I'm not privy to any inside information when it comes to ship building, but I am sort of privy to information about automobile building, since many top exec's from the auto industry frequented my camera shop. In the glory days, before Japanese cars were a significant import, many cars made by the big three were built very shoddy with many defects.Especially those assembled on Monday and Friday when employees were in the lowest attendance.

Cars were delivered to dealers with the expectation that they would fix the defects before selling the cars. Many dealers only fixed the cars minimally in order to keep the un-reimbursed costs low. One dealer complained to me that he got one care with the entire engine in the trunk. Every one knew about the practice. No one said much about it except for Nader, Who wrote a book called "unsafe At Any Speed" that was quite a hit, but very little was done about it. Now, my question is, are we sending our men to lay down their lives in ships that are unsafe at any speed or any maneuver?

So basically, we have a Navy that can't put to see or do any real fighting. [facepalm]

Who signs off on these pieces of floating junk and can we hang them by their toenails?

Oh, I thought that this was going to be a book review of Elting Morison's biography of William S. Sims. But, yes, I see that you use the present tense.

Having worked many years ago for my father's Marine engineering company I find this appalling that these major ship building companies are out to line their own pockets. If they were in the the commercial shipbuilding business they would have been litigated out of business by their customers. I watch some of the cable programs about building military vessels in other European countries the aircraft carriers are considerably smaller. They have new technologies that work and also design to be stealthy. To me, smaller would be better and survivable in ocean warfare.

There is a flip side to this that rarely (if ever) get publicized. I was in development and delivery of new Air Force space systems, and had to constantly fight the operational (customer) side that kept wanting to change specifications far past final design. I had a reputation for being an iron clad hardass compared to more malleable developers, because I refused to allow significant changes beyond a certain point in development, knowing that they would either be extremely expensive, cause significant delay, or be written up as "deficiencies." I suspect that many of the so-called "deficiencies" are a result of late changes the operator forgot to include in the original specs.

we should contract with the ship builders that make the cruse ships.

The problem the U.S. Navy faces is that it is developing technology and isn't allowed to fund that separately. Therefore, each ship's actual cost is hard to determine, since both development and construction are rolled into it.

I expect nothing less than this, so no disappointment. Good thing we do not get all the government we pay for.

This is along the same lines as England buying 18 billion in defective F35's to bail out the pentagon and England calling it the premier fleet although they are really useless.