Forbes: What A Waste! The U.S. Navy Just Blew Up A Very Useful Old Warship
On Aug. 17, 23 warships from 10 countries gathered off the coast of Hawaii for the U.S. Navy’s biennial Rim of the Pacific war game. The two-week exercise came to a dramatic conclusion on Sunday with the explosive sinking of an old Navy cargo ship.
A very useful old Navy cargo ship. So useful that it was a shame to watch her sink.
As RIMPAC came to a close, the allied fleet surrounded the Charleston-class amphibious cargo ship Durham. The fleet pummeled the 575-foot-long Durham with five missiles—three Harpoons, an Exocet and a Hellfire missile—plus cannon rounds.
Durham sank in no less than 6,000 feet of water. Her sinking left the Navy with three old Charlestons, all laid up in reserve and slowly rusting away.
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Previous Post: Watch Three Anti-Ship Missiles Rip Through The USS Durham During RIMPAC NAval Exercises Off The Coast Of Hawaii (August 31, 2020)
WNU Editor:The ships are all laid up and rusting away. Does it make sense to refurbish them? Apparently not.
4 comments:
"Ship mothballing itself can provide additional support to storage efforts involving boiler mothballing, turbine mothballing and turbine storage, and even other defense oriented storage efforts. As a ready made internally segmented structures serving little other purpose than remaining inactive and in storage, mothballed ships can themselves hold a variety of equipment that may be useful at a later date.
Another advantage to mothballing ships rather than simply scrapping or selling them at the end of their useful lives is that the equipment unique to their design can be salvaged and used in sister vessels."
https://www.bryair.com/news-and-events/articles/the-uses-of-ship-mothballing/
Sounds expensive.
After you cannibalize so much and still have a problem with corrosion with what is left, why not use it as part of an operational test
Sophmores in physics and engineering learn that entropy always wins.
At the start of the 2003 Gulf War, the Navy used mothballed ships in San Fran to store arms. The ground troops had a dire need of a long range 30 caliber semi-auto rifle. Turns out that thousands of M-14's were stored aboard these mothballed ships. They did a quick refurb of the rifles and shipped them to Iraq.
But this ship? It was 53 years old. Way past its expiration date and a maintenance nightmare.
She served her purpose well.
What young sailor pulling the trigger didn’t have a great day?
The worry is that it takes 5 direct asm hits to sink a piece of junk,time to up those payloads.
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