Over on Forbes, I’m banging away at the opportunity Joe Biden and Emmanuel Macron have this week to deepen an ongoing Franco-US maritime relationship at the G-20 meetings. I have long extolled the strategic value of France’s strategically-useful maritime holdings, and, as we are already working together on maritime security and carrier integration, we should deepen and formalize our relationship. It’d give Macron something really high-profile while advancing our mutual strategic positions at sea.
Go read it here.
I’m quite interested in the potential for a viable mid-sized carrier design. While a range of strategists have urged the U.S. Navy to consider mid-sized carriers, the Navy, for a lot of reasons, has slow-walked every proposal to look beyond the Ford Class. The excuse was that a new design would be expensive, and nobody wanted to fund it, etc etc.
Well, now, with France getting into the game, we’re going to get one of the first modern mid-sized carrier designs since, oh, the Kennedy was launched. It’s pure opportunity. And with the design not owned by Huntington Ingalls, there’s, suddenly, real potential for the Department of Defense to open the innovation aperture and, potentially, look at introducing some modest threat of competition into America’s flat-deck manufacturing industrial base. Neat stuff!
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This comment is with regard to an article you published in Forbes, summer 2022.
At that time, you suggested that a system of barrage balloons could become a powerful barrier to Russian air assault. I’ve vainly hoped that some agency in Ukraine or an ally’s, would validate your proposal, during the ensuing several months. Now, in light of our Congress’s sabotage of the future arms and funding pipelines to our desperate Ukrainian friends, I’m anxious to know if there has ever been any consideration of your cost-effective addition to the air defense of Ukraine. Our ally is supposedly running low on air defense munitions. I would appreciate any light on this matter, you could provide. Thanks,
Jack Cohen