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.
In this encore FbF, a reminder that life may put you in a place where you will have to do the right thing, and by doing this you will be hated by your own, and it may take decades for the people you help to even grudgingly acknowledge what you did. Such is the price fate deals some people - but there is something about doing the right thing - the guy in the mirror every AM will know what you did, and more often than not, history will as well. Bravo Zulu Heinz.
The line between hero and traitor can be a thin one.
The important thing for anyone is to know what the answer is from the person in front of the mirror tomorrow morning - or the man a few decades later.
Heinz/Henri slept well I think.
A renegade former member of Germany's World War Two navy, who thwarted plans to wreck the French port of Bordeaux by retreating Nazi forces, has died at the age of 91, officials said.
Heinz Stahlschmidt was serving as a petty officer in the Kriegsmarine when he was ordered to help prepare the destruction of the southwestern city's port facilities as the Germans pulled out ahead of advancing allied troops.
Instead, he set off an explosion in the bunker holding detonators and time fuses for the planned demolition, preventing mass carnage in the port area and, according to some historians, possibly saving up to 3,500 lives.
Stahlschmidt, who was long considered a traitor in postwar Germany, stayed in Bordeaux, taking the name Henri Salmide and working in the port fire department. But he struggled for a long time to win recognition in his adopted country.
Rest in peace. You did good in a way few can in life - especially in the time you lived in.
Yes, I get bored with thumping this drum ... OK, I don't. We need to drag this out on a regular basis as an example to others. "See what they did with LCS, well ... don't do that." For the new readers, you can click the LCS tag for ~ a decade of commentary on this Little Crappy Ship if you wish. Yes, good people in hard jobs are doing the best they can to make something out of this - but it is an exercise in institutional de-optimization that didn't have to be, except that we followed the path of loyalty to personalities pushing ahistoric and fanciful theories, vice loyalty to institutions and proven requirements. BTW - I'd really like to see that report non-FOUO'd now that Tony Capaccio at Bloomberg has it.
U.S. Navy officers in the Pacific fleet say the service’s Littoral Combat Ship may lack the speed, range and electronic warfare capabilities needed to operate in Asian waters, according to a congressional audit.
“Several 7th Fleet officials told us they thought the LCS in general might be better suited to operations” in the smaller Persian Gulf, the U.S. Government Accountability Office said in a 56-page report, labeled “For Official Use Only,” obtained by Bloomberg News.
...
The Navy should consider buying fewer of the ships if its limitations prevent effective use in the Pacific, according to the report by GAO, Congress’s watchdog agency. The report follows others that have questioned the cost, mission and survivability in combat of the ship that’s designed to operate in shallow coastal waters.
...
The first two vessels -- one from each maker -- are overweight, resulting in “not meeting performance requirements” for endurance or sprinting over 40 knots (74 kilometers per hour), the GAO said.
“This situation has led the Navy to accept lower than minimum requirements” on the two ships, the report said.
...
The GAO reviewed the 10-month deployment to Singapore last year of the USS Freedom, a ship built by Bethesda, Maryland-based Lockheed.
...
The Freedom’s stay was marred by 55 days lost due to mechanical problems with gears, hydraulics, generators and water jets, “which is a significant portion of its” deployment, the agency said.
In a tough position, I think this PAO played the ball as best that could be,
Lieutenant Caroline Hutcheson, a Navy spokeswoman, said in an e-mailed statement that the service was aware the report was coming out and expects “it to cover areas already being collaboratively addressed by the Navy and industry.”
“We continuously refine and test the LCS program to learn the full extent of possibilities for these first-of-a-kind ships,” she said. “We’ve incorporated engineering modifications which improve performance and continue to look at the concept of employment, as exemplified” by a recent war game.
Another example in the civilian world of the racial self-identification fraud that is far from the exception - especially when one takes in to consideration so many of us who are mixed race. This, however, is along the lines of the well-off now (Ret.) USN Rear Admiral of German extraction who happens to call Puerto Rico home and claims to be Hispanic ... and the other USN Rear Admiral who grew up in the leafy suburbs in DC with a nice Anglo-Saxon name and whose had a grandparent from the Texas border area ... so claimed to be Hispanic as well. Yea, those guys and more who played it for all it was worth. Those are pillars of virtue compared to this guy. Behold the fruits of perverse incentive.
On numerous occasions this column has given shout outs to the quality journalism published in the Indianapolis Business Journal.
And this week is no exception. A front page story by IBJ’s Managing Editor Cory Schouten reports the machinations and political logrolling by Ersal Ozdemir, a politically connected businessman, who’s used his connections to garner millions in tax benefits and subsidies for a variety of projects throughout Indianapolis.
These types of business-meets-politician deals happen in cities all over.
But what makes the deals of Ozdemir and his main business Keystone Construction of great interest to our African-American community is that his business has been certified as a minority-owned business by both the City of Indianapolis and the State of Indiana.
Just one problem – Ozdemir isn’t a minority, based upon the commonly accepted definitions of minority-owned businesses (MBE).
Ozdemir is a native of Mersin, Turkey, a town on the Mediterrean Sea.
According to IBJ, Ozdemir applied to the city as an MBE business, but was turned down in 2010. Under existing laws, individuals from Turkey aren’t considered one of the minority groups – Black/African-American, Asian, Hispanic, and American Indian, defined by the feds, state and city.
But, according to IBJ, Ozdemir appealed saying that because Turkey is located both in Europe and Asia; he should be considered “Asian” and thus a minority.
In a zero sum game where preferential treatment is given on the basis of self-identified racial and ethnic groups, the theft that is self-identification fraud is encouraged and rewarded. The incentives are perverse and for those of mixed race background, the structure is illogical and in many ways immoral. The whole structure is wormed.
You have a senior leader who had a regular habit of using his position of authority, it is alleged in many cases and in some places proved, in order to engage in sexual activity with his junior employes and in some cases, their wives and girlfriends. In the course of an official investigation, he lied about it under oath. His lies were so over the top and brazen, he lost his law license over it. In light of the exceptional effort to make sure future leaders understand that sexual misconduct - especially between senior personnel and junior personnel - will not be tolerated, and wanting to make sure that in a profession where your word is your bond, and your oaths sacred, who do we put forth as an example?
As Naval Academy Superintendent Vice Adm. Mike Miller, USN said:
"I will hold accountable those who are found to have committed these heinous acts...As superintendent, I want to ensure that all midshipmen have confidence that the Naval Academy will address and appropriately resolve all incidents of sexual harassment and unwanted sexual contact. Most importantly, I want to ensure that everyone at the Naval Academy continues to promote a positive command climate where this type of behavior is immediately identified and ultimately eliminated. As an institution producing future leaders for the Navy and Marine Corps, nothing is more important than instilling and maintaining a climate where all midshipmen always treat one another – and expect to be treated – with dignity and respect."
OK. Words are one thing; deeds are another. I'll let ya'll fight it out, but I have a word for you - politics. Another word: shame. Here; bask in it. The visuals are so gobsmacking that I couldn't have made it up if I wanted to.
Former President William J. Clinton will deliver a Forrestal Lecture to the Brigade of Midshipmen as a part of the 54th Annual Naval Academy Foreign Affairs Conference today in Alumni Hall at the academy.
You can officially stop lecturing your MIDN every other day via the SAPR rep. Your credibility is shot on this issue. I really hope this was a Staff failure that was so far down the pipe, no pun intended, that by the time VADM Miller found out, he could "not" stop it without that act itself being political. Well, that is hope - in a fashion. We know what track record that has. What I want to know is this; who started the ball rolling for this invitation? What is their job now? Have they read any newspaper after 2000 outside the Style Section?
A third level topic here continues to be the importance of education. We've seen it in the Fleet and we see it at parties and family gatherings - blazing examples of the failure of the US public education system. With rare exceptions, the public education system and its social promotion and social experimentation ethos has created a mass of ignorant and mal-educated citizens. Poorly educated voters is a cancer to any republic. Long gone are the public education systems where, even in a poor Mississippi county, Mother Salamander could get an education that would lead her to the front of her generation of women in her field. We could go on and on ... but let's look at where we are now. One of the first places in the last 40-years that the professional educators decided to gut was geography. That, along with history and the classics, are the foundation for understanding how the world works and where a nation such as ours should comport itself. Why does something as simple as geography matter? Kyle Dropp at WaPo outlines the problem quite well for us. To make it extra sexy for your humble blogg'r, he talks statistics like he knows it;
On March 28-31, 2014, we asked a national sample of 2,066 Americans (fielded via Survey Sampling International Inc. (SSI), what action they wanted the U.S. to take in Ukraine, but with a twist: In addition to measuring standard demographic characteristics and general foreign policy attitudes, we also asked our survey respondents to locate Ukraine on a map as part ... Survey respondents identified Ukraine by clicking on a high-resolution world map, shown above. We then created a distance metric by comparing the coordinates they provided with the actual location of Ukraine on the map. ... About one in six (16 percent) Americans correctly located Ukraine, clicking somewhere within its borders. Most thought that Ukraine was located somewhere in Europe or Asia, but the median respondent was about 1,800 miles off — roughly the distance from Chicago to Los Angeles — locating Ukraine somewhere in an area bordered by Portugal on the west, Sudan on the south, Kazakhstan on the east, and Finland on the north.
...
Information, or the absence thereof, can influence Americans’ attitudes about the kind of policies they want their government to carry out and the ability of elites to shape that agenda. Accordingly, we also asked our respondents a variety of questions about what they thought about the current situation on the ground, and what they wanted the United States to do. Similarly to other recent polls, we found that although Americans are undecided on what to do with Ukraine, they are more likely to oppose action in Ukraine the costlier it is — 45 percent of Americans supported boycotting the G8 summit, for example, while only 13 percent of Americans supported using force.
However, the further our respondents thought that Ukraine was from its actual location, the more they wanted the U.S. to intervene militarily. Even controlling for a series of demographic characteristics and participants’ general foreign policy attitudes, we found that the less accurate our participants were, the more they wanted the U.S. to use force, the greater the threat they saw Russia as posing to U.S. interests, and the more they thought that using force would advance U.S. national security interests; all of these effects are statistically significant at a 95 percent confidence level. Our results are clear, but also somewhat disconcerting: The less people know about where Ukraine is located on a map, the more they want the U.S. to intervene militarily.
After the government decided it needed to put me on a bus for two hours a day so someone in Washington DC could experiment with people's lives, I was about seven my Mom and her significant intellect went to work full time so I could go to private school, and I was a latchkey my entire youth, so ... yea - I have a bit of attitude on the topic. I didn't have a mother at home because in the Space Age, our educational system couldn't produce what she had in the the middle of a World War. I still hold most, not all, public school districts with the utmost contempt with their layers of bureaucracy, teaching school theories that fail, social promotion, and warped priorities. The ones who are more interested in protecting union members than educating the next generation of voters, they hold the power in most areas - forcing those who can to take what little disposable income they have, or sending mothers back in to the workforce, just so their kids can have a good education. Ignorance gets people killed - and when ignorance masses, nothing good ever happens.
By now, the Navy brass have surely gotten tired of GAO taking shots at LCS. But according to GAO, LCS sailors are getting literally tired of the ship: They averaged about six hours of sleep per day, 25 percent below the Navy’s eight-hour standard, and key personnel such as engineers got even less. That’s in spite of extensive reliance on contractors both aboard and ashore, with a “rigid” schedule of monthly returns to Singapore that restricted how far from port the LCS could sail; the decision to increase Freedom‘s core crew by 25 percent, from 40 to 50 — the maximum the ship can accommodate without a “significant” redesign; and the 19-sailor “mission module” crew, who are supposed to operate LCS’s weapons, helicopters, and small boats, pitching in daily to help the core crew run the ship’s basic systems.
The core crew’s engineering department in particular told GAO they had no idea how they’d keep the ship going without help from the mission module’s engineers. But the module the Freedom took to Singapore, the “anti-surface warfare” module that includes several small boats, has many more engineers than the forthcoming mine-countermeasures and anti-submarine warfare modules. In fact, while the entire 19-sailor anti-surface module crew has skills useful in running the ship itself, the MCM crew has only four sailors who could help, and the ASW module only one. That means an LCS outfitted to hunt mines or subs would effectively be 15 to 18 sailors short — about 20 to 25 percent.
Yes, yes, yes ... all very nice to hear again. The Front Porch circa 2005 says "hello," but Sid isn't impressed ... however, that is not the most important part of Sydney's article. Well, as we have seen as of late, the overcaffinated alter-boys from the LCS Cargo Cult have their rapid response team on short-standby - and they did not let Sydney and the GAO's blasphemy stand for too long.
This afternoon, Navy spokesman Lt. Robert Myers provided us the service’s official response to our story:
“While I won’t speak to an unreleased, FOUO [for official use only] report what I can say is the Navy is continuously refining and testing the LCS program as we learn the full extent of possibilities for these first of a kind ships. Each successive LCS commissioning is a testament to the hard work and experience gained from Freedom’s deployment to Singapore. We have incorporated engineering modifications which improve performance and we continue to look at the concept of employment, as exemplified by the recent war game in Newport.”
Ummm, ok. Thank you for the latest edition of the "LCS PAO Random Response Generator." That isn't, again, the important part of the story. (Yes, I am dragging this out) Let us revisit Rear Admiral Rowden from last week,
“The ships we are playing are the ships we are building today,” says Rear Adm. Thomas Rowden, director of surface warfare.
Drum roll please, and cue to the camera to Sydney;
One thing I was able to find out is that the wargame doesn’t seem to have any computer models or simulations of the LCS performance, with the outcome of combats between the “Blue” (US) and “Red” (enemy) teams being determined by human umpires known as the “White Cell.” So while the wargame was a great venue for exploring concepts, as Lt. Myers said, it doesn’t prove anything about the Littoral Combat Ship’s real-world performance.
Glory, glory, glory. Nice. Very nice. LT Myers, Rear Admiral Rowden's PAO is one the line and would like to speak with you.
As with most concepts and good ideas, you really don't know what you need and how you need to do it until you put Sailors to task and head to sea. The idea of an Afloat Forward Staging Base has, in a variety of forms, been a regular part of naval operations arguably for centuries under different names and with different equipment. What about the 21st Century? More than just a story about the use and utility of the AFSB concept, the story of the USS PONCE is larger than that - it also has a lot to say about how one can quickly turn an old LPD around for a new mission, and how you can blend together the different but complementary cultures of the US Navy Sailors and the Military Sealift Command civilian mariners. Our guest for the full hour this Sunday from 5-6pm Eastern to discuss this and more will Captain Jon P. Rogers, USN, former Commanding Officer of the USS PONCE AFSB(I)-15.
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.
