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All of the U.S. Navy's nuclear-powered aircraft carriers have a maximum speed of 32 knots. In other words, they can move 30.866 meters each minute and 216.06 meters within seven minutes.

Say what?

OK, look, I am going to do this in grade school arithmetic.

A "knot" - a nautical mile - is 1,852 meters, or 6,076 feet. 32 times that is 59,264 meters, or 194,432 feet.

That's 59.264 kilometers, or 32 nautical miles, in an hour.

Divide this by the number of minutes in an hour, and you get 987.7 meters per minute, or 3240.5 feet per minute.

In seven minutes, the carrier will have moved 6,914 meters, or 22,683.5 feet - 3.733 nautical miles, which for us infantry types works out to be 4.296 landlubber miles.

And if anyone has bothered to read any of the literature in the last 20 years, it is a matter of record that a carrier in a hurry can crank out something over 40 knots - can, in fact, outrun her escorts.

Last but not least, the US Navy has this nasty tendency to shoot back - and now has a functioning ABM capability - the Standard 3 with a 'smart rock' inertial impact warhead - which in tests has outperformed the Air Force's ABM interceptors.

Interesting little factoid...

The typical maximum speed in knots of a full displacement hull is approximately 1.34 times the square root of the length of the hull at the waterline, in feet.

If you’re 1000 feet long (like a carrier), then you can do about 1.34 times 31.6, or around 42 knots at full displacement. This is taught to just about any rookie hull draftsman, and is known world-wide. Carriers should be expected to do at least this fast (at least, US carriers, given than every other country has considerably shorter carriers).

You can go faster, but power requirements increase exponentially. Of course, with your own nuclear power plants on board, power isn’t really the issue - it’s the torque rating of the prop shafts and the props themselves! But you can typically add another 25% or so on top of your displacement limit, if you really push it.

This capacity is the real key to survival of the carrier, although mobility helps. Frank Gaffney urged Bush when he came in 2001 to immediately deploy another 22 Aegis cruisers with NMD from the get-go, and retrofit the remainder of the 50+ Aegis ships, and to go back and undo the sabotage on the Standard missile that Xlinton's croneys Strobe Talbott/Mad Halfbright had committed. They ordered that the completed Standard design...be reworked, to be slower and lower altitude so that it would not be so effective an NMD. In simplest terms, they shrank the missile. The cut the upper stage dimensions to sub-optimal.

This could be affordably fixed. The fix is called the Flight II(4)A. It restores the dimensions of the upper stage to full width, giving it substantially more fuel...which means significantly closing speed, altitude and range improvements. Unfortunately, Bush has refused the calls to do the "fix" and had his DOD Depty secretary Gordon Englund cancel the other alternative, TBMD.

And as for Aegis numbers, there have been no additional 22 boats ordered, nor, has he been very fast about rigging them for the limited NMD the current SM's 2/3 afford them. Right now, we have 3 Aegis cruisers rigged for NMD. 15 more will be added by 2009. Let's just hope the balloon doesn't go up substantially sooner than that.

The intercept game with kinetic-kill is a simple game of numbers. We need lots more. The Chicoms have over a thousand warheads to flood Taiwan's and our naval assets with. And many of them will be nuke and EMP in character...according to what the Chicoms themselves have boasted.

We need a lot more of these fine vessels