Ghosts

[FrugalFloyd]

Originally Posted by Biffmeistro

First off, both Basra and Umm Qasr are RIVER PORTS, not ocean ports.

You don't let facts get in the way of a good story, do you? Umm Qasr is a seaport.

Mina Al Bakr is an offshore terminal, pretty good for a landlocked nation, you have to admit.

When you shoot down your own credibility with false claims, you lose. It's that simple.

[Jay2TheRescue]

Not only is it cheaper to maintain them than rebuild them if needed, these ships can also be refurbished and put into service faster than a new ship can be built.

[FrugalFloyd]

According to this Wikipedia reference, there are 73 remaining ghost ships. 52 of them are scheduled for scrapping. That leaves a grand total of 21 that are considered capable of actually being put into service.

At one time, under Reagan, we attempted to maintain a 600 ship navy. 21 additional semi-rotting, 70 year-old merchant ships aren't going to turn the tide against China or Korea in a real naval war.

[Wyldesoul]

Originally Posted by SentraSE-R

You don't let facts get in the way of a good story, do you? Umm Qasr is a seaport.

Mina Al Bakr is an offshore terminal, pretty good for a landlocked nation, you have to admit.

When you shoot down your own credibility with false claims, you lose. It's that simple.

I must tell you something, more about how you are doing things.

When you're so rude, and so personally attacking in your arguments, even when you bring up a good point, you make people not want to admit it, because you're such a jerk.

So I will say this.

I concede that Iraq is not landlocked.

However, I do not concede that Iraq could support a navy worth fearing.

My looking at Umm Qasr on google maps showed it was quite a while back into an estuary. Not on the edge of the gulf. Looked like a river port to me, which is why I called it one.
I was wrong.

You bring up Mina Al Bakr, which now goes by the name of Al Basrah Oil Terminal, and it now used primarily to facilitate the exporting of Iraq's oil.

Would they need a deep water oil terminal to allow their oil to be exported if Umm Qasr was a deep water port capable of supporting capital ships?

I still hold that we didn't bring the mothball fleets out of retirement for Iraq due to the fact that they didn't have a navy worth our time. Their biggest ship were some old Soviet fast attack crafts, the Osa class. Destroyed by F-14's before they could even shoot us.


And on the mothball fleets.


Will they turn the tide against China, or N Korea?

No, not at all.


However, It takes, as I was able to find, between $1 and $5 million per year to maintain our mothball fleet. Lets just say $5 million for giving your side the advantage.
$5 million per year, and only 21 ships worth saving. That's $230,000 per save able ship, per year. Lets just round that up to $250,000, for easy calculation, and once more, your side has the advantage.

Some looking up shows that the US's new supply ships cost about $430 million each to build. Heck, let's say these are only worth 1/4 of that, and that to build a new one would cost $100 million, on average. (This one rounded down, to give your side the advantage, and for easy calculation).

Let's also say that the cost of re-fitting the ship is 1/2 the price of building a new one. Heck! Let us say that it costs 3/4 of the price of the ship to re-fit it.

It would cost $100 million to build a new ship, and $75 million to refit the old ones.

That 25 million difference? You would have to maintain the mothball fleet for 100 years to make it no longer worth it.

I know the price of the ships is wild conjecture, but I did base it on the new budget for the new T-AKE supply ships, which is 6.2 billion for 14 ships, or about $430 million per ship.


THAT is why the mothball fleet is still floating.

No, it wouldn't turn the tide in a war, but if it comes to it, it would make it quicker and easier to put 21 supply ships out there, rather than having to wait and pay for them to be built.

It is cheaper to maintain and refit then it is to rebuild, at least on this large of a scale.

Too old for refit? Heck, the USS Kitty Hawk is still in active duty, and not just as a museum, and it's been in service since 1961. Almost 50 years of active duty, and it's still going strong. It can be refitted to be perfectly modern, and at a very low cost compared to building a replacement.

Just like the mothballs.



Edit, and one final note to this:
If you're going to reply to this with a personal attack, trying to make me feel like an idiot, or anything other than polite rebuttal, I won't reply.
I've made my point, and unless you can politely bring up good counterpoints, I'm stepping out.
If you want to feel like you've won because you're rude? Good for you.

[FrugalFloyd]

Trust me, it's even harder to agree with someone who plants a flat-out lie (like Iraq is a landlocked nation), and blatantly and repeatedly tries to pass it off as a fact.

We don't need a naval presence in the Persian Gulf to deal with their outgunned navies. We have it there to force our policies in the region (or to police our interests, if you want to put it that way). In Gulf War 1, we couldn't have marshaled an attack force in 6 days if we didn't already have two naval battle groups in the region.

Your cost-benefit analysis is very good, but it doesn't include the environmental and health costs to the Bay Area. Suisun Bay is the breeding ground for the Bay Area's Striped Bass and sturgeon fisheries, which have plummeted to 1% of their former numbers, due in part to the military's and DOT's poisoning of Suisun Bay waters, and in part to California's agricultural and residential diversion of >90% of the water that formerly fed into the bay. The California Dept. Fish & Game warns the Bay Area's pregnant women and children to avoid eating bay seafood more than once/month. That's a serious cost of keeping the mothball fleet's 21 ships ready - millions of people harboring a toxic waste dump in their backyard for 70+ years.

The bigger problem with fighting the next war, is the US lacks the manufacturing ability to build any ships at all. Because of the Jones Act, the US builds just 1% of the world's large commercial ships. During WWII, we converted typewriter factories to build guns. Now we outsource our gun manufacturing and our televisions, microwave ovens, and (seemingly) most of the other consumer commodities we buy and use.

[shatto]

Geez! I thought it was a neat picture.

[shatto]

Fellows. Something to consider, in the "really big argument" is modernization.



The Iowa story tells of battleships being upgraded to carry cruise missiles, and we saw the night launches on TV during the Gulf War. The reason they no longer use those ships is because it requires over 1,000 men to run it, and automating the innards of the ship would cost more than building a 'specific built' ship from scratch. Then, there is the matter of an utterly obsolete hull, incapable of the defense of it's design.



Our current batch of carriers are obsolete because the newest are designed to have entire modules of the ship replaced as necessary to upgrade, something impractical now.

China just unveiled a aircraft carrier killing missile that could, I suppose, be launched from a Junk or fishing trawler. Now, we will be restricted to operating in deep water and will have to exercise extreme caution next time a Tsunami causes a dire need for American help. Remember, the Cole was taken out by some men in a Zodiac.


Having Liberty and Victory ships anchored in bunches in the bay is a quaint picture and is testament to the futility of government management.

[Jay2TheRescue]

I think everyone needs to take a chill pill here. Any more personal attacks/remarks will bring disciplinary action. We're all civil adults here, lets act it.

[GasSavers_Scott]

Speaking about kids trying to operate WWII era ships, have you ever seen a kid try to dial a rotary phone?

[shatto]

You have a little evil streak....