The Influence of Woo on Naval Engineering
With absolutely no apologies to Alfred Thayer Mahan...
I've recently been reading The World's Worst Warships, by the British naval engineer Anthony Preston.
This may not qualify as "woo" exactly, but Preston was involved in ship design during the Cold War. He has a lot of snarky remarks about the constant panicking over OMG-THE-SOVIETS-ARE-BUILDING-SUPER-MONSTER-SHIPS-WE-CAN-NEVER-MATCH!1!
Most of that panicking came from the naval intelligence community...who are usually Navy line officers, not ship designers. They didn't know what was possible in ship design, tending to believe all rumors. And when asked where they got the information, of course they responded with: "We can't tell you. It's classified."
In his own words:
All Soviet ships were credited with very high speeds and perfectly functioning weapon systems. When more knowledgable commentators questioned the assumption that the Soviets had perfected technology not known to the West, they were told that the technical superiority stemmed from the Communist system.
I made myself unpopular at a seminar by suggesting that the implication of that explanation was that the West should adopt Communism to allow fair competition...
But Preston also points out that it has ALWAYS been this way, with an example from the British Navy in the 1930's:
The British Director of Naval Intelligence (DNI) attacked the Director of Naval Construction (DNC) for not matching the Japanese Furutaka class cruisers in speed, armament and compactness. To which the DNC retorted that the figures were either untrue (the correct explanation) or the Japanese had built the ships out of cardboard.
The World's Worst Warships: The Failures and Repercussions of Naval Design and Construction, 1860 to the Present Day; Anthony Preston, Conway Maritime Press 2002
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