Proactively “From the Sea”; an agent of change leveraging the littoral best practices for a paradigm breaking six-sigma best business case to synergize a consistent design in the global commons, rightsizing the core values supporting our mission statement via the 5-vector model through cultural diversity.
I don't know what is worse; that it has taken so long just to do this simple test - or that we knowingly AGAIN put our Sailors in unnecessary danger for such mindless reasons.
You don't need me to tell you that on a warship, a fire, attack, or mishap does not wait for you to change clothes. It does not only endanger those who have the right NECC.
The video released Thursday — which had been requested a week earlier by Navy Times — shows the Oct. 15 flame-resistance test, which compared the blue-and-gray NWUs with other services’ combat uniforms. Strips of each fabric were hung and exposed to flame for 12 seconds. Testers then measured the results.
The video first shows the flame-resistant organizational gear used by the Marine Corps. It behaved as rated — the fire went out immediately once the flame was removed and the fabric didn’t melt.
The NWU is the second fabric tested. It’s exposed to flame at the 19-second mark in the video. Twelve seconds later, the external flame is removed; the fabric is already engulfed in flames.
What happens when a global maritime power finds itself in a position where it can no longer sustain the global presence it once considered an essential requirement?
The US Navy has been in a period of decline in both numbers and capability for awhile, and as budgetary reality sets in and burn out starts to hollow remaining capabilities - the decline is set to continue for at least another decade.
How far the decline goes until stability sets in is unknown, but what is the best reaction to this reality? Are the lessons one can derive from history that can help policy makers shape direction and priority going forward?
Join us this Sunday from 5-6pm EST with our guest for the full hour to discuss will be Daniel J. Whiteneck, Ph.D.
Dr. Whiteneck is a Senior Research Scientist at the Center for Naval Analyses. He has directed projects ranging from Tipping Point and the future of US maritime dominance, to the use of naval forces in deterrence and influence operations. He also led studies on naval coalition operations and maritime security operations focusing on counter-piracy and counter-proliferation. Dr. Whiteneck deployed twice with Carrier Strike Groups for OEF and OIF. His CNA field assignments included two tours on numbered fleet staffs, as well as field representative to the Commander of NATO Joint Command Lisbon in 2004-05. He also did three tours in the Pentagon as CNA Scientific Analyst to N51, N31, and OPNAV DEEP BLUE.
He held academic positions at the Seattle University, the University of Colorado, and the Air Force Academy, before joining CNA. In addition to authoring a number of CNA studies over the past 14 years, he has published articles and book chapters on US and British global leadership and naval operations, NATO’s expansion and operations, and the role of conventional and strategic deterrence against terrorist networks and rogue states after 9/11.
Join us live if you can, but if you miss the show you can always listen to the archive at blogtalkradio - 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.
We've blogg'd about the gun line in Vietnam before ... but here is a different story that needs to be told of the Hairy Navy at its best. In the backdrop of the broader known bombing campaign in '72 known as Linebacker II, there was a naval component that most don't know about? Have you ever heard of The Battle of Brandon Bay? Well you have now.
Imagine if we had done that during the entire period of time we were engaged in full conflict during the war.
Also, don't think this is ancient history - very similar action took place in The Falkland Islands War, DESERT STORM, and the 2003 invasion if Iraq.
Heck, during the Libyan operations the French even gave their 100mm a workout.
Enough of me - below is Part 1 with more background; read this too.
I would also recommend this five part series that has the audio from the B-52 strikes and their communications with each other and Red Crown, it will raise your heart beat: part 1, part 2, part 3, part 4, part 5.
The president of the Board of Inspection and Survey (INSURV) rolled out major changes to the frequency and grading method of the INSURV program effective Jan. 1, 2013.
INSURV President Rear Adm. Robert Wray said changes to the frequency of the inspections and the grading system were implemented to improve the readiness of Navy ships and crews and to provide Navy and congressional leaders with an accurate reflection of that readiness.
Under the old program, INSURV teams conducted exhaustive inspections and surveys of ships every five years and reported their material readiness to Congress. Now ships will be inspected about every
30 months.
Under the new inspection timeline, INSURV inspectors will conduct a traditional "Material Inspection" during a unit's Fleet Readiness Plan cycle. In the alternating cycle, a similar inspection will be conducted by the unit's type commander with INSURV support.
"The major change for the average sailor will be twofold," Wray said. "First, each ship, prior to each deployment, will have a full-blown material inspection in which the ship will be expected to get under way, do full power, anchor, shoot guns, operate combat systems, etc., for a team of external inspectors. Second, ships will be expected to do this on their own, without months of external preparation and assistance."
While twice as many inspections may sound like a bad thing, Wray stressed that the new process will benefit the sailors who have to prepare the ship for INSURV.
"We want the pre-deployment material inspection to be a normal part of doing business, like the Composite Training Unit Exercise (COMPTUEX), something ships know how to do on their own," he said. "In a larger sense, we want to create a 'culture of material readiness' in which ships and their crews are always thinking about being ready for INSURV. The concept is to create a culture for material readiness, in which any ship, at any time in the appropriate part of the FRP, could successfully shoot their guns, do full-power runs, anchor, and demonstrate her combat systems."
This is something that, at first glance, seems quite harmless ... but when you understand the whole current of Cultural Marxism that under-girds so much of the (D)iversity industry ... well ... it just looks sad.
Officer candidates from the Officer Candidate School (OCS) wade waist deep in water as they perform a log carry on the Montford Point Challenge obstacle course at Marine Corps Base Quantico. The challenge was designed in 2011 to give candidates a taste of the hardships of the first African-Americans allowed to enlist in the Marine Corps. (U.S. Marine Corps photo by Lance Cpl. Thomas DeMelo/Released)
Is this really what you need to build combat leaders in the second decade of the 21st Century?
Why is this struggle so important for leaders now? Why does this in-your-face grievance self-criticism exercise important for building leaders, promoting unity, and executing the mission of the USMC?
Marines should be taught about what it means to be a Marine - not a this or that Marine, much less pick at a clean skin until you open a sore that you can later pic at the scab over and over and over.
Pathetic - but not shocking. Patronizing to both the Montford Marines' barrier breaking efforts, and the Marines of the 21st Century. Perhaps the first week everyone should wear hair-shirts.
Well, for the romantic Sailors out there, this is an interesting economic vanity;
"We wanted to keep the energy that the producers had already put in the wine, and not break the chain. And, I'm telling you... this wine just tasted amazing."
On a warm summer's day in August, Danish wine merchant Sune Rosforth took delivery of 8,000 bottles of wine that had arrived from France.
From the offices of financial institutions flanking the quay, workers looked out at something that had not been seen in central Copenhagen for many years.
The ship that had brought the wine from the Breton port of Brest was a 32m-long brigantine, a twin-masted sailing ship, called the Tres Hombres.
Mr Rosforth's company, Rosforth and Rosforth, supplies restaurants in Denmark with organic and biodynamic wines.
Sometimes though, economic vanity can also simply be meeting a different customer's market preferences; and they are willing to pay for it. I will say this; I get it. I am a member and extra supporter of a local organic farm. I have my own garden and orchards. A lot of the pork and beef I ate this year, my family knew the animal by name. I also eat what I kill on my own land during hunting season, from animals fed in part by the foot plots I plant, and they live and grow well via the improvements in the land I have made over the years. So, I'm guilty of a little food vanity myself. I could get the same raw calories at a much lower price by simply getting what I need from the frozen and canned goods bargain section at the Piggly-Wiggly … but I don’t. If someone wants to enjoy wine that – in theory – has moved around without tons of refined fuel … why not. In any event, the world could use a few more gainfully employed works of art – which tall ship are – moving about. If you can earn a living doing it – more power to everyone involved. Think about it – who wouldn’t want to one day see the Cutty Sark underway under full sail again (with modern improvements that minimize manning requirements)? But ... sadly, those beautiful lines are not the plan. FairTransport Ships has other designs. Who knows. I wish them well.
I'll give you a hint; it has nothing to do with the military. Mort Zuckerman outlines it well;
All eyes have been on the clear and present danger of the fiscal cliff—understandably—but there's a sound in the mountain range that's even scarier than the cliff. It's the sound made by an avalanche, the trillions of dollars of debt that's heading our way, gathering speed and mass. For most people, it's out of earshot now, and that's the way our government prefers to play it in its financial statements. Liabilities are not set out there in accordance with the well-established norms of the private sector, where this overhang of liabilities would set off alarm bells in the markets, with boards of directors in emergency sessions.
We'll come to why that's not happening, but let's consider first why we should regard our predicaments as gravely as any private company does on the path to bankruptcy.
We are on a trajectory of cumulative fiscal deficits that cannot possibly be sustained. We have gone from being the world's largest creditor nation, with no foreign debt at the end of World War II, to the world's largest debtor, with roughly half of our public debt held by foreign lenders. Over the last four years, our national debt has grown by more than $5 trillion to over $16 trillion. We have to service that debt. The Federal Reserve is keeping rates historically low but here's the cost of paying interest on the debt for fiscal 2012: $359,796,008,919.49.
What do you get for that? Nothing.
The greatest fiscal challenge to the U.S. government is not just its annual deficit but its total liabilities. Our federal balance sheet does not include the unfunded social insurance obligations of Medicare, Social Security, and the future retirement benefits of federal employees. Only in the small print of the financial statements do you get some idea of the enormous size of the unfunded commitments. Today the estimated unfunded total is more than $87 trillion, or 550 percent of our GDP. And the debt per household is more than 10 times the median family income.
...
If we continue in these irresponsible ways, an eventual reckoning cannot be avoided. The liabilities are so huge, and multiplying so fast, that there will be one unavoidable demand as the various bills come to their due date. Show us the money!
How will the bills be honored? Let's remember that 100 percent of the payroll taxes for Social Security and Medicare are spent in the year that they are collected, leaving no leftovers for the unfunded obligations. And this doesn't take into account other risks, hardly minimal, like the fact that the Federal Housing Authority confronts a $16.3 billion net deficit after its latest audit that may force a taxpayer bailout for the first time in its 78-year history. And just four years from now, in 2016, the Disability Insurance trust fund will be fully depleted.
...
Merely to avoid going deeper into debt, to cope with the speed at which compound interest is growing the real debt annually, we would have to collect $8 trillion in taxes each year, Cox and Archer point out. And here's the nub of it: All individuals filing tax returns in the country with incomes over $66,198 have a total adjusted gross income of about $5.2 trillion. The total corporate taxable income (at its peak in 2006) amounted to $1.6 trillion. This means that we have a maximum of roughly $7 trillion available if the government confiscated the entire gross income of individuals and corporations—not nearly enough to cover the yearly growth of U.S. liabilities.
Read it all - that only touches the surface in an article that really pulls it all together. None of your military theory, concepts, COAs or contracts mean anything if a nation's economic structure eats itself alive. The "deal" that everyone is talking about from last night will do nothing. The problem is spending, and all the class warfare perpetual campaign taxing will do nothing to either grow the economy of fix the budget problem. A promise to cut spending some insignificant amount at a later date is just an advertisement of the dismal state of leadership, vision, and courage we are in. The Republicans only control the House, so there is only so much they can do even if they had a different Speaker than Boehner. Senator Reid's Senate has not passed a budget (in violation of the Constitution) in years. The President has neither the background or the inclination to be a national leader or to govern, he is a revolutionary. He is doing exactly what he wants to do, that is to create wholesale change in this nation more in line with his ideology. We elected him to do so, and he is doing it. Agree or disagree, but what do you expect him to do? So, as we talk about "payloads and platforms," Pacific Pivot, the LCS makeitwork patch of the month, and all that good stuff, remember this - it is no more important than Napoleon in 1812 deciding on the best winter gear for his infantry. Important in an isolated sense, but not critical to the macro decisions happening in the background. All this has been known for years - Professor Lieberman warned us about it in the late 80s as I sat in his classroom in quasi disbelief that we would ever let this happen. Well, we did, and here we are. As I outlined in an email to some folks last night, our plans for a future fleet right now is vapor-locked, and unless a major global war or significant regional maritime war breaks out in the next decade, there is a better than even chance that on the Surface side of the house at least, we will be in stasis until we leave the 2020s.
The big challenge for the next 15-years will be force level preservation in a military fiscal environment not unlike the the time period of 1920-1933 - without the innovation that we saw in the same period in carrier and cruiser development.
Where does anyone see innovation in a tight budgetary environment that can seed future advancement if/when the fiscal house is put in order? I'm looking. Rail guns, maybe coming out of the 2020s. UCAV (aka re-usable TLAM) may add some flavor to the mix, though are problematic in their own way. We can at worst hold our own or be a half-generation ahead in cyber if we want. Directed energy is half a century out from operational utility.
No, as unsexy as it is, the smart minds are looking at force and capability preservation with the best technology and weapons we have now. We already had one lost decade of PPT success, we don't need another. With the cutting edge Chinese technology tickling the late 70s through the late 80s, and the Russians just bringing themselves in to the late 90s in places - we have time.
As always, the question will be - do we have the leadership?
