Andrew Higgins loved bourbon, cursed a lot and built the boats that won D-Day
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D-Day was a triumph of logistics and planning. Eisenhower, in overall charge, was a logistics guy, which was exactly what was needed. D-Day was just the beginning of the invasion. The purpose of D-Day was to establish beachheads through which larger armies could be landed and then supported. The support function was key. Without extensive logistic support, the heroics necessary to force a hostile landing were pointless. The Dieppe and Dunkirk failures had clearly established this. Eisenhower delayed D-Day until huge support resources had been built up.
There were Higgins boats, in both infantry and tank sizes. There were Dual Drive tanks, Sherman tanks which could float, sort of, for a short while. (Many didn't make it to the beach, but those that did meant the troops had armor on their side.) There were "Hobart's Funnies", tanks with strange attachments to flail their way through minefields and barbed wire. There were the Mulberry temporary ports, sections floated over and sunk to create jetties to which cargo ships could dock and unload. Fuel pipelines were unrolled across the English channel to carry fuel in bulk.
In the later stages of the invasion, more and more support resources were ferried over and deployed. This included multiple mobile Coca-Cola bottling plants and mobile bakeries.
Eisenhower wrote that the conquest of Europe pretty much followed his original plan. Probably the greatest triumph of the waterfall method, ever.
Creating a plan and collecting the resources to execute that is not disjoint from agile principles. In fact, the amount of leeway given to the troops upon landing to determine the best course of action was imperative to the success of the landing.
In a sense, Eisenhower made a plan; collected the people and resources to execute it; and then got out of the way as it was successfully executed. Each unit of the landing parties operated at that point as scrum teams, with all the necessary and redundant team members to execute the mission.
seriously?
Source: I work at Coca-Cola (a bottler in Japan), but mostly this book: https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/203586.For_God_Country_a...
That's because it's a delicious spirit. It's whiskey after all, the essence of beer.
Speaking of which, I recently had a Sierra Nevada Barrel-Aged "Islay Fog". I happen to have found it delicous, but regardless, its manufacture is quite interesting if you think about it.
In case you aren't aware, American whiskey is aged in new oak barrels whose insides have been charred. Those barrels are then sent to Scotland, where they are used to age Scotch whisky. In the case of Scotch from the island of Islay, the malted barley is toasted over a peat fire, which is what gives Islay Scotches their distinctive smokey flavor.
So here we have an American beer that was aged in a barrel formerly used to age Islay Scotch, formerly used to age Bourbon, imparting a peat flavor. A barrel traveled twice across the Atlantic, and is probably at least a dozen years old, and held three different alcohols, just so I could have a delicous drink.
Here's the label - http://imgur.com/a/KnIBN
The importance of the casks cannot be understated I believe; American Oak/Bourbon casks are a wonderful, core part of the whisky experience, though there are other types of casks that are used (sherry casks have been in vogue of late, for example).
Your final point, which I construe ultimately to be about the nature of trade that made the Bourbon, the Scotch, and the Beer, is well taken and is a true wonder of trade's relationship to the enhancement of humanity (qua man). It naturally also reminds me of George Thorogood and leaves me to ponder that his song could all have been sourced from the same barrel. Hmm.....
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/One_Bourbon,_One_Scotch,_One_B...
Anorak
1. A kind of heavy jacket
2. Someone considered boring because of their obsessive hobby or narrow solitary interests
Of course, Scotch being an obsessive hobby could also just be called alcoholism... but that's a entirely different comment thread :-)
You're right that that was a better submission, though. Obscure, substantive, curiosity-gratifying... the best.
It's reasonable to speculate that drone swarms will become a real thing, probably very soon. Will they replace aircraft carriers? Not for decades, unless we stumble into a war and get humiliated by an enemy swarm. (For what it's worth, I think we've become so arrogant that another military humiliation in our lifetimes is almost a certainty. But now I'm editorializing.)
But again, this seems so reasonable as to almost seem inevitable. When you no longer have to worry about feeding, accommodating, and protecting human sailors, it's pretty amazing how much smaller, faster, cheaper, and more performant your ships can get.
I worry carriers will be like ships of the line after the invention of iron hulls. Huge investment instantly obsolete by new technology. The u.s. Is in a great position to repeat the British empire's mistakes.
That's correct. To your earlier point :), post-Cold War consensus is that the traditional battleship should be replaced by destroyers with modern targeting capabilities.
So the US Navy is somewhat in between ships for naval gunfire support.
The Zumwalt-class destroyers [1] were supposed to take over here but that's been a bit of boondoggle.
They'll just hang out near the bases, latch on as they head out and start cutting holes.