Folly of the DayThe Most Expensive Warship Ever Floated — Thirteen Billion Dollars of American Naval Supremacy — Was Very Nearly Gutted by a Fire in Its Own Laundry Room, Which Burned Unchecked for Thirty Hours Because the Fire-Suppression System Engineered for Exactly This Moment Simply Never Switched On
Thirteen billion dollars buys electromagnetic catapults, a reactor that need not be refueled for half a century, and a flight deck from which to project power across the curvature of the earth — but it does not, apparently, buy a sprinkler that comes on when the dryers ignite. The Ford spent thirty hours being defeated not by a peer adversary but by its own dirty linen, and the only system that performed exactly as designed was the one that did nothing at all.
Source: 19FortyFive
The WireA KC-46 Boom Operator and the F-22 Pilot He Was Refueling Each Managed, in the Same Instant and Apparently Independently, to Get It Wrong — Snapping the Refueling Boom Clean Off and Sending Ten Million Dollars of Precision Hardware Tumbling Into the Atlantic
Aerial refueling is the choreography of two aircraft kissing at four hundred knots; it demands that exactly one party not blunder at a time. Here both parties obliged simultaneously — the boom operator erred, the F-22 pilot erred, and their combined competence was sufficient to deposit a ten-million-dollar boom into the sea. It takes two to fail this expensively, and on this occasion the crew rose to the occasion.
Source: Air & Space Forces Magazine
The WireA Royal Navy Autonomous Sea Drone, Built With the One Cardinal Instruction to Keep Six Hundred and Fifty Feet Clear of Every Vessel, Promptly 'Went Rogue' in Portsmouth Harbour and Rammed a Four-Hundred-Thousand-Pound Racing Yacht — the Latest in a Series of Boats These Same Drones Have Forced to Scramble
The single design parameter — stay 650 feet from anything that floats — was the one thing the Rattler resolved to violate, steering itself into a £400,000 racing yacht called the Lutine with the conviction of a machine that has read its orders and disagreed. This was no first offence; a tug and a ferry have already had to dodge the same fleet. The Navy has built a drone whose only consistent behaviour is to seek out the precise object it was forbidden to touch.
Source: InView
Treadwell's CornerThe Pentagon Suspended Its Mandatory Flu Shots, Watched Nearly Three Hundred Recruits Drop With Influenza at a Single Boot Camp, and Only Then — With the Sick Bay Already Full — Rediscovered the Wisdom of Vaccinating the People It Crams Into Shared Barracks
There exists no environment on earth more hospitable to a respiratory virus than a boot camp — hundreds of exhausted young bodies stacked in shared bunks, breathing the same air on command. The Pentagon looked at this petri dish, suspended the one measure standing between it and an epidemic, and then, having achieved the predictable epidemic, solemnly reinstated the measure as though it had learned something. It had learned only what the immunologists had told it beforehand, at the cost of three hundred recruits.
Source: International Business Times UK