In person it turned out to be even more beautiful than I expected. Photos can't do justice to the atmosphere of a floating city. Even in movies like "Top Gun" it is impossible to fully tell the atmosphere aboard such a ship. It is simply too big and too complex.
Above all, it teems with life. It is like a piled-up anthill. Streams of people, vehicles and goods pour through the open hatches, gates, shafts, docks, ramps, elevators, numerous elevators and cranes between the ship and the port. Fresh tomatoes and lettuces straight from the Gdynia warehouse on pallets are heading for the kitchen warehouses. A company of armored vehicles is just returning from the training ground, and one by one they disappear into the great belly of the ship. On the flight deck, the busyness of the Viper attack helicopters continues. Inside the sea dock, commands can be heard being issued by a system of speakers present throughout the ship. This voice of LHD sounds like the voice of some great transformer.
The ship remains constantly on the move, crews swap, families miss each other - life itself
© U.S. Navy
It really seems to me that TO is alive. It's impressive, it has - I'm not the only one who feels it - some kind of cosmic magnetism. On the terrace of the Emigration Museum in Gdynia, next to which the American colossus is moored, there are crowds of people with cameras, TV crews. This is the largest ship to have entered this port in its entire history, longer even than the German battleships Bismarck and Tirpitz from World War II.
By the number of smaller pieces of equipment it houses, the multitude of people hovering on its decks, and the dynamics resulting from their interactions, the lump of a ship turns into a fascinating, giant, three-dimensional 4K TV for me. I watch it for hours. All in all, I find the WASP type even more intriguing than the larger strike aircraft carriers. I guess it's that magical ability to be a Noah's ark, able to turn itself into a sea landing craft, to deliver supplies to itself. There is something amazing about this combination of port and airport. A specific authority emanates from this unique city. Those who saw it up close felt that bad people would think a thousand times before scrambling into the world protected by such ships. Moored in Gdynia, the LHD gives a sense of security. That's what it's here for - to show off. Earlier it was in Riga, sailed along the coast of the Kaliningrad region, stopped in the Polish Tri-City. Demonstrationally, with access to the civilian public and mass media. With the landing craft ashore, exercises on the training ground, public display of all its "contents".
The aircraft hangar is quite crowded - here every square inch is used wisely
© U.S. Navy
That's what they're supposed to be used for. For deterrence. Ideally, of course, they should never be used in combat - and by and large, that's what they are. That's what we all seem to have learned in 2022 - you want peace, be ready for war. Don't be naive, don't count on the fact that a stronger thug won't beat you up; if he has the opportunity - he will.
That's why the affection I feel for the floating city of the U.S. Navy is no boyish fascination with the military. These 250,000 sailors and soldiers are the people to whom we owe our security. They are flesh and blood people, just like us. I watched them walk around the flight deck, as they discussed something laughing on the stern, next to the Phalanx anti-aircraft system. How they stare at their smartphones, just like my daughter. How they dodge forklifts like employees at Krakow's Ikea. How they steer powerful MRAP vehicles climbing up ramps - thousands of miles from their homes.
The armored car company is back on board
photo: Matthew Zmyślony
250,000 (that's how many of them on average live on the water) efficiently interacting people. Because that's what matters most in all this: the efficiency of interaction. A floating city never stands still for too long. This fleet is constantly on the move, training, practicing, repairing, improving, modernizing and replenishing. The floating city - for all its incredible complexity - operates very efficiently. The traffic operators on the aircraft carrier, with all its picturesque pantomime and choreography, costumes, electromagnetic catapults, the flight control tower, the giant factory below deck - it all runs smoothly. The aircraft carrier can handle up to several hundred flights a day - when all the machinery kicks in, it becomes a demonstration of civilization's capabilities, some kind of extraordinary spectacle, showcasing the experience gained over eighty years, unmatched soft power, because here it's probably more about the soft, rather than the hardware that can be seen at first glance.
Fresh lettuce and delicious Polish tomatoes, the crew must eat well
photo: Mateusz Zmyślony
It's worth comparing all this to Russia's only aircraft carrier, the perpetually broken Admiral Kuznetsov. Next to the American machine, the Kuznetsov is a joke - nothing really works on it. For me, a visit to a floating city is a form of anti-war therapy. From here you can see that the enemy is just a barbaric force, unspeakably blunt, incapable of doing anything of the sort. This is reassuring.
High-technology civilization is not a world in which there would be room in the long run for a primitive culture based on theft and corruption, on stick and carrot, on barrels and fetters. The sight of the floating city's inhabitants, men and women, free people, driven by understandable and meaningful motivation, educated, trained, capable of improbably complex cooperation in large teams - is a heartening sight. It gives a sense that, however, the bright side of power will always win in the end. All it needs to do is to keep growing.
"The city" requires massive amounts of supplies, everything must be perfectly organized
photo: Matthew Zmyślony
The floating city will be guarding us for a long time to come. However, the year 2022 will be a landmark in history - not only because of the war unleashed by the enemy from the east, a war that drew the USS Kearsarge to Gdynia. From the perspective of this text, an equally important event that took place this year was the launch of the Chinese aircraft carrier Fujian. It is the world's first non-American-made super aircraft carrier, similar in size to the U.S. Navy's largest. The road to challenging the U.S. fleet will be a long one, however, as it is not the size of the hull that will determine future successes. The Chinese ship has, among other things, a conventional propulsion system and is a debut design, on which it will take many mistakes to learn all that the U.S. Navy already knows very well. At the same time, a new generation of U.S. super aircraft carriers is entering service - the first in the series is the aforementioned USS Gerald Ford.
Discussions on the aft deck; the sky is guarded by the so-called weapon of last resort - the Phalanx system
photo: Mateusz Zmyślony
The colossal size needs to be able to be filled not only with efficient technology, but also with what drew me in so much when I stared for hours at the LHD: the hard-to-grasp, powerful know-how necessary to manage a floating city.
defenders of freedom guard the order of this world
© U.S. Navy
The bottom line is this: our civilization will be protected by the complexity of the processes necessary to make our ever-modern: economies, fleets and the cities we live in run smoothly. Development is a run to the front - in this run, aggressive and backward societies fortunately have no chance.
The bridge - all this machinery is managed from here
Photo credit: Matthew Zmyślony
Mateusz Zmyślony
Photos courtesy of the U.S. Navy and the Author.
