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.
If you are at a high level of anxiety right now because of COVID-19, you probably need to look at different coping mechanisms. We are weeks from the peak. There are a lot of places out there that have just plain bad information coming from either bad players, ignorance, malice, or what could be the worst - those on either side trying to find political gain from a pandemic. Others can Monday morning quarterback or time travel if they wish, but we are where we are & plus or minus a few days, I doubt within a half-standard deviation anyone would have done anything different to bring us to a different place. The more we know about the virus and the more we have solid metrics coming in from Europe, the better our modeling will be. I think the best place to go is the CDC. Check on a regular basis as they are updating modeling as more information reveals itself from the data, but the critical takeaway is that we are heading in to the most difficult month. Mid-April will be rough. Don't be surprised, unprepared, or paralyzed by panic. Be informed. These graphs should tell you what you need to know.
There are different responses a navy can take in respond to COVID-19. You can: 1. Assume readiness risk by pulling ships in, decrease manning/training/etc for a few weeks or months to enable social distancing and stop COVID-19 was spreading crud-like through your battleforce ships. 2. Continue as before because those readiness reports and stop light PPT won't wright themselves. 3. Deploy what you must for critical presence missions, hard operational necessity, or to help the fight against COVID-19. With our hospital ships MERCY and COMFORT, we have done a bit domestically with #3. The French don't have hospital ships ... but they are doing something very interesting with their big-deck amphibs in line with #3, via David Axe:
The French navy has mobilized all three of its Mistral-class amphibious assault ships and is deploying them across Europe, Asia and the Americas in response to the coronavirus pandemic.
The mobilization of the assault ships Mistral and Dixmude on March 25, 2020 came just five days after the French fleet sent sister vessel Tonnerre to Corsica to transport coronavirus patients to hospitals in mainland France.
...
French President Emmanuel Macron described (Operation) Resilience as an “unprecedented military operation dedicated to supporting public services and the French people in the fields of health, logistics and protection.”
Mistral will support the French territory of Reunion in the Indian Ocean. The ship already was in the region for training when the government announced the pandemic-relief operation. Dixmude at the time of the announcement was in the Mediterranean Sea but will sail west to aid France’s Carribean territories.
Time to come up with a few COA around this specific question: what do you do with a ship that has an active COVID-19 outbreak? Another article by David Larter who, it seems, is a national asset. No one covers the Navy more or better.
To combat a growing outbreak of COVID-19 on the carrier Theodore Roosevelt, the Navy has ordered the ship to pull into Guam and have the whole crew of 5,000-plus sailors tested for the novel coronavirus, the service’s acting secretary announced Thursday.
“We found several more cases,” Thomas Modly said in a news conference. "We are in the process of testing 100 percent of the crew of that ship.
“The ship is operationally capable if called upon to do so,” he added, “but we are pulling the ship into Guam. Nobody from the ship will be allowed to leave the ship other than on the pier.”
That is a hell of a fastcruise. Most of those who have deployed know how a "crud" can pass through a ship. Almost everyone to one degree or another gets it. A ship is an incredibly close-proximity place. I don't know if keeping 5,000 Sailors on a ship will do anything but cause more people to get sick. You have to eat, you have to keep the ship going, you have to use the head ... and you cannot self-isolate in 75-man berthing. What can you do? How many berthing barges, YRBM and YRBM(L) do we have available? I have no idea, but we need to find out. If you can take division by division off ship in to these barges, you can at least break down the total number of Sailors quarantined together into a number of smaller blocks, containing where you can. That would be the first step I would take as we looked at other options. We have ships presently deployed who will be coming home to CA, WA, VA, FL and other locations. How many will have outbreaks on the way home? What do you do when a plague ship pulls in to Norfolk or San Diego and thousands of Sailors' families are demanding their husbands, wives, fathers and mothers back? We will find out sooner more than later. And no, I won't second guess this decision. No one can see the future. No one has perfect information. It is what it is.
The Roosevelt was last in port in Da Nang, Vietnam, 15 days ago, Gilday said. The decision to go forward with the port visit in early March was made when Vietnam had only 16 total cases, all isolated in the northern city of Hanoi, he said.
We have learned nothing from our foolish habit of burning out Sailors and ships chasing fevered dreams pumped out by over-caffeinated and under-employed mid-level thinkers. I'm screaming in to the void again over at USNIBlog. Come by and bring you autotune machine with you.
It has been awhile since we covered the second most important thing to a happy Sailor next to good food - that is an easily available and fully functional head. Want a nasty ship? Worse than the Big E during a Suez transit? Have the heads crap out on you. Better yet, have it do so because someone during the Age of Transformationalism had a great PPT slide that, after telling you how equality and modernity required you to get rid of urinals, told you modern technology was going to revolutionize the heads on your transformational warships. Via Anthony Capaccio at Bloomberg, hug your HT today;
New toilets on the Navy’s two newest aircraft carriers clog so frequently that the ships’ sewage systems must be cleaned periodically with specialized acids costing about $400,000 a flush, according to a new congressional audit outlining $130 billion in underestimated long-term maintenance costs.
The Navy isn’t sure the toilet systems on the USS Gerald R. Ford and the USS George H. W. Bush can withstand the demand without failing frequently, according to the watchdog agency’s report on service sustainment costs released Tuesday.
No, there is no excuse for this. The USN has decades, well, actually over a century of experience having thousands of people use the head on a warship every day. I guess the Boomer designers and program managers just knew better than everyone who came before them. Of course;
“The pipes are too narrow and when there are a bunch of sailors flushing the toilet at the same time, like in the morning, the suction doesn’t work,” said Oakley. “The Navy didn’t anticipate this problem.”
Amazing. No, "the Navy" isn't the right answer. Follow the people. Follow the money. Probably the same experts who sold the Navy on titanium fire mains.
Here and on Midrats we have been calling for new and more hospital ships for over a decade. In a crisis, needs and utility come in to clear focus. The argument should be over. I give you Rep. Jim Banks R-IN;
We need a fleet of a dozen or more hospital ships, says Navy reservist and Indiana Congressman Jim Banks.
Good people can hold different opinions on things, but good people can be wrong. Those who don’t support something between new hospital ships to replace the ancient MERCY and COMFORT on one end of the scale to taking up Banks’s idea on the other are, well, just wrong. While there are many more, here are the Top-3 Reasons hospital ships are critical to our Navy: 1. Presence, morale and reassurance are missions. When citizens of LA & NYC see these CVN sized which ships sail in to view, they will know that their government cares and is there to serve. 2. Mobility is a multiplier. A mobile, self-supporting 1,000 bed hospital would be science fiction if it didn’t already exist. Look at the recent videos of hospitals in Spain and Italy with patients laying down on floors in hallways. Tell those people they don’t need a 1,000 bed hospital to help take even the non-COVID load. 3. Nice in peace and war. When not needed for war, pandemics, or natural disasters – imagine the positive effects to our nation of our hospital ships and other ships visiting ports of nations who have limited to no medical care for their citizens. Just ponder what a fleet of 4, 6, or 12 could do? Imagine the training our people will get seeing things they never would in the USA. That is enough. I’ve read and digested all the reasons not to have hospital ships, and to be frank, they are weak arguments made by myopic minds. If they can’t change their minds now, then they are just bullheaded.
Executive Director Gene Seroka: “Port of Los Angeles stands ready to partner with the @USNavy and the federal government as it prepares to bring the USNS Mercy to the Port of Los Angeles. The welfare of our residents is the top priority during this public health crisis.” #COVID19pic.twitter.com/4p28o9TBL6
The City of LA is thrilled to welcome #USNSMercy to the our hospital overflow strategy. Mercy will help attend to patients requiring acute care and in doing so will open up capacity in LA regional hospitals to address COVID-19 patients. #LAStrong#GoNavyhttps://t.co/eftVLtoKJt
What is the nature of obedience for those in the the profession or arms and the civilian political community? With a review of classical studies, philosophy, history, international relations, literature and military studies, can you get a firm grounding on what it is, what it means, and how it should shape decisions and behavior? Returning to Midrats Sunday from 5-6pm Eastern to talk about this and more based around her new book, On Obedience: Contrasting Philosophies for the Military, Citizenry, and Community, will be Dr. Pauline Shanks Kaurin. Pauline holds a PhD in Philosophy from Temple University, and is a specialist in military ethics, just war theory, philosophy of law and applied ethics. She is is a professor in the College of Leadership and Ethics at the US Naval War College. Prior to her arrival in Newport, she was Associate Professor and Chair of Philosophy at Pacific Lutheran University in Tacoma, WA and teaches courses in military ethics, warfare, business ethics, social and political.
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