I mean, like, containerized by design. Weapons not only transported by container, or stored in a container, but deploying directly from a container. In this case, super-powerful anti-aircraft and anti-ship missiles.
What’s chilling is how this makes perfect sense from a product-design/ease-of-use standpoint. It really is an obvious way to make a weapon easier to buy, sell and use. You don’t even have to take it out of the box, or plug anything in, or hook anything up.
But it’s also scary. I would certainly prefer that sophisticated weaponry capable of destroying an aircraft carrier remain ungodly expensive and mind-bendingly complicated. Too damn bad, Craig.
(Also, I would prefer that the Navy not even have aircraft carriers anymore. They’re no longer good for anything but the transfer of wealth from the working and middle classes to ten huge corporations in Virginia. Act like ya’ know.)
Longshot City 
April 28, 2010 at 5:35 pm
Interesting comment on aircraft carriers. Speaking as someone who thinks the highest purpose of military readiness is to not have to fight wars, I always kind of liked the idea of mobile platforms for projecting air power anywhere. I do agree that the possibility of Bond supervillain-style hidden portable cruise missiles shifts the cost-benefit there in a big way.
April 28, 2010 at 7:30 pm
Indeed Rif, I agree with your understanding of the military’s best purpose, which is why aircraft carriers are now out of date, just a floating human sheild. (This isn’t MY idea, mind you, but simply stuff I’ve read in the popular press written by Navy people.)
F18’s do not rule. AUV’s and missiles rule, both ours and “theirs”, and those tools can be used from many smaller craft, only ONE of which will be destroyed in a nuclear blast.
Recall that carriers were invented in this quaint window between the invention of the aircraft and that of the self-guided missile, nuclear explosive and affordable attack submarine. For that brief few-decades window, they ruled, and won the most important and horrible war in human history.
Now they’re just deathtraps, really.