Bryan Clark

If you look at it in comparison to other services, the Navy is in good shape, it’s more about how much money the Navy should be getting relative to the demands being placed on the service.

At the end of WWII we did not have an undersea advantage. The Germans had developed submarines with snorkels and the US was searching for how they would deal with them. The new subs could avoid radar detection and were quiet when using their batteries. Then, nuclear submarines came along. Passive sonar worked really well against them because they make noise continuously. Passive sonar works well against nuclear submarines and is less effective against diesels.

In the last 20 years there has been a dramatic increase in computer processing power and a miniaturization of computer processing. It used to be that some of these technologies could not be used in real-time. The ability to process and use information in real-time was not there. Processing power is now small enough and powerful enough to fit onto a platform.

The engineering is not that hard. It’ll just take time and money to make it happen.

There was a need to reassure people that something was being done, and hospital ships are very good for that.