{"id":193703,"date":"2008-11-22T09:37:00","date_gmt":"2008-11-22T14:37:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/2008\/11\/22\/this-is-about-pork-nothing-else\/"},"modified":"2008-11-22T09:37:00","modified_gmt":"2008-11-22T14:37:00","slug":"this-is-about-pork-nothing-else","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/2008\/11\/22\/this-is-about-pork-nothing-else\/","title":{"rendered":"This is About Pork, Nothing Else"},"content":{"rendered":"

Well, it looks like the US Navy is looking at moving a carried from Hampton Roads, Virginia to Mayport, Florida<\/a>, near Jacksonville, and the Virginia Congressional delegation is throwing a fit over this.<\/p>\n

This is not surprising, the presence of that carrier pumps something like \u00bd a billion dollars into the local economy.<\/p>\n

The Navy is arguing that, “The five East Coast carriers should be dispersed as a hedge against a natural disaster or attack that could shut or cripple the sprawling Norfolk base.”<\/p>\n

So, in order to hedge against natural disaster, you want to move the ships into hurricane alley<\/span>, otherwise known as Florida.<\/p>\n

Of course the idea that foreign power will launch a sneak attack on the base is ludicrous.<\/p>\n

SecNav John Lehman did this in the 1980s, on the argument that it would make more difficult for Soviet subs to shadow fleet movements, but it was a crap argument then.<\/p>\n

Of course, these days the USSR is no more, and the Russians can’t deploy a significant portion of their fleet and the Chinese are a decade from a meaningful submarine fleet, so there is no risk of attack<\/span>.<\/p>\n

The reality was that Lehman wanted to do this because it created more constituencies for his vision of a 600 ship navy, because a large number of small bases gets you the support of many congresscritters, where as one large base just gets you 1 or 2 districts support.<\/p>\n

With the Navy claiming that their ships and aircraft are wearing out and need to be replaced, they still want to drop a billion dollars on the move, not because of military need, but because of political need.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Well, it looks like the US Navy is looking at moving a carried from Hampton Roads, Virginia to Mayport, Florida, near Jacksonville, and the Virginia Congressional delegation is throwing a fit over this. This is not surprising, the presence of that carrier pumps something like \u00bd a billion dollars into the local economy. The Navy …<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[998,1008,1161,978],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-193703","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-congress","category-defense-procurement","category-naval","category-politics"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/193703"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=193703"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/193703\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=193703"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=193703"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=193703"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}