How About Them Supercarriers?

If you are a news reporter sent on to an aircraft carrier, you are expected to write about aircraft carriers. It's just that Eric Talmadge comes off as a fanboy as soon as he gets going: "Nothing projects U.S. global air and sea power more vividly than supercarriers... America's virtually invincible carrier fleer has long enforced its dominance of the high seas."

By now I've skipped over the parts where he talks about ships bristling with fighter jets, all in the first paragraph. Later he delves on to the fact file to tell how long the flight deck is (1,092-feet) and how it has 6,250 personnel, but that's him missing his own point.

The article is about the Chinese carrier killing DF 21D missile. Actually, I remember reading about the weapon more than a year and a half ago, but then I wasn't aware of the designation. Actually, I wasn't sure he was talking about the same weapon since he didn't mention it was a ballistic missile until pretty much the end of the article, but it is.

Really, that's pretty much the new information presented, the name, Dong Feng 21D. The rest of it is fact-file stuff and carrier praise.

Cool if you enjoy reading about missiles, carriers, airplanes et cetera, but it's not very fresh.