Nixon Administration News

The privately owned U.S.-flag foreign trading fleet, which is an essential component of U.S. sealift capability, stands on the edge of a precipice. The fleet – roughly stable in terms of cargo carrying capacity from 2000 to 2012 – has declined from 106 vessels in 2012 to 78 vessels at October 30, 2016 primarily because of a substantial decline in available U.S. Government-reserved cargo. The size of the fleet has reached a point where the viability of the U.S.-flag industry involved in foreign trade – including its trained mariners…

Nominees for the 2001 David Packard Excellence in Acquisition Award include NAVSEA's Lewis and Clark Class (T-AKE) Project Team. The team was one of five Navy candidates recently announced by the Assistant Secretary of the Navy for Research, Development and Acquisition (ASN RD&A) John Young. The T-AKE Program accounted for two of the nine environmental awards given for FY 2001 by the Secretary of Defense. The David Packard Excellence in Acquisition Award, the Department's highest acquisition award, recognizes DoD civilian and/or military organizations, groups and teams who have made highly significant contributions and demonstrated exemplary innovations in the Defense acquisition process.

Andrew Edward Gibson died on July 8, 2001, at the age of 79 in Short Hills, New Jersey. His final decade, after a life of notably active achievements, had been primarily devoted to scholarship, at the Naval War College where he taught, and in work with Kings Point Professor Arthur Donovan, in the preparation of a history of United States maritime policy, published in 1999 as The Abandoned Ocean, and of a to-be-published history of containerization. Gibson was born on February 19, 1922 in New York City, and entered the Massachusetts Maritime Academy in 1940. He graduated two years later to be among the first Americans to sail in the North Atlantic convoys. By January 1945 he was in command of his own Liberty ship at age 22.