No, just high water
Aircraft carriers are rather impervious to all but the highest water, the problem is they are existentially vulnerable to hell in high places…
Damn, looks like someone left it in a pool of saltwater for nine months… oh, right.
Seriously, how the hull looks is the least of the crews’ concerns. You’d expect over 210 days of continuous deployment at sea to look like this. The toll on the crew is much uglier.
They chose to join a fascist army, I couldn’t care less about them. I might care if they mutiny or start fragging officers and NCOs tho.
The rust will buff out. The lifelong psychological torment the seamen suffered? Priceless.
It’s embarrassing to spend this much money on the military and have this little to show for it
I get what you’re saying, the US military is not really proportionately impressive to its budget and is historically terrible at winning wars, but that’s also not the point of it. The US has an entire hegemony to show for its military force, and even if it isn’t impressive in terms of conventional warfare, it has been used brutally and effectively to subdue challenging political and decolonial movements globally; there’s a reason they have it and support it beyond reason. They don’t need to win wars to maintain that power, they just need to be able to wield enough violence to kneecap anything that threatens them and discourage anyone else that may try in the future.
I’m not saying this in support of the US military (obviously), but to caution against minimizing the destructive potential of this institution. Look at the death it causes with even a short conflict, how much they’re able to throw away frivilously. I think a lot of people are starting to forget how one-sided and brutal the so-called “War on Terror” was, which means they ignore just how destructive even their losses are.
Excellent point
It’s an issue I notice a lot. It’s important to remember that the knowledge produced around these topics is also subject to that hegemony, which means we should always question our presumptions of these systems when something just seems nonsensical or stupid.
Fascists suck at war.
The one thing in our favor
They travelled back in time and almost stopped Pearl Harbor.
I loved that movie as a kid.
Then you might like Zipang, which is an anime about a Japanese Aegis cruiser traveling back in time to right before the Battle of Midway and the crew asking themselves not necessarily “can we afford to change the timeline because of the butterfly effect” but “maybe Japan specifically needed to lose that war”
https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0963150/plotsummary/
Honestly, I think a Japanese crew grappling with that question adds quite a lot more to it given the all too frequent denialism on the topic.
They are terrorists.
I was on that carrier, as a visitor when they were in the Mediterranean during the gulf war… Feels like a lifetime ago and looks like it when you see it like this
Imagine the smell.
