More Meaningless Meanderings

*Sigh* Well, she's at it again. By "she," I mean my friend with the penchant for falling for ponzi schemes, and by "it" I mean the, well, ponzi schemes.

You know, I really feel like I should be doing my best Ted Koppel imitation right now: "Welcome to Nightline and Day 125 of the Iraqi Dinar Crisis . . ." Yeah, my friend brought that one up again, how all her financial dreams will be fulfilled, and that $10 thousand dollars she owes me will be repaid "with interest," just as soon as The Big Move takes place with the Iraqi dinar. They are, you see, going to "revalue" it right after their elections in early March. Oh, yeah, and it seems that Donald Trump just bought $300 million in dinar, so you know it just has to be true.

Pardon me while I vomit. For those of you who may, God knows why, have been paying attention to such things, at the current exchange rate 100,000 Iraqi dinar equates to the whopping total of $83.73. Methinks it's going to take one hell of a "revaluing" to make any money off that cow of a currency. But what do I know? I'm not Donald Trump . . .

Oh, well. I suppose one of these days that pig will just have to fly.

In more amusing news, I read today that the Secretary of Defence has directed the Navy to lift its ban on women serving aboard submarines. What a truly horrible idea.

Look, I have no problem with women serving in the military, nor do I necessarily have a problem with women serving aboard ships (I do have a problem with women serving in certain combat billets, like the Infantry in the Army, but that's got more to do with the physical standards being relaxed than anything else). Women have been serving aboard U.S. warships for quite a while now and, aside from, I'm sure, a purely coincidental rash of pregnancies among the first mixed crews, that has been pretty much a success.

But a surface ship is not a submarine. Crew space is always at a premium on a warship - remember, machinery and weapons come first, people come second - but it is a relatively eas thing to refit an aircraft carrier to accept a mixed crew than it is a submarine. More to the point, it just can't be done with a submarine. Sure, for a boat that hasn't been built yet, you can redo the plans to make that allowance. But in a boat that's already in service? Nope.

Think of a submarine this way: it's a tube, about thirty feet in diameter and three hundred or so feet long. Into that tube go the ballast tanks that make it go up and down, and the pressure hull in which the crew lives and works. Everything from the Reactor Room aft is occupied by the machinery that makes the boat go. Everything forward is full of the machinery and weapons that allow the boat to fight, the batteries, and the air plant that allows them to blow water out of the ballast tanks so the boat can surface. Next comes all the pumps and piping that allows them to fill the ballast tanks, trim the boat, and empty the tanks. Then come the electrical runs, HVAC runs, food storage, weapons storage, generators, etc. and etc. Last of all come accomodations for the crew, which are crammed in wherever they can find room forward of the Reactor and Engineering spaces.

Put another way, the average Los Angeles-class SSN has a crew of 130, and only enough space to put in bunks for about half that. The Navy gets around this problem through the practice of "hot bunking" - three guys share on bunk, on the theory that one of them will always be on watch, one of them will be engaged in ship's work, and the third one gets to sleep. It's called "hot bunking" because when you get in, the bed is still warm from the guy who preceded you.

Even at that, the bunk itself is only the size of an average coffin and, unlike in surface ships that have the room for distinct "bunk rooms," those on a submarine are crammed in wherever they can find the room. Privacy is nil, and there's just no way to create sex-segregated sleeping areas.

So just why in the hell is this a good idea? I'm all for progress, but why when you're trying to force a foot into a shoe that won't fit? Again, I have no problem with women serving on the boats, but I think it would be a much better idea to leave that to the next generation of submarines we build, where the appropriate allowances can be designed in. It just seems to me that by pushing this for the existing generation of boats, we're just trying to prove how progressive and P.C. we are, and to hell with the consequences.

Oh, well. My time in the Navy has been over for a long time, now. I guess I'm just too set in my ways to realize that the military exists solely to be a laboratory for social engineering . . .

P.S. Battleships suck big donkey balls.