New Ship for a New Kind of War?

                   There's an interesting article in the January issue of The Electrical Worker,  which is the house organ journal of the International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers.   The article is about a new warship being completed in a shipyard in Pascagoula, Miss.  The IBEW has a particular interest in this ship because large numbers of its local members, over 700  of them in IBEW local 733, found employment in constructing this ship. The article, "USS AMERICA, In a Class by Itself", explains that the USS America is the first of a new class of amphibious assault ships, a kind of ship that will make beach landings obsolete.

                  Beach landings, from the Greeks at Troy to Eisenhower at Normandy and McArthur at Inchon, have always been nasty, bloody affairs.  But the Navy is betting that in future wars, such landings will be unnecessary.  In future wars, invading marines will simply fly over the beaches in planes that can take off like helicopters and then fly like regular planes, escorted by jet fighters that can take off in a very short space and land vertically. This ship will carry no landing craft at all, nor would it be capable of launching them. This marks a radical departure from existing amphibious assault ships.

                  The  America also departs from conventional craft in other ways. It will have no boilers and use no steam power. All systems will be electric, including the propulsion system, and will be powered by two 4 mw diesel generators backed up by two 35,000 horsepower jet turbine generators.  The entire ship is a maze of  electrical cables and fiber optic links, installed over a 5 year period by hundreds of electricians. One question left unanswered is how, in these hypothetical future wars, equipment such as tanks, heavy trucks, and artillery pieces were to be hauled ashore.  Will future armies not need these things?  Yet one thing is clear.  There are a few countries in the world whose main importance to anyone is the fact that they would make a good beach-head, if such a beach-head were ever required.  The strategic usefulness of such places is now zero.  Think about it. http://www.ibew.org/articles/13ElectricalWorker/EW1301/USSAmerica.0113.html