USS Cole

Underwater welding case study illustrating the wet-welding repair scenario at shallow depth. Tom uses it to make the point that capital ships are repaired rather than scrapped for political/strategic reasons even when economically irrational.

For example, was it the Cole that had the big hole in it? We didn't want the terrorists out there in the Gulf to think they had destroyed a U.S. capital ship, so they actually went in and they had to do underwater welding. It wasn't very deep — just down to the keel beam. And they towed it back and repaired it. They could have bought a new ship for less. They wanted to prove that some terrorists with a motor launch didn't destroy a U.S. capital ship. So they repaired it, but it was an expensive repair. They couldn't have even gotten it back — just the seas would have torn it apart; the damage was severe enough they had to have some weld repairs before they could even tow it back to the U.S.

Cited as another case where the repair cost exceeded new-build cost, for strategic-signaling reasons — the US didn't want to concede the loss of a capital ship.

It's sort of like the USS Cole. They repaired the USS Cole at a cost greater than building a new destroyer, because they didn't want — whoever bombed the Cole — to think they had destroyed a capital ship of the USA. So they spent more money to repair it. That was sort of the Seawolf too, but with blue jelly suits. They don't use blue jelly suits anymore. The reason they had to in this case is that they could get all the up-to-two-inch-thick plate they wanted from the steel mill, but they couldn't get the four-inch plate for more than a year, for various reasons — capacity of the steel mills. So they had to reuse the really heavy steel plate, and that's what they were welding in the blue jelly suits.