Cosby, Justice, and the Morality of Blood Sacrifice

When we use the phrase, "In the finest traditions ..." what tradition are we using?

Have we adopted some of the traditions, habits, and sense of justice of a totalitarian society - or do we maintain the traditions of a representative republic based on the rule of law?

Are we erring on the side of the values that make our nation unique, or are we making decisions based on less honorable reasons?

I'm trying to get my head around some sadly disturbing responses from out Navy specifically around Bill Cosby - but this is about a lot more than him.

Come join me over at USNIBlog and let me know your thoughts.

Fullbore Friday

Just finished the Norwegian campaign part of William L. Shirer's, The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich: A History of Nazi Germany, and was reminded of one of my favorite FbF. So, an encore this week - and well worth it.

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Time to revisit the first Battle of Narvik. The reason is that I think we need to look at some of the lessons we can glean from the HNoMS Norge and HNoMS Eidsvold. We learned some good things that you must and can do, even with old equipment, from the Norwegians at the Battle of Oslo - but further north at Narvik, the other side of the coin is sadly obvious - to not to try to learn from their mistakes is to ignore their sacrifice.

The destroyers, moving closer to Narvik, were spotted by Norwegian vessels, which promptly reported the sighting and alerted the old coastal defence ships HNoMS Eidsvold and HNoMS Norge. Both Norwegian ships prepared for combat: the guns were loaded and life preservers issued to the crew. Around 04:15am, the Germans spotted Eidsvold, and Eidsvold immediately signalled the leading German destroyer with an aldis lamp. When the Germans failed to respond to the signal, a warning shot was fired across their bow while the Eidsvold flew a two flag signal, ordering the destroyer to halt.

The Germans had orders to occupy Norway peacefully if at all possible, so the German flagship Wilhelm Heidkamp stopped and signalled that it would send an officer to negotiate. From a distance of about 200 metres, a small launch ferried Korvettenkapitän (lieutenant commander) Gerlach over to Eidsvold. Gerlach and a signalman were taken to the bridge to speak to Captain Willoch. At the same time, the gun crews of both the 21 cm guns and the 15 cm guns aboard Eidsvold kept the German destroyer in their sights, at point-blank range.

Gerlach tried to convince Willoch that the Germans had arrived as friends and that Willoch should surrender peacefully. Willoch pointed out that he was bound by duty to resist, but asked for a ten-minute break to consider the matter. He used this time to contact his superiors, including the captain of Norge, further inside the fjord, informing them of his intent to engage the German forces. In the meantime, a second German destroyer crossed behind Eidsvold and took up a position 700 metres from the vessel, ready to fire her torpedoes.

Gerlach tried once again to convince Willoch to surrender, but Willoch refused. As Gerlach left Eidsvold, he fired a red flare, indicating that the Norwegians intended to fight. At this point, Captain Willoch shouted: "På plass ved kanonene. Nå skal vi slåss, gutter!" ("Man the guns. We're going to fight, boys!").[3] Eidsvold turned towards the closest destroyer and accelerated, while the battery commander ordered the port battery (three 15 cm guns) to open fire.

The Germans, afraid that Eidsvold might ram the destroyer, fired two or four torpedoes from Wilhelm Heidkamp at the old ship. Two or three of the torpedoes hit before the port guns could fire, according to Norwegian sources: one under the rear turret, one midship and one in the bow. It is likely that the torpedoes ignited one of the magazines aboard, because Eidsvold was blown in two and sank in seconds around 04:37am, propellers still turning. Only six of the crew were rescued by the Germans, 175 died in the freezing water.

Deeper inside the fjord, the explosions were heard aboard Norge, but nothing could be seen until two German destroyers suddenly appeared out of the darkness and Captain Per Askim of Norge gave orders to open fire at 04:45am. Four rounds were fired from the 21 cm guns (one from the fore gun and three from the aft) as well as seven or eight rounds from the starboard 15 cm guns, against the German destroyer Bernd von Arnim, at a range of about 800 metres. Due to the difficult weather conditions, the guns' optical sights were ineffective: the first salvo fell short of the target and the next ones overshot it.

The German destroyers waited until they were alongside the pier before returning fire. Bernd von Armin opened fire with her 12.7 cm (5 inch) guns as well as with machine guns, but the weather gave the Germans problems as well. The destroyer also fired three salvos of two torpedoes each. The first two salvos missed, but the last struck Norge midships and she sank in less than one minute. 90 of the crew were rescued, but 101 perished in the battle which had lasted less than 20 minutes. The destruction of Norge signaled the end of Norwegian resistance in the port.

What are your ROE? Are you ready to make the call a warfighter is paid to make? You? Do you demand perfect information to defend your nation?

Are your Sailors as trained on their weapons as they need to be? Damage control? Combat readiness? Balls?

To learn and see more, there are good pics of some of the ships from the various Battles of Narvik can be found here, and other of my posts on Narvik here.

Hug your gun a little closer .... F-35B/C, I'm talking to you.

It is rather hard to jam lead;

The problem is that many potential adversaries, such as the Chinese and the Russians, have developed advanced digital radio frequency memory (DRFM) jammers. These jammers, which effectively memorize an incoming radar signal and repeat it back to the sender, seriously hamper the performance of friendly radars.

Worse, these new jammers essentially blind the small radars found onboard air-to-air missiles like the Raytheon AIM-120 AMRAAM, which is the primary long-range weapon for all U.S. and most allied fighter planes.

That means it could take several missile shots to kill an enemy fighter, even for an advanced stealth aircraft like the Raptor. “While exact Pk [probability of kill] numbers are classified, let’s just say that I won’t be killing these guys one for one,” the senior Air Force official said. It’s the “same issue” for earlier American fighters like the F-15, F-16, or F/A-18.

Another Air Force official with experience on the stealthy new F-35 Joint Strike Fighter agreed. “AMRAAM’s had some great upgrades over the years, but at the end of the day, it’s old technology and wasn’t really designed with today’s significant EA in mind,” this official said.

Good reporting or bad ... good to ponder your planning assumptions.

Diversity Thursday

Glory, glory, glory ... Plan Salamander is going along just fine, thank you. We're going to punk their system one love story and one bedroom at a time. Via TNR;

The usual way that race labels are applied in the United States in everyday parlance and in government statistics fail to capture a phemenon poised to reshape how race is actually lived in America: the increase in multiracial marriages and births, which almost certainly will lead to more blended populations in future generations. As this trend continues, it will blur the racial fault lines of the last half of the twentieth century. The nation is not there yet. But the evidence for multiracial marriages and multiracial individual identity shows an unmistakable softening of boundaries that should lead to new ways of thinking about racial populations and race-related issues.

I've said it before, I'll say it again; our Navy used to lead the nation in race relations, but we are stuck in 1970s race theory due to retrograde political pressure and a lot of people's paychecks that require the ongoing sectarianism and promotion of difference that is the Diversity Industry and the Navy's little corner of it.

If you cannot be of one race - then you aren't one and as a result you have the elimination of race (one person at a time to start) - you just are. Unless of course you want to follow the KKK's "one drop rule" or if you look at human beings like the American Kennel Club looks at dogs, this is the reality that needs to be accepted.

We are better, and the human condition is much too rich for us to default to that one drop rule - but many still do. That is changing.

Sociologists have viewed multiracial marriage as a benchmark for the ultimate stage of assimilation of a particular group into society. For that to occur, members of the group will already have reached other milestones: facility with a common language, similar levels of education, regular interaction in the workplace and community, and, especially, some level of residential integration. This is what we saw with European immigrants from Italy, Poland, and Russia in the last century. After decades of being kept at arm’s length by “old” European groups such as those from Britain, Germany, and Scandinavia, the newer arrivals finally began to intermarry with the more established ethnic groups as they became more upwardly mobile and geographically dispersed. Hispanics and Asians differ from white Europeans, of course—most significantly, for these purposes, Americans tend to view them as racial groups rather than ethnic groups. And race divisions, especially between whites and blacks, have historically been far less permeable. So the blending of today’s new racial minorities through multiracial marriage is breaking new ground.

Here is where we can all contribute.

Using the rule that we have documented here, many Flag Officers and others have used to designate themselves - on very thin terms - as a part of a "minority group" - most of us can click more than one box. Heck, the Salamander younger generation can click three if they want with a clear conscience.

That or we can follow the Jim Webb faction and just put in "American."

Heck, if we follow Sen. Warren (D-MA) lead, almost everyone can click one or many different boxes.

Punk the system;

A second reason why the multiracial population may be going undercounted is that the single racial status of children is often determined by the adult who fills out the census form. Research suggests that in identifying the race of their children, multiracial couples often select single-race identities that they believe will be more socially acceptable or will better prepare their children for success. This, of course, may change as these children come of age and begin defining themselves. President Barack Obama, the child of a multiracial marriage, announced through his spokesperson that he identified himself as “black” rather than “white and black” on his 2010 census form. It is likely, however, that younger and future generations of Americans from multiracial families will be more likely to embrace their heritage.

If their metrics are all akimbo, then they can't use them. If they can't use them, they can't do their job. If they can't do their job, they get desperate. If they get desperate, they let the mask slip. When they let the mask slip, the Diversity Bullies show what they are - bitter filled racialists. Once the mask slips, so does their credibility. Once their credibility goes, so does their power.

That doesn't mean even those with little credibility and full of hateful bile won't have some influence - but they will be at the margins more and more each year as this nation progresses towards a truly color-neutral ethos.

We have a way to go - but let not your heart be troubled, we'll get there.

Moran, Foggo and an Economist Walk in to a Bar ...

Sam LaGrone over at USNINews did a great job with an interview recently with Vice Adm. Bill Moran, USN, Deputy Chief of Naval Operations for Manpower, Personnel, Training and Education (N1).

Sam lays out a great series of question in an wide-ranging interview that covers retention, education, and trying to work with a personnel systems that is almost designed to prevent positive change.

You need to read it all, but here is one item that got my attention:

What we don’t have are the clear signals of when it’s going to occur. I have an economist now working for me and he understands that . . . [we should know] where this storm is heading, when we think it will come to shore, what’s the intensity level and what can we do to prepare and have policy?

This goes back to [identifying] what polices we need to have in our quiver to be able to attack retention in sectors that will really hurt the Navy if we aren’t smart about it.

Earlier this year in San Diego, I had the opportunity to steal a few moments with RADM (soon to be VADM) James G. Foggo, III. One of the topics we discussed was something I have been an advocate of for a very long time - we need to have economists on staff to help with planning and understanding some of the complex issues we are dealing with. Foggo gets it - and it seems Moran does as well. Our Navy will be better off for it. Nice.

I already had a good opinion of Moran - it just grew to another level.

In a larger context, he outlines where he is watching closely for high-impact retention problems. In part;

We’re seeing the senior leaders starting to retire earlier than they have in the past. I think that’s in recognition of how hard they’ve fought for the last 13 years. Lots of deployments, lots of time away from family.

It’s not necessarily a big problem except there’s a lot of combat experience that’s walking out the door that we don’t want to lose.
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On the aviation side [there’s] not too much trouble yet on retention. The one bubble we’ve seen here in the last couple of years is retaining . . . those coming right out of command and reaching their 20-year mark.

Rather than sticking around and competing for captain and follow-on command opportunities . . . [they’re] retiring earlier than we’d like. We’ve recently reestablished a bonus for those guys to help incentivize them to stay around.

The surface nuke community is clearly the most challenging in terms of keeping the junior officers and experienced enlisted nukes in.
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You’re always up against the bureaucracy and the laws and statutes of personnel policy that haven’t changed significantly since World War II.

There is more, much more.

Personnel policy is the "entering argument" for almost all we do. If we get that right, it has a knock-on effect throughout the Fleet. If we dork it up, the damage is exceptionally difficult to mitigate or recover from.

One final note; I would be remiss in my duties and not a typically narcissistic blogg'r if I didn't bring up this pull-quote;

USNI News: Which blogs do you read?

Moran: Oh, man! Should I even go there?

Actually [N1 Public Affairs], scours the blogs and sends me links to ones from which he sees some areas to harvest good ideas. I’ve been on [CDR Salamander] a couple of times, I watch that from time to time. I don’t want to leave you with the impression that I spend a good part of my day on these things—but when there’s one [the Public Affairs team] says, “Hey, you probably should take a look at this,” [I’ll take a look at it].

I tell them to bring me the criticisms, don’t bring me—and there isn’t much of it—praise. I want to see where the criticism is and see what’s making people’s heads hurt.

I have become somewhat of a believer that in the blogosphere you’ll get a lot of the critics and rarely do you get people that are as thoughtful.

But still the [blogs] are data points for me to make sure we’re addressing some of that criticism.

Always thankful for the mention - you can hear EagleOne and my interviews with VADM Moran on Midrats here and here.

It is interesting to see leadership doing their best to get their head around this new-ish part of the information/media ecosystem. He is right, blogs can be a source of a lot of heat and not much light - but that is their job - and as a wide-open medium, it takes time and effort by the consumer to break the wheat from the chaff. That is its strength. It truly is the marketplace of ideas in all its glorious inefficiencies, anarchy - and as a result - value.

Where the blogosphere gains its greatest utility is when it functions as a collective, self-policing, and re-generating idea generation and perspective provider. It really is just another part of the media environment - just a little more chaotic and untrainable. It is a way to get a different, often unfiltered, view of opinions and ideas that may not make it through the filters others have put in between senior leadership and the deckplates. Not their fault, it just is.

In the solo-blog format (old school, not the magazine or group-blog format), EagleOne, Steeljaw, and myself have been at it for a decade with others, while newer Navy bloggers such as AskSkipper and TheGreenieBoard have joined in with some superb content and discussion. Each one brings a different voice to a crowd-sourced intellectual churn that keeps out little pond healthy.

We're all glad that CNP has a chance to see what breaks above the background noise. If nothing else, reminds me to try to edit my work better. 

The Terrible 20s meet the Tiffany Navy

As the regulars here and over at Midrats know - we've been hitting one constant note for the last decade - the music will stop. We've gone from 78 to 45 rpm and are about to find ourselves at 33.

After all the happy-talk, the hours of PPT, the endless iterations of taking the best case scenario - and even more often; shifting the truth telling and hard decisions to many PCS cycles down the road for others to fix - after all that: we have the macro-economic pressures of the national debt on one end, the sadly predictable results of an exquisitely designed Tiffany Navy in the middle, and the looming requirements for the recapitalization of the SSBN on the other end.

Over at DefenseOne, our friend Jerry Hendrix takes those to school who have not been paying attention, and reviews the fundamentals for those who have. He knows the topic well; priorities.

For almost a decade the Navy’s annual shipbuilding budget has hovered around $14 billion in adjusted dollars within an overall budget of $160 billion. But beginning in fiscal year 2020, the Navy will request an additional $5 billion dollars per year to pay for submarines to replace the 14 Ohio-class ballistic missile “Boomer” submarines that have been performing nuclear deterrence patrols since 1982 and are set to begin retiring in 2027.

You cannot have your cake and eat it too. There really are only three choices. All have their costs, but to pick the least painful you have to set your priorities.

In a fiscally constrained era there are three options. The first is to ask President Obama and members of Congress to increase the Navy’s budget to create a separate funding scheme for the Boomers.
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The second approach would be for the defense secretary to redistribute funds within the defense budget.
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The third approach would be for the Navy to pay for its new submarines out of its own resources.

Which is the right choice? Watch Congress.

From here - this is where I see the the three "Jerry Courses of Action."

Ideal is COA 1, but it is the most unlikely.

The best hope is COA 2, but that would take just the right combination of a strong SECDEF and House and Senate leaders who can make hard decisions with a long view. Ahem.

Sadly, it is COA 3 that the Navy must plan for. Hope for COA 2, but be ready for COA 3. If the stars align just right, you might get COA 1 after the 2016 elections - but to play for that is folly.

The need for a replacement for the Ohio-class ballistic missile submarines is undeniable. The strategic deterrence mission, although little understood or appreciated by the American people, is, as the CNO stated, the number one priority of the Navy in that it ensures the survival of the Republic. However, the challenge of finding the money to pay for these new boats is largely self-imposed. For 10 years the Navy planned to buy a fleet of sports cars like Arleigh Burke class destroyers, even where mission requirements called for pickups, all the while ignoring that there would be a mortgage payment coming due at the same time.

The Navy needs to move quickly to reorder its priorities. If strategic deterrence is our primary mission, then funding the next submarine for that mission is the first priority. We have to pay the mortgage. It’s common sense.

Yes it is.

If we happy-talk ourselves in to planning for COA 1 or 2, then we are repeating the mindset that got us to where we are today, and reality will hit our Navy up side the head.

Let's go back to the start of our Terrible 20s discussion here relative to SSBN back in FEB 2010. Almost half a decade ago, but it still applies - to quote myself;

If you continue to assume that CG(X) is dead, then you might get funding for the much needed DDG(X) follow-on for the DDG-51 class - might. That will be requested in light of the SSBN money sponge - and I don't see how with all the other needs in the 20's, we will be able to afford both a DDG(X) and a CG(X) - and there is a good chance that we will simply have to live with DDG-51 Flight III as our "new" platform through the beginning of the mid-21st Century.

I know that looking into the future is a fuzzy hobby. Heck, if you outlined in 2000 where we were in 2010 people would have said you were a nutty pessimist - so we can only see 2020 in very large, fuzzy pixels. The beginning of the mid-century (2030) is just a silly exercise in many ways - but one that needs to be done. There are known-knowns (DDG-1000 will be a rump, expensive class of ships, Ticos history, DDG-51 backbone, LCS decomm'n like flies), known-unknowns (will LCS even meet some of its promised ability and numbers, will DDG(X) be moving forward), and unknown-unknowns (Black Swan events), but still - 2020 is closer than we think, and there are economic facts that need to be looked at.

Huge challenge, one whose source is the lost decade we just came out of. You know, that "transformational" decade. The one that was to build the Fleet of the future. Well, it sure did, didn't it?

Look at what the Royal Navy is dealing with today, and it isn't a stretch to see similar challenges for ourselves. Look and learn - and perhaps we can mitigate the pain.

We'll be blogg'n about the 20's a lot down the road; let's call this an introduction to the Terrible 20's.

We are roughly halfway to 2020 from the time the above was blogg'd. So far, so pathetically on course.

I hope that very smart people in the right places with access to levers of power are listening to Jerry and others along the same lines. We have simply pissed away half a decade plus on vanity projects, bad theory, and worse program management - all in a vacuum missing updated, meaningfully effective, and actionable vision.

Miles to go, miles to go.

So, are you enjoying your cheaper gasoline?

In diverse economies, shifts in the price of oil can have an economic impact in the positive or negative direction, depending on the direction of the change. That can supply joy, or discomfort and dislocation.

In petro-economies, often in nations that are not politically and culturally stable, the "good" times can promote cash fueled aggression and radicalism, and the "bad" create instability that is far more complicated and unpredictable.

The rich can be erratic and are drawn to flights of fancy; poor and desperate people are dangerous.

Two articles on the subject are worth your time to start the month. The first I quibble a bit here and there about, but on balance good stuff to chew on. The second are just facts and graphs - stuff I like to get nakid and roll around in. Some of the data in the second conflict with the opinion in the first - so keep that in mind.

First from the problematic but well-versed Juan Cole;

It is clear that among the major losers in the fall in the price of Brent crude petroleum from $115 a barrel last summer to about $75 a barrel today are Russia, Iraq and Iran. Petroleum sales are 50% of Russia’s income, and are also central for Iran and Iraq.
But the big loser will likely be shale oil producers and prospectors in the US, who probably cannot make a profit if the price falls into the 60s.
The cause of the fall, by $40 a barrel, in petroleum prices since last summer is almost completely on the demand side. Asian economies, especially China, are dramatically slowing, and won’t be requiring as much petroleum to fuel trucks, trains and cars to deliver people and goods around the country.
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It isn’t that there is more oil being pumped, it is that the world doesn’t want it as much because of cooling economies.
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The Iraqi government of Haydar al-Abadi will also have much less income with which to fight Daesh/ ISIL.
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Saudi Arabia did not cause the oil price fall, though since 2011 it has been flooding the market to offset the decrease in Iranian exports because of US sanctions. Riyadh, however, is the main geopolitical winner here, which is why the Saudis stopped the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries from reducing country production quotas. (That step would have reduced supply and put up prices). As it is, the Saudis can afford to wait as fracked oil is driven out of the market because too expensive, so that they regain their market share.
The Saudis must enjoy punishing Iran and Russia for defying them by propping up the Bashar al-Assad regime in Damascus and the Da’wa Shiite regime in Baghdad.
...Saudi Arabia, Iran, Russia and North Dakota are all up the creek in the medium term. But for the latter three, which have complex economies and in the case of Russia and Iran, sizeable populations, the economic benefit of inexpensive renewable electriicity will likely outweigh the loss of oil income. Everywhere, renewables are likely to put money and power in the pockets of ordinary people and workers, and may spell a weakening of the oil-based rentier state.
Saudi Arabia should enjoy its brief moment of triumph. Its business model is actually a dinosaur, as is that of the rivals it is punishing.

I've used a few of the graphics from the second article I'd like you to review, from Pat Minczeski and Sarah Kent at the WSJ. Spend some time there pondering.

…but the Saudis depend less on high oil prices to balance their budget than some OPEC countries. 

Breakeven price per barrel for crude oil in 2015 for select OPEC producers