A Very Barney Pearl Harbor Day

It is time for Episode 2 of, "The Books You Need to Purchase This Christmas." Episode 1 is here.

Who better to bring forward some suggestions on Pearl Harbor Day than the Dean of theCenter for Naval Warfare Studies at the Naval War College, Professor Robert C. (Barney) Rubel, CAPT, USN (Ret.).

Remember - if the right people read the right things, they may be able to prevent the next "Pearl Harbor."

Barney - over to you!

---

On the verge of sequestration and massive defense cuts, we recall what a British defense official supposedly said "Gentlemen, the money has run out, now we will have to think." My own experience is that it is difficult to get an organization composed of smart, energetic and dedicated people to not act stupid in the aggregate. For these reasons I have been thinking and reading quite a bit about the sociology of innovation this past year. Here are some of my favorites:

Moneyball (the book, not the movie) by Michael Lewis. This book has been around for a while, and anyone who's a baseball fan has probably read it. If you haven't and are someone interested in the sociology of innovation, this one is for you. It's a bit chaotic and uneven, but Lewis gets in a number of good turns of phrase. More importantly, the book brings out very compellingly some of the reasons that organizations fight innovation even as they pay lip service to it. In this case, the stats the Oakland As used to win on a shoestring budget were available to everyone, but only Billy Beane, their general manager, was able to overcome the corporate culture and milk the value out of them. Some good lessons for the Navy in here.

Innovation in Carrier Aviation, by Thomas C. Hone, Norman Friedman, and Mark D. Mandeles. This is Newport Paper 37, which can either be read on line or purchased through the Government Printing Office. Continuing the theme of the sociology of innovation, the authors take a detailed look at how the Royal Navy came to invent the angled deck, steam catapult and optical landing system, three innovations that were essential to make operating jets from aircraft carriers feasible. Concurrently, they examine why the US Navy did not come up with these things and why and how it was able to adopt these British innovations. Although readable enough for most anyone interested in naval aviation, it is perhaps most useful and interesting for insiders.

The Fourth Part of the World: The Race to the Ends of the Earth, and the Epic Story of the Map That Gave America Its Name, by Toby Lester. I like maps and I spend a lot of time trying to think globally. Moreover, our Museum has opened a new exhibit on the history of maps of the world. Thus I became interested in this book. Ostensibly focusing on the provenance of a particular map that first named the New World "America," it turns out to be a sweeping tale of discovery in which the sociology of innovation is ever-present. The evolution of the world in the European mind is a fascinating story of how we can individually and collectively hold highly distorted concepts to be truth, and the risks people take to challenge them. For you e-book readers, I recommend you do this book in hard cover to fully appreciate the wonderful maps.

Neptune's Inferno: The U.S. Navy at Guadalcanal, by James Hornfischer. This is what I call SWO porn. If ever a surface warfare officer wanted to develop pride in his specialty, this is the book that will do it. It is an absolutely horrific account of the naval battles attending the campaign for Guadalcanal. The prose borders on lurid at times when the effects of major caliber gun hits on US and Japanese ships are described. The Marines sometimes think they were abandoned by the Navy at Guadalcanal, but this account will rectify any misconceptions. To continue a theme, there is plenty of grist for the sociology of innovation mill here too. The long and frustrating process of mastering radar is brought out as is the tactical development process of learning to fight in narrow waters. If you wore Navy blue, you will be prouder you did after reading this book.

Pacific Crucible by Ian Tol. Another WWII potboiler, but with a different focus. Tol takes us on a meticulous march through the first year of the Pacific War, when the US was on the defensive and had to fend off a superior Imperial Japanese Navy with relatively few assets. The title was not chosen randomly; the first year of the war was a crucible that tested the leadership in both the Japanese and American navies. Tol meticulously takes us through the backgrounds of both the leaders and the societies in order to give us a deeper insight on the events that are otherwise so familiar to us. Here again we see the broad vista of organizations being forced to innovate.

Unmanned Combat Air Systems by Norman Friedman. This is kind of a coffee table book in format, and could be viewed as a sales brochure for the Northrup Grumman X-47B unmanned aircraft. However, the book turns out to be a very clever and useful tour of what the future might hold in store for naval aviation. It is important to understand that the X-47 and its future brethren are not simply sleek looking versions of the Predator drone. As autonomous systems they will coordinate among themselves at machine speed. If this all works out, it will fundamentally change the face of naval aviation, and this book gives us advance warning and understanding of what it will look like. Many readers may recoil at the idea of armed, autonomous machines. If so, and you have not read Wired for War by Pete Singer, I recommend you do so.

Merry Christmas to all and to all a good read!

Let the Grinding Begin ...

What is going on in the Fleet to effect force reductions when few want/can leave?

Are we using a good system?

Also, after a decade of war - have out officer selection process for our front line leaders reflected wartime requirements for officers, or are we stuck in a mid-80s time-warp?

I'm discussing it all over at USNIBlog. Grab a fresh cup of coffee, send the phone direct to voicemail and join me.

---

UPDATE: Zacchaeus over at Small Wars Journal fleshes out the concept a bit with "The Lance Corporal Equivalent." Check it out.

Everyone knows their time ...

As many of you know, late last week our nation lost an opportunity; one it probably would have passed on - but an opportunity nonetheless.

I’m a colonel in the U.S. Army, and next summer I will retire to teach high school social studies. My friends think I’m crazy, and they may have a point.

That is Col. Paul Yinling, USA. He is going home.

It is funny, when you retire some people ask either why you stayed in so long, or why you are leaving so soon. Everyone knows their own reasons - and Paul I think has a good one on the top of his list.

Colonel is the last rank before general’s stars, and it comes with significant perks. My pay is triple the national average teacher’s salary. Military budgets have doubled over the past decade, while school districts have slashed funding, increased class sizes, cut programs and laid off teachers. The social status accorded to the military is wonderful, while teachers are routinely pilloried by politicians and pundits for student outcomes that are often driven by events and conditions far beyond the schoolhouse door.
....
Especially in a democracy, we ought to respect most those who foster the character traits that make self-government attainable — parents and teachers, coaches and ministers, poets and protesters. When I hear the Army motto, “This We’ll Defend,” it’s them I have in mind.

I’ve served five combat tours in Desert Storm, the Balkans and Iraq, and I’ve had cause to reflect on what it means to live well. It has little to do with money or social status or proximity to power. Instead, amid the clamor of a youth baseball practice, I’m part of a conversation on character that echoes in eternity. The opportunity to engage in that conversation more often is why I want to teach.

I've blogg'd about Paul before, generally due to his very brave and well focused critique coming after his 2007 article, "A Failure in Generalship."

His diagnosis of the Army's General Officers paralleled the same problem we have in the Navy with our Flag Officers;

“As matters stand now, a private who loses a rifle suffers far greater consequences than a general who loses a war” - arguing that Congress needs to be more bold when holding three- and four-star generals accountable.
...
"It is unreasonable to expect that an officer who spends 25 years conforming to institutional expectations will emerge as an innovator in his late forties." - arguing that the US generalship suffers from conformity, lack of vision, and lack of creativity.

Since 2007, I have looked for the Navy's Yingling to come to the front - but it has yet to happen. I know we have a few, I exchange emails with them on a regular basis - but for reasons of their own, they remain in the background working other issues - and for good reason they best know and I don't question.

In a parallel universe, it would have been good to see people like Yingling and McMaster rise to the top in our Army - but that isn't to be. Perhaps McMaster has a better chance as his critique was made towards a previous generation and not this one; but it took an act of Petraeus to get him to BG .... We'll see.

As for Paul - we should all set aside our own selfish projections on the man and just thank him for his years of service. We should wish him the best going forward, as he will continue to serve his nation - just in a different way.

Everyone knows their time - and their reasons. Thanks Paul, we'll be hearing from you again soon I hope.

Sunday Funnies

More Broadside here.

Where are the Carriers, on Midrats of course

"Where are the Carriers?"

Whenever the expected unexpected happens on the globe, that is the question that is often asked first. As our nation also faces one of its greatest budget crisis - it is also one that the budget cutters are asking as well.

What is the status of our carrier force as we approach 2012 and what possible directions are we heading? Is the carrier more important in supporting our national strategy than it used to be, or less? Are we buying the right kind of systems to go on and in our carriers? Are we buying enough? How are we assessing our technology risk as we bring in new tools?

Our guest for the full hour on Sunday, December 4th from 5-6pm EST will be J. Talbot Manvel, CAPT, USN (Ret.), presently teaching at the U.S. Naval Academy and is a frequent writer on issues of carrier issues and larger Navy policy issues. In the course of his career he served on three carriers and led development of the maintenance plan for the Nimitz class and design of the Ford class carriers.

Join us live if you can and pile in with the usual suspects in the chat room where you can contribute your thoughts and observation - and suggest to us questions for our guests.

If you miss the show you can always listen to the archive at blogtalkradio - but the best way to get the show and download the archive to your audio player is to get a free account and subscribe to the podcast on iTunes.

Listen to Midrats on Blog Talk Ra

Fullbore Friday

Good German, bad German and the changing odds of a war staggering to an end.

Moser's ordeal dates to Aug. 13, 1944, when he flew his 44th mission in the cramped cockpit of a Lockheed P-38 Lightning.

Flying over the French countryside, the 22-year-old first lieutenant from Ferndale was assigned to seek out any sign of the German occupiers, unload his plane's two heavy bombs on them, then strafe them with the plane's cannon and four machine guns.
...
Moser spotted a convoy of trucks parked in the open on a country road, an inviting target. "I didn't stop to think that it might be too obvious," Moser said. "It was a trap and I had fallen right into it."

As he swooped toward the convoy, anti-aircraft fire erupted from both sides of the road. His plane gave a sharp shudder as a shell ripped through the left engine, and it burst into flames.
...
He did what he was taught, releasing the canopy, then turning the plane over to fall out. But his shoe caught in a hinge, and he barely managed to get loose and open his parachute before he hit the ground. "The good Lord was riding with me, I'll tell ya," said Moser, a devout Catholic.

French farmers tried to hide Moser, but German soldiers who saw the crash soon caught up with him and demanded to know the whereabouts of his co-pilot, not realizing the P-38 was a one-man plane.

Moser was first taken to a French prison, but a week after his capture he and nearly 170 other captured Allied fliers were crammed into railroad boxcars for an five-day ride to Germany.

At Buchenwald, they were marched past rows of snarling dogs and armed guards, then were stripped, shaved from head to toe, swabbed with a stinging disinfectant and forced to sleep outside in a rocky field, with three men sharing a single blanket.... when a guard who spoke English "told us the only way we'd leave was as smoke up that chimney," the reality of the horror in front of Moser began to take shape.

In the weeks to come, he and his fellow prisoners would see corpses piled up outside the crematory. "People were dying faster than they could dispose of the bodies."

A typical day's "rations" consisted of a small dish of watery cabbage soup with cabbage worms still wriggling on top, and a hunk of bread laced with sawdust. Toilets were unsanitary trenches; dysentery was rampant.

Unlike "death camps" such as Auschwitz, developed for mass executions, Buchenwald was a sprawling compound of munitions factories, fields and barracks — built as a forced-labor camp for political prisoners.

But as the Nazi cause became increasingly desperate, conditions at Buchenwald grew more brutal. It's estimated that at one point, as many as 500 Russian prisoners a day were shot to death, and that over the course of the war, 56,000 of the camp's 250,000 inmates were either executed, starved, worked to death or died from illness.

Fortunately for Moser, conditions in the SS-run camp apparently shocked even some members of Germany's power elite, including high-ranking members of the Luftwaffe, Germany's air force.

Luftwaffe officers had heard that Allied aviators were at the camp, and arranged a visit with the top officers among the prisoner group, a colonel from New Zealand and an American captain.

"The disgust they felt for their fellow German SS officers was clear," Moser said. "It was also certain that they did not approve of the way we were being treated."

An unusual sense of fraternity was at work: Although Allied and German pilots wouldn't hesitate to blast each other out of the sky in battle, they felt a kinship that predated World War II.

A week after the Luftwaffe visit, the Allied pilots at Buchenwald, which included about 60 Americans, were told to gather up their belongings. They were marched to a warehouse and handed back the clothes they had arrived in.

"There were smiles on our skeletal faces," said Moser. The fliers correctly surmised that they wouldn't be getting their belongings back if they were on their way to be cremated.

Moser, who weighed 155 pounds when he was shot down, had dropped nearly 40 pounds in his two months at Buchenwald.

Years later, after Allied forces examined camp records, Moser would learn Buchenwald's SS officers planned to execute the Allied fliers, and likely would have done so within days if the Luftwaffe hadn't intervened.

Even after he was transferred to a regular prisoner-of-war camp, life was not easy for Moser. As the Germans held less and less territory, he was twice relocated on wintertime "death marches," one of 60 miles and one of more than 100. But at the three POW camps where he was held, life seldom approached the hopelessness that pervaded Buchenwald.

On April 29, 1945 — eight months and two weeks after his capture — Allied forces finally burst into his camp. A battle-scarred U.S. tank appeared in front of him.

"A roar went up from the camp that rolled through the acres ... a roar of relief and joy and exhilaration that only the liberated can truly know."

Interesting story ... but ...

... he ran into skepticism regarding his story about Buchenwald, partly because there were no official records that Americans had been held there. Rather than defend his account, he opted to keep it to himself.

Even his wife, Jean, whom he married in 1946, didn't know about his Buchenwald experience until the early 1980s, when the editor of the Lynden Tribune, who'd heard Moser's story at a meeting of a local POW group, persuaded Moser to tell it to a reporter from the weekly newspaper.

As they say - the rest is history. In this case, also a book and a documentary.



Hat tip AT1.

Diversity Thursday

Sometimes a DivThu just writes itself.

Though we have covered a lot here over the last few years - I think one of the good things is that more and more people no longer lash out or defend what is going on.

Sure, they try to excuse or hedge - but the facts are so clear. In that light, behold this slide from the Aviation Major Command Screen Board out-brief. I think the stats speak for themselves.

Can the last of the hope/believe/think flotilla stop pretending now? The mask hasn't just slipped - it is flying through the air in to the next room

You don't need graduate level statistics to see the story. It's all there.

BTW - if you don't get the last part of the slide - that means that the female selection rate was 50%. That is five times greater than the overall population.