New short piece at @prismeorg.bsky.social "The Machines of War and the Manufacturing of U.S. Empire" -- prismeinitiative.org/publications...
Flanked by her husband, then Senator from Indiana and future Vice President of the United States Dan Quayle, Marilyn Quayle smiled as she smashed a bottle of champagne against the hull of the USS Vincennes on April 14, 1984. Gathered at the Ingalls Shipyard in Pascagoula, Mississippi, the Quayles and hundreds of others in attendance celebrated the launch of a new centerpiece of U.S. military power. The Vincennes was one of what would eventually become twenty-seven high-tech ships in the new Ticonderoga class of guided-missile cruisers, designed to serve a range of U.S. military objectives at the height of the Cold War. Expensive to build at $1 billion per ship, strategists and politicians celebrated the Vincennes and those like it as cornerstones of rejuvenated post-Vietnam War U.S. military hegemony.
prismeinitiative.org
