Diversity Thursday

The cancer of identity politics, where politicians and professional agitators earn their living by dividing the people in to small, easily manipulated sectarian groups, is a common feature in much of the West but especially in the Anglosphere.

In this video from Australia, the author outlines a lot of the issues we've raised here over the years. It is both encouraging and discouraging. Give it a watch.

Budget Smudget

The VCNO has put out a few markers on the budget. 

Catch the details over at USNIBlog.

The IPs Revolt

When you can't breath, nothing else matters.

Take your stereotypical Naval Aviator; cocky, aggressive, devil-may-care, hour-hounding etc, etc ... now double it.

That is your standard issue Navy Instructor Pilot. More often than not, the top pilots coming out of their first tour go on to some kind of billet as an Instructor Pilot at their FRS or a VT squadron.

Keep that in mind.

Via Lucas Tomlinson, the Pentagon and State Department producer for Fox News, this is something.

More than 100 U.S. Navy instructor pilots are refusing to fly in protest of what they say is the refusal of top brass to adequately address an urgent problem with training jets’ oxygen system, multiple instructor pilots tell Fox News.

The boycott started late last week and has effectively grounded hundreds of training flights.

“The pilots don’t feel safe flying this aircraft,” one instructor pilot told Fox News.
…
Vice Adm. Mike Shoemaker, head of naval aviation, told Fox News in an exclusive interview that the training jet issue is the “number one safety priority” across naval aviation right now.

“Right now we don't have the smoking gun,” he cautioned.
In the last five years, physiological episodes, caused in part by problems with the oxygen system, have nearly quadrupled on the T-45 training jet,
…

Last week, a student from training squadron VT-86 in Pensacola, Fla., had to be “dragged out” of his jet because he became “incapacitated” from the faulty oxygen system, according to two flight instructors.

In March, a British exchange instructor pilot with thousands of hours in the cockpit had to conduct an emergency landing during a training flight near Meridian, Miss., after both he and his student experienced hypoxic symptoms.

In August, a flight instructor and his student were forced to eject near Kingsville, Texas, when they felt symptoms of hypoxia, crashing the multi-million dollar jet.  Both pilots ejected safely and were not seriously injured.

Last month, there were 10 episodes in T-45s, according to Shoemaker.

Anticipating the pilot protest, the Navy sent a team of engineers and other specialists this week to its T-45 training bases in Kingsville, Meridian and Pensacola for talks with the pilots.

A meeting Tuesday in Meridian “got heated,” Fox News is told.  The pilots told the civilians from Navy Air Systems Command their complaints about the oxygen system were being ignored. When a senior Navy pilot showed photos of a faulty oxygen system he claimed had been sent up to NAVAIR’s headquarters in Maryland, the engineers said they never received the photos.

Navy spokeswoman Cmdr. Jeannie Groeneveld acknowledged that 40 percent of instructor pilots refused to fly their training flights Friday. A flight instructor said the number was closer to 75 percent, because the Navy reduced the flight schedule knowing more than half the pilots would refuse to fly.

Shoemaker said following a meeting in Kingsville, flights there had resumed.  

Navy IPs are not drama mamas. They are not type-B personalities who look for excuses not to fly. They do not make stuff up except for liberty stories.

...and JOPA ain't changed;

I don't think this is a helpful response;

“We have been working this for five, six years now to try to get to the bottom of this,” one official said.

Both officials acknowledged “communication problems” between the upper echelon of the Navy and the instructors.

Six months ago, the Navy sent the T-45 and other jet squadrons Sorbent tubes to measure the air the pilots were breathing. After each flight, the tubes were sent to a lab in Maryland for analysis. After 1,500 flights worth of air samples, the results remain inconclusive.

“We haven’t come up with anything conclusive … showing a contaminant or something like that,” a senior official said.

The instructor pilots see it differently.

“They sent our squadron six tubes,” one pilot said. “That’s part of the frustration. They are doing the absolute minimum.”

A longer period of time than it took to develop the atomic bomb. Longer to fight WWII.

And yet ...

The dangers with the oxygen system are not limited to the T-45 training jets either. U.S. Navy F/A-18 Hornets have been known to suffer similar problems.

As was stated earlier, this is not a new problem. Bad on me, Meghann Myers at NavyTimes wrote about this 11 months ago;

"There’s only one thing that scares the s--- out of guys that fly the airplane, and it’s OBOGS," the pilot said in an interview.

That day in Nevada, the pilot and the NFO pulled out their backup oxygen bottles, landed the plane and met with the squadron's safety officer to file a report. It turned out, the pilot said, that the jet's OBOGS had stopped producing oxygen. What's more, he added, the filtering material inside the system had just been cleaned and it was the jet's first flight with a fresh oxygen generator.

That was back in 2007, when aviators reported annually a dozen or so reports of physiological episodes — the technical term for the effects when a plane stops producing oxygen, pumps a toxin into the cockpit or loses pressurization.

The rates were troubling. In 2010, Navy aviation pushed to get pilots and aircrew to report every time they thought they'd had an episode. And NAVAIR engineers focused on how to improve OBOGS and the environmental control system — the pieces of the airplane that keep clean, dry air circulating.

Navy officials say it's progress that more fliers are recognizing and reporting physiological episodes. They say the causes of these distressing incidents are varied across the air systems' dozens of components, many of which have been modified and are now being more regularly checked. Meanwhile, engineers work to develop sensors that detect air contamination and low oxygen levels.

The Navy's air warfare director summed up the dilemma in a tense exchange during a February hearing.

"It’s like chasing a ghost," said Rear Adm. Mike "Nasty" Manazir, a career Navy pilot. "You can’t figure it out, because the monitoring devices that do this are not on the airplane."
...
The air flow issues have bedeviled the Navy and Marine Corps' fleet of F/A-18 Hornets, EA-18G Growlers and T-45C Goshawk trainers, all of which use the OBOGS. In the case of air contamination, there are no warning systems to alert the aviators breathing disorienting and potentially deadly gases. Complicating the assessment of the breadth of the incidents is the general reluctance of pilots to report what seem to be physiological problems, which can remove their flight status.

Meanwhile, the reported number of events is skyrocketing. Aviators reported 15 physiological episodes in 2009, concentrated in strike aircraft and the trainer jets that aviators learn on, according to Naval Safety Center data.

By 2015, the fleet reported an eight-fold increase to 115 episodes: 31 in the T-45C Goshawk trainer and 41 in Hornet variants, plus 19 in the EA-18G Growler. The Marines also reported a spike that year, including hypoxia and OBOGS failure in the brand new F-35B joint strike fighters and seven more events involving its legacy Hornets, as the F/A-18 A through D variants are known.
...
"I’ve been flying Navy airplanes since 1982 on oxygen," testified Manazir. "I commanded an F-14 squadron that had OBOGS back in 1998. I have two cruises on that system and I have four cruises on the Super Hornet. I’ve never experienced a hypoxic event."

If the Navy were concerned about the safety of the jets, he added, they would ground the fleet.

But inside ready rooms, his comments landed like a ton of bricks.

"We have definitely upped the reporting since 2010 and it is a huge issue for us," the East Coast pilot said. "In my opinion, the admiral is just lucky that he has never had an incident."

The West Coast pilot shared that disappointment.

"I have a concern. I have a huge concern. Lots of guys have concerns. That’s the perfect time to go, 'We have a problem and we need the funding to get it fixed,' " he said. "If that’s for a media comment, then I get it. But if that’s what he’s really thinking, then I’m disappointed."

The pilot also pointed out that Manazir's timeline suggests his first 16 years flying were with liquid oxygen pumping into his mask, a system which OBOGS replaced.

"I would say, go to his log book and take all of the LOX flights out of there, and those numbers are going to come way down," he said. "We’ve got guys who have never been hypoxic, and guys who have been multiple times."

Her article goes in a to a lot of detail on the OBOGS. Read it all.

I can't get over on how long we are taking to solve this problem. BZ to the IPs for keeping up the pressure.

So, how long would it take and how much money to either convert back to LOX until we ID the problem or fix it like the USAF did with the F-22? Is either an option? 

If not, what is Plan C?

Or are we going to play management for Convair and McDonald-Douglas to Dan Applegate's memo? Just put a price on dead Naval Aviators and figure that is cheaper than fixing a hard problem?

Did the USCG Overplay its Political Hand?

Few things are as hamfisted as Flag Officers who think they have become part of the DC machine and manage to overplay their hand in a way obvious to everyone but themselves.

There is a thin line between getting in alignment with the CINC and being a sycophant. One should and must be in alignment with your CINC, but it takes close attention and a good staff to stay in your lane - as others will encourage you to drift out of your lane for their own political purposes.

The seduction is easy to fall for; from Casey to Hoss to Mullen and Roughead - we've all seen it in its eye-rolling counter-glory.

It is one thing for a GOFO to do it in a way that internalizes the frag pattern, but it can cause significant damage to the service as a whole when we see a leader fly too close to the sun while dragging their service with them.

Did the USCG do that recently? In the latest edition of Proceedings, CAPT Steven Vanderplas, USCG (Ret) outlines a good argument that it did;

Aligning an armed service with the domestic policies of the President requires a sensitive touch because getting too cozy with one administration can make it difficult to thrive under the next. With reports emerging that President Donald Trump is weighing significant budget cuts to the Coast Guard, it appears the service overplayed its support of President Barack Obama’s policies. To avoid painful cuts the Coast Guard must lose Obama administration-era vocabulary and develop a new rationale for its priorities.

It is understandable that Trump’s election surprised Coast Guard leaders. The service, however, should have realized more quickly the peril of being “all in” on Obama’s priorities in its budget and strategy documents.

For example, the number one priority for sustaining mission excellence in the Coast Guard’s 2017 budget fact sheet is “enhanc[ing] Coast Guard military justice capabilities, including the handling of sexual assault allegations.” The Coast Guard was obliged to implement the Obama administration’s policies on sexual assault, but it had no obligation to present its compliance as its most important mission performance initiative. This makes it harder to plead any readiness shortfalls, because all problems are, by the Coast Guard’s admission, less important than this issue. This is an unforced error.

Another unforced error was associating major acquisitions with partisan issues. The “Commandant’s Strategic Intent 2015-2019” and the “Implementation Plan for the U.S. Coast Guard Arctic Strategy” link new icebreakers and other polar capabilities to one side of the climate change debate—the side not supported by the new President. It was unnecessary to create this political liability because the need for polar capabilities is not contingent on climate change. It would have been more persuasive and less contentious to justify icebreakers in terms of increasing energy exploration, economic activity, and regional competition without predicting the presence of more, less, or the same amount of ice.

Read it all ... but yep'r.

Live by virtue signaling, die by it.

Islamists & the Left; The Popular Front Against Liberty

My brief flirtation with the left as a young man was initiated by a mistaken assumption that it was the left that was that guardian of individual liberty, free speech, free association, and the right of the individual to live their lives as they see fit. It was a place to be united against the monied interests that exploited the people for their own personal gain.

Whelp.

One thing I could not get past as I read, argued, and pondered in the mid-80s was their constant inability to oppose the soul crushing international Communist movement. I'm not sure what was the exact tipping point for me, but it was somewhere along and understanding of the left's long record of promoting the blood soaked Communists in Central America (I grew up around Cubans, so that was in the air). That set the stage for a dust up I had concerning the genocide in Ukraine that broke first in the open while I was in college. The same gaggle that prattled on about Western imperialism in the previous centuries showed no interest in the horrors of Stalin's Soviet Union - something as distant to then as the Vietnam War is to today.

In a paragraph, I guess that is as good as a description of a critical juncture of my final pivot as any.

In the years since, I have come to realize that the Western left's love of Communism was a combo of a few items. First, as the distilled essence of the political left, Communism had to be defended or at least excused in order to protect the fringes of the vital center, Socialism. The selfish seduction of both of these political ideas once you got past the window dressing of helping he "working class," was that they gave the promise of power to leaders of the movement. A lot of power for a few people who had the will to use it.

Power, on both the personal and macro levels, is a drug - a drug people have an innate desire to get, hold, and enjoy.

In the stew of a lust for power, there was another flavoring - self-loathing. In the tightened eyes, curled lips, and strident tones through clenched teeth, you could feel their loathing of the nation and the culture that they were born to. Trust fund leftists like Katrina vanden Heuvel are perfect examples of such creatures. They were rarely happy about much, but they loathed so much. Anything that loathed their nation or culture as much a they loathed it was their friend. For much of the 20th Century, Communism was it - so regardless of what it represented, it was a friend to be excused and supported.

Of course, hard core Communism is gone from the world scene except for the college campus and a few nation-state freak shows. For the left, the lack of a threat to the West and the fruits of the Enlightenment created a void that had to be filled, but with what?

In the immediate post-Communist era, the left searched long and hard for another effective tool to exercise their self-loathing.

The Green movements was the first place they migrated to. It held the promise for power, money and influence, but never really got an electoral footing and as such, limited the ability to leverage great power. It enriched a few poseurs like Al Gore and brought various tomato EuroGreen parties in to partnership of a few governments, but it never really took off. 

Green anti-West agiprop is easily countered as the worst offenders of the Green Goddess are non-Western. Still, it was and is effective on the margins for useful idiots, but only as a bit player.

For the bloody minded left, there was still nothing that held the romantic threat to core Western values. Nothing made the hated West blanch in fear ... until it became clear after 11 September 2001.

Islamism was it. Islamism would be the new club.

Each year since, their partnership has grown. The left have put to the side those things they like to say they support; feminism, LGBT rights, freedom of speech, etc - in order to embrace their romantic blood soaked fringe.

This time, it isn't Ché'a beret, but the hijab and black-and-white Palestinian Keffiyeh.

It is harder to spot weld on to the left's usual line-up of public consumption causes, but that won't stop them from trying.

For the last few years, the left have gotten their footing and with the remaining backwash from the remnant Communists, they are back as a factor. With Obama out of office, they have a clear range. 

Easy or already compromised targets are where they have tried out their new verve; their greatest success as of late has been at our weakest point; our universities.

They fold quickly to the Antifa & Islamist shock troops. Not just in the USA, but the entire West, especially the Anglosphere. As such, they will keep going and will expand their spectrum of excuses to violence until they find stiff resistance. That is why each surrender will just make the eventual stand harder, more costly, and deadlier.

The latest example is the shameful retreat from support to one of the lions of The Enlightenment, Ayaan Hirsi Ali. 

The front today; Australia.

The news that Ayaan Hirsi Ali has cancelled her speaking tour of Australia due to ‘security concerns’ should concern anyone who believes in freedom. It is a dark day when a woman who fled to the West to escape the Islamist suffocations of Somalia, and precisely so that she might think and speak freely, feels she cannot say certain things in certain places. That even a Western, liberal, democratic nation like Australia cannot guarantee Hirsi Ali the freedom to speak her mind without suffering censorship or harm is deeply worrying. It points to the mainstreaming of intolerance, to the adoption by certain people in the West of the illiberalism that makes up the very Islamist outlook that Hirsi Ali and others have sought to escape.

Hirsi Ali’s Oz tour, ‘Hero of Heresy’, had been due to kick off this Thursday. She would have visited Brisbane, Sydney and Melbourne, hosted by Think Inc., an organisation devoted to ‘the promotion of intellectual discourse’. But today, citing, among other things, ‘security concerns’, Think Inc. announced the tour was off.
...
The more people depict certain ideas as unfit for public life, the more they send out a signal that the people who hold those ideas are dangerous and wicked, and possibly fair game for violence. They branded Hirsi Ali an enemy of public order and decency, no doubt making it easier for others to fantasise about punishing her. They said she would harm Australia and its Muslims, no doubt giving others the idea that she should therefore be kept out of Australia by any means necessary.

Where some want to crush the likes of Hirsi Ali or Charlie Hebdo with laws and bans, others want to crush them with violence. Different means, yes; but these two sections of society, the chin-strokers and the gun-strokers, share the same aim: to silence people whose ideas they dislike. The bookish censor lends moral authority to the violent censor. From the failure to stand up for Salman Rushdie to the No Platforming of the likes of Hirsi Ali today, too many thinkers in the supposedly tolerant West unwittingly give a nod of approval to efforts to shut down ‘dangerous’ people. The signal we should be sending to society is not that some ideas are too dangerous for public life, but that no ideas, even ridicule of Islam, will ever be silenced or punished; that it is unacceptable ever to harm someone simply for what they think and say.

Shame. Shame on everyone on the left - and shame on everyone else for surrendering again.

Stand up people and call these leftists out.

If you ever find yourself sitting next to someone at a feminist march wearing the symbol of patriarchal oppression, or Jew-hating terrorism - you may want to re-evaluate your political decisions.

If you find yourself making excuses for being led by convicted terrorists, or are in alignment with people who proudly mimic blood soaked political movements of the past - you may want to re-evaluate your political decisions.

In any event, don't get all butthurt when others look at you for what you are; a tool or a fool.

China & the Challenge in the Cyber Domain, on Midrats

You hear a bit on the edges about China's cyber forces' ongoing efforts to penetrate the cyber domain in order to get an edge against the USA and other nations she sees as either being in the way of her national goals, or in possession of something they need to keep their economy strong.

This Sunday from 5-6pm Eastern we are going to take a deeper dive in to the role of China in the cyber domain with our guest Dean Cheng.

In addition to being the author of the book, Cyber Dragon, Dean Cheng has been studying Chinese political and security developments for over 25 years. He has worked at a variety of think-tanks, including the Center for Naval Analysis, the Institute for Foreign Policy Analysis, and SAIC, as well as the Heritage Foundation. His research builds on a variety of Chinese materials, to bring to light how the Chinese talk about key issues such as space warfare and information warfare to their own military and civilian decision-makers.

Join us live if you can, but if you miss the show you can always listen to the archive at blogtalkradio or Stitcher. 

If you use iTunes, you can add Midrats to your podcast list simply by clicking the iTunes button at the main showpage - or you can just click here.

And You Thought Go-Pro Was Great