Mines

The USS Samuel B Roberts sails up the Clyde this morning. There is some kind of exercise in the area by the quantity of grey steel floating about. The Sammy B is of note as she is a floating demonstration of the financial effectiveness of naval mines (these are not banned like landmines). In 1988 she hit an Iranian mine in the Persian Gulf, and was severely damaged. It cost the US Navy nearly $90 million to repair her (according to Wikipedia) - but the mine that hit her cost in the order of $1,500. The years that I spent working on shock protection and survivability of ships is all rooted in that equation - ships are expensive to build and to repair, but mines and even missiles are cheap and deadly and can be acquired by almost any nation or group. Investing a little more in the design of a ship to survive is a sound investment faced with those unfortunate imbalances. But that was then...