[High Praise! to Gunslinger’s Journal]
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“During the 3-1/2 years of World War II that started with the Japanese bombing of Pearl Harbor in December 1941 and ended with the surrender of Germany and Japan in 1945, the U.S. produced 22 aircraft carriers, 8 battleships, 48 cruisers, 349 destroyers, 420 destroyer escorts, 203 submarines, 34 million tons of merchant ships, 100,000 fighter aircraft, 98,000 bombers, 24,000 transport aircraft, 58,000 training aircraft, 93,000 tanks, 257,000 artillery pieces, 105,000 mortars, 3,000,000 machine guns, and 2,500,000 military trucks.
We put 16.1 million men in uniform in the various armed services, invaded Africa, Sicily and Italy, won the battle for the Atlantic, planned and executed D-Day, marched across the Pacific and Europe, developed the atomic bomb and ultimately conquered Japan and Germany.
So it’s worth noting, and is somewhat frightening, that during the same amount of time our current administration couldn’t build a freakin’ web site.”
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What’s more, they allowed all that industrial capacity, which made us the “arsenal of democracy,” to be shipped to China, Indonesia, Mexico… We couldn’t be the arsenal of a wet noodle now.
During my life time I’ve always wondered why the Democrats almost always opposed new weapon systems, especially those for our defense. Why would anyone oppose weapons for defense? I could understand why our enemies would oppose them. And then it dawned on me.
Ah, but imagine how long it would have taken FDR to build one. So there!
The list ignores the 150 escort carriers built, which were instrumental in the battle of the atlantic in closing the “air gap” in the middle of the atlantic ocean.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Escort_carrier
In fairness, the US Navy HAS been building ships during the Obama Administration. They were programmed during the Bush administration. And teh Obama administration has programmed ships to be built that will be delivered in the Clinton administration. That’s how ship building goes. And since we aren’t at war with anyone, we don’t really need shipyards cranking out 100 new escort carriers.
Prof: That we need 100 CEs wasn’t my point. My point was that the list given in the original post was missing 150 CEs. So we accomplished a bit more in terms of naval manufacture than the list stated, in the same time that the Obama administration couldn’t build a web site.
And our current naval strength is less than half what it was 25 years ago. But what the navy is expected to be able to do hasn’t been reduced. They’re still expected to win another conventional war like WWII – control both the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans.