Davy Jones’s Locker

Davy Jones’s Locker

By William S. Lind

That is the real lesson of the Chinese sub incident: The U.S. Navy, like the U.S. Air Force, without a torpedo fired or a single dogfight, is on its way to Davy Jones’s Locker through sheer intellectual inanition. Preparing endlessly for another carrier war in the Pacific against the Imperial Japanese Navy, it has become a historical artifact.

In the late 19th century, the Chinese people, outraged by repeated foreign humiliations of China, took up a sizeable collection of money to build China a modern navy. The Dowager Empress used the funds to build a marble pleasure boat for herself in the lake near her summer palace. The U.S. Navy’s carrier battle groups are the marble pleasure boats of the House and Senate Armed Services Committees of the U.S. Congress.