I thought this article would be a solid contribution to the effort that started to get traction inside the last 18-months. A lot of effort has been made to get in to the larger information space the critical shortfall in shipyard building and maintenance capability and capacity the US Navy must fix if we are going to be able to meet the challenges west of the International Date Line.

That isn’t what we are getting with Lipton’s article. Just the opposite. Even worse than negative-help, that first pull-quote above is your I&W that we are about to be fed a dish of recycled talking point, vision, and just bad thinking from the Age of Transformationalism we’ve spent the better part of two decades at the OG Blog and here debunking and warning about.

Bad ideas that never result in bad consequences for those who promote them will always return.

[Worth a full read. Clearly, the NYT needs someone of Salamander’s caliber to tell a poop deck from just plain ol’ poop. The phrase “magic beans” comes up a lot, and not in a good way. So does the term “snake oil.” And for that matter, so does a dread that we are faced with a situation that we have lost a generation of innovation and improvement for an aging navy, and that may be time we very much regret pissing away at some point … perhaps sooner than we know. — Ed]