OUR BALSA WOOD NAVY?

This blog posting from Danger Room, Wired Magazine’s military blog, suggests that 20% of the US Naval Fleet failed its 2011 inspections and an alarming 50% of the Navy’s combat aircraft are not ready to fight.  Those are Soviet Union type numbers, well in advance of the coming defense budget cuts. http://www.wired.com/dangerroom/2011/07/over-a-fifth-of-navy-ships-arent-ready-to-fight/

In a related story, the snazzy new superfast, shallow water combat ship, the Littoral Combat Ship, built by Austal, an Australian defense contractor, has literally fallen apart, a victim of “electrolysis”- a product of disastrously faulty engineering that destroys the metal joints in its engines.  http://www.wired.com/dangerroom/2011/06/shipbuilder-blames-navy-as-brand-new-warship-disintegrates

The Navy has not played a major role in the two Middle East wars, and may have been shorted for operations and maintenance to keep the Air Force and Army going strong. It is unnerving, to say the least, that we can manage to spend north of $700 billion a year on defense, and yet have huge gaps in readiness.