How Lenny Got Fat

What I thought was a typical case of a fallen CDR with at great backstory just might be a bit larger than I thought. Via S-n-S;

Nicknamed "Fat Leonard," the gregarious Malaysian businessman is well known by U.S. Navy commanders in the Pacific, where his company has serviced warships for 25 years.

But prosecutors in court papers say Leonard Francis worked his connections to obtain military secrets by lining up hookers, Lady Gaga tickets and other bribes for a U.S. commander, in a scandal reverberating across the Navy.
...
Navy commander Michael Vannak Khem Misiewicz passed confidential information on ship routes to Francis' Singapore-based company, Glenn Defense Marine Asia Ltd., or GDMA, according to the court documents.

Misiewicz and Francis moved Navy vessels like chess pieces, diverting aircraft carriers, destroyers and other ships to Asian ports with lax oversight where Francis could inflate costs, according to the criminal complaint. The firm overcharged the Navy millions for fuel, food and other services it provided, and invented tariffs by using phony port authorities, the prosecution alleges.

Here is my concern - I don't think Misiewicz was the only pony in the stable.

Francis is legendary in military circles in that part of the world, said McKnight, who does not know him personally. He is known for extravagance. His 70,000-foot bungalow in an upscale Singapore neighborhood drew spectators yearly since 2007 to its lavish, outdoor Christmas decorations, which The Straits Times described as rivaling the island city-state's main shopping street with replicas of snowmen, lighted towering trees, and Chinese and Japanese ornaments.

"He's a larger-than-life figure," McKnight said. "You talk to any captain on any ship that has sailed in the Pacific and they will know exactly who he is."

You don't get that from just an isolated deal. Also, 70,000 sqft? That has to be a type ... or at least don't call something that big a "bungalow."

The company bilked the Navy out of $10 million in just one year in Thailand alone, U.S. Attorney Laura Duffy said.

In December 2011, the two exchanged emails about the schedule of the USS Blue Ridge, investigators say. According to court documents, Francis wrote Misiewicz: "Bro, Slide a Bali visit in after Jakarta, and Dili Timor after Bali."

The complaint alleges Misiewicz followed through on the demands: In October 2012, the USS George Washington was scheduled to visit Singapore and instead was redirected by the Navy to Port Klang, Malaysia, one of Francis' preferred ports where his company submitted fake contractor bids.

After Francis offered Misiewicz five tickets to a Lady Gaga concert in Thailand in 2012, Francis wrote: "Don't chicken out bro we need u with us on the front lines," according to court documents.

Innocent and all until proven guilty etc ... etc ... but, in the end no one is going to come away looking all that well, and there will be a frag pattern when it is finally put away.

How many more names will drop? I hope I'm wrong, but I don't think so - the guy was way too connected.

South China Sea: What Could Go Wrong?

Navy SEALs in the Long War, with Jason Redman

In an arch that spans the immediate post-Cold War era through the Iraq War, what are the observations & lessons a front-line leader at the tactical level and, for those who are injured in service to their nation, through recovery?

Our guest for the full hour this Sunday from 5-6pm Eastern will be Jason Redman, author of The Trident: The Forging and Reforging of a Navy SEAL Leader.

Jason joined the Navy on September 11, 1992 and served as an enlisted SEAL until he entered to Old Dominion University in August of 2001, graduating Summa Cum Laude with a Bachelors Degree in Business Management via Naval ROTC. He was commissioned in May of 2004 and returned as Naval SEAL Officer.

He deployed to Fallujah, Iraq in 2007, and in September was severely wounded.

While recovering at Bethesda Naval Medical Center, Jason underwent 37 surgeries. His experience led him to create Wounded Wear, a Non-Profit organization that provides clothing kits and clothing modifications to America’s wounded warriors.

Join us live if you can with the usual suspects in the chat room and offer up your questions for our guest, but if you miss the show you can always listen to the archive at blogtalkradio.

Listen to internet radio with Midrats on Blog Talk Radio

de Blasio needs a Page-13

OK Shipmates, we've all seen or been this Sailor before;

Bill de Blasio might need to invest in a better alarm clock if he wins on Tuesday.

The Democratic mayoral candidate admitted that he overslept this morning, keeping dozens of supporters, elected officials and reporters waiting more than an hour for a get-out-the-vote rally on the Upper West side that had been scheduled for 11:30 a.m.

“Did I what?” he responded this afternoon at a second, delayed event, when asked by a reporter whether his tardiness had been the result of over-sleeping. Asked the question again, he said that he’d had a particularly “challenging night.”

“I got a call at five in the morning that threw off my sleep cycle. But other than that, it’s all good. So I wouldn’t say I typically overslept, I’d say it was a divided sleep,” he answered, refusing to share any details about the call.

Politicker reported earlier this week that, as public advocate, Mr. de Blasio often had trouble waking up in the morning, keeping staffers who were supposed to pick him up waiting for hours and showing up late to events.

The candidate today admitted that, unlike the current mayor, he’s more of a night owl.

“I am not a morning person,” he said. “I think we should reorient our society [to] staying up late, but I don’t think that’s happening right now.”

I'll say it; Bill where were you last night? Unless you've left your credit card at a bar in the West Village and woke up this AM still wearing your shoes - you have no excuse.

We all understand a good Liberty Call now and then, but if you can't make a simple 11:30am meeting because some pogue called you at 5am, then you can't be the LPO of the Admin Office, much less mayor of NYC.

If your initial instinct isn't to accept responsibility, but to blame the larger culture for your failures, then screw the Page-13, you're going the NJP route if the CMDCM can't knock some sense in to you via the DRB ... oh, wait ... we don't let Master Chiefs be Master Chiefs much anymore, and the Chief's Mess is probably terrified of an IG if they hurt your feelings ... so ... yea - maybe NJP. No, you are "one of those" types who might make a hotline call ... so ... ungh. Forget that scenario; I digress.

I have intentionally avoided blogging at all about the NYC mayoral campaign because I know most of you don't care, and the whole thing just depresses me.

It isn't so much that we have as the clear front runner a Communist fellow-traveler in Bill de Blasio. Just as a reminder, anyone who in 2013 cannot bring themselves to speak against the complete horror and evil of the Communist governments from the Soviet Union to Cuba to Nicaragua  to the blood soaked Communist rebel groups El Salvador and Colombia - well - they are just stupid or still willing to line people up against wall and be shot for reasons as simple as political debate.

Anyway ... it depresses me for something that may surprise my readers - I love NYC. Yes, I am an unabashed Southern partisan with right of center libertarian tendencies - but I love that city.

The reason are complicated and derive from my own weirdness I am sure, but let me try to help explain part of it for you. If you recall, my candidate for the Republican nomination in 2008 was Giuliani. If I had a bag of pixie dust, he would be in the White House right now ... but we don't live in that universe. I consider him one of the closest living examples of the best of Churchillism that we have in this country - he did something many thought was impossible; he brought NYC back from a nightmare of its own creation.

NYC if you define it broadly, had a population of 8,336,697 in July of 2012. It is a nation-sized entity. For reference, the population of Denmark is 5,580,500, Austria 8,443,000, and Sweden 9,482,900.

I first went to NYC when I was about 10. That would have been in the mid-1970s. In the blink of an eye, the kind of leftists like de Blasio took NYC from a flawed but highly functional Gotham of Rear Window to a dystopian Taxi Driver. My parents did not just take me to the nice places, they intentionally showed my little mind the very gritty parts. It still sticks in my head.

The cause of NYC's fall was one thing; leadership. Great societies can find themselves with poor or toxic leaders who can drag something great into a sewer in a flash. In the Navy we've seen it in commands and it scales up to the national level just as well. Also, a society in crisis and decay can be brought up by an outstanding leader; a Giuliani, a Churchill, a Cincinnatus.

When I brought my young children first to NYC a decade ago, it was amazing; a totally different place. I was able to go places and show things to my daughters that would have been unheard of when I was their age.

Decline isn't inevitable  and can be reversed. Success isn't granted or permanent either. It requires constant work, effort, and dedicated leadership. In a democratic form of government, ultimately the success or failure of a society derives from those leaders the people elect. So, NYC, it is your call and you will have no one but yourself to blame or praise. What does history, your history, tell us about putting someone like de Blasio in power?

Is that who you really want running things? If so, you are not only willfully ignorant of your own history, you are spoiled and once again - you will have to drag yourself out of a hole you dug for yourself at some point in the future after much misery, tears, treasure, and blood. Sad.

The Walking Dead at Sea

Well ... not quite. Everyone on FB was having fun with this yesterday, so I thought I would bring it over here.

It seems that only 10% comes from the book, if that. I'm not asking much ... just don't suck as much as Battleship.

I could quibble about 4 months without UNREP or that even under EMCON you can receive messages, the "take enough for deployment" use of hair gel, the inability to properly pronounce Nawfauwk ... etc ... etc ... but let it roll and have fun.



I'd be interested if anyone in San Diego went to this casting call for it.

Keeping an Eye on the Long Game: Part XLVIII

Come on China, you really don't want to play this game, do you?

Chinese state-run media revealed for the first time this week that Beijing’s nuclear submarines can attack American cities as a means to counterbalance U.S. nuclear deterrence in the Pacific. 

On Monday, leading media outlets including China Central TV, the People’s Daily, the Global Times, the PLA Daily, the China Youth Daily and the Guangmin Daily ran identical, top-headlined reports about the “awesomeness” of the People's Liberation Army navy’s strategic submarine force. 

“This is the first time in 42 years since the establishment of our navy’s strategic submarine force that we reveal on such a large scale the secrets of our first-generation underwater nuclear force,” the Global Times said in a lengthy article titled “China for the First Time Possesses Effective Underwater Nuclear Deterrence against the United States.”
The article features 30 photos and graphics detailing, among other things, damage projections for Seattle and Los Angeles after being hit by Chinese nuclear warheads and the deadly radiation that would spread all the way to Chicago.

In 2010, a new class of missile sub, the Type 094 Jin class, entered the service. It is capable of launching 12 to 16 JL-2 missiles with a range of about 8,700 miles, covering much of the continental U.S. with single or multiple, independently targetable re-entry vehicle warheads. 

Chinese calculations for nuclear attacks on the U.S. are chillingly macabre.
“Because the Midwest states of the U.S. are sparsely populated, in order to increase the lethality, [our] nuclear attacks should mainly target the key cities on the West Coast of the United States, such as Seattle, Los Angeles, San Francisco and San Diego,” the Global Times said. 

“The 12 JL-2 nuclear warheads carried by one single Type 094 SSBN can kill and wound 5 million to 12 million Americans,” the Global Times reported. 

China also has developed land-based intercontinental ballistic missiles — notably the DF-31A, which has a range of 7,000 to 7,500 miles. 

“If we launch our DF 31A ICBMs over the North Pole, we can easily destroy a whole list of metropolises on the East Coast and the New England region of the U.S., including Annapolis, Philadelphia, New York, Boston, Portland, Baltimore and Norfolk, whose population accounts for about one-eighth of America’s total residents,” the Global Times said.

From an ASW perspective, though YG88 and older are the only ones who really had to deal with this type of issue ... that's OK. We have enough institutional knowledge to knock off the cob-webs and work off the flab, we're good with this if you really want to play. I don't think China wants to play this game, just a few writers getting a little full of themselves - but let's pull that thread some more.

As for actual click-boom nuclear war ... yea, we've got that too. If you want to go the human traditional total war body count, well, nuke 12 million Americans? Your population is a lot more concentrated and your economic nodes more centralized, so .... yea. Just move that decimal point over one, and there is our second strike.

Nuke 12 million Americans? The other 305 million will fully support trying to knock your population back below a billion before demanding your surrender before we cut it in half. Even th most passive parts of the nation can get quite bloody minded. The Yankees killed a few hundred thousand of my countrymen on a point of political order - so just be careful.

Then again, if we keep networking all our military computer systems together for "efficiency" and let more and more security holes open for Chinese spies ... maybe we would lose that second strike capability - then we have a different game altogether.

Well, if nothing else, it looks like China isn't interested in nuking Dixie or most of the red states. Deer season is still a go.

Fullbore Friday

A bad pilot with a spotty record at best.

A beat up aircraft with the unloved BUNO ending in 666.

A mission that no one wanted to take.

A crew full of equally broken and unwanted crew members.

What does that give you? Just the most decorated combat flight in U. S. history.

There were only three things standing in his way: he didn’t have a crew, he didn’t have an airplane, and oh, yeah, he still wasn’t a qualified pilot.

He solved the first problem by gravitating to every misfit and ne’er-do-well in the 43rd Air Group. As another pilot, Walt Krell, recalled, “He recruited a crew of renegades and screwoffs. They were the worst — men nobody else wanted. But they gravitated toward one another and made a hell of a team.”

The plane came later. An old, beat-up B-17, serial number 41-2666, that had seen better days was flown into their field to be scavenged for spare parts. Captain Zeamer had other ideas. He and his crew decided to rebuild the plane in their spare time since they weren’t going to get to fly any other way. Exactly how they managed to accomplish their task is the subject of some debate. Remember, there were so few spare parts available that their ‘plane’ was actually brought in originally to be a parts donor.

But rebuild it they did. Once it was in flying shape the base commander congratulated them and said he’d find a new crew to fly it. Not surprisingly, Zeamer and his crew took exception to this idea, and according Walt Krell the crew slept in their airplane, having loudly announced that the 50 caliber machine guns were kept loaded in case anyone came around to ‘borrow’ it. There was a severe shortage of planes, so the base commander ignored the mutiny and let the crew fly – but generally expected them to take on missions that no one else wanted.

The misfit crew thrived on it. They hung around the base operations center, volunteering for every mission no one else wanted. That earned them the nickname The Eager Beavers, and their patched up B-17 was called Old 666.

This alone makes them Salamander approved.

... the Eager Beavers became known as gun nuts. They replaced all of the light 30 caliber machine guns in the plane with heavier 50 caliber weapons. Then the 50 caliber machine guns were replaced with double 50 caliber guns. Zeamer had another pair of machine guns mounted to the front of the plane so he could remotely fire them like a fighter pilot. And the crew kept extra machine guns stored in the plane, just in case one of their other guns jammed or malfunctioned.
...
In June, 1943, the U. S. had secured Guadalcanal in the southern Solomon Islands. They knew the Japanese had a huge base at Rabual, but were certain there were other airfields being built in the Northern Solomon Islands. They asked for a volunteer crew to take photographs of Bougainville Island to plan for an eventual invasion, and of Buka airfield on the north side of the island to assess for increased activity there. It was considered a near-suicide mission — flying hundreds of miles over enemy airspace in a single, slow bomber. Not to mention photoreconnaissance meant staying in level flight and taking no evasive action even if they were attacked.

The only crew that volunteered, of course, was Jay Zeamer and the Eager Beavers. One of the crew, bombardier Joseph Sarnovski, had absolutely no reason to volunteer. He’d already been in combat for 18 months and was scheduled to go home in 3 days. Being a photo mission, there was no need for a bombardier. But if his friends were going, he wanted to go, and one of the bombardier’s battle stations was to man the forward machine guns. They might need him, so he went.

Go to the link and read it all.

No question; fullbore in every way.

Zeamer's Citation:

On 16 June 1943, Major Zeamer (then Captain) volunteered as pilot of a bomber on an important photographic mapping mission covering the formidably defended area in the vicinity of Buka, Solomon Islands. While photographing the Buka airdrome. his crew observed about 20 enemy fighters on the field, many of them taking off. Despite the certainty of a dangerous attack by this strong force, Major Zeamer proceeded with his mapping run, even after the enemy attack began. In the ensuing engagement, Major Zeamer sustained gunshot wounds in both arms and legs, one leg being broken. Despite his injuries, he maneuvered the damaged plane so skillfully that his gunners were able to fight off the enemy during a running fight which lasted 40 minutes. The crew destroyed at least 5 hostile planes, of which Major Zeamer himself shot down one. Although weak from loss of blood, he refused medical aid until the enemy had broken combat. He then turned over the controls, but continued to exercise command despite lapses into unconsciousness, and directed the flight to a base 580 miles away. In this voluntary action, Major Zeamer, with superb skill, resolution, and courage, accomplished a mission of great value.

Sarnoski's Citation:

For conspicuous gallantry and intrepidity in action above and beyond the call of duty. On 16 June 1943, 2d Lt. Sarnoski volunteered as bombardier of a crew on an important photographic mapping mission covering the heavily defended Buka area, Solomon Islands. When the mission was nearly completed, about 20 enemy fighters intercepted. At the nose guns, 2d Lt. Sarnoski fought off the first attackers, making it possible for the pilot to finish the plotted course. When a coordinated frontal attack by the enemy extensively damaged his bomber, and seriously injured 5 of the crew, 2d Lt. Sarnoski, though wounded, continued firing and shot down 2 enemy planes. A 20-millimeter shell which burst in the nose of the bomber knocked him into the catwalk under the cockpit. With indomitable fighting spirit, he crawled back to his post and kept on firing until he collapsed on his guns. 2d Lt. Sarnoski by resolute defense of his aircraft at the price of his life, made possible the completion of a vitally important mission.

Here is Zeamer actual.



Dogfights gives it a good rendention at the 19-minute point.



Hat tip TheFrontPorch.