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.
There is a line in this article on the updates to the DDG-51 Class that is sublime in its importance and the story it tells. I'm serious;
"If you look at one of the ships that have been through the HME modernization and look at one of its tanks and its bilges -- it looks like a ship that could last another 15 years."
Remember the movement to extend the service life well beyond 30 years? Well it won't happen by PPT alone. Hard, smart work needs to be done for decades. This is a good quote too;
"A DDG 51 has got to be able to fight and withstand a reasonable amount of battle damage, so you need to keep up with things like corrosion, hull strength and paint,"
...
"Every year you have a ship out there is a significant investment in fuel, people and spare parts. What you want is to keep the ship combat relevant so it continues to be able to perform the full range of missions against all the modern threats throughout its life," Capt. Mark Vandroff, program manager for DDG 51 acquisition,
We can chat all we want about the hope of LCS one day finding something satisfactory for the Fleet. We can let some have fevered dreams of DDG-1000 doing ... whatever that rump of a program will be able to do. You can ignore economics, physics and politics and dream of platforms yet funded, much less at IOC ... all the while pretending we can conduct a 21st Century war at sea with late-20th Century 2nd class ASCM and a LWT magazine that .... well, you know. The fact is that in the near to medium term - at least through the end of the 2020s, the backbone of the Fleet and the primary surface combatant giving Combatant Commanders' maritime component Commanders the ability will be the Burke Class. Until then, as our defense budgets strain and non-warfighting needs still bloat ... we should all baby our Burkes - they are even more important to the future than they are now.
I sure hope we have taken better care of them than we did the SPRUCANS. We'll need every one.
Obama ordered an intensification of our effort in Afghanistan, while admitting privately that he expected it to fail. Approximately 80% of the fatalities our military has suffered in Afghanistan have taken place on Obama’s watch, not because he was pursuing a strategy that he sincerely believed to be in America’s interest, but because he cynically calculated that sending Americans to die in a useless campaign (as he assessed it) would benefit him politically.
This is what has set me back. EagleOne brings in one of Napoleon's Maxims.
Maxim LXXII. A general-in-chief has no right to shelter his mistakes in war under cover of his sovereign, or of a minister, when these are both distant from the scene of operation, and must consequently be either ill informed or wholly ignorant of the actual state of things.
Hence it follows, that every general is culpable who undertakes the execution of a plan which he considers faulty. It is his duty to represent his reasons, to insist upon a change of plan--in short, to give in his resignation rather than allow himself to be made the instrument of his army's ruin. Every general-in-chief who fights a battle in consequence of superior orders, with the certainty of losing it, is equally blamable.
In this last-mentioned case, the general ought to refuse obedience; because a blind obedience is due only to a military command given by a superior present on the spot at the moment of action. Being in possession of the real state of things, the superior has it then in his power to afford the necessary explainations to the person who executes his orders.
But supposing a general-in-chief to receive a positive order from his sovereign, directing him to fight a battle, with the further injunction, to yield to his adversary, and allow himself to be defeated -- ought he to obey it? No. If the general should be able to comprehend the meaning or utility of such an order, he should execute it; otherwise, he should refuse to obey it.
I need to ponder this some more, but here is a central point; who knew what when - and what did they do? Those in uniform who violated Napoleons Maxim do realize that, by knowingly going along with a political decision with no military end - they have become political themselves. Either they led people to their death for political convenience of others - or if they did not know, were ordered to by other up the chain of command. So. Where does that buck stop ... or in the words of that great American Stateswhatever;
In the universe of journalists, Jake Tapper is one of the good ones. He is an exceptional professional, fair, and open minded. He has also done more than most to try to get the story out about those who have served.
Especially for someone who has not worn the uniform, he mostly gets it right. This time with Marcus Luttrell, he missed. While Tapper was perhaps making comments about the AFG war in general - this interview was about a very specific operation - and that is what Marcus was focused on. From a journalistic point of view, I think Tapper has turned the knob a bit to 11 looking for the "bad planner" and "incompetent leadership" or worse, cover-up to protect those responsible. Somethings, things just go to sh1t. Maybe he is right, but there is something else. Now and then, things do not go right. When you plan, you have certain planning assumptions, restraints, constraints; you do your troops-to-task analysis and hope for the best. Sometimes you get one or all of your planning assumptions wrong - you can't see in the future. Sometimes the convoy to the enemy leadership meeting gets confused with the convoy going to a wedding party. Sometimes when trying to aviate, navigate, and communicate you confuse the target position with the blue positions. Sometimes you say 030 when you clearly have 050 in front of you. Sometimes, you just live in an imperfect world. That is, perhaps, where he is getting the professional issue wrong. Tapper is also getting a personal issue wrong, I think. It is a common mistake a lot of people with good intentions people make. As most have not served, they only know what being in the military at war is like from a theoretical point of view. What they read, see on the TV, the impressions of others whose personal specifics become the listeners general assumption. As a result, they know what it means to serve and to go to war like the rest of us know what it is to travel in to space. Tapper is good - but no one is perfect - so in this case I will cut him some slack. It is easy for some to fall in to old habits and comfortable archetype; the victim, the compassionate observer, the concerned supporter. The last two lean on the first; the victim. In trying to find common ground, they reach for the easiest reference point. Some who have worn the uniform, in my experience those who have other issues, will try to play the victim card for attention. Those who seek someone to help will gravitate to those who want to feel helped. The shame of it all is that in most cases, those who have served who may actually need "help" don't want it. They won't ask for it, and if you imply that you think they need help - they will not appreciate the effort. They don't want your sympathy, they don't want your thanks, and they don't want to be patronized. Some do, but they are like the crickets in the cow-field; small and insignificant - but exceptionally loud. When confronted with the well meaning but wrong, when able most on the receiving end will be polite, say something harmless, and then try to change the subject. Others can quickly tire of the unwanted embrace, the assumptions of the broken vessel, the mythology of Hollywood and the attention seeker becoming fact. From having to deal with the clueless repeating the latest they read about PTSD, to well meaning people who assume a lot what they think those who served want to hear. Eventually, you get enough. That is what you saw above. Shipmate has had enough. BZ Marcus. BZ.
Though nations for thousands of years have been wrestling with the challenge of Joint operations, we are still trying to get it right. As an island nation with significant global interests ashore, the USA has a rich history of doing Joint right, and blind parochialism as well. Using this as a starting point, this Sunday from 5-6pm Eastern, for the full hour we will have returning guest, John Kheun. Dr. John T. Kuehn is the General William Stofft Chair for Historical Research at the U.S. Army Command and General Staff College. He retired from the U.S. Navy 2004 at the rank of commander after 23 years of service as a naval flight officer in EP-3s and ES-3s. He authored Agents of Innovation (2008) and co-authored Eyewitness Pacific Theater (2008) with D.M. Giangreco, as well as numerous articles and editorials and was awarded a Moncado Prize from the Society for Military History in 2011. We will also discuss his latest book, just released by Praeger, A military History of Japan: From the Age of the Samurai to the 21st Century.
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.
I'm in the process of listening to Jon Meacham's Thomas Jefferson: The Art of Power, and I came across a story that just captivated me. Why there isn't a cross country horse race each year to celebrate this ride, I have no idea (probably has to so with lawyers) - and why I wasn't taught this in school, well, just drives me nuts. 8-yr old Sal would have eaten this story up. This has nothing to do with anything nautical - but it has everything to do with the kind of thinking all in the profession of arms should have; bravery, quick of mind, thinking three steps ahead, and more than anything else - a bias towards action. If you do not know of him yet, let me have the pleasure of introducing to you Captain Jack Jouett, Virginia Militia and the ride to save the Republic that was yet to be.
LATE IN THE EVENING, Lieutenant Colonel Banastre Tarleton and 250 mounted British soldiers reined up near Cuckoo Tavern. The troopers were hard, dusty hours in the saddle. They had mounted before dawn at a Hanover County camp and pushed themselves more than twenty leagues across the Virginia Piedmont to this Louisa County way station. But the riding of that day—June 3, 1781—was not over. Before it was done, a tavern patron, putting down his drink, would gallop into the night and the history of the American Revolution, and dismount, to be remembered as Virginia's Paul Revere. That man was Captain Jack Jouett of the Virginia militia, a fierce and astute patriot who understood why Tarleton was there.
...
Operating north of Richmond, chasing Lafayette, Cornwallis received an intercepted American dispatch reporting the presence of Jefferson and members of the legislature in Charlottesville. To his mind, they were legitimate military targets, and he ordered Tarleton to capture them.
Tarleton faced a seventy-mile ride, but he believed that he could reach Charlottesville before American spies noticed his absence. The raiders rested about noon and hurried toward Cuckoo Tavern. Jouett saw them there about 9:30 p.m.
He and his father had signed the Albemarle Declaration, a renunciation of loyalty to King George III. His father and brother Matthew were also captains in the Virginia Militia, as was brother Robert in the Continental Army. Jack Jouett was twenty-six years old, 200 pounds, and six-feet-four. Contemporaries described him as handsome, a superb marksman, and an accomplished horseman.
He stole away as Tarleton, dismounting at a nearby plantation, gave his men three hours rest beginning at roughly 10 p.m. Jouett pounded through the night. He reached Monticello near daybreak, warned Jefferson, and headed to Charlottesville to raise the alarm.
So, has everyone had a chance to digest the JO SWO survey? I am actually humbled by slide 15 and really appreciate the opportunity to be considered on that slide. Nuff of that. There is a lot of good stuff there that everyone should ponder - BZ to those who gave this the go - but there was also a little tidbit that is helpful to our weekly Thursday conversation. Sadly, there was a little slip of the mask on slide 2 that simply cannot be allowed to pass, and it is instructive. Let us repeat the simple truth; when anyone in the Navy talks about "diversity" - they are thinking of one thing; non-white. As practiced by our Navy, (D)iversity is a discriminatory cancer on our honor, and everyone who takes it in to consideration is demonstrating bias against people on the basis of a self-selected racial classification. Though they may speak of diversity of backgrounds, education and life experience - that isn't what they are actually doing. If they say that with a straight face, their are either woefully ignorant to the point of not being qualified to hold any position of authority, or they are simply lying to your face. They hold your intellect in contempt and at best are patronizing you. Look at the slide, you are either "white" or "diverse." There it is - the Navy's support of the racialist, Cultural Marxist, socio-political movement of sectarianism - red in tooth and claw.
Now that you've had a chance to review, let's go back to something we've been discussing over the years on DivThu. These racial classifications are self-selecting. It is all a fool's errand. It isn't harmless though - it divides and gives special treatment. Worse, it gives those of us who are of mixed ethnicity a requirement to pick one part of their DNA over another - or totally ignore it like Senator Warren (D-MA); just pick one that gives us the most advantage. That corrodes the soul and character of everyone involved in the charade. For those who really don't know what is going on - let's play the Diversity Bullies' game - let's do the most superficial thing and just look at appearances. It is what they do, so why not. As they have adopted the KKK and National Socialist racial theory of "one drop" - who is out there right now claiming to be Black - just to pick of the Navy's preferred ethnicities? Well, here is a gallery for you to ponder. Are they punking the system? What do you think of those numbers you see now? Gabrielle Reece
Wentworth Miller
Vin Diesel
Pete Wentz
Jessica Szohr
Darnell Martin
Adriana Lima
Some of those on the list do like to prattle on about their chose ethnicity - but to be fair, some do not. Others found out and have pushed it for their own agendas. We know how that works too. What do they like to say? Ahhh, yes. Let's quote former CNO Roughead;
... they ... look like America from a diversity stand point ...
If you say so. Again, this isn't harmless. In the zero sum game that is selection, support, promotion, and award - special treatment based on race, creed, color, or national origin is discrimination. It also puts in a perverse incentive to lie, cheat, steal, and to tolerate those among you who do. When you have the blond haired, blue eyed son of a millionaire take a Hispanic scholarship, or someone 25% sub-Saharan African, 25% Philippino, and 50% European claim that he is "Black" - then you are building a culture of lies. Do not be shocked when that culture breeds other forms of lies. When you reward those lies? Well ... you have larger issues. I am always game to discuss the ongoing legacy of racial slavery and segregation in this nation - really the only major issue in living memory WRT race outside of FDR's pursuit of Americans of Japanese extraction. My family was one of the largest slave owners in Mississippi - I have skin in that game - it is a ligit topic for discussion. I'll only do it on an individual basis depending on that person's family background and station in life. Then again, I look at people as individuals, not like the AKC looks at dogs. That gaggle above expects special treatment and wants to talk about being "the other" and "white skin privilege?" No thank you, not interested. You're just another person. The Navy though - yea, they'll swallow it. It makes their metrics work better. They'll even award you for it.
An interesting day it has been, reading the responses here and there to some of the quotes coming out of former SECDEF Gates's book, Duty: Memoirs of a Secretary at War. As most of the responses are personal attacks or tales of butthurt, I'll let you find them yourselves. I would like to comment on a few quotes from Gates in his book that have come out, as most of this rings true from what I saw and thought. From WaPo;
... by early 2010 he had concluded the president “doesn’t believe in his own strategy, and doesn’t consider the war to be his. For him, it’s all about getting out.”
Leveling one of the more serious charges that a defense secretary could make against a commander in chief sending forces into combat, Gates asserts that Obama had more than doubts about the course he had charted in Afghanistan. The president was “skeptical if not outright convinced it would fail,” Gates writes in “Duty: Memoirs of a Secretary at War.”
Similar to the argument made here for over four years. Click the AFG tab below to the posts from DEC09 on; it's all there. I would add that Obama did something morally worse than sending people to die for something you don't believe in ; setting the conditions for a self-fulfilling prophecy of failure.
In “Duty,” Gates describes his outwardly calm demeanor as a facade. Underneath, he writes, he was frequently “seething” and “running out of patience on multiple fronts.”
Gates had good company. Many of us did. We also saw you set your jaw and suspected you felt the same. Many did our duty as best we could while serving under people we had little faith in. Serving your nation is much greater and very different than those you are sometimes serving with. Gates served his nation well. Gates is also spot-on Salamanderesque on Biden;
Gates calls Biden “a man of integrity,” but questions his record. “I think he has been wrong on nearly every major foreign policy and national security issue over the past four decades,” ...
Anyone who saw the Senate Democrats pivot a decade ago should not be shocked by this.
Gates offers a catalogue of various meetings, based in part on notes that he and his aides made at the time, including an exchange between Obama and then-Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton that he calls “remarkable.”
He writes: “Hillary told the president that her opposition to the [2007] surge in Iraq had been political because she was facing him in the Iowa primary. . . . The president conceded vaguely that opposition to the Iraq surge had been political. To hear the two of them making these admissions, and in front of me, was as surprising as it was dismaying.”
Of course it was political. They were both in Reid's caucus in the Senate. To them, foreign policy is just an extension of domestic party politics - just with actual dead bodies.
At a March 3, 2011, National Security Council meeting, Gates writes, the president opened with a “blast.” Obama criticized the military for “popping off in the press” and said he would push back hard against any delay in beginning the withdrawal.
According to Gates, Obama concluded, “ ‘If I believe I am being gamed . . .’ and left the sentence hanging there with the clear implication the consequences would be dire.”
Gates continues: “I was pretty upset myself. I thought implicitly accusing” Petraeus, and perhaps Mullen and Gates himself, “of gaming him in front of thirty people in the Situation Room was inappropriate, not to mention highly disrespectful of Petraeus. As I sat there, I thought: the president doesn’t trust his commander, can’t stand [Afghanistan President Hamid] Karzai, doesn’t believe in his own strategy, and doesn’t consider the war to be his. For him, it’s all about getting out.”
It was always so with Obama. He wants to fundamentally change the USA. To do that he does not want or need foreign entanglements - and he does not want to do anything to empower those in uniform or their standing with the American public. The worse the better.
“I was extremely angry with President Obama,” Gates writes. “I felt he had breached faith with me . . . on the budget numbers.” As with “don’t ask, don’t tell,” “I felt that agreements with the Obama White House were good for only as long as they were politically convenient.”
...
Gates says his instructions to the Pentagon were: “Don’t give the White House staff and [national security staff] too much information on the military options. They don’t understand it, and ‘experts’ like Samantha Power will decide when we should move militarily.”
...
Another time, after Donilon and Biden tried to pass orders to Gates, he told the two, “The last time I checked, neither of you are in the chain of command,” and said he expected to get orders directly from Obama.
So important. With the exception of Gates and Jones, who are now gone, the intellectual capital at DOS and DOD is very thin - and will not get better. A final note, I think many who served or are serving will well understand this quote. I greatly respect Gates for putting a voice to an emotion that is hard to explain. It has to do with service to nation and duty. I'll leave it there for you to ponder.
Gates writes, “I did not enjoy being secretary of defense,” or as he e-mailed one friend while still serving, “People have no idea how much I detest this job.”
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, and I came across a story that just captivated me.
