The “Family Jewels”

Read the other 703 pages here.

Read the other 703 pages here.
Without a doubt, navies are among the most expensive arms a nation may deploy. Our own ongoing going experience being germane – Russia is re-discovering the cost of admiralty and it isn’t always in rubles: “The project to modernize an aircraft carrier for the Indian Navy in Severodvinsk Sevmash has resulted in the bankruptcy of…
I remember, a sky so blue it burned your eyes to look up . . .and smoke that scarred your lungs; I remember shipmates . . . and a piece of notebook paper listing for whom the bell had tolled; We remember that for one brief moment it wasn’t New Yorkers, or Washingtonians, or businessmen…
Fifth ship of the Essex-class CVs. Fifth ship named for Benjamin Franklin… The date – 19 March 1945. Area of operations – fifty miles off the coast of Japan. Flight ops have been underway since before dawn, beginning with a strike against Honshu and another against shipping in Kobe harbor. On…
The weak can be rash. The powerful must be restrained.– Secretary of State William Rogers, April 1969 For most of these past several weeks, international attention has been focused on the activities taking place near a peninsula on the north-east coast of Korea. There, despite protests and warnings from around the world, the…
Guest blogger Chuck Hill checks in with the first of two parts of the Naval Battle of Guadalcanal (12-13 November). We are less than a month out from the attack at Pearl Harbor and Allied forces are on the move – in Europe, Africa, Asia and the Atlantic and Pacific oceans. But so too are…
For some time now we’ve been hosting a link for the USS Ranger Foundation, a group dedicated to moving the ex-USS Ranger (CVA/CV-61) to a site in the northwest US for establishment as the centerpiece of a maritime museum. Contingent on that hope was approval by the US Navy to do so and raising significant…