. They just aren't economically competitive even when you ignore piracy - which is rather geographically limited. Nor is your assertion about why we have these big container ships correct.
Container ship size is driven by:
- Port depth and infrastructure (your ship is useless if it can't dock)
- Canal constraints (Panamax, New Panamax, Suezmax classes exist for a reason)
- Economies of scale in cargo handling and fuel consumption
- Interest rates and capital costs (larger ships = more capital outlay)
Even if global piracy was zero, shipping ships would still be the size they are today. Economies of scale and fuel efficiency -> Big ships -> Low per-unit costs - this is the reason. Annual operating costs per TEU (Twenty-foot Equivalent Unit - basically a standard shipping container) drop by more than one-half when moving from Panamax to larger vessels. That's not piracy protection - that's pure physics and infrastructure optimization. Pirates don't factor into naval architecture decisions at all.
If they did, we'd still have larger ships but they'd have anti-boarding features built into them. In fact, your argument that big and slow is easier for pirates is inverted from reality. Modern pirates use fast skiffs. Container ships cruise at 12-20+ knots. The differential isn't the issue. You simply are not going to get fast small container ships that a small, fast pirate skiff can't catch. What actually matters is freeboard height (how high the deck is above water) and armed guards. The largest ships are harder to board, not easier.
Even with that aside, recall I mentioned piracy is geographically constrained. Piracy is geographically concentrated in a few chokepoints. The vast majority of shipping routes have zero piracy risk. The idea that the entire global fleet architecture is optimized around piracy avoidance is not how shipping economics works. Standard war-risk premiums hover at 0.3–0.5 percent of vessel value per transit - but only for high-risk zones. Most shipping routes carry essentially zero piracy-related insurance cost.
The zones where this applies are:
- Gulf of Aden (Somali piracy zone): 0.3-0.5% per transit
- Strait of Hormuz: ~0.2% per transit
- Red Sea during Houthi attacks: 0.6-1% per transit (spiked dramatically)
- Gulf of Guinea: 0.3-0.7%
The global total of war-risk premiums is close to $1 billion. That sounds large until you realize global container shipping moves ~$14+ trillion in goods annually. War risk is not even a rounding error in global shipping economics. Ship stores and lubricants is far greater of a cost, and that comes in at about 4% of operating costs for a typical 10k TEU ship. Fuel is half of operating costs. And fuel costs go up on smaller ships for teh same amount of cargo (physics, again). A lot.
Say you had a fleet of ten 10K TEU ships and you switch to 40 2.5K TEU ships. Your daily fleet fuel consumption would from about 1,750 tons to about 2500 tons - for moving the same amount of cargo. Call it roughly 30-40% more fuel for the same cargo capacity.
That will drive you to the larger ships all on its own. But that is before accounting for:
- 40 crews instead of 10
- 40 sets of port fees instead of 10
- 40 insurance policies
- 4× the maintenance
This is why the industry relentlessly pushed toward larger ships until they hit the physical constraints of ports and canals, not because the USN has big warships to fight pirates.
Second, with the advent of Drones and the ability to attach a Drone Mine to the bottom of a ship, and emit enough noise to hold the ship hostage.
This, to me, changes everything. Piracy will become technological. And the smart Pirates will charge what amounts to a nuisance fee (like anti-virus software, LOL)...
Finally, and I am not challenging what you provided... But is there a "normalcy bias" here. Because we have had quite the fleet knocking the crap out of any ships that threatened ships for a long time. Piracy has NOT been a great business idea for some time.
When the "Police" stop roaming around, I assume it will pick up, like inner city crime does...
Drones don’t really change much. For one, consider the primary barriers to piracy I mentioned. Drones don’t remove the height problem for boarding. They also don’t do much about armed guards. Nor do they change the economics of piracy or shipping.
Piracy is economically limited. The limited infrastructure and economic network access of piracy are a significant choke point and one of the drivers of it’s limited spread. Surely you don’t think drones will let Somali or Houthi pirates swarm out into the ocean lanes between China and the US West coast, do you?
From economics to geography piracy wouldn’t expand if the US had smaller warships. Indeed a single frigate, even a coastal guard one, suppresses piracy over a large area. This is because of the requirements for piracy. Piracy is fundamentally a poverty trap exploitation business that exists in the narrow overlap of failed states + shipping chokepoints + desperate populations. It’s not a scalable threat to global shipping architecture.
While the US’ navy does perform counter-piracy operations, it isn’t with the big warships and the USN isn’t even a majority player there. Indeed fact no nation does.
When it comes to ships, since that is core among your premises, the USN doesn’t assign ships on anything other than opportunistic cases, unlike other nations that assign ships on a dedicated basis. Even considering the opportunistic uses, the USN provides between five and ten percent of the ships used in counter-piracy. Where the US does lead is in command and control infrastructure and leadership.
Most remain unaware that there are several multinational organizations that handle counter piracy. Mostly because if the media reported on that and how successful it has been, it would be less fear inducing.
The primary ship classes (which are not exactly uniform across countries, but close enough for this discussion) used in active counter piracy operations are frigates in the 3-5k displacement range. One of the reasons these and smaller dominate is the cost of deployment, which is also why nations rotate patrols between them. Sometimes a destroyer class is deployed.
Another reason is that frigates hit a sweet spot in task capability. Helicopters are crucial and frigates provide that. The frigate provides longer range “warning shots” and sensor range, while the helicopters provide rapid response that pirate skiffs cannot outrun outmaneuver. Helicopters are the primary method to counter high freeboard levels because you drop down to the ship instead of climbing. In order for pirates to expand and target the big ships with a high freeboard, they would need to field frigate class ships with helicopters. And that is incredibly expensive, prohibitively so.
Consider this: today I could buy a small ocean going vessel from which I could launch pirate operations and deploy to the Gulf. I mean that literally - the ship is in the zone of 200k. But the cost of operations in logistics blows that out of the water, if you will. Then where would I get revenue from? Most piracy is really more of a hostage situation where the ship is ransomed back. Why? Because where an I going to offload that cargo in the Gulf area? It just isn’t viable in the gulf with or without big USN ships.
I understand your reasoning, but the premises it uses are simply incorrect and the opposite of the reality. The premise that we have giant shipping ships because of the USN stopping pirates is demonstrably false as I have shown. The premise that snakes and faster cargo ships are more pirate resistant is not only false but the inverse of the case. The fact that piracy only occurs in limited areas that have specific features needed for piracy, and that outside of those areas there is already limited to no counter piracy operations demonstrates that your premise that absent the big US navy ships piracy would expand is also false.
Drones don’t fix any of those premises. They don’t eliminate or reduce the regional requirements, the cost of operations, or the physics of boarding.
Let's assume China and the USA have a COMPLETE falling out.
China imports about 75% of the FUEL and their FOOD (Peter Ziehan).
How easy/hard does it become to just SINK every ship carrying food or oil, headed for China?
BTW, I bring this scenario up, SPECIFICALLY because it highlights WHAT I BELIEVE is Trumps plan on Greenland through S. America. We are going to get cut off from the rest of the world. Because the Globalists would rather have WWIII with NUKES than give up their chance to control EVERY country in the world.
We are CLEARLY moving in this direction (hence the TSMC Chip Making in AZ), Greenland, Venezuela, etc.
For basic Piracy... I stand corrected (Thank you).
But for pre-war crippling of our enemies or perceived enemies.
Big ships are BIG Targets. Pipelines are (as we've seen) easy targets.
I agree, and those who have the most to lose will pay to stop the crimes ...
unless the corrupt fedgov continues to make us pay for it,
just as they make us pay for gambling losses by the banking cartel and Wall St.
The biggest enemy of the American people has been in D.C. for more than a century.
In some ways Trump is making progress against that enemy.
In other ways Trump appears to be assisting the enemy.
Trump has to help SOME of their pawns...
While targeting some of their stronger pieces.
I could be wrong, but I believe he is doing this for US.
Trump is in a TOUGH spot. Do you RELEASE the Epstein stuff BEFORE you figure out "Who is using it, and how, against WHOM?" (He clearly used it to remove the Ambassador from England)
It's easy to tell us what "WE" would do or should do... When we have NONE of the extra information Trump has. Some good, some bad (clearly).
Celebrate his wins. Pray for his soul, and give him space to "Shake The Box"
I have no issue with some ships being built, but the type of ships that were effective in WW2
are sitting ducks today, and those are the ones that Trump appears to be promoting.
(Trump's ego shouldn't be a deciding factor in naval construction decisions.)
Dealing with piracy (which is a valid goal for naval power) does not require a CVN today.
Must American taxpayers always pay for such anti-piracy efforts when the benefits are often
primarily for European countries?
I agree, Trump has started to move the spending on defense toward actual defense of
American interests. Building an expensive navy of sitting duck naval war machines is
going in the wrong direction.
Increasing military spending by 50% as proposed today is utter foolishness.
(Sorry this has gone off topic.;^)
Except the USA consumes more than Europe.
We were/are always a primary beneficiary.
This is why China struggles when we stop buying as much.
But I've learned to let Trump be Trump. These are long term projects.
The Carrot. And I am watching him threaten their bonuses (the stick).
And that 50% "planned increase" may shrink once things change.
(Whatever they promise us ALWAYS shrinks before it gets to us).
Besides the 50% increase is 1/2 due to inflation :-)
But I would not be surprised to see Trump snatch that stuff away AFTER the midterms.
He cannot afford ENDLESS more attacks and still carry the house and senate.
Once he does, things will LIKELY shift back, but he needs the win to keep the wolves at bay.
has little affect on US goods which cross the pacific unthreatened while Europe is the
destination of the shipping being threatened by Houthi pirates.
Per industry statistics about 10% of shipments to the US went through the Red Sea and therefore affected.
As I stated above, Europe is the primary beneficiary of anti-piracy efforts there and US taxpayers bear the costs.
BBG47 is an overpriced sitting duck target. Perhaps Trump can put his golden name on some attack subs or
cyber systems instead.
I haven't found details online. If you can point me to some links, I'd appreciate it.
(I see the BBG47 as an example of Star Wars' death star.)
Here is the sophomoric government site:
https://www.goldenfleet.navy.mil/
We disagree about Navy ships. Although you can clearly make them cheaper... a LOT cheaper. The path to that is to get NAVSEA OUT of ship design and specification. They are incompetent. Just the welding requirements are ridiculous. They require RT films for certification. Digital (you know, like at your dentist) is not allowed. Tell private industry what you want it to do, and let them design and build ships.
They are sitting duck targets for modern technology.
I think Trump is under pressure (by the folks who killed JFK, shot Reagan,
and shot at Trump) to keep spending on military. Ship building is also
a way to give union members jobs, a political and personal survival choice.
Unfortunately, it's a case of fighting a war from the previous century,
ignoring the fact that they've been losing such since 1945 any time the
opposition has any capability to resist past a week.
We already have this problem, regardless of building BBG-47
Is the 'protection' cost and the construction costs of such ships the most economic use of scarce resources? Can the so-called projection of power that those ships arguably provide be done using more economic advanced technology?
Then there is the issue of protecting the big ship. This is possible, but they need a paradigm shift for the lasers they have. They have 300kW lasers (going to 500kW). They need ~2MW. This is a physics problem. However, we can point 10x 300kW lasers on the same target without issue. This is not a problem, and with such a system, we can defeat hypersonics and drone swarms.
The last issue is cost vs size. If you look at shipbuilding costs, the cost of a surface ship is proportional to the tonnage, with high-correlation. That is why old-timers in government don't believe anything about lower cost shipbuilding. However, the cost of a cruise ship or other navy's ships do NOT follow this same trend. We need to get the RIDICULOUS NAVSEA organization and SUPSHIPS organizations the phuck out of the way. They are worse than dinosaurs.
For example, the Navy has it's own welding requirements and certification. If you want to make equipment for the Navy you MUST weld and braze to these requirements. Every welder and weld type has a separate certification. This means that the 1,000's of American Welding Society (AWS) fully-certified companies can NOT supply for any equipment going to the Navy. Who do you think knows more about welding, the thousands of people in AWS, who like IEEE or ASME study and improve welding year over year OR the 40 people in the NAVSEA welding code in 05? My brother eliminated NASA welding requirements and switched to AWS 14000 (flight safety) requirements. You can add an inspection on the weld, but not a unique weld requirement. This increased NASA's supply base over 10x! Just one stupid thing, but a perfect example of why we can lower the cost of our ships. It is NOT greedy shipbuilders, it is incompetent Navy specifiers and requirements.
If the prior Philly Shipyard, now acquired by Hanwah (Korean conglomerate and shipbuilder), gets engaged and we get NAVSEA out of the way, you will see some real affordability transitioning.
This is especially true for naval ships - arguably one of the few net benefits at a monetary/asset level.
And surely you're not suggesting a modern navy doesn't need aircraft carriers - the largest of naval warships? Which makes your recommendation even less meaningful.