Member-only story
The U.S. Navy Will Never Go Through the Strait Of Hormuz Again
Was Britain still a superpower after WWII? It thought so. But in 1949, a British warship attempted to sail up the Yangtze river in China. A commander in China decided to let his artillery open fire. What happened surprised everyone.
The HMS Amethyst got stuck in the mud and was soon crippled by artillery — disabled for four months before it could limp back to port. The British Navy never sailed the Yangtze again.
It was as good as any year, to mark the end of the British Empire.
That story is repeating itself. But this time, the stakes aren’t one ship. It’s the Naval power of the United States.
Building a Giant for a War That No Longer Exists.
We need to go back to the 1980s.
Missiles, in those days, were expensive. A single precision guidance system required advanced electronics that only a handful of nations could manufacture. If you wanted to threaten a super-power you needed to be a super-power yourself — like the Soviet Union.
