Boondoggle: noun: work or activity that is wasteful or pointless but gives the appearance of having value.
Wow. Only seven years after the big brouhaha of commissioning the USS Detroit at Hart Plaza, it has been decommissioned and likely faces scrapping, so bad of a design the half billion dollar ship has been.
Like the other ships in its class, the USS Detroit had an innovative propulsion system that never worked right. Its anti-submarine package turned out to be too big to install. The niche it was designed to fill when its program was conceived in 2002 was already bordering on irrelevance by the time it set sail.
And you know how owners refer to boats as holes in the water you pour money into? The USS Detroit swallowed $440 million before it left the Marinette Marine shipyard in Wisconsin, across the Menominee River from the U.P.
Rather than siphon more of its budget into keeping balky boats afloat, the Navy opted in the last few months to permanently park the USS Detroit, USS Little Rock, USS Sioux City and USS Milwaukee.
https://www.freep.com/story/news/col...e/71160399007/
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