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With a new administration well over a year in and a clearer view of the direction our Navy is headed, now is a great opportunity to check in with one of the most knowledgeable observers on the maritime scene, Chris Cavas.
Join us this Sunday from 5-6pm Eastern for an hour-long broad-ranged discussion of national and international naval issues.
Chris was the naval warfare correspondent for Defense News from 2004 to 2017 and is a former managing editor of Navy Times . He has reported on Navy issues across the globe, including aboard USSPonce in the Fifth Fleet and aboard National Security Cutters.
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Young leaders, properly motivated a few decades in to a war, can accomplish remarkable things;
In March 1804 two of the ships tasked with watching the Vlie to prevent Netherlands privateers slipping out into the North Sea, were the sloops-of-war HMS Scorpion and HMS Beaver. The Scorpion was under the command of Commander George Nicholas Hardinge (1781 – 1808) who, though only twenty-three, had already accumulated a notable service record and promised to merit high command. The recently constructed Scorpion was one of the first of the Cruizer class of brig-rigged sloops, 106 of which would enter service by the war’s end. Of only 100-ft length and 382-tons, these proved enormously successful. With a crew of only a hundred men, these vessels were so heavily armed – typically with two 6-pounder long-gun bowchasers and no less than sixteen 32-pounder carronades – that they could deliver a broadside-weight comparable to that of a frigate, but with a third of the manpower. Command of such a vessel – which Hardinge had succeeded to two years before (at the age of twenty-one!) – was a prize that all young officers would aspire to.
On 28th March, patrolling north of the Vlie, Hardinge spotted two Dutch corvettes – heavily armed brigs – at anchor deep inside the waterway. Lacking detailed knowledge of the shoals flanking the approach, he realised that direct attack by the Scorpion must be ruled out. With sufficient men available, a cutting-out operation might be feasible, but Scorpion’s crew alone would be insufficient to provide the necessary numbers. Three days later however, on March 31st, the Scorpion was joined by the Beaver, the commander of which, Charles Pelly, was as enthusiastic as Hardinge about a cutting-out operation, for which there were now sufficient men.
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Five pulling boats, carrying some sixty men between them, left the British ships in darkness at nine-thirty in the evening, rowing with the flooding tide. These men would have been mainly armed with cutlasses, pikes and boarding axes while officers and petty officers would have carried pistols in addition to their own swords or cutlasses. Describing himself to his father as “your humble servant”, Hardinge was in the leading boat. Undetected, the boats reached the nearer of the enemy vessels, which proved to be the Atalanta, a vessel generally similar to the Scorpion herself. Hardinge was to write that “I had the good fortune, or, as by some it would be considered an honour, to be the first man who boarded her. She was prepared for us, with boarding nettings up, and with all the customary implements of defence; but the noise, and the alarm etc., so intimidated the crew, that many of them rushed below, leaving to us the painful duty of combatting those whom we most respected.”
The scene must have been a nightmarish one, all the more so in view of the darkness and the narrow confines of the deck on which hand-to-hand combat took place. Hardinge wrote that “the decks were slippery, in consequence of rain, so that, grappling with my first opponent, a mate of the watch, I almost fell, but recovered my position, fought him on equal terms, and killed him.” He was now confronted by the Atalante’s captain, regrettable unidentified in the letter, whom he described as being “as brave a man as any service ever boasted; he had almost killed one of my seaman; to my shame be it spoken, he disarmed me, and was on the point of killing me. When a seaman of mine came up, rescued me at the peril of his own life, and enabled me to recover my sword.”
By this stage the boarders were largely in control of the deck and two of them now attacked the Dutch captain. Hardinge however “ran up, held them back, and then adjured him to accept quarter.” Heroically, though unwisely, the captain refused. “With inflexible heroism he disdained the gift, kept us at bay, and compelled us to kill him: he fell with honourable wounds.”
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Hardinge now has possession of the Atalanta. “The vessel was ours, and we secured the hatches, which, headed by a lieutenant wo had received a desperate wound, they (i.e. the captured crew below) attempted repeatedly to force. Thus far we had been fortunate; but we now had anther enemy to fight, it was the element. A sudden gale, in which the wind shifted against us, and impeded all the efforts we could make.” Hardinge was undeterred however. “As we had made the capture, we determined at all events to sustain it, or to perish. We made the Dutch below to surrender, put forty of them in irons, stationed our own men to their guns, brought the powder up, and made all necessary arrangements to attack the other brig. But as the day broke, and without abatement of the wind, she was at such a distance, and in such a position that we had no chance to reach her.”
Forty-eight hours passed. “Two of the boats had broken adrift from us, two had swapped alongside. The wind shifted again, and we made a push to extricate ourselves, but found the navigation so difficult that it required the intense labour of three days to accomplish it. We carried the point at last, and were commended by the Admiral for our perseverance. You will see in the Gazette my letter to him.” The Atalante had suffered five killed, including the captain, and eleven wounded.
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Hardinge’s success was rewarded with immediate (ten days after the attack) promotion to coveted post-captain rank, one of the few who attained this at such a young age. For all his courage, chivalry and promise, his subsequent career was to be tragically short. While in command of the old frigate HMS St Fiorenzo in the Indian Ocean in 1808, he was killed in the course of an epic three-day battle with the French frigate Piémontaise.
David French over at National Review gives a good summary of an event I am surprised is not getting more coverage. Of course, a large fault lies with our media who is more interested in being players in domestic politics than doing their frack'n job of keeping the American people informed - but even in the natsec world, this story only received superficial coverage.
Then again, many of them are too stuck on domestic politics as well because, TDS and reasons.
Back to David's summary;
Did American and Russian forces just engage in a deadly clash in Syria, and was that clash the direct result of a Putin-approved effort to test American defenses? While Americans were arguing over Russian Facebook posts, did American air power and artillery leave up to 300 Russians dead on a Syrian battlefield?
Here’s the basic chronology.
On the night of February 7, “pro-regime” Syrian forces reportedly launched an assault on a “known” American base. American forces defended themselves with attack helicopters, jets, and AC-130 gunships, and the attackers withdrew after taking significant casualties.
That next week, on February 12, Reuters reported that at least two Russians died in the fighting, according to their associates. The Russian casualties were apparently contractors accompanying regime forces. By February 13, both the Washington Post and New York Times had picked up the story, and the number of rumored Russian dead swelled to “large numbers” or “dozens,” but — we were assured — there was no direct confrontation between Americans and members of the Russian military.
As rumors swirled online that the true number of Russian dead numbered in the hundreds, the Washington Post published a report suggesting that the attack on U.S. forces may have had official Russian backing:
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Monday, Business Insider published unverified transcripts of “leaked audio recordings” from Russian mercenaries on the scene. The mercenaries describe a violent hellscape, where they were sitting ducks as American artillery and aircraft killed more than 200 of their comrades.
The alleged transcripts certainly make for vivid reading. Here’s a taste:
The reports that are on TV about … well, you know, about Syria and the 25 people that are wounded there from the Syrian f*** army and — well . . . to make it short, we’ve had our asses f*** kicked. So one squadron f*** lost 200 people … right away, another one lost 10 people . . . and I don’t know about the third squadron, but it got torn up pretty badly, too. . . . So three squadrons took a beating. . . . The Yankees attacked . . . first they blasted the f*** out of us by artillery, and then they took four helicopters up and pushed us in a f*** merry-go-round with heavy caliber machine guns … They were all shelling the holy f*** out of it, and our guys didn’t have anything besides the assault rifles . . . nothing at all, not even mentioning shoulder-fired SAMs or anything like that . . . So they tore us to pieces for sure, put us through hell, and the Yankees knew for sure that the Russians were coming, that it was us, f*** Russians . . . Our guys were going to commandeer an oil refinery, and the Yankees were holding it. . . . We got our f*** asses beat rough, my men called me . . . They’re there drinking now. . . many have gone missing . . . it’s a total f*** up
There are a lot of good reasons for both parties to downplay this lopsided battle.
First of all, neither nation wants its people to get in even more of a froth over the other than they already are. Second, neither Russia or the USA wants the Syrian conflict to spiral out of control. It is really in neither nations' interests, but stupid wars have started for even stupider accidents.
...both Russia and the United States are downplaying the incident. If the Russians were testing American will, they got their answer, but there appears to be no American desire to retaliate or to escalate the confrontation into a full force-on-force encounter. This is encouraging, but not entirely comforting. When blood is spilled, the consequences are not always predictable or controllable.
Second, the situation in Syria is extraordinarily dangerous. It’s understandable that international eyes are focused on North Korea, but consider this: If reports of hundreds of Russian dead are correct, the American military just killed more Russians than it did in any single encounter throughout the entirety of the Cold War. That’s stunning. At present, a few thousand American troops are in the midst of the world’s most vicious war, rubbing up against hostile Russians, Syrians, Turks, Iranians, and Lebanese. Confrontations are inevitable. Proper management of those confrontations is not.
We need to start disengaging from Syria. Our point with the Russians and others has been made. If everyone can keep things in the bottle for now, we can happily leave with honor.
"Don't mess with us while we are here. We're leaving." Once we leave, everyone can fight over the scraps and we will no longer have a reasons to make the point we made to the Russian mercs.
As I mentioned over at twitter earlier today, the USA only has two interests in Syria;
1. The physical destruction of the Islamic State's caliphate and the killing of as many of its cadre as reasonably possible on the battlefield.
2. Make sure our allies that helped us with #1 are treated fairly in a post-war settlement.
That is about it.
So, really ... no one here really thought the IZUMO Class was just an ASW carrier, did you?
Come on over to USNIBlog and see the least surprising bit of naval news so far this year.
The Economist's Lexington brought back to me one of my hobby horses that I have not ridden in awhile; the fact we cannot afford the military we think we need - even if we could, we shouldn't.
The world changes, constantly. We once stood athwart the world because the rest of the world was so relatively poor. That world is gone.
The rest of the world is getting richer, and as a result regional powers will naturally grow. We are not declining - the delta is just shrinking.
We have become accustomed to having overmatch to such a degree that we are setting ourselves up for overreach trying to live in a past that was never that great to begin with.
I can hear intellectual shields going up all over the place - again - so just take a moment to ponder Lexington's last two paragraphs;
A less-noted problem is that America’s unthinking reverence for its fighters is forestalling a badly needed reappraisal of how it organises its forces, and to what end. The fact is, America’s foreign-policy doctrines envisage a degree of global dominance, based on military might, which its volunteer force is now too small to enforce. And to increase the force sufficiently, on current trends, appears unaffordable or impossible. “This force cannot carry out that foreign policy,” concludes Andrew Bacevich, a historian and former army officer, who happens also to be a Gold Star father.
This constitutes a looming crisis, which could logically end in one of two ways. Either America will have to reintroduce conscription. Or it must curtail its military ambitions. Neither outcome is palatable to American policymakers, however, so the problem is seldom discussed. Maintaining the happy delusion that America’s forces are ideal and irreproachable makes that easier. But reality cannot be deferred indefinitely.
We need to finish up the wars we have. Give our friends enough notice to get their defenses in place, as we need to come home.
Let me a repeat again what I have put out for over a decade; remove all land-based maneuver forces from overseas. Maintain a few combined bases with allies for training, logistics, and the occasional surge exercise. No forward deployed TACAIR. Exceptionally limited forward deployed naval forces, if any.
We are a maritime, air, and space power. That is our competitive advantage. We were not designed to sustain, nor do we need, a large standing Army. We need to demobilize and shift to a largely balanced towards National Guard and Reserved land forces. If our rich friends are under threat from ground forces, then they should reflect that in their military investments. We can argument them from the sea, air, and space - and if needed, begin to mobilize land forces.
Our military spending could, and should, be 30% less than it is right now if we really believe that we should be a mercantile republic. If as a nation we decide that we are a global empire in style and action - then keep doing what we are doing.
We aren't. We shouldn't.
Does anyone really think the path we are on is that desirable or sustainable? Ignore the domestic spending challenge - that isn't "our" wheelhouse. Do you want to be a citizen of a republic blessed with relatively good neighbors and large oceans - or an empire that desires and is expected to bleed blood and gold to protect people who won't protect themselves, or to rule people who have no desire to be ruled?
Must we always be searching for dragons to slay, both real, imagined, or of our own creation?
Thanks to Rachel Karas over at InsideDefense, a little bit of an untold aspect of the unmanned aircraft side of the house slipped out.
Lt. Gen. Steven Kwast said at the Air Force Association's winter conference the service doesn't have to settle for a personnel-to-aircraft ratio about seven times greater than manned aircraft require, and needs to find a way to manage those...
Did you catch that? Seven times.
Remember, the greatest utility of UAS is that there is no possibility of human loss to the enemy in case one is shot down. The PAO, PSYOPS and INFO OPS - not to mention all the associated POW issues - unwanted effects of losing a manned aircraft are huge, and quickly move a tactical loss to a strategic handicap.
Those who say they are a great manpower saver? Well ... notsomuch.
We are still in the early days of this chapter in the expansion of unmanned systems decades in the work. To make sure we tailor our platforms and CONOPS - not to mention budgets - we need to be as open as possible to the cost-benefit of the manned unmanned mix.
Personnel costs are not a secondary concern.
You've heard it here before; character isn't built - it just waits for a moment in time to be demonstrated.
You have it or you don't.
As three young JROTC members demonstrated recently, they had it.
Three cadets killed in the Parkland school shooting are being posthumously honored for their acts of heroism.
The Army is recognizing Peter Wang, 15, and Martin Duque and Alaina Petty, both 14, with the Medal of Heroism for the danger and extraordinary responsibility they took on during last week’s shooting at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School.
Friends said the three always had a sense of duty and honor as members of the school’s junior ROTC.
Also Tuesday, the U.S. Military Academy at West Point posthumously admitted Peter to the prestigious academy on the day of his funeral. It’s where Peter dreamed of attending. He could have been in the Class of 2025.
Peter died in his JROTC uniform last Wednesday, holding the door open to allow others to escape, as gunman Nikolas Cruz shot and killed 17 at Marjory Stoneman, authorities and witnesses said.
“He saved people’s lives,” said Victoria Downing, one of Peter’s classmates, at the funeral service. “He deserves it.”
West Point conferred the letter of admission, along with honorarium tokens, to his family, local West Point alumnus Chad Maxey said.
Gov. Rick Scott also has directed the Florida National Guard to honor all three cadets. Alaina was honored at her funeral Monday, as Martin will be at his funeral Saturday.
That's about all I will have to say about that.
Fullbore young men and lady. Fullbore.
