It is once again time for our commemoration of the day traditionally picked for the celebration of the US Navy, and for the fifth anniversary of this blog.
First, it's hard to believe it's been five years. I've had a lot of fun over that time, researching, writing and interacting with you guys, both online and in the comments. It's been a quieter year in terms of content here, as I've been down to one a week, with most of my effort during that time going to the book. I was hoping to be done by now, which hasn't happened, but it's gone from a few pages to 130,000 words. My plan going forward is to keep writing here on Sundays and finish up the book. After that, who knows.
Thanks to everyone who has contributed this year, including Suvorov and Evan, who contributed posts, obormot for hosting, John Schilling for reviewing posts and being willing to go on Russell Hogg's podcast with me (thanks to Russell too), and to Lord Nelson for putting up with me through all of this. And thanks to everyone who has been willing to join me at one or another naval/aviation museum/event, be it in the Bay Area, Miramar or DC. Getting to meet more people was definitely one of the highlights of the year. And thanks to everyone who keeps reading my stuff for some reason.
I'm also going to designate this as the place to provide suggestions for what I should write about in the next year. More WWII? More battles? More discussions of modern warships? More basics of how modern defense stuff is set up? Something different? As usual, I make no promises to actually follow through with anything, but I'll take it into consideration.
Lastly, the Open Thread scheduled for tomorrow is likely to be delayed. I unfortunately came down sick during/after the recent DC trip, which rather interrupted the updates.
Comments
Bean, I'd like to see you write "The Five Biggest Errors, Dysfunctions and Wastes of Money in the Modern US Navy."
As always, I cast my vote for the 19th Century.
Historical articles are interesting, but contemporary stuff is more useful. Maybe the war in Ukraine or the US-China tensions can provide inspiration?
Congratulations for keeping up the good work!
My 2c: as long as you write about things you're interested in / find cool, you won't go very wrong.
The most bang for your buck usually comes from looking at something that hasn't been looked at before.
Are there any naval issues from the 21st, 20th, or 19th century that haven't been addressed? The first half of the 19th century is fairly untouched, but I believe this is because Bean thinks he's well out of his field before about 1850. (Otherwise I'd push for Spanish armada era.)
So, looking for something after that?
I'm just going to name things that I suspect might exist: Russian riverine warfare across Siberia from... well it started when they got there in the 1500s, through to fighting the Japanese in 1940s.
Japanese riverine warfare would also have extended down to Thailand, and maybe Burma?
What was the Arab world doing up until WW1? They had an oceanic trading network from Indonesia to Morocco, surely they had conflict.
Korea? They had their famous armoured turtle ships before the target period, but where did they go from there?
I propose a series called “battle damage” where you write about impacts of various weapons on ships and try to analyze the effectiveness of the various protective elements that were employed as protection.
@Johan
I've already done five parts on that, although it was only two systems. And I've got something on hypersonics in the works...
@Doctorpat
Several of those sound very interesting, but I don't have the sources to do them justice.