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.
Let's touch base on a topic that is always good to return to now and then - the Navy being top-heavy in a following seas; via Mike Mather at WKTR.
In World War II, there were 30 Navy ships for every admiral. Now, the Navy has more admirals than ships.
That’s a point not lost on Virginia Democratic Senator Mark Warner.
“I want to see the Pentagon cut back on some of this “brass creep” both in terms of numbers and some of these perks,” Warner said.
Not long ago, the Navy forced out 3,000 mid-career sailors.
...
... the Pentagon has added admirals and generals. There are now nearly a thousand. Many of those top officers are surrounded with entourages including chauffeurs, chefs and executive aids. Top flag officers have private jets always at the ready. They live in sometimes palatial homes and frequently travel in motorcades. Former Democratic Senator Jim Webb asked the Pentagon why the Air Force has more four-star generals than the Army, even though the Army has almost twice the manpower. Across all service branches, Warner said, the number of people at the bottom has shrunk while the number of generals and admirals has swelled.
That is a tough topic to step in front of the press about, but I thing RDML Kirby did a real good job here. He's good. Watch the full interview, especially if ERB is a concern to you. One thing I didn't care for, is the reporter seemed to try to get "personal" with RDML Kirby (you can hear more of him during his visit to Midrats), but he moves off that fairly fast enough. More work needs to be done, but can anyone think that we don't have enough GOFO?.
Last month saw the newest shipbuilding plan hit the streets (Justification of Estimates here). Is this good news, more of the same, or are there some systemic issues that are being painted over? What can the Navy expect over the next few years as the defense cuts bite deeper and the battle for wedges of the defense budget pie heats up. Using their latest article in RealClearDefense as a starting point, EagleOne and my guests this Sunday, 05MAY13 from 5-6pm EST to discuss this and more will be Mackenzie Eaglen, Resident Fellow at the Marilyn Ware Center for Security Studies at the American Enterprise Institute and Bryan McGrath, Director, Delex Consulting, Studies and Analysis.
Who benefits when senior leadership takes a position of removing themselves from public debate? Who benefits when everyone speaks the same? Is lock-step always been the case? When is it good, when is it not? I'm discussing over at USNIBlog. Come visit and tell me what you think.
Sometimes Fullbore is just all in a days work ... and a few decades to make it back home.
The Department of Defense POW/Missing Personnel Office (DPMO) announced April 30 that a Navy pilot, missing from the Vietnam War, has been accounted for and will be buried with full military honors along with his crew.
Navy Lt. Dennis W. Peterson of Huntington Park, Calif., was the pilot of a SH-3A helicopter that crashed in Ha Nam Province, North Vietnam. Peterson was accounted for on March 30, 2012. Also, aboard the aircraft was Ensign Donald P. Frye of Los Angeles, Calif.; Aviation Antisubmarine Warfare Technicians William B. Jackson of Stockdale, Texas; and Donald P. McGrane of Waverly, Iowa. The crew will be buried, as a group, on May 2 at Arlington National Cemetery.
On July 19, 1967, the four servicemen took off from the USS Hornet aboard an SH-3A Sea King helicopter, on a search and rescue mission looking for a downed pilot in Ha Nam Province, North Vietnam. During the mission, an enemy concealed 37mm gun position targeted the helicopter as it flew in. The helicopter was hit by the anti-aircraft gunfire, causing the aircraft to lose control, catch fire and crash, killing all four servicemen.
In October 1982, the Socialist Republic of Vietnam (S.R.V.) repatriated five boxes of remains to U.S. officials. In 2009, the remains within the boxes were identified as Frye, Jackson, and McGrane.
In 1993, a joint U.S./S.R.V. team, investigated a loss in Ha Nam Province. The team interviewed local villagers who identified possible burial sites linked to the loss. One local claimed to have buried two of the crewmen near the wreckage, but indicated that both graves had subsequently been exhumed.
Between 1994 and 2000, three joint U.S./S.R.V. teams excavated the previous site and recovered human remains and aircraft wreckage that correlated to the crew's SH-3A helicopter. In 2000, U.S. personnel excavated the crash site recovering additional remains. Analysis from the Joint POW/MIA Command Central Identification Laboratory subsequently designated these additional remains as the co-mingled remains of all four crewmen, including Peterson.
Giving your all to make sure that every effort is made to make sure we leave no one behind. Welcome home Shipmates.
Buck up Shipmates! Another feel-good DivThu for 'ya. Remember about a year ago I almost let the bastards get me down and I almost quit DivThu? Well ... I'm glad I didn't. I still don't like the subject - but no one else could cover it, so I did. The toxic nature of it all is well documented - and in my email I hear 10x more stories than make it here, mostly because readers ask that I not do it, as they fear they will be found to be the source of the information and treated as such. The nasty threats I get do drain on the soul a bit ... but ... here is why DivThu needs to be here. Our Navy has a great tradition of being at the front on race relations. Sometimes we were slow and leaders needed a boot to the back of the neck ... but we got there. Each step along the way was based on one thing - or it aspired to be based on it - a color blind Navy. A Navy where you were evaluated and treated based on your performance, not something as useless as where your DNA came from. Where everyone was Navy Blue, and just carried out the plan of the day. Well, along the way, we became stuck in some early 1970s racial-theory time warp of divisive, retrograde Cultural Marxism. We soon found ourselves trapped in to supporting an entire world of the Grievance Industry, expending millions upon millions of dollars a year on speakers, BSC, programs, contractors, and more - all for one thing - to keep our Sailors thinking about what made them different, not what brought them together. Even worse, we picked "approved" and "unapproved" racial and ethnic groups - giving special attention and consideration for one over the other.
The intentions don't matter - the end result was institutional discrimination that exists to this day. Check it out if you wish. In this upside down world, with each new cohort of young Sailors, the archaic nature of our entire (D)iversity Bully driven program becomes more and more out of phase with reality. To push back against the monied interests in the (D)iversity Industry though is a rough business. You will be called names, your career will be threatened and even your livelihood will be attacked. The pattern is well known ... but things are changing. More and more, you can feel a shift in the wind - a shift that is heading the direction that DivThu has been asking for from the start - a culture of inclusion where we truly throw away all reference to the useless classification of race and the created ethnicity of choice. Sadly, the Navy could have been at the front of this new effort of inclusion, but instead we seem to be doubling down on the side of division and racialism. The change is coming from the outside. No less of an institution such as The Economist is now sounding almost Salamanderesque in saying, Time to Scrap Affirmative Action.
America is one of many countries where the state gives a leg-up to members of certain racial, ethnic, or other groups by holding them to different standards.
Fact; it is silly to argue otherwise. Ditto Navy - if you still have a doubt, then click the Diversity tab and take awhile to read the archive.
Awarding university places to black students with lower test scores than whites sounds reasonable, given the legacy of segregation. But a study found that at some American universities, black applicants who scored 450 points (out of 1,600) worse than Asians on entrance tests were equally likely to win a place. That is neither fair on Asians, nor an incentive to blacks to study in high school. In their book “Mismatch”, Richard Sander and Stuart Taylor produce evidence that suggests affirmative action reduces the number of blacks who qualify as lawyers by placing black students in law schools for which they are ill-prepared, causing many to drop out. Had they attended less demanding schools, they might have graduated.
That is the real crime. They use minority applicants to fill their PPT slides, make themselves feel good - and then set those young men and women up for failure. The case study is legion.
Although the groups covered by affirmative action tend to be poorer than their neighbours, the individuals who benefit are often not. One American federal-contracting programme favours businesses owned by “socially and economically disadvantaged” people. Such people can be 87 times richer than the average American family and still be deemed “disadvantaged” if their skin is the right colour.
Think about some, ahem, recent examples we all know of.
The University of Texas (UT) justifies discriminating in favour of black people not on the ground that society owes it to them, but because, it claims, a diverse university offers a better education to all its students. That is a reasonable argument—some companies benefit from understanding a variety of customers, for instance, and the police probably keep order better if enough of them share a culture with the neighbourhood they patrol—but it does not wash for most institutions. In UT’s case, although colleges benefit from a diversity of ideas, to use skin colour as a proxy for this implies that all black people and all Chinese people view the world in a similar way. That suggests a bleak view of the human imagination.
Universities that want to improve their selection procedures by identifying talented people (of any colour or creed) from disadvantaged backgrounds should be encouraged. But selection on the basis of race is neither a fair nor an efficient way of doing so. Affirmative action replaced old injustices with new ones: it divides society rather than unites it. Governments should tackle disadvantage directly, without reference to race. If a school is bad, fix it. If there are barriers to opportunity, remove them. And if Barack Obama’s daughters apply to a university, judge them on their academic prowess, not the colour of their skin.
That last paragraph is perfect, and the fact that it paraphrases things we have been discussing for years every DivThu just tells me to keep going. Keep the light shining - keep the roaches scampering. They can't stand the light and fresh air. In time, we'll get there ... in time; I can feel the wind at our back.
The question is, of course; will the Navy bravely lead from the front, or will it be dragged in shame in to the future kicking and screaming ... again?
From the start of this blog we have been reminding you; we are building an operational foundation on sand. Over reliance on networks and satellite-based communication without adequate safeguards in place, and an unpracticed ability to sustain operations offline is a huge Operational vulnerability ... and puts our nation at Strategic risk. Now and then, something sneaks out in to open-source that serves as a good chance to remind everyone again; we do not own the electromagnetic spectrum; satellites are fair game. You can add to the list; when you talk on your neighbor's phone - assume he is listening in. Via Wired's Noah@Danger Room.
The Pentagon is so starved for bandwidth that it’s paying a Chinese satellite firm to help it communicate and share data.
U.S. troops operating on the African continent are now using the recently-launched Apstar-7 satellite to keep in touch and share information. And the $10 million, one-year deal lease — publicly unveiled late last week during an ordinarily-sleepy Capitol Hill subcommittee hearing — has put American politicians and policy-makers in bit of a bind.
...
“That bandwidth was available only on a Chinese satellite,” Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense for Space Policy Doug Loverro told a House Armed Services Committee panel, in remarks first reported by InsideDefense.com. “We recognize that there is concerns across the community on the usage of Chinese satellites to support our warfighter. And yet, we also recognize that our warfighters need support, and sometimes we must go to the only place that we can get it from.”
... and in wartime you will get all that additional bandwidth (in addition to what you are already using), from whom exactly?
What is it like to break up a ship? Well, I think the below speaks for how we took care of the USS GUARDIAN (MCM-5). On the positive side; BZ to the crew and the salvage pros who did this all without loss of life.
