Here’s how to write a proper article. Maybe some authors can use it to guide them in improving prose:
The U.S. possesses the world’s most modern Army, Air Force, Navy, and Marine Corps. But sealift capability is the key backbone to all of it.
Est. reading time: 6 minutes
1 Like
DavidMT
November 18, 2022, 10:50pm
2
This is a good article, now go read the comments.
Note the level of ignorance, and this is from people who seek out articles like this, now extrapolate that ignorance to the population at large.
Unless the public is educated, the U.S. Merchant Marine (and our jobs) will keep declining.
1 Like
ombugge
November 19, 2022, 9:05pm
3
The comment by Alex S November 18, 2022 at 9:15 am:
Avoiding war – meaning being strong in statecraft and having a longer vision than an election cycle – means integrating our trade agreements and commerce strategies with diplomacy, and providing an opportunity for our Nation to have sufficient numbers of US flag merchant ships trading internationally and competitively. This means mariners who are working and ready, ships that are not on shelves for DoD to budget. If conflict arises, the fleet and the mariners are available.
The center of gravity of sealift is the US flag merchant fleet in trade . If the fleet is sparse, as it is now, we won’t have the mariners to crew the RRF “ships on shelves”. I’m a master mariner and sailed on US flagged ships for 14 years, and crewed some old RRF ships in breakout exercises. The US strategic sealift business model is old and nearly irrelevant because the industry has changed, the character of warfare has changed, and our adversaries are smart.
The US flag fleet struggles to be competitive for a number of reasons. One that isn’t talked about is how the PRC has dominated shipping for many years and changed the market. Don’t you think executing stronger trade and security agreements could have provisions for US-flag marine transportation, particularly with those nations which are partners and allies? Relationships and hard work set the conditions. Why is our ability to trade internationally with our ships still not a priority?
The PRC has certainly shaped global shipping to their strategies – why can’t we? Or is there simply no political will? part
(My highlights)
Maybe if more articles on gcaptain were to the point and well written, the message could go further instead of the meandering rambling points that don’t even make sense.
Maybe if we all just flagged off-topic posts they would disappear…
Maybe if average user improved his/her reading comprehension, the world would be better off. My original post was not referring to forum posts; it was in reference to gcaptain.com articles that are horribly composed.