Historical Experience
A wide range of riverine craft were used by the allies, both before, and during the formalization of the US Navy Brown Water Navy, in 1964–1965. Foremost were the surplus World War II US naval crafts; LCMs, LCVPs, LSMs, PGMs, MTBs, LSSLs, etc. One of the most popular riverine craft was the all-steel LCM which converted nicely into a naval monitor, and was used by the French during the first Indochina war; and later by the US and South Vietnamese Navies. However, The French, during their war in Vietnam (1945–1954), had been heavily inspired by the US Navy LCVP, which they had received from the US, as part of the United States massive assistance program to fight communism (US Forces were fighting in Korea, at that time, and could only give material aid). The French took the LCVP design and created an all new, and as it turned out, the only "original" or entirely new boat built for riverine warfare during the French Indochina war; the STCAN (a corruption of the acronym STCN, which stood for the French equivalent of the US Navy's BuShips, which read Service Technique de Construction Navale). The French STCAN was built of steel, approximately 40 feet (12 m) long, "V" hulled, with a shiplike bow, was armed with one .50 cal machine gun, three .30 cal machine guns, and eight crewmen.
Read more about this topic: Mobile Riverine Force
Famous quotes containing the words historical and/or experience:
“Culture is the name for what people are interested in, their thoughts, their models, the books they read and the speeches they hear, their table-talk, gossip, controversies, historical sense and scientific training, the values they appreciate, the quality of life they admire. All communities have a culture. It is the climate of their civilization.”
—Walter Lippmann (1889–1974)
“UG [universal grammar] may be regarded as a characterization of the genetically determined language faculty. One may think of this faculty as a ‘language acquisition device,’ an innate component of the human mind that yields a particular language through interaction with present experience, a device that converts experience into a system of knowledge attained: knowledge of one or another language.”
—Noam Chomsky (b. 1928)