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.
They never really went away, but for almost 20 years the world had a holiday from an old challenge and a new one; Russia and the prospect of nuclear war. Some thought, and more hoped that with the end of the Cold War, a newer world order would emerge that would enable an era of stability and peace. In a way, it did – but only in spots and for short periods of time. While for the last 15 years most of the attention was focused on the expansion of radical Islam, two not unrelated events began to wax. From the ashes of the Soviet Union, fed by a charismatic leader and a resource extraction economy, Russian began to reassert itself in a manner consistent with the last 500 years of its history, and in parallel – the boogyman of the second half of the 20th Century began to grow as well; the proliferation and possible use nuclear weapons. To discuss this and more for the full hour this Sunday from 5-6pm Eastern will be Dr. Tom Nichols. Tom is a professor at the Naval War College and at the Harvard Extension School, as well as a Senior Associate of the Carnegie Council on Ethics and International Affairs in New York City and a Fellow of the International History Institute at Boston University. Previously he was a Fellow at the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington, DC. Before coming to the War College, he taught international relations and Russian affairs for many years at Dartmouth College and Georgetown University. In Washington, he was personal staff for defense and security affairs in the United States Senate to the late Senator John Heinz of Pennsylvania. He received his PhD from Georgetown, an MA from Columbia University, and the Certificate of the Harriman Institute at Columbia. He's also a five-time undefeated Jeopardy! champion. He played in the 1994 Tournament of Champions, is listed in the Jeopardy! Hall of Fame. He played his final match in the 2005 Ultimate Tournament of Champions.
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. 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.
Always good to have another post about Colombia. Not my usual Colombian post, but more nautical. There is a niche between our PC and our LCS that simply does not get as much respect as it should. Shame, a great platform with a lot of utility, and even better - a great LT/LCDR Command. Not sure it fits USN requirements, but good people can argue both sides, and in any event - shouldn't stop us from looking at them in detail. First, I don't like the programmatic speak of "OPV." I would prefer the archaic word to be used for the modern day Sloop-of-War, but for now, the Offshore Patrol Vessel it is. Let's look at one example. What can it do? Get your globe out.
On Saturday 8th August 2015, Colombian warship, ARC 7 de Agosto, arrived in the Gulf of Aden to start her counter-piracy operations in close collaboration with Operation Atalanta.
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The Colombian warship will work together with the EU Naval Force in escorting and protecting World Food Programme (WFP) vessels and vulnerable shipping along the Somali coastline and also help to deter and disrupt any acts of piracy in the Gulf of Aden, the EU Navfor said.
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7 de Agosto sailed from Cartagena on 27 June and will deploy for five-months. ARC 7 de Agusto is the second of Colombia’s three 1 723 ton OPV-80 designs built in Colombia by COTECMAR in Cartagena. The vessels has a crew of 85 and is armed with a 40 mm Oto Melara 40L70 twin gun, a 20 mm Oerlikon GAM-BO1 gun, and two Thor T-12 Remote Controlled Weapons Stations (RCWS). The T-12 RCWS includes a .50-calibre M2HB machine gun linked to a Controp SHAPO maritime day/night observation system.
For interdiction the vessels is equipped with two boats and a medium sized Bell helicopter.
That is a Fassmer OPV-80 Class warship. A solid German design used by the Colombian, Argentinian, and Chilean navies. Another German builder, Lürssen, has some nice designs as well. There whole catalog is full of goodness. More details on the OPV-80 here, and Chuck has done some good work on the class too if you have not read it. Cost? You don't want the cost, do you? Well ... numbers are all over place, but the most reported I see is $54 million as constructed in S. America. Nice looking ship.
You can get another feel for the class via this Chilean Navy video;
Let’s review some fundamentals. 1. Build a little, test a little, learn a lot. 2. First in class always have first in class “issues.” Find those on Hull-1 and fix in time so they aren’t an issue with follow-on platforms. 3. Sailors go on ships; ships go to sea. 4. Ships go to sea in peace, so they can perform at war. 5. At war, ships get hit. 6. Hit ships need to be able to fight hurt. 7. The bigger the ship, the more resilient they need to be. 8. The time to find out your primary weapon system is not war-ready is … when? Of course, the answer to #8 is, peace. We are relatively at peace right now. So, our new carrier is the FORD class. OK. Help me with this. Via Chris Cavas at DefenseNews;
The Pentagon rejected a US Navy plan to carry out shock and survivability tests on the second ship of its new aircraft carrier design, and instead directed the service to test the first ship — even though doing so may delay the ship's first deployment by at least half a year.
In an Aug. 7 memo to Navy Secretary Ray Mabus, Frank Kendall, the Pentagon's top acquisition official, ordered the "full ship shock trial" (FSST) to be carried out on the Gerald R. Ford (CVN 78), first of a new class of carriers and expected to enter service in 2016.
The ship is in the final stages of construction at Newport News Shipbuilding in Virginia.
The Navy had wanted to wait until the second ship, the John F. Kennedy (CVN 79), was available, but that carrier isn't expected to enter service until late 2022 or 2023. Among other issues, the Navy argued that the time taken to perform the tests on the Gerald R. Ford would delay the ship's first deployment.
Let’s backup a bit. What is more important, a showboat deployment with a “?” on survivability, or properly testing Hull-1? Are we doubling down on the bad habits from LCS that our ships are best used as PR platforms as opposed to properly tested warships? It should be simple, but is appears not to be. There are some distinct narrow-band sources breaking out from the ambient noise that are telling me there is a reason we don’t want to shock test the FORD, and it has to be a lot more than just the deployment schedule. Really, a deployment schedule at peace? First, that is lame as both a reason and an excuse. Reason or excuse? Let’s run with the excuse gambit. If an excuse, what are we worried about not being able to handle it? Also, for goodness sake, why would we want to put one of our capital ships on the front line with a possible China-doll own-mission-kill problem that should be fixable? That makes about as much sense as the Jets putting Geno Smith in pads for a scrimmage this weekend. There is something more here, what it is? No idea. As a side note, I like this Kendall guy;
Quoting directly, Kendall's memo directs the Navy to:
"Execute the FSST for the CVN 78 Class using the lead ship, CVN 78. The FSST shall be conducted prior to the initial operational deployment of CVN 78.
"Fully fund the CVN 78 program in the FY 2017 Navy budget submission to complete the component shock testing program and to execute the FSST as directed.
"Complete the Total Ship Survivability Test (TSST) using CVN 78 prior to initial operational deployment, as currently planned.
"Provide me the detailed plan to implement this direction at the CVN 78 Annual Defense Acquisition Board In-Process Review in December 2015."
Also, via Bloomberg, right thinking people are thinking right;
Pentagon leaders considered the test’s timing and implications and its impact on the deployment schedule, Kendall’s spokeswoman, Maureen Schumann, said in an e-mail.
After discussions with the Navy, the leaders “concluded that impacts on operational deployments did not outweigh the utility of obtaining information about potential vulnerabilities, which could be revealed through testing,” she said.
Work made “the right decision,” Senate Armed Services Committee Chairman John McCain said in an e-mail.
McCain, an Arizona Republican, has pressed the Navy to do the testing that he said “will mitigate the risks of integrating several new technologies, improve the design of future carriers, and, most importantly, increase” the vessel’s survivability and the “ability of the crew to survive battle damage.”
So to make this perfectly clear, women by and large do not appreciate, deserve, or desire different physical standards to be a Marine, nor do they benefit from them. Female Marines do not clamor for lower standards, don’t seek simply to achieve the minimum of said lower standards, and rarely speak approvingly of such standards. Those of us serving today did not create the existing standards, and do not benefit from their existence.
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Lower, different physical standards for women are restrictive, because they teach women and men alike that women simply aren’t capable of tougher physical achievements. Higher standards may be tough to reach at first but they are reachable, and by holding expectations low we are just teaching that that’s all we can expect from women.
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Why are separate standards for women there? Read First Class, by Sharon Disher, or Breaking Out, by Laura Brodie, to get an idea of how those standards were set and who really was asking for them (hint: it wasn’t the women trying to join the academies or VMI. It was the middle-aged men making the decisions and regulations.).
So to sum up: separate and unequal physical standards help no one and endanger everyone; most of us do not want or need separate standards; and the Marine Corps would be better with one standard for Marines based on the needs of the job. Stop blaming female Marines for being subject to lower physical standards, and start listening to them when they say they don’t want them. For crying out loud, we have been saying it long enough. That is all.
Read it all and know this; not all women in the service think like the victim pimps that advise our senior leadership. We have great and many female leaders - sadly - they are not the ones that are getting the exposure they should. BZ to Kate and Jeannette for taking the guide-on.
As we look to just a few months left of the 2015 fighting season, let's check in with Afghanistan. I wish it were getting more attention. We can ignore it's progress, lack of it, or the consequences of failure - but it will not ignore us. Via Gary Owen at Lawfareblog;
Thanks to advances by the Taliban in Faryab and Kunduz, influential politicians like Rashid Dostum (currently Ghani’s vice president) and Atta Noor (the powerful governor of Balkh province) have been pretty vocal in their thinking that Afghan forces alone can’t get the job done; that to tip the balance means more troops from somewhere—either the Americans (not out of the question completely, but unlikely), or some kind of militia. Since today’s anti-Taliban militia could be tomorrow’s coup attempt, it lays some troubling groundwork for widening existing divides in the country that the United States had hoped the Ghani/Abdullah deal would help bridge. Unless they can manage to bring the security situation that’s deteriorating faster than Iggy Azalea’s career back under control, Afghan troops could have some new bosses very soon. Their current performance doesn’t inspire much hope.
Watts and Mann state that “no one is certain how the ANSF will perform as the U.S. and international drawdown proceeds” and argue that the forces are “passably capable” and “resilient.”
Actually, it’s pretty clear how those forces will perform. In a word? Badly.
Since the Afghans assumed control of the country’s security in 2014, more civilians have been killed, more soldiers have died, more Afghan troops have deserted than ever before, and security forces are still torturing one-third of their detainees. This is the force Watts and Mann describe as “passably capable” and “resilient.” If by “passably capable” they mean “doesn’t torture too many people,” then sure, I suppose they are “passably capable,” but I think we might want to aim just a bit higher.
According to the Americans, civilian casualties as a result of ground engagements between the Afghans and insurgents were up eight percent for the first three months of 2015 when compared to the same period in 2014. In June, Afghan Chief of Army Staff Gen. Qadam Shah Shaheem told his troops that using artillery and conducting night raids against the insurgents was just fine, and no one would be prosecuted as a result. Since most engagements occur among the population when one is countering an insurgency, this change in the rules of engagement means more innocent civilians are going to die as the result of actions by Afghan security forces.
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An American solution to Afghanistan’s problems faces the struggles of a dwindling security force to keep the Taliban at bay as they strike from sanctuaries in Pakistan, a government on the verge of collapse, and large numbers of civilians being victimized by their own government. And that’s without the growing threat of the Islamic State. In an alternate-reality Afghanistan, civilians aren’t dying in greater numbers, the government isn’t on the verge of collapse, and the return on foreign investment is staggering. The Afghans would love it—because that’s the country the Americans promised them.
The reality is that that Afghanistan’s future, while grim, is still better than it was. There is cause for cautious optimism. That does not mean that we shouldn’t be painfully honest about what’s happening in Afghanistan. Given the sacrifices made since 9/11, it’s tempting to do otherwise. But doing so means ignoring challenges the country faces, and the decisions about its future the Americans still need to make.
