USS cruiser brass airline failure (Second Gulf War)

Used to motivate Navy investment in additive manufacturing for ship repair — wrong-alloy brass elbow failed by stress corrosion cracking, taking out the entire 3,000 psi air system mid-assault.

In fact during the Second Gulf War — supposedly only about three days long, when they did the final assault — right in the middle of it, one of the cruisers, they have 3,000 psi airlines that run almost everything on the ship, a brass elbow failed, and their whole 3,000 psi airline went down. If you lost all the electricity in your home, what can you do? You can't run your computer, you can't watch TV, in the old days you couldn't use the landline telephone, your furnace doesn't work — everything's built around the infrastructure of the electricity. On the ship, that 3,000 psi airline is basically the same thing. Everything runs off the compressed air, and the whole ship had to come offline. You're losing one of your major ships in the middle of an assault. It's like someone hit it with a torpedo and wiped it out. They weren't happy. It turns out the brass alloy was the wrong brass, and it failed by stress corrosion cracking. Simple little thing, but it wiped out a whole ship in terms of its utility. If you could replace it quickly, you've got some advantage.