Robert Zubrin Quotes
The United States has the largest and best navy in the world.
Zubrin, Robert. "A Navy to Defend Freedom." National Review, 2015.
This quotation illustrates several historical differences of the past with today. To be a world superpower, one had to have a dominant navy. Yet that navy was, in Churchill’s concept, a defensive system. It could protect the nation from invasion, and its merchant ships on the seas, but a navy provided no threat to invade towns and villages in Europe or elsewhere. Germany and France in contrast, with their large armies could invade other nations and menace Europe and Asia. It also illustrates why the navy and the army were considered completely separate departments of government in that they had different functions. The early American government had a Navy Department and Secretary but no Secretary of the Army or standing army.
America’s oldest foreign policy problem has been freedom of the seas for American shipping. Since the end of WWII, the U. S. however performed this function—and pays for it—for the entire world with some minor exceptions.
Germany had a very small and insignificant navy. It was Tirpitz who persuaded the nation to develop sea power.
Most Americans do not realize that our naval forces were disbanded after the Revolution and even the Constitution did not require a navy. We had some Federal revenue cutters to interdict smugglers but no warships and no permanent sailors or officers. The Barbary Pirates had an incredible extortion racket going in the Mediterranean. If nations would pay them an annual sum each year, they would not attack and seize merchant ships of that country and sell the ships and goods while holding the sailors for ransom. See {640850},86703,{640846} & {640848}
He was referring to attacking the Barbary States. The Barbary Pirates had an incredible extortion racket going in the Mediterranean. If nations would pay them an annual sum each year, they would not attack and seize merchant ships of that country and sell the ships and goods while holding the sailors for ransom. See {640846}.
Robert Zubrin is an American aerospace engineer, author, and advocate for human exploration of Mars. He and his colleague at Martin Marietta, David Baker, were the driving force behind Mars Direct, a proposal in a 1990 research paper intended to produce significant reductions in the cost and complexity of such a mission. The key idea was to use the Martian atmosphere to produce oxygen, water, and rocket propellant for the surface stay and return journey. A modified version of the plan was subsequently adopted by NASA as their "design reference mission". He questions the delay and cost-to-benefit ratio of first establishing a base or outpost on an asteroid or another Apollo program-like return to the Moon, as neither would be able to provide all of its own oxygen, water, or energy; these resources are producible on Mars, and he expects people would be there thereafter.
