Among the four completed Iowa-class battleships, New Jersey is notable for having earned the most battle stars for her combat actions, and for being the only battleship of the class to have served a tour of duty in Vietnam during the Vietnam War. During World War II, New Jersey shelled targets on Guam and Okinawa, and screened aircraft carriers conducting raids in the Marshall Islands. During the Korean War she was involved in raids up and down the North Korean coast, after which she was decommissioned in to the United States Navy reserve fleets. She was briefly reactivated in 1968 and sent to Vietnam to support U.S. troops before returning to the mothball fleet in 1969. Reactivated once more in the 1980s as part of the 600-ship Navy program, New Jersey was modernized to carry missiles and recommissioned for service. In 1983, she participated in U.S. operations during the Lebanese Civil War. During its participation in that operation, a shell fired from the New Jersey killed the commander of Syrian forces in Lebanon when it hit his bunker.

New Jersey was decommissioned for the last time in 1991, having earned a Navy Unit Commendation for service in Vietnam and a total of 19 battle and campaign stars for combat operations during World War II, the Korean War, the Vietnam War, the Lebanese Civil War, and service in the Persian Gulf. She was donated to the Home Port Alliance in Camden, New Jersey, and began her career as a museum ship 15 October 2001.

The Reagan administration certainly hastened the fall of the Soviet Union by using the massive economic power of the U.S. to out-spend the Soviets in the arms race.

Recommissioning the Iowa-Class battleships, and the '600-ship Navy' forced the Soviets to try to match the U.S. military by spending billions to expand their own forces. Both the U.S. and the Soviets spent tens of billions each in this arms race competition during the early 1980s. But the U.S. had a larger capacity to sustain this massive spending, whereas the moribund Soviet economy could not compete.

I'm no Communist. I know that unilateral central economic planning delivers output at a level far inferior to that of a free market.

In the arms race between the U.S. and the Soviet Union, the Soviets ended up being the ones who cried "uncle!"

But beating a fool at a fool's game is a pyrrhic victory. The hundreds of billions of dollars spent by the U.S. during the Cold War could have been much better spent on social programs. Fat arms manufacturers in the U.S. and Western Europe and even Canada became a lot fatter by keeping NATO supplied with both conventional weapons and nuclear weapons.

But the Reagan administration's crusade against Communism had less happy endings elsewhere in the world. It sold arms to post-revolution Iran in order to feed a dirty slush fund for arming the 'Contras' of Nicaragua. Reagan had you all believe that the 'Contras' were bona fide crusaders of freedom in Latin America, against those evil Sandinistas who were feared of plotting to nationalize U.S. companies. In reality, these 'freedom fighter' Contras were mostly the remnants of the former Nicaraguan dictator Somoza's Guardia Nacional (National Guard.) The Guardia Nacional of Nicaragua isn't anything like the National Guard of the U.S., who come to rescue civilians after domestic disasters. The Guardia Nacional were devoted only to keeping the dictator Somoza in power. They silenced any domestic opposition to the Somoza regime by kidnapping, torturing, and killing the dissidents. They were the guards in Somoza's political prisons.

I admit that the Sandinistas were a bad group, but the Contras were much worse.

According to Human Rights Watch: "the Contras systematically engaged in violent abuses... so prevalent that these may be said to have been their principal means of waging war. It accused the Contras of:

• targeting health care clinics and health care workers for assassination

• kidnapping civilians

• torturing civilians

• executing civilians, including children, who were captured in combat

• raping women

• indiscriminately attacking civilians and civilian houses

• seizing civilian property

• burning civilian houses in captured towns

So, during the 1980s, Regan decided to spend your U.S. tax dollars to fund these Contra thugs--your own personal Latin American Vietcong!

So, this is the less known, and less reputable, legacy of the Reagan Doctrine.