After our visit to Fort Point, we headed across the Golden Gate bridge to the Marin Headlands. The whole area on the north side of the Golden Gate used to belong to the Army, which installed numerous batteries there from the 1890s to the 1940s, many of which can be visited. But that was only secondary to our real objective, Nike Site SF-88, a Cold War-era SAM site that is the only real memorial to a massive network of air defenses built in the 1950s to protect America from Soviet bomber attack.

The Nike system grew out of concerns in late WWII that aircraft would soon be flying too high and too fast for existing gun-based systems to handle, necessitating a weapon that could alter its course in flight. The obvious answer was to use a rocket, and both Army and Navy began developing systems on that basis. The Army's was called Nike, and it was designed primarily to protect American cities and military bases from Soviet bombers. The first site became operational in 1954, and the system was rapidly built out, with a total of 265 batteries built around the country. The initial Nike Ajax missile, had a range of only 30 miles, and with no more than four launchers per site, it would likely be overwhelmed by a large attack. The answer was the bigger Nike Hercules missile, which could not only reach out almost 100 miles, but also carry a large nuclear warhead, hopefully capable of taking out multiple bombers at once. Most Ajax sites were modernized to take the new missile, although a fair number were shut down as no longer needed. The follow-on to Hercules, called Nike Zeus, would have been intended to shoot down ballistic missiles, but it was sadly cancelled. The majority of the American Hercules sites were shut down in 1974, leaving the country without any serious ground-based air defenses, although a few soldiered on for another 5 years. Read more...

While in the Bay Area for the DSL meetup, I finally managed to get inside a Third System Fort, specifically Fort Point, built in the 1850s to guard San Francisco Bay. It's a late addition to the Third System, and shows all of the various features developed during that system's life. And if the thought of mid-19th century coastal defenses isn't enough to excite you, you should consider going anyway, because it's right under the Golden Gate Bridge and the area is stunning.

The Golden Gate, the stretch of water between the Pacific and San Francisco Bay, is an obvious chokepoint for anyone trying to protect San Francisco, so the first fortification in the area was built by the Spanish in 1794, with only a handful of cannons. It fell into ruin after Mexico gained independence, but when gold was discovered in California in 1849, only a year after the US seized the territory from Mexico, there was interest in protecting the rapidly-growing city from attack. The result was the only Third System fort on the West Coast, started in 1850 and completed in 1860. Like most of the Third System, it was built with casemated guns inside the walls, although it is unusual in having three tiers of casemates instead of just one, as well as a barbette tier on top of the wall. Unfortunately, just after it was completed, the performance of several other brick forts in the Civil War, most notably Fort Pulaski, showed that rifled guns had made masonry forts like this obsolete, and the fort was placed in reserve, even as new batteries were built starting in the 1890s. Read more...

It's time once again for our regular Open Thread. Talk about whatever you want, so long as it isn't Culture War.

The LA meetup last month was excellent, and everyone seemed to have a great time. Next year, the plan is to go to the Air Force Museum in Dayton. There may not be ships, but it is a really impressive museum, and unlike museum ships, I have much less concern about the size of the group. You should plan to come.

Overhauls are Battleship Aviation Parts One and Two, FFG(X) and for 2024, reviews of Bovington Tank Museum, museums around Boston, places we went during last year's meetup and my piece on Eagle.

I attempted to visit Hornet while in the Bay Area as part of the DSL meetup in May 2025. Unfortunately, when we arrived, there was a long line to get onto the ship, as they were hosting a furry convention¹ that day. Now, I have nothing against museum ships doing unusual things for money, and I'd heard of CarrierCon, a more general fandom convention hosted aboard Hornet, but that was a few months ago.² The real problem was threefold. First, one member of our party had checked their website that morning, and not seen anything about this, so it was a unpleasant surprise to find the ship full of people, with an hour-long line. Second, upon arrival we were told that admission would require a con pass, which was $50 instead of the normal $25. Third, it was Memorial Day weekend, and while I'm sure that this wasn't one of their busier weekends,³ doing a convention of any sort⁴ on that weekend feels tacky and a bit disrespectful.

That said, I do want to zero in on the second of the three issues. My basic problem is that because the ship was hosting a con, the experience onboard would be much worse than it would normally have been. I got a look at their map, and pretty much every large public space aboard was being used for panels and the like, which is going to make talking about them much harder, even with the relatively small group (8 people) I had. The only open area on the ship looked to be the flight deck, which is fun, but not $50 worth of fun. And while I am sympathetic to the operational difficulties of trying to separate the general public from con guests, charging people who actually want to see your ship (instead of the thing on it) more for a worse experience isn't a great look. Read more...

While in LA for the Naval Gazing meetup, the group went to the Western Museum of Flight in Torrance. It's a small, obscure museum that I hadn't even known about until a friend recommended it during the last LA meetup, but it seemed like a good thing to do on Friday as an appetizer before the battleship on Saturday.

The museum's party piece

Website

The museum is at the Torrance Airport, which is somewhat irritating to get to, given its distance from the freeways. And while it makes some attempt to chronicle the rich history of airplane production in greater LA, it started as Northrop's house museum, and that very much shows in the planes they have and what part of the story they are most interested in telling. The site is absurdly small, with only five jets on display and not really room for any more: a rather pretty F-86, a two-seat Harrier trainer (which may not be there long, but I'm sure they can find something to replace it), an early A4D-1 Skyhawk, and two Northrop products, an ex-Norwegian F-5 and one of two YF-23 prototypes, the other one of which is at Dayton. (Various places talk about an F-14 and a YF-17, but these appear to be parked elsewhere on the airport.) They did have a fairly large collection of models, engines, and so on to pad the museum out, including an R-4360 that was on Spruce Goose at one point. Read more...

Recently, Brian Potter of Construction Physics (whose work I am generally a fan of) and Austin Vernon (who I met in person two days ago and liked) have released a a blueprint for fixing US naval shipbuilding. I have mixed thoughts on their three points:

1. Instead of complex, multi-role ships which have expensive and often unnecessary features, the Navy should focus on simpler ships with narrower use cases.

2. Rather than outsourcing design to third parties, ship design should be brought in-house, and NAVSEA should expand its staff of Naval Architects from around 300 to closer to 1200.

3. Production on ships should not begin until design is substantially completed.

Now, 2 is a position I've held for a long time, and really should write about more. I think they do a decent job of arguing for it, and I believe this is the thing they emphasized most in their policy paper, so I have no quibble at all here. 3 is patently obvious to everyone, and has been since forever. Unfortunately, this means that we'll need to go beyond simply pointing out that the problem exists, because if it was that easy to solve, someone would have solved it. The people who do this work are not stupid. I suspect political pressures are to blame here, but actually tracking down the drivers and providing solutions for them is not something I'm going to get into here. Read more...

I recently watched Pentagon Wars, a 1998 comedy that purports to portray the development of the Bradley Fighting Vehicle. I came away from it extremely irritated. It's a story based on a fundamental misunderstanding of the problems with defense procurement, treating complicated, difficult issues as things that would be simple if not for the interests of those with power. This is entirely contrary to my views on such things, and as a lot of people's best reference for military procurement, I think it has had a corrosive impact on the public discourse.

Now, for those who don't follow this, the Bradley is the US Army's main Infantry Fighting Vehicle, designed to move a small squad of infantrymen about and provide them with the bulk of their firepower in combat. The movie is based on a book by Air Force Colonel James Burton, who during a tour at the Pentagon had gotten into a fight with the Army about appropriate testing methodology for the Bradley. Things got so heated that Burton retired early and took his case to the public. Read more...

It's time once again for our Open Thread. Talk about whatever you want, so long as it isn't Culture War.

Also, for those of you who missed the Naval Gazing meetup in LA, you can have a second chance at a ship tour in two weeks. I will be at the DSL meetup in San Jose, and we are touring Hornet on Saturday, starting at 1 PM. Feel free to just show up, although it would be nice to know if you are planning to come. I will be wearing an Iowa hat.

Overhauls are Main Guns Part 2, SYWTBABB Construction Part 3, my review of Ft. Sill, O'Callahan and the Franklin, Coastal Defenses Part 2, Oil Tankers and for 2024, Air Attack on Ships Parts three and four, Thoughts on the Iranian Missile Attack and the Fatherly One's review of Cod.

During WWI, the Royal Navy had worked out the basic mechanics of operating airplanes from ships, but the absorption of its aviation units into the Royal Air Force in 1918 saw British naval aviation stagnate in the years after the war. Progress would instead come from the United States, which commissioned its first carrier, Langley, in 1922. Langley had been built as collier Jupiter, and was converted as simply as possible, with a deck built over the existing ship and the coal holds converted to carry aviation supplies, except the one that had machinery for the single lift. There was no hangar as such, with planes being stored under the open-sided flight deck on what had been the upper deck of Jupiter. Moving them about was the work of a pair of overhead cranes, which meant that early operations, where each plane had to be struck down before the next could land, were even slower than aboard Argus.

Langley, known as the "Covered Wagon"

This was clearly unacceptable for an operational carrier, and Langley might have been simply an experiment if not for Joseph Reeves. Reeves was a career surface officer, and had been Jupiter's first captain, but became interested in aviation as it started to demonstrate its potential in the 20s. The Billy Mitchell-driven imbroglio over military aviation a few years earlier had seen Congress require that all aviation units be commanded by aviators, which was also a problem for the Navy, as virtually none of its pilots had the rank to fill senior posts. The solution was the naval aviation observer's course, set up to teach senior officers about flying and qualify them under the law, even if they were not rated to actually fly planes. Reeves passed in 1925, and became Commander, Aircraft Squadron, Battle Fleet, the senior aviation officer afloat. As an outsider who had just completed a stint at the Naval War College, Reeves began his tenure with a lecture. "First of all, from what I have seen, this command lacks a coordinated set of tactics and has no conception of the capabilities and limitations of the air force" was not a sentence designed to endear him to his pilots, but he swiftly laid out a number of questions about how best to turn a ship and a group of planes into an effective part of the fleet, and set about answering them. Read more...

Operating planes off of a ship is tricky. Planes only work well when flying at speed, and unlike on land, there isn't a lot of space for a runway. It turned out that while flying planes off ships was relatively straightforward, landing them back aboard was very difficult. The solution was to attach floats the plane, which allowed it to not only land on the open sea, but also take off while the carrier was anchored, a common condition in the early days of naval aviation.

Seaplane carrier Engadine

But while using the sea as a runway worked well for anchored ships, it was far less suitable for operations with the fleet. The carrier would have to stop and hoist the plane in or out, costing it ground relative to the rest of the fleet, and all of the ships suitable for carrier conversion were too slow to regain position reliably. Also, while an anchored carrier would generally be somewhere protected from the worst of the ocean's waves, this was definitely not the case for a seaplane carrier operating in support of the fleet. In particular, taking off from the open ocean in any sort of sea is extremely tricky, to the point that the wakes of nearby ships might disrupt the operation. These problems were dramatically illustrated by the first serious attempt to use airplanes in concert with the fleet during the Battle of Jutland. Read more...