Reality of U.S. War Machine For World Domination

[Savannahmann]

37. I've given it a bunch

When Hurricane Katrina showed the paucity of assets available for response, I started looking at it seriously. Realizing that any response to a Hurricane or Tsunami would have to come from the sea, and include waterborne and airborne assets. So in other words some sort of large heavy ship with helicopters and a way to launch boats on search and rescue/supply missions.

Guess what? I found a way to do it for a hell of a lot less money.

Shadow Marine had just started up converting old Oil Supply Ships into "shadow vessels". These conversions created a goodly sized sea worthy vessel for a fraction of new construction. They already are designed with large helipads for all but the largest helicopters. Also they come with a large hanger/garage that can store several watercraft.

A company on the west coast is making aluminum landing craft similiar in basic design to the classic Higgens boats of World War II. These are inexpensive, and very versitile and able to land personnel and equipment right on just about any beach. The basic design worked well across the pacific and european war invasions. They also have optional firefighting capability.

A company in Canada makes a eight wheeled ATV that is slow, but able to float, swim, and climb over many obstacles. Several have optional stretcher racks for search and rescue operations.

The total cost of all of this including a medium sized helicopter is less than half of one ultra modern helicopter like the AW 101 which we were going to buy for the President to use as Marine One.

Imagine this for a moment. For half the cost of an ultra modern helicopter, you get airborne, seaborne, search and rescue, water making capability, resupply and communications capability.

So for the cost of 20 of those ultra modern helicopters, we could literally put one of these things with all equipment and supplies pretty much all over the place.

I remember shaking my head in frustrated blind anger when I heard that NASA had spent a million dollars to develop a way for the Astronauts to make necessicary notes in space. These ball point pens that had to write in zero gravity are now sold as space pens. They cost a million dollars to develop. The Russians who were going to space and had the same problem, the need to take notes in zero G, found a more elegant and much more inexpensive answer. They still to this day use a pencil at the cost of a few cents. I'm figuring that a million dollars worth of pencils would have never run out.

But for some reason we as a people never look at things that way. We never look at a problem and figure out all the possible answers, and then pick the one that works best for us. No, we look at a problem, if there really isn't a problem we make one up, and we come up with the most complex and expensive, answer possible.