DD 1000

Okay, so I can't resist starting with this bright idea. I am a former Naval Officer, and in fact a Surface Warfare Officer (which means my life was about driving ships). Stepping back into the real world, though.....$4,000,000,000,000 plus (that is "Billion with a B" for fans of the movie "Pentagon Wars") for a single destroyer with a two guns. Okay, I hear all the arguments about needing to introduce new technologies...but all at once, and all on one platform. The pork that feeds our Government Labs is so rampant in this kind of a concept it makes one wonder if the Navy has any intention of ever being relevant again. We intend to build 7 of this, probably for a final cost in excess of 21 Billion Dollars (that is nearly half of the entire annual budget of the Department of Homeland Security). For that we will get maybe 2 forward deployed at any one time......2. Have we completely lost track of important concepts like economy of force, global presence....who are we going to fight with these 2 ships. I am so frustrated watching the Navy shrink itself to irrelevance because of fear...fear of not being on the most advanced ship, fear of taking any losses (this is the military, that is what we signed up for), fear of admitting that you were wrong, fear of losing budget...all rockheaded silliness. Our nation cannot afford to fund these ridiculous pipedreams (one of my partners uses the term "unobtanium"). We have real challenges and threats, threats that can deeply affect the nations future, these threats do not come in the form of another Midway. They come in the form of small, high speed, hard to detect platforms packed with goodness knows what (we do know what, we just call it "classified").

I think we need to have the Department of the Navy (in fact the entire Department of Defense) stand up to the country and describe what they are doing....lets put that to an election and see if we want to spend $21B for 7 ships....or maybe fix up all the schools in the country, build a truly first rate cell infrastructe, protect our country against cyber threats, or any of 100 other more worthy causes than these 7 wastes of our taxes. The money belongs to the citizens, not the Navy....we need to hold them accountable.