Musings on history and Bonhomme Richard: The Drift, S. II, Vol. XLI

Sponsored by:

Navigation Brief

This is an e-newsletter first published Oct. 1.

ALEXANDRIA – Good Evening, Drifters

I wrote a story this week on the various options confronting the Navy on Bonhomme Richard. You can read about that here:

For the fire-ravaged ship Bonhomme Richard, the US Navy has no good options

If you didn’t read the story, ehhhhhh. But here’s the main paragraph:

Excerpt: The bottom line? The Navy can either: fix Bonhomme Richard at enormous cost; replace her with a new LHA, a class of ship that Congressional Research Service says is running about $3.8 billion per hull, further constricting an already squeezed shipbuilding budget; try to pull an old big-deck out of mothballs and overhaul it for a few years of service; or it can cut bait entirely and lose the capacity all together.

In the course of reporting this story I had a chat with Friend of The Drift Sal Mercogliano, who is a maritime historian and a former civilian mariner who teaches at Campbell University. We discussed the possibility of pulling a little financial wizardry: Instead of overburdening the already jam-packed shipbuilding account, why not just break down and rebuild the Bonhomme Richard from the keel up with Operations & Maintenance money. Same ship … but not really.

That set off a memory in his head and he quickly forwarded a report from the early 1990s put together by NAVSEA’s Carderock division on the Baltimore-based Museum ship Constellation, which was supposed to be one of the first six frigates built by Joshua Humphreys. That is until NAVSEA threw cold water on that theory in their report, “Fouled Anchors: The Constellation Question Answered.”

That’s what I want to talk about tonight.

Let’s Drift!

-DBL

[Since publication, the Navy has decided to scrap Bonhomme Richard, but that isn't the point of this email anyway, so enjoy!]

Fuzzy Math

I want to be clear up front that the solution the Navy chose in the 1850s to replace the badly deteriorated 1797 Constellation with a new Constellation is not an option today. But it is an example of how the Navy has been clever about shipbuilding in the past.

So, the Constellation that sits in Baltimore Harbor today is most certainly not the 1797 Constellation, but lots of people believed that it was for a long time. Apparently, according to the report, there are documents from the SECNAV Franklin Roosevelt era that show plans to have Constellation participate in the 100^th anniversary of the composition of the Star Spangled Banner, apparently unaware that the ship was not the actual Constellation of the era. This did not help things.

But by the late 1940s, the evidence was beginning to stack up that Constellation wasn’t the ship people believed she was. A curator from the Smithsonian published in 1949 an article called “The Constellation Myth” that laid out that his review of the historical record showed that the Constellation in Baltimore did not match the designs of the 1797 Constellation, but did match design records of a second Constellation from 1853.

The jig, it appeared, was up for the fraudulent Connie. But folks don’t believe facts that conflict with their emotions, and the myth lived on for decades until NAVSEA finally pieced together the facts once and for all.

Here’s what happened:

In 1816 the sense of Congress was that the Navy should, over time, gradually increase in size. But running a Navy is no cheap business, so Congress wanted to take it slow. It passed the “Act for the Gradual Improvement of the Navy of the United States,” which appropriated to the Navy $1 million per year to buy stockpiles of live oak timber to create a kind of strategic reserve for future shipbuilding.

Not a bad plan if you wanted to build a Navy in a hurry.

That act was adjusted over the years but the peak of the timber hoarding went on from 1827 and 1839. The Navy even prefabricated the timber to a degree so that they could be rapidly assembled into ships, the report says.

Ships were hard to come by in the 1850s and the shipbuilding budget was being taken up largely by expensive steam-powered ships. So, to add another ship to the fleet, the Navy did some creative budgeteering.

The 1797 Connie had been in layup for 8 years in 1853 when the Navy decided it was time to cut bait on the old girl, badly degraded and ready to go to the operating area upstate where she could sail around and be happy.

So, with no apparent subterfuge or secrecy, the Navy got timber together from the strategic stockpile and drew off money for labor from the “Gradual Increase” pot. This use of the funds was expressly allowed in the law. The Navy dismantled the old Connie and built the new Connie 600 feet away with the reserve timber, siphoning the money for the rest from the Gradual Increase fund. The annual operating costs went through the normal Navy budget process. And, voila, the 1855 Constellation was born: the last ship built by the US Navy to be powered exclusively by sail.

You can still visit her today.

Now, unfortunately the Navy doesn’t have a stockpile of Wasp-class amphibious assault ship parts just lying around and there is no slush fund of congressional appropriations it can draw money from to rebuild Bonhomme Richard. But if it doesn’t want to lose the capacity completely, it may have to get creative as their forebears did with 1855 Connie.

Finis.

The Hotwash

Straight to the links tonight.

More Reading

The Pentagon is eyeing a 500-ship Navy, documents reveal

Navy conducts freedom of navigation operations off Venezuelan coast

DoD Ponders 581-Ship Fleet, As Navy Shipyard Problems Persist

Navy to Use Sea Hunter in Fleet Exercises as Unmanned Systems Experimentation Continues

Pompeo says USS Hershel ‘Woody’ Williams will be based at Souda Bay

Sponsored by:

Our Mission, Your Success. Telephonics - globally recognized for our maritime surveillance & weather avoidance radar systems which are designed to meet the rigorous mission demands of our customers for littoral and overland surveillance. Today we are developing the next generation of radar technology with the introduction our MOSAIC® Active Electronically Scanned Array (AESA) radar.
Visit https://www.telephonics.com/product/mosaic to learn more.