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The Littoral Combat Ship began with the Street Fighter, a concept from Navy strategists Wayne Hughes and Arthur Cebrowski for a 1,000-ton, heavily armed coastal ship costing about $90 million in 2001 dollars, cheap enough that its crew could abandon it if badly hit. After the Cold War, threats had moved into shallow coastal waters crowded with quiet submarines, cheap mines and fast attack boats. When Donald Rumsfeld became Defense Secretary in 2001 and pushed transformational approaches, the DD-21 was canceled, and by 2003 the LCS was the top budget priority. The Navy rejected an expendable crewed ship, and the push for survivability and a 40-knot top speed grew the design to 3,000 to 3,500 tons and $220 million per ship.

The Navy kept two designs in production: the steel monohull Freedom class from Lockheed Martin and Marinette Marine, and the aluminum trimaran Independence class from General Dynamics and Austal USA. Each was meant to swap mission modules for anti-submarine warfare, mine countermeasures and surface warfare, but a 2012 report found a swap could take weeks, and a core crew of 50 to 70 left sailors exhausted and reliant on contractors. A 2010 Pentagon test report said neither design was expected to survive a hostile combat environment. In 2016 the Navy assigned each ship a single mission and cut the program from its original 55 ships, later turning to the FREMM-based Constellation-class frigate, while USS Independence, USS Freedom and USS Coronado retired early.

• The LCS was rated at survivability Level 1+, below the Level 2 of the frigates it replaced.
• The official plan for a badly hit ship was an orderly abandon ship or a limp away from the fight.
• After the NLOS-LS missile was canceled, the Navy bolted on Army Hellfire missiles and later the Norwegian Naval Strike Missile.
• In 2012 Rear Admiral Samuel Perez reported the ships lacked the manpower and firepower commanders needed.
• The 3-2-1 crew rotation was replaced by blue and gold crews, the model used on nuclear submarines.

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RJR Nabisco was formed when R.J. Reynolds, a tobacco company rooted in Winston-Salem, North Carolina, since 1875, bought Nabisco Brands in 1985 for $4.9 billion in cash and a $1.9 billion stock swap; the combined company took its name in April 1986. It sold KFC to PepsiCo, Canada Dry and Sunkist to Cadbury Schweppes, and Heublein to Grand Metropolitan. F. Ross Johnson took charge in early 1987, judged Winston-Salem too bucolic, and moved headquarters to Cobb County, Georgia, handing the old building to Wake Forest University. In 1988 Johnson and Shearson Lehman Hutton offered $75 a share to take the company private, setting off a bidding war that drew Henry Kravis and KKR.

KKR made a $90 tender offer directly to shareholders, and the final round pitted KKR's $109 a share against management's $112. The board took the lower bid because KKR's was firmly financed, while Johnson's mix of cash and securities lacked a reset provision to protect its value. A Time cover in December 1988 called the contest "a game of greed," and Johnson still left in February 1989 with over $60 million. The roughly $25 billion leveraged buyout forced new chief Louis V. Gerstner to move headquarters to the New York area and sell assets, and a 1994 Labor Department report counted over 2,000 jobs lost. In 1999 the tobacco businesses were split off, and Philip Morris bought Nabisco Holdings in 2000.

• In April 1988 RJR Nabisco fired Saatchi & Saatchi, which handled only its food brands, after the agency made a Northwest Airlines ad promoting an in-flight smoking ban.
• Bidders in the frenzy included Morgan Stanley, Goldman Sachs, Salomon Brothers, First Boston and Merrill Lynch.
• To pay down debt the company sold the Walkers and Smiths snack brands, Chun King, Fresh Del Monte Produce and a 20 percent ESPN stake to Hearst.
• Laid-off workers took an average of 5.6 months to find new jobs, and those who did earned less than half their old pay.
• In 2021 the Pandora Papers linked pre-split RJR Nabisco to shell companies set up in Cyprus.

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The Gerald R. Ford class of aircraft carriers exists because the Nimitz class ran out of room. A 2005 RAND report concluded the 1960s-era design had hit its limits: the A4W reactors lacked spare electrical capacity, and decades of added topside equipment had eroded the center of gravity margin. The CVN-21 program produced USS Gerald R. Ford (CVN-78), a roughly $13 billion ship in a class that cost over $37 billion to develop. Two new Bechtel A1B reactors are smaller and simpler yet deliver at least 25 percent more power, and the ship uses only about half its electrical capacity, a reserve held for future weapons across a service life expected to run to 2105.

The Electromagnetic Aircraft Launch System replaced steam catapults with linear induction motors that launch more smoothly and need no fresh water, but it suffered reliability problems, and in August 2026 President Donald Trump ordered a return to steam catapults starting with the future USS Doris Miller. The Navy forecasts 160 sorties a day and 270 in a surge, figures former test director Michael Gilmore called unrealistic. Narrow vacuum sewage pipes clog with scale, and each acid flush to clear them costs $400,000, according to the GAO. The Ford made its combat debut in the 2026 Iran War, Operation Epic Fury, leading Carrier Strike Group 12 in the eastern Mediterranean against drones launched from Lebanon.

• The island was shrunk and moved aft, and linear-motor weapons elevators keep ordnance out of the path of taxiing aircraft.
• Automation cuts the crew by about 700 sailors compared with a Nimitz carrier, and sailors sleep in 40-rack rooms.
• The Plasma Arc Waste Destruction System vaporizes combustible trash at about 10,000 degrees.
• Starting with USS John F. Kennedy, the $500 million Dual Band Radar gave way to the roughly $180 million Enterprise Air Surveillance Radar.
• A laundry fire in March 2026 paused flight operations and later sent the ship to Croatia for repairs.

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Hyatt Hotels began in 1954 with the Hyatt House, a motel beside Los Angeles International Airport opened by Hyatt Robert von Dehn and Jack Dyer Crouch. In 1957 Jay Pritzker bought it for $2.2 million, and his brother Donald soon joined him. The Pritzkers bet that air travel was creating a class of flying executives who valued time over setting, and within two years they had airport hotels in San Francisco and Seattle. In 1967 the Hyatt Regency Atlanta, designed by John Portman, opened with a towering indoor atrium and glass elevators that became the signature of the Hyatt Regency brand. Today Hyatt operates over 1,300 hotels and all-inclusive properties in 69 countries.

On July 17, 1981, two skywalks at the Hyatt Regency Kansas City collapsed during a crowded tea dance, killing 114 people and injuring over 200. A late design change had hung the second-floor walkway from the fourth-floor walkway instead of from the ceiling, doubling the load on the fourth-floor box beams. Decades later, family member Liesel Pritzker sued relatives for over $6 billion, alleging her trusts had been looted. Settling and dividing the family empire required cash, and in November 2009 Hyatt raised $1.15 billion in an IPO under the ticker H, with Thomas Pritzker as executive chairman and Mark Hoplamazian as CEO.

• Hyatt first went public in 1962, and the Pritzkers took it private again in 1979.
• The first Grand Hyatt, in New York, was a partnership with Donald Trump, whose share the Pritzkers later bought out after lawsuits.
• In August 2009 three Boston-area Hyatts fired their entire housekeeping staffs, the Hyatt 100, and Governor Deval Patrick threatened a state boycott.
• Hyatt turned AmeriSuites into Hyatt Place and Summerfield Suites into Hyatt House, and paid $2.7 billion for Apple Leisure Group in 2021.
• PETA has pressed Hyatt over an Alaska hotel's Iditarod sponsorship, with over 40,000 public pleas and no response from the corporate office.

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The Pennsylvania Railroad and the New York Central, bitter rivals on the New York to Chicago routes, proposed merging in 1957 as trucks and the 1956 interstate highway program drained their freight and the Interstate Commerce Commission barred them from raising rates or dropping money-losing routes. The ICC took nearly a decade to approve the deal. By the time Penn Central formed in 1968, many young managers had left, the cultures of Stuart Saunders' traditional Pennsylvania and Alfred Perlman's modern New York Central had never meshed, and regulators required the new company to absorb the bankrupt New Haven railroad.

Incompatible computers lost trains, union contracts kept crews from handling each other's equipment, and rotten cross ties caused standing derailments; the Cleveland yard averaged six derailments a day. Losing about $1 million a day, management diverted cash into real estate and pipelines, borrowed to keep paying dividends, and reported a 1969 railroad loss of $56 million to the public and $67.8 million to the ICC while internal figures showed $190.8 million. Washington refused aid without new leadership, the board fired Saunders and CFO David Bevan, and after requests for a $750 million loan guarantee and a $200 million defense loan failed, Penn Central filed for bankruptcy on June 21, 1970, then the largest in U.S. history. Amtrak followed in 1971 and Conrail in 1976.

• In 1969 a Maine potato shipment rotted at New York's Selkirk yard, and Bangor and Aroostook shippers vowed never to ship by rail again.
• Bankruptcy-era president William Moore fired a superintendent for failing to clear a derailed coal train from a Baltimore tunnel within one hour.
• Moore was ousted after using railroad staff to renovate his home and having Scott Paper bill Penn Central for toilet paper to cover a borrowed corporate jet.
• Investor Max Heine bought bonds at pennies on the dollar, betting the assets were worth more than the debt, and profited in the 1978 reorganization.
• The 1978 Supreme Court case Penn Central Transportation Co. v. New York City upheld the city's block on a tower over Grand Central, which the MTA bought in 2020.

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The T-72 began as an act of defiance. In the 1960s Alexander Morozov's Kharkiv bureau built the T-64, with an autoloader and a fragile 5TDF opposed-piston two-stroke diesel that took about twice as long to build as a V-shaped engine. The GABTU, the Soviet Main Agency of Armored Forces, ordered Leonid Kartsev's bureau in Nizhny Tagil to refit the T-64 with a V-12 diesel as a cheap mobilization model. Kartsev instead combined the T-64's gun, the V-12 and the suspension of his rejected Object 167 in a project code-named Ural. Field tests showed it was cheaper and more reliable, and in 1973, after Kartsev had retired due to illness, it was adopted as the T-72. About 25,000 were built, serving in over 40 countries.

The 41-ton tank carries a 125mm smoothbore fed by a floor-mounted carousel of 22 two-part rounds, with 17 more stowed around the crew compartment. A penetrating hit that ignites those spare charges can set off all 39 rounds and blow the turret off the hull, the jack-in-the-box effect. Armor evolved through the composite "Dolly Parton" turret of the 1979 T-72A, the thicker T-72B and Kontakt explosive reactive armor. Iraqi T-72s beat British Chieftains in the Iran-Iraq War, and Hafez al-Assad called it the best tank in the world after Lebanon in 1982. In 1991, downgraded Iraqi export models firing 1970s steel-core rounds were destroyed at 73 Easting by Abrams crews using thermal sights.

• Soviet rules allowed crewmen up to 5 feet 9 inches, so the short-crew legend is mostly a myth, though the interior is very cramped.
• With a snorkel the T-72 can cross rivers 5 meters deep, and a stalled engine must restart within about six seconds before it floods.
• Explosive reactive armor throws metal plates across an incoming shaped charge jet to break it up.
• Cope cages welded over turrets in Ukraine gave little protection against tandem-charge Javelin missiles and could trap crews.
• Kartsev's design became the basis for the later T-90 series.

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Prudential Financial began in Newark, New Jersey, in 1875, when John F. Dryden founded the Widows and Orphans Friendly Society, soon renamed the Prudential Friendly Society. Its one product was industrial burial insurance for the urban working class at three cents a week, collected door to door by agents. Relative to the death benefit, those premiums cost more than ordinary life insurance, and when a family missed a payment the policy lapsed and the company kept everything paid in. In 1907 Louis Brandeis pushed Massachusetts reforms that let savings banks sell cheaper life insurance. Prudential's Rock of Gibraltar symbol was inspired by Snake Hill, a rock formation in Secaucus beside the New Jersey Turnpike.

In 1954, after blockbusting in East Palo Alto, Prudential and Equitable refused to insure mortgages for white families in integrated neighborhoods, in line with FHA and VA redlining rules. The 1981 purchase of the brokerage Bache led to an SEC finding that Prudential Securities had defrauded investors of nearly $8 billion through risky limited partnerships sold as safe income, and a 1993 settlement of $330 million plus $41 million in fines. A $2 billion class action over policy churning followed in 1997. Prudential sold its health unit to Aetna for $1 billion in 1999, demutualized, and listed on the New York Stock Exchange in December 2001. By 2019 it was the largest U.S. insurance provider, with over $815 billion in assets.

• About 400,000 investors lost money in the limited partnership scheme, at the time the largest fraud the SEC had uncovered.
• Regulators from 30 states imposed a $35 million fine over churning, in which agents replaced older cash-value policies to earn fresh commissions.
• In 2010 military families sued over retained asset accounts that paid 0.5 percent while Prudential earned up to 4.2 percent on the money; earlier similar suits had been dismissed.
• In August 2004 the Newark headquarters was fortified with concrete barriers and X-ray machines after terrorist threats were discovered.
• In 2026 its Japanese life insurance unit suspended new sales for nearly a year after a misconduct probe, at an estimated cost of over half a billion dollars.

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The M1 Abrams grew out of the failure of the MBT-70, a U.S. and West German project launched in 1963 with an autoloader, a driver seated in the turret, adjustable hydropneumatic suspension and a gun that fired guided missiles. By 1969 its estimated unit price had reached $1 million, and Congress canceled it. The 1972 XM1 program capped the cost at $507,790 per tank and required competing contractor prototypes. At Aberdeen Proving Ground in 1976, General Motors' variable compression diesel design beat Chrysler's gas turbine on armor, fire control and cost, but in July 1976 Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld delayed the award and made a turbine mandatory, and Chrysler won the contract.

The production tank used British-designed Chobham composite armor, moved from a 105mm rifled gun to a 120mm smoothbore firing depleted uranium darts on the M1A1, and ran on the AGT-1500 turbine, reaching 45 mph while burning 1.5 to 3 gallons per mile. In Desert Storm in 1991, nearly 2,000 Abrams deployed and none was destroyed by enemy tank fire: of nine lost, seven were friendly fire and two were destroyed by U.S. forces after getting stuck. Later came the Tank Urban Survival Kit for Iraq, Ukrainian crews welding cages over turrets against drones, and the Marine Corps giving up all its tanks in 2020 under Force Design 2030.

• Testers at Fort Bliss threw tracks with the "bow tie," slamming into reverse at speed, so Chrysler added a device to block it.
• Chrysler earned about 5 percent of its income from military sales, while GM earned about 1 percent and bid only after a Pentagon plea.
• At 73 Easting, Captain H.R. McMaster's 2nd Armored Cavalry Regiment used thermal sights to fight through a sandstorm.
• The Abrams could kill tanks at 2,500 meters, while Iraqi tanks could not answer until within 2,000 meters.
• In 1993 the FBI borrowed two Abrams tanks during the Waco siege to breach the compound walls.

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The Churchill tank grew from the A-20, an infantry tank designed for the trench warfare British planners expected in a second European war. After France fell and the army left much of its equipment at Dunkirk, director of tank design Dr. H.E. Merritt revised it into the A-22, and Vauxhall Motors was told to put it into production within one year. The first Churchills rolled out in June 1941 with a leaflet apologizing to crews for their flaws. The 350-horsepower Bedford Twin-Six joined two truck engines into a flat-12, the tank was underpowered, and in one 1942 exercise a single Churchill needed five gearbox replacements. Its Merritt-Brown triple differential, however, could drive the tracks in opposite directions and spin the tank in place.

At Dieppe in August 1942, about 60 Churchills supporting Canadian troops bogged down on the stony chert beach, yet none was penetrated by German anti-tank fire while manned. In Tunisia in 1943, a Churchill of the 48th Royal Tank Regiment jammed the turret of Tiger 131 with a six-pounder shell at Longstop Hill, giving the Allies their first intact Tiger, still running at the Tank Museum in Dorset. The Mark VII carried 152mm of frontal armor, thicker than the Tiger I, and the chassis carried Percy Hobart's specialist vehicles. Over 300 went to the Soviet Union under Lend-Lease. The Black Prince, built for a 17-pounder gun, reached only six prototypes before cancellation in 1945 as the Centurion arrived, and the Churchill retired in 1952.

• One King Force tank at the Second Battle of El Alamein was hit up to 80 times, and only one of the six was knocked out.
• At Steamroller Farm, two Churchills destroyed multiple 88mm guns, 25 wheeled vehicles and two Panzer III tanks.
• The NA75 used 75mm guns cut from mine-damaged Shermans and mounted upside down; about 200 were converted.
• The AVRE's 230mm spigot mortar, the "flying dustbin," had to be reloaded by hand through a roof hatch.
• The Crocodile flamethrower towed a 400-gallon armored fuel trailer linked by an articulated coupling.

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The Zumwalt-class destroyer, the DDG-1000, began as the DD-21 program after Congress required the Navy to replace the shore bombardment capability lost when the Iowa-class battleships retired. The result displaces over 15,000 tons, about 40 percent more than a standard destroyer, yet looks like a fishing boat on radar thanks to a wave-piercing tumblehome hull that slopes inward, a shape often compared to the Civil War ironclad CSS Virginia. It runs with a crew of 147 through a Linux-based network on IBM blade servers, places 80 missile cells in a Peripheral Vertical Launch System around the hull, and generates 78 megawatts through a turboelectric drive fed by two Rolls-Royce gas turbines.

The plan for 32 ships fell to 24, then seven, then three: USS Zumwalt, USS Michael Monsoor and USS Lyndon B. Johnson. With $9.6 billion in research spread over three hulls, the program reached $22.5 billion, triggering a Nunn-McCurdy breach and a cost near $7.5 billion per ship. Its two 155mm Advanced Gun Systems were built to fire the Long Range Land Attack Projectile, but with so few ships each round rose to between $800,000 and $1 million, and the Navy canceled the ammunition. Budget cuts removed the SPY-4 radar and the ship lacked the Aegis software used for ballistic missile defense, so starting in 2023 the Navy began removing the guns to fit Conventional Prompt Strike hypersonic missiles.

• The Government Accountability Office found only four of the design's 12 critical technologies were mature.
• Water sleeting over the hull and exhaust mixed with cool air aim to match the ship's surface temperature to the sea.
• Explosions in the peripheral launch cells are designed to vent outward into the ocean rather than into the ship.
• The LRLAP had an 83 nautical mile range, and the water-cooled guns could fire 10 rounds a minute from a 750-round automated magazine.
• For comparison, a Virginia-class nuclear attack submarine costs about $2.7 billion.