The U.S.'s $13B aircraft carrier has a toilet problem | Hacker News Reader

The U.S.'s $13B aircraft carrier has a toilet problem

popularmechanics.com

109 pointsgscott91 comments

Given the size and complexity of such a device, and the limited number of them that are constructed (which means they are always a one-off), it would be a miracle on the order of Moses parting the Red Sea for one of them to be built __without__ such mistakes happening.

In you are a developer, think of the number of times you have seen a successful SAP deployment i.e. on time, on budget, meets specs. Then multiply that by about 10k to reach the complexity of an aircraft carrier.

Engineering has a much stronger and more specific focus on avoiding "unexpected" problems like this. At its most general you use things like dimensional analysis to identify and avoid issues that you can't specifically foresee.

This is, bare minimum, an embarrassing failure of design. No system, especially on a military ship, should have no redundancy. A single point of failure should not bring down every toilet on the ship. It's a damn aircraft carrier- splurge on separate sewage in the aft and fore.

Engineering in the traditional sense plays very little role in modern defense systems. The overriding concern is profit: How can we extract the most money from the DoD? Good engineering that avoids recurring costs is discouraged in favor of gee-whiz technology that's easy to sell but expensive to build and maintain. The icing on the cake is that bids no longer matter; the largest contractors always underbid to get the contract then send bills that are 2x, 4x or 10x the bid, knowing they have the DoD over a barrel.

The solution for this nonsense is competition. Real, honest, open, transparent competition. Combined with laws that dictate refusal to pay in excess of the bid, instant scrapping of programs that exceed cost estimates, and a 10-year timeout window between when people in DoD leadership can transition out and get jobs with DoD contractors.

> instant scrapping of programs that exceed cost estimates

So you're gonna build 75% of an aircraft carrier, and... then what?

Realize you’ve screwed your self over for underbidding and not do it again?

Given the timeframes on a project like an aircraft carrier, both sides are equally screwed here.

Better to screw both sides than only screw the military/taxpayers as is.

It’s possible to put performance guarantees / insurance etc. into contracts such that if the contractor cannot build the entire thing within some percentage of budget then the entire cost is refunded, and the contractor is left with scrap metal.

That sounds like a great way to make sure no company ever bids to build an aircraft carrier.

Then it's a wide open field for a company who can do it to get the contract at whatever price they want. See how markets work?

How many companies are there with shipbuilding competence and the ability to absorb $10B risk for a decade?

How often does a “competitive” bidding process for being handed a temporary monopoly work out? The competition flies out the window the moment the contract is signed.

What if the Navy builds the ships itself?

> Engineering in the traditional sense plays very little role in modern defense systems. The overriding concern is profit: How can we extract the most money from the DoD? Good engineering that avoids recurring costs is discouraged in favor of gee-whiz technology that's easy to sell but expensive to build and maintain. The icing on the cake is that bids no longer matter; the largest contractors always underbid to get the contract then send bills that are 2x, 4x or 10x the bid, knowing they have the DoD over a barrel.

As a government contractor, I agree and fully endorse this.

> The solution for this nonsense is competition. Real, honest, open, transparent competition. Combined with laws that dictate refusal to pay in excess of the bid, instant scrapping of programs that exceed cost estimates, and a 10-year timeout window between when people in DoD leadership can transition out and get jobs with DoD contractors.

...And I disagree with this fully. The solution is for the government to return to in-housing, relax the rules they hold themselves to, and aggressively expand their own capabilities. The things the government makes are far and away superior to anything in the private sector. At its best, the government does it better, cheaper, and longer-lasting than anyone else.

Real competition for the things the government needs done is just not possible. Roughly 50% of contracts are based on just flat-out lies, and it's even worse for shitty contracts like SBIRs. I'll tell you, I have seen some real dumb shit. The BUYER needs technical expertise in order to not get ripped off, and if you already have expertise it makes much more sense to go the extra miles and build it yourself.

The market for government contracts would need to be way more lucrative to allow companies to fail honestly, and even then, why would they when lying is more profitable? Plus, this doesn't even cover the worst part of large contracts, which is that they're effectively negotiated by politics, either congress itself or inter-DoD factionalism. That, more than anything else, creates large-scale rot.

I have tried many times to break into government contracting and always failed. It's always one of two problems: The award is too small to cover the cost of the proposal and reporting paperwork (e.g. SBIR) or the award is huge and you need a full-time team whose sole job is to navigate all the red tape. And like you said, the people evaluating proposals often have no background in the field, so proxies for competence are used like slickness of marketing materials, whom you know in the organization, or how good-looking you are (not kidding).

After I graduated I thought I wanted to work for NASA. Then I found out most NASA employees spend most of their day not inventing or building things, but managing contractors who did the actual work.

I guess I'm saying I like your suggestion better than mine.

> At its best, the government does it better, cheaper, and longer-lasting than anyone else

Can you cite examples and explain factors that you think lead to the government working at its best?

As much as I like free market competition, I think you’re probably right, at least when it comes to projects/pieces of projects where the only customer is the government. But when there’s a problem not well suited for competition to solve efficiently, that doesn’t guarantee a good government result: there’s a ton of variability in the quality of government responses.

My basic theory is this: the success of large government engineering projects depends primarily on whether or not everyone involved in the project believe it to be of existential importance (military projects during the cold war), whether its something that they will personally use and want to feel pride in (golden gate bridge), or whether or not the problem has some novel/interesting element that attracts the best and brightest.

USPS delivers packages much faster, more efficiently (fewer stops), significantly more cheaply, and with better employee pay and benefits. Medicare negotiates far more effectively than private insurance (although obviously that isn't a simple comparison) and has dramatically lower overheads. Government and even locally-owned infrastructure is cheaper than commercial infrastructure like roads or communications. Government-owned health services are cheaper and higher quality. Government engineering projects are superior. The GAO and IRS are extremely effective financial institutions.

> But when there’s a problem not well suited for competition to solve efficiently, that doesn’t guarantee a good government result: there’s a ton of variability in the quality of government responses.

Can you find me an example? By and large, the idea that the government is inefficient is a myth. There are boondoggles like Star Wars, but those are failures independent of government implementation. There are "failures" like Amtrak that are unprofitable, but they are kept running to offer services at a given price point because we want that regardless of what the market says.

Government projects are generally subject to the exact same motivations as private projects. They make profits. Employees can be fired and promoted. Innovation is rewarded, at the individual level. Underperforming projects are cut, often much more aggressively than in the free market.

Much more important than a sense of patriotism is the fact that governments are subject to intense internal and external scrutiny. Literally the most powerful people in the country are constantly looking, specifically to cut individual programs. There is no safe position in the government and institutional rot is constantly being gutted even when it's unwise, eg CDC, EPA, IRS lately. You will not find that pressure at IBM.

> USPS delivers packages much faster, more efficiently (fewer stops), significantly more cheaply, and with better employee pay and benefits.

USPS is fast because its mail is hauled by Fedex. Fedex is also significantly cheaper than USPS at delivering packages if you have a large contract with them. USPS is sometimes cheaper for retail customers, though, and it's also cheaper for standard mail.

But because of all that scrutiny, the government often has to behave suboptimally:

a) Processes can be a matter of law, requiring an extraordinarily heavy bureaucratic lift to adapt to new information or fix bugs.

b) Processes are calibrated to minimize trust. Contracting must be as obtuse as it is, because the alternative is to let civil servants make judgement calls, which the public cannot abide. This probably mitigates some serious downside risk, but it also precludes a lot of potential upside. Other institutions succeed when competent and trustworthy people just do what they think is right. (I daresay this is the only way an organization ever accomplishes anything difficult). Government agencies are only allowed to do that in emergencies, or in tiny edge cases like special forces.

c) Where leaders do have latitude, the fear of embarrassment weighs unusually heavy on their decision-making. It's harder to take good risks. I'm sure there was waste at IBM that would not survive in government. I'm equally sure there was innovation at IBM that could not have happened in government.

In some ways "government can't do anything right" is a self-fulling prophecy. The controls we implement in response to that perception make it come true. More fundamentally, I think any engineer can identify with how having to balance so many stakeholders could be incompatible with doing their best work. Making government less accountable probably isn't the answer either.

Institutional rot is extremely expensive, and large institutions eventually wither away because of it. That pressure exists whether or not companies are aware of it/proactive about cutting it out.

I think the problems with government controlled projects are better generalized as problems with incentives and accountability in large organizations. It’s possible to get it right, but the bigger an organization gets, and the less existential pressure it feels/the more it can let problems fester without consequence, the more problems will occur.

The most stereotypical example is the soviet union. There was no accountability, and production and quality problems were endemic to pretty much every sector under government control. Cars, food, housing, clothing, energy, etc, were all behind the west, and became increasingly behind the longer things went on.

The soviet union was a particularly horrible government, but the US government also has plenty of inefficiencies. The SLS project has been dragging for eons, while SpaceX has been accelerating rapidly. Virtually no one pays taxes directly through government interfaces; they all use private services like TurboTax because they’re much simpler to use and more user friendly that what the government provides. Publicly funded job training programs have abysmal success rates, whereas private apprenticeships a schools that earn by pairing well trained students with their first job do much better.

Once you become a mega corporation, I think accountability and incentive problems start to kick in, just like in many governments. If they also lack the internal scrutiny that you describe within the US government, they will do worse (assuming they don’t have as many differing political objectives as a government).

Because there are also examples of huge government funded successes, like the Apollo program, the Golden Gate Bridge, the internet, etc, there is some sort of difference between the government projects that work and the government projects that don’t. I think its important to explicitly determine what that difference is, rather than reduce it to a binary opinion on government projects.

Any very large project is expected to have a number of embarrassing failures. You just don't hear about most of them. Not surprisingly, on a __military__ ship, sewage is not considered mission critical and required to have multiple redundancy. You can, after all, take a poop in a bucket and throw it over the side. Redundancy engineering is reserved for truly mission-critical things, like being able to find and shoot the enemy, and surviving a certain amount of damage. You don't waste valuable redundancy resources on things like this.

It's a shame they also haven't wasted redundancy resources on the electromagnetic catapult system used to launch aircraft, and which as of 2018 had a failure rate consistent with a 70% chance of completing a full day of flight operations without downtime. (1)

It's easy to imagine that the toilet failures here under discussion represent an isolated concern and a teething problem for the kind of new, nonessential system that you expect to see in a new class of capital warship which, after all, still gets the fundamentals right. The trouble is that, once you start really looking, that's just not borne out by the evidence.

A lot of the ideas in play with these ships, as with the LCS or the F-35, are fundamentally good. But the US military procurement process has become so deeply corrupt that we as a country are no longer capable of implementing these good ideas well. The multiple-decade, trillion-dollar boondoggle has become table stakes, and that doesn't deserve to be excused by anyone.

(Also, a Ford-class carrier has a crew of something like four thousand. They're gonna need a lot of buckets...)

(1) https://breakingdefense.com/2018/06/navys-troubled-ford-carr...

> It's a shame they also haven't wasted redundancy resources on the electromagnetic catapult system used to launch aircraft, and which as of 2018 had a failure rate consistent with a 70% chance of completing a full day of flight operations without downtime. (1)

Note that this system is a privately-contracted one and was supposed to work as delivered.

I mean it's not like humans have been putting toilets in ships for a while and have past metrics they can use to predict things like pipe diameter or anything.

“system must regularly be cleaned with ... acid solution that costs $400,000 per use.”

I realise the government/military procurement process can result in higher costs than the private sector would pay, but that is beyond ridiculous.

Guess how much shipping is to the middle of the ocean. Go on, guess.

Surely you can stock on the thing.

And store it where? Dry volume is at a premium, just look at the compactness of living quarters to get an idea how little room there is to spare.

Why in the world would you stock it and use up valuable space, and fuel on carrying it around the world?

Also, it surely cannot be a good idea to keep massive amounts of acid around for non essential purposes.

How is it non-essential if that's the only way to get the toilets going?

Its non essential if you can get it shipped there easily in a resupply

Surely no one sends a warship "just" with their shipment of toilet acid, an aircraft carrier will be getting resupplies regularly anyway. So either the resupply run is insanely expensive and $400k is just a part of it, or someone is being dishonest and uses a cost of a single run as the cost of the clean.

The DoD will not hesitate for a second to call in contractors if they aren't confident in their crew. I'm sure they did so in this case.

Even though you're just flying a few guys (say a few acid guys, maybe an engineer who knows the toilets, just in case) out for a day or two, that's stupidly expensive. Not even just the cost of putting them on a plane or helicopter- even though you may only be paying for a few hundred man hours, you need to pay a lot to pull those guys out of whatever they were doing.

4,700 people shitting in buckets is kind of an emergency in the middle of the ocean, unfortunately. The navy is notorious for its sleep deprivation and tight schedules. Seemingly small disruptions and timewasters can lead to major problems and mistakes.

It probably qualifies as hazmat, which has a whole slew of special handling and storage requirements and raises the cost.

Well, which private sector organization fields 1,000+ feet ships housing thousands of people, besides cruise lines? I don't know how much a flushing of the entire wastewater system on a ship like the Oasis of the Seas costs, but it's probably not as low as $1,000.

My guess would be that this figure also includes costs for downtime and the like, but that's just a guess. Would be interested to see a more detailed breakdown of the $400k.

How would you measure the cost of downtime for a toilet system? Number of people in the infirmary with constipation?

I would imagine that repairing it would mean it'll be out of commission for a few hours up to a few days, for example by waiting until the repair techs arrive or whatnot, interrupting regular operations. Depending on how the costs are counted, even just a few hours can quickly catch up if you add all the personal costs of the sailors on the ship etc.

It's the same with things like outages, an outage lasting a day may "cost" $1 million, but what's actually meant is that you missed $1 million in profits for the day, not that you had to pay $1 million. If operating a carrier costs $400k/day then you could say then fixing something for a day "costs" $400k, but that's kind of a simplistic way of putting it.

Try $400 a gallon off gas--after paying the enemy (the Taliban) to allow the shipment though. https://thehill.com/homenews/administration/63407-400gallon-...

My guess is that the liquid is toxic and also might have to be processed after.

Article from 2009. They now use long haul truck convoys through Russia and Central Asia to avoid this problem.

What is their fully burdened cost of fuel today? It seems like it would still be tremendously expensive.

I think it's less insane when instead of perceiving it as flushing a building's plumming, you're flushing a town of 6000's plumming.

4,656 to 4,758 crewmen, at $391 million average annual.

If you read the GAO report[1], most of the costs are due to commercial outsourcing- either outright failures on the part of private contractors, like the unreliable automated systems, plane arrestors, and other misc. equipment and services, or on the part of the DOD making assumptions about those equipment and services (like one notable instance in several classes where the navy assumed that commercial equipment would not require service or repair for the life of the ship).

These high costs occur when contractors have the government by the balls, because... that's what markets are for. The gov will pay $10,000 to replace a bulkhead (toilet cover), because well, toilets need to be covered on an airplane. $10,000 is just what it costs for someone to pick up the phone.

1: https://www.gao.gov/assets/710/705463.pdf

It's interesting that there's so much focus on the toilet problem, and not the other $139 billion in unexpected maintenance costs

I know right. A billion here, a billion there, and pretty soon you're talking real money.

your mind would be rapidly changed when you learned the concept of shit lasagna. Layers or waste and toilet paper.

Still sounds harmless compared to the toilet problem of U-1206: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Pfr0nsh0Ghc

What problem is solved by using aircraft-style toilets on Navy ships?

Stealth.

Aircraft toilets always sound pretty damn loud to me. And their main reason to exist on planes is the lack of available water. Pretty sure that is not an aircraft carrier’s constraint.

Actually ships are very water constrained. Especially Nuclear as they can't risk sea water contamination to the reactor cooling.

Modern aircraft carriers have reverse-osmosis desalination systems on board. These can supply hundreds (thousands?) of tons of potable water per day.

Yes, fresh water is a valuable commodity at sea; on U.S. Navy ships, water-flushed toilets are flushed with sea water, not fresh — or at least that's the way it used to be, and I can't imagine it'd be different today. (Source: Three years' sea duty as an engineering officer in the aircraft carrier USS Enterprise, CVN-65.)

EDIT: See https://www.navy.mil/submit/display.asp?story_id=103122 for a 2017 press release describing how the Reactor Department produces fresh water aboard the aircraft carrier USS Abraham Lincoln (a Nimitz-class carrier, i.e., an old design). TL;DR: It's done with giant evaporators, that is, distilling units.

Fun fact: At sea, one of the big uses of fresh water aboard a carrier is the repeated washing down of the aircraft to reduce corrosion from the salt air.

Well, the old way to do it is to use sea water flushing which leads to its own problems over the life of the ship with pipes corroding. New(ish) environmental regulations dictate that you can't just flush everything overboard anymore, it needs to be processed through a sewage plant. Despite probably being able to ignore most environmental laws, the Navy normally at least tries to abide by the current laws to be a good citizen and not pollute the oceans as well as having an easier time when visiting foreign ports.

The process plants run better on fresh water but fresh water is expensive and heavy on a ship so a vacuum system allows for less water per flush and really works pretty well if people don't flush stupid things.

Stupid things that my co-workers have fished from sewage plant besides the things mentioned in the article: Towels Screwdrivers Glasses Rags baby wipes/ flushable wipes Pens

As long as only body waste and a small amount of toilet paper are used, the systems are actually fairly reliable. Teaching people that that is ALL that can be flushed is an on going problem. The chemicals seem to be another issue, possibly a design issue but there are ways around that too. Urine crystals build up on the walls of the pipes and reduce the diameter for the waste water to flow. The vaccum systems typically have smaller diameter pipes then the old style "gravity" flush systems. There are companies that make continuous dosing systems that go in the end of the branch lines to help keep them clear.

A lot of issues with maintenance can be solved by design of branches in the piping system with isolation valves so the whole system doesn't have to be shut down to fix something. Even replacing a toilet means shutting off the branch or system since it opens a hole in the vacuum system and leads to loss of vacuum.

Some more information: https://www.boatus.org/clean-boating/sewage/msd-types/

Manufacturers: https://jetsgroup.com/jets-group/the-highest-standards/the-h... https://evac.com/

Actually, good design recognizes that people can't be trusted to follow instructions. Seems even Navy doesn't have enough discipline.

One thing of note: seems the whole system is designed for peace. While I can understand armchair designer (it is likely it will never see something like WWII action) this should be designed as a machine of war in case all hell breaks lose. I guess the backup plan is to have buckets and a bucket brigade...

If all that can be flushed is human waste and paper, then why not put it directly into the ocean? It's quickly and completely bio degradable (eaten by fish and micro organisms).

If the ship is at sea (>12 NM) it can be put directly into the ocean but when it comes close to land it needs to be mashed up and disinfected. Also there are some places called special sea areas that have different rules even if you are more than 12 NM. There are different rules for less then 3 NM and between 3NM and 12NM too.

Having one system for when the ship is out at sea and switching to something else causes even more engineering problems. Even if you're not processing the waste, the vacuum sewage system would still be used to collect the waste to discharge it.

MARPOL Laws: http://www.imo.org/en/about/conventions/listofconventions/pa...

https://www.dco.uscg.mil/Our-Organization/Assistant-Commanda...

Special Sea Areas: http://www.imo.org/en/OurWork/Environment/SpecialAreasUnderM...

When I was on ship, when it was trash day you'd watch them take every trash bag, slit it open, and toss it into the sea.

I wonder if toilets can't be adapted so as to prevent those inappropriate items from being flushed.

For example, suppose that you move part of the "processing" into the mechanism of the toilet itself, i.e. you use some kind of lever-operated press to pass your own output through a sort of a sieve; only soft items will pass, or items you break apart - but then you notice you've broken something apart which demotivates throwing those things in the toilet.

Just a thought.

There’s a substantial number of big passenger ships cruising the seas. One would think this was a solved problem.

Previous (flagged) discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22681785

Wait, what kinda of acid and how much? $400,000 seems like a lot.

Exactly. The real question is - why do the chemicals cost $400,000? This seems to be a recurring theme with U.S. expenditure - particularly within the defense sector. When you get nearly blank checks from the government it’s not uncommon for items to be “marked up” so to speak and the difference pocketed by the vendors. Granted, this kind of stuff is pervasive across all sectors/layers.

“[A] McKinsey “business analyst”—someone with an undergraduate degree and no experience—lent to the government priced out at $56,707/week, or $2,948,764/year.”

Why did you have to bring politics into this (Buttlegug)?

You can throw shade at a consultancy without necessarily referring to one of their alumni. McKinsey was a major player in the field long before Buttigieg was an ultrasound.

> $56,707/week, or $2,948,764/year.

I picked the wrong job.

they are paid a pittance of a salary compared to their charged. McKensey is pocketing the difference.

It also goes back into wining and dining the very clients they are charging, and otherwise bribing whoever they need to get the work.

The amount of red tape involved in working with the government- especially anything related to defense- is astounding. I previously worked with a start up whose contacts in the military genuinely wanted to buy our services, but the process to do so was so long that the company ended up pivoting to focus exclusively on the commercial market. It was a less ideal fit, but it actually paid.

Take:

One part slow bureaucracy

One part nepotism

One part jealousy of internal teams

One part good intentions (regulations to prevent said nepotism)

And you get a cluster of inexcusable outcomes.

The company seriously considered hiring a consulting firm whose sole business was helping other businesses land government contracts. The fact that the system is so inefficient that that kind of arbitrage opportunity exists is depressing.

The only companies that can possibly win government contracts here are those that are huge, with tons of staff dedicated to winning government contracts. The end result is they can charge the moon and the sky, not because they do what they do better than anyone else, but because they are just as bloated and inefficient as the government itself and can survive the process of winning the contract in the first place.

I wonder if thats one of the reasons, in this case the acid, is so expensive. You have to add all of the logistical and bureaucracy costs.

One solution is to be acquired by a defense contractor. A company which I worked for went that route.

I worked for a government contractor for a little over two weeks once. (I gave my 2 weeks notice almost right away.) It’s hard to express how wasteful and broken this process is. When I realized that I wouldn’t actually be doing anything useful for the first two months of my job, I just quit. No way could I do that kind of “work” day in and day out.

I did the exact same thing for similar reasons (although it would be nice to have a paycheck during COVID-19). 3 months of side projects, nothing related to what I had studied to do. We were projected to begin work 3 months later, but that was after dozens or so deadline pushbacks already.

My guess is that the cost of the raw chemicals is a small part of the $400,000. If there's 500 toilets on board that's $800 per toilet. What is probably much more expensive is safely transporting the chemicals in massive amounts, storing them, inspecting all the pipes after the treatment, and safely disposing of the chemicals. The GAO report doesn't say what they're using. I wouldn't even be that surprised if the acid flush was actually done with a base like Drano/lye

Figure can include not only acid costs, but work amount and ship idle costs

If you have to make 120m each in campaign donations to 3 senators to get the contract, plus another 40m in actual cost of research, supply and profit margin and then the navy only wants to buy 1000 units because its new and they get in trouble for buying necessary supplies instead of cool shit like torpedoes, then you sort of have to charge 400k a unit...

" 120m each in campaign donations to 3 senators to get the contract"

The contributions they are making are usually much lower. When you read the numbers it's actually surprising how little money you have to spend to get government money in return. Very good ROI.

Yeah, I'd heard that too. It's all so shameful...

Odds are that a good part of that expense is just storage for the massive amounts of the product. x100 of course. But when you need it, you'd better be able to get it and that's what's more than likely being paid for.

I'd have to say my favorite problem with the ship is that it has to stop flight operations if the new arresting gear needs repairing, and if one catapult needs repairs, it cannot be independently shut-down, all four need to be turned off, which takes ~90 minutes.

Link to GAO report:

https://www.gao.gov/assets/710/705463.pdf

"The more they overthink the plumbing, the easier it is to stop up the drain."

Another toilet problem was in a WWII submarine which had worse consequences. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/German_submarine_U-1206#Fate

That would be mighty unpleasant in case real war broke.

Human poop cannot polute oceans, fishes tend to poop and pee as well

Perhaps it’s classified poop and pee

Fish and humans have vastly different diets, and human feces contain different bacteria and viruses than fish feces. You can absolutely pollute an ocean with sewage. Please try to educate yourself.

It's also not just about the ocean- hepatitis A spreads quite regularly when shellfish feed on contaminated sewage.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VGJLKhsLx18&ab_channel=Steve...

The crew should be required to use a laxative at all times instead. Wouldn’t cost 400k

So the 'Bush' is so filled with excrement it cant function? Appropriately named :)

US Carriers will repeat History in following the usage of the British Dreadnoughts.

In WW1, the Dreadnoughts were too valuable to be risked. So they were really only used once, in the non-conclusive Battle of Jutland which only lasted a couple of hours.

Millions of Pounds (the equivalent of Billions of Dollars, in today's money) were wasted on ships that were locked safely away because they were too valuable to be actually used in combat. That money could have been far more usefully employed elsewhere.

The same can be said of today's billions of Dollars wasted on useless slow, very expensive targets (= carriers).

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