skip to main |
skip to sidebar
I was thinking of my grandfathers this week - so a little encore FbF in their memory. Enjoy again.
My Grandfather's Navy, thanks to the good people over at the National Film Preservation Foundation.
Take the time to click here for the whole video. Well worth your time. Here is the background.
U.S. Navy of 1915 (1915)
Production Company: Lyman H. Howe Company. Transfer Note: Digital file made from a 35mm negative. Running Time: 11 minutes (silent, no music).
We are indebted to independent scholar Charles “Buckey” Grimm for identifying this 11-minute piece of the celebrated “lost” three-reel documentary U.S. Navy of 1915, produced by the Lyman H. Howe Company. (The piece had formerly been known only as “U.S. Navy Fragment.”) The film was made with the full support of the Secretary of the Navy, Josephus Daniels, who believed in the power of motion pictures to convince isolationists of the importance of building a strong American navy. A former newspaperman who knew the value of publicity, Daniels allowed Howe’s camera crew remarkable shipboard access. The results show sailors as they go about their day—doing repairs, cleaning the deck, exercising, as well as demonstrating naval might. The film drew praise as capturing “the pulse-beat of the complex life that throbs through our dreadnoughts from reveille to ‘taps.’”
This was not first time the Navy had turned to film to tell its story. Early on, the Navy had collaborated with the Biograph Company on a now-lost series of 60 short films showing sailors and officers at work. The series screened at the 1904 St. Louis World’s Fair and 1905 Lewis and Clark Centennial Exposition in Portland before being put to use in a Midwest recruitment tour. Naval facilities and ships also figured prominently in early newsreels and narratives. The service took care to ensure that depictions presented it in a favorable light and reserved the right, for commercial films shot with official approval, to reuse them for the Navy’s own purposes.
Buckey identified the fragment through careful detective work involving the ships and ordnance on display in the fragment. For example, the “E-2” class submarine, pictured in the opening scene, was taken out of service in 1915, and the shells mentioned in a intertitle—“It costs the U.S. government $970.00 for each 14 inch projectile fired”—were added to the naval arsenal the year earlier. The clincher was matching a frame from the documentary with an image used in a newspaper piece to illustrate the Howe film. Buckey reported his research at the 2010 Orphan Film Symposium at New York University.
Born in Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania in 1856, Lyman Hakes Howe got his start as a traveling salesman. In the 1880s he switched to lecturing and demonstrated a miniature working coal mine on the road. When movies came along, he was among the first to make the transition. He devised his own projector, the Animotiscope, which upgraded the Edison machine by adding a second reel, and playing a phonograph to add sound. Soon he was making his own travelogues and newsreels. Little survives of his output other than this fragment.
About the Preservation
The National Film and Sound Archive of Australia generously lent the nitrate print to make the preservation copies. Edge codes on the source material date from 1917, suggesting this print of an earlier film may have been distributed to demonstrate American naval strength after the United States entered World War I. New prints are available at the Library of Congress and the NFSA.
My favorites? Swim call while taking on stores. PT - and the fact they worked in what we now call a dress uniform.
Hat tip Steve.
The end of July brought us this little nugget that I have not pulled out of draft yet;
Republican senators want to include $2.2 billion for Navy shipbuilding in the latest round of relief funds meant to combat the coronavirus pandemic.
According to the text of the bill, lawmakers would allot $1.45 billion of that money so the service could buy four “expeditionary medical ships.”
The proposed funds for medical vessels come after the Navy dispatched its two hospital ships, USNS Mercy (T-AH-19) and USNS Comfort (T-AH-20), earlier this year to aid in pandemic relief efforts. Austal USA, which builds the Expeditionary Fast Transport (EPF) vessels in Mobile, Ala., has evaluated the potential to use the EPF hull for missions like hospital ships.
Here and over on Midrats we've asked for more hospital ship and for more "unsexy but important."
From both a manning and utility point of view - there is a whole lot of potential for presence, public relations, and info ops with these vessels inline with Jerry Hendrix's "Influence Squadrons" concept from the previous decade.
It is as correct now as it was then. Many of the naysayers when it comes to hospital ships touch on the fact our existing hospital ships are hard to man, have obsolete engineering plants, etc, etc.
These are smaller, more flexible, easier to ... well ... as VADM Merz said more professionally;
“The problem with those [hospital] ships is, there’s only two of them, and they’re big, and we’re moving to a more distributed maritime operations construct,” Merz explained at the April 2018 hearing. “There’s no lack of commitment [to this medical capability]; matter of fact, we’re taking a broader look at the capabilities on whether or not they are aligned with the way we plan to fight our future battles. So you’re going to see that requirement surface probably this year, and then we’ll start the process on how we’re going to fill that requirement.”
I think we should at least experiment with a variation of Jerry Hendrix's influence squadrons with these at the core.
People who should know better are promising the same miracles they've promised before ... hoping no one notices, no one cares, and no one refuses to send them billions.
I'm controlling my desire to rage over at USNIBlog.
Come on by and grind your teeth with me.
While keeping a weather eye on China is required, we need to multi-task.
If you are concerned with the long term national security challenges the USA and her allies face - you need to check in on a regular basis with sub-Saharan Africa and Latin America.
From the exceptional Armed Conflict Location & Event Data Project (ACLED) team - something from Latin America that is worth putting in your scan for a few minutes;
Governments in Central America have imposed a variety of measures to contain COVID-19. The government of Mexico officially declared a national health emergency on 30 March 2020 after its first case of COVID-19 was reported at the end of February, suspending non-essential economic activities and advising the population to shelter at home. Some Mexican states imposed further restrictions in addition to the federal order. In the Northern Triangle countries of El Salvador, Guatemala, and Honduras, governments began establishing preventive measures in mid-March, albeit with different degrees of stringency. On 13 March, Guatemala introduced a travel ban for any person arriving from Canada and the United States. Meanwhile, in El Salvador and Honduras, a state of emergency was announced on the 13 and 16 March, respectively. These measures were followed by a national quarantine at the end of March in El Salvador, and curfews during the first week of April in Guatemala and Honduras.
These restrictions have had immediate impacts on gang operations. Locally, the temporary closure of non-essential economic activity has hindered money laundering, as it is traditionally carried out through front businesses that appear to be engaged in legal commerce, while mobility restrictions have similarly impeded extortion rackets. Globally, the demand for recreational drug use has decreased amid the pandemic, and travel restrictions obstruct both drug users looking to purchase as well as drug traffickers aiming to supply (Global Initiative, May, 2020).The reduction of the international traffic of goods and passengers also makes the discovery of illegal cargo by authorities more likely, resulting in the scarcity of certain chemical products essential for drug production (InSight Crime, 18 March 2020).These challenges have forced cartels to seek alternative means of drug distribution and income generation during the crisis.
OK kiddies, take out your JPME-I papers ... what does instability bring?
Conflict;
The health emergency and the consequent economic crisis will certainly shift the balance between cartels and lead some to seek new business models (Al Jazeera, 29 April 2020). Smaller gangs, or those with less economic capacity, are threatened by more established groups and may try to survive by diversifying into violent street crime, extortion, kidnappings, and attacks (Infobae, 25 April 2020). Despite COVID-19 quarantines and stay-at-home orders, Mexico’s homicide rate hit a new high in March 2020 (Government of Mexico, 21 March 2020).
...
Economic pressures have led to increased competition in Honduras, where battles involving gangs as well as reported fatalities stemming from gang violence have spiked, hitting their highest levels of the year (see graph below). Inter-gang fighting has particularly increased across the country, with multiple clashes between the larger mara groups Mara Salvatrucha 13 (MS-13) and Barrio 18 (B-18) and smaller local gangs.
Violence, instability, and economic fragility drives migration. Large scale migration drives instability where they migrate to.
That is us.
In a recent article unrelated to all things maritime, Rod Dreher quoted an anonymized teacher, a “Mr. Smith” who stated,
We have been living, he said, in a condition “like the eight minutes twenty seconds between when the sun dies and we experience it.” He’s talking about the time it takes for light from the sun to reach earth. If the sun suddenly went out, it would take eight minutes and twenty seconds for people on earth to realize it, because that’s how long it will take for the sun’s final rays to arrive here.
When I read this, what immediately came to mind was an article that bothered me since the moment I first read it, the David Ignatius interview at the end of last week with the CNO, Admiral Michael M. Gilday, USN.
Everyone knows the US Navy has not been over-performing the last two decades. We continue to suffer under the unrecoverable sunk cost of the Age of Tranformationalism that begat the sub-optimal drains of LCS, DDG-1000, and the Tiffany good-enoughs of LPD-17 and Ford Class CVN. The dry-hole fiasco born of ill-discipline that was the aborted CG(X) will haunt us well in to the 2030s. No suitable organic tanking, no deep strike. The list goes on and on – regulars here know it.
We think we’ve had bad press, and we have, but we are lucky this is was not worse. Our nation for 19 years decided to invest its blood and treasure in land wars in Asia, distracting the natural focus of a maritime power like the USA on the performance of its Navy. Fat Leonard and the horrible summer of 2017 were bad. The recent burning of BHR in San Diego not quite as bad. Other issues abound.
We also have good stories, important stories, and we owe the American public an opportunity to see that they have a Navy of strong technical expertise, superior deployed leadership, and a capability second to none to guarantee the free flow of goods at market prices through the global maritime commons. The American public should have confidence that their inheritance is in good hands and will continue to protect their interests.
How do we do that? There are a lot of ways, but I don’t think we are getting off to a solid start. Why do we have an inability to do this? Why do we have an inability to move forward?
After an extended period of minimal presence in the public spotlight, we have the Ignatius interview. Help me find the good here, because I can’t;
Gilday discussed the Navy’s problems with me during a frank, hour-long interview last week, initiated at his request. When I asked for his “theory of the case” about what’s wrong, he focused on two areas. The first was professional competency, which was demonstrably flawed in two 2017 ship collisions and in Crozier’s ham-handed handling of the Theodore Roosevelt. The second involved character lapses, evident in SEAL discipline cases and the “Fat Leonard” corruption scandal involving the Pacific fleet.
You guessed it – most of this is simply picking at the failures of the past, and not doing it well – by Ignatius or the CNO.
The CNO asked for this interview with the WaPo. As such, he was hoping to get in front of the major political players in DC and lower levels of the traditional news media that feed off what the WaPo produces. This is not a minor attempt … and IMAO it has backfired.
Read it all, but here’s a few more pull quotes to ruin your Monday;
“After the two collisions in 2017, we asked: ‘Are we building the right values? What can we do better than in the past?’ ” Gilday told me. The Navy revamped its training and tried to inculcate what Gilday describes as “fearless communication” up the chain of command. The goal: “We need a tougher, more resilient sailor than what we saw in those two collisions.”
No. Not just “no,” but “hell no!”
That is not what I saw. That is not what anyone saw. The damage control efforts on the FITZ and MCCAIN were exceptional. The Sailors we saw there were as tough and resilient as any Sailors our Navy has produced. Full stop.
What we need are better leaders – leaders that ensure ships have the depot level maintenance support they require so they don’t have to do other people’s work on top of their own. They need a personnel system that will ensure ships have the proper manning levels … and not just bodies, but qualified Sailors for the equipment that they will operate. We need a culture that does not hide CASREPS, but demands them and aggressively works to resolve them – especially in our forward deployed units. We need training and inspections for personnel and ships as another check to insure that a local unit level failure does not become a national strategic level negative effect.
Sailors are not our problem – their leaders are the problem.
So, we have this precious column space at WaPo … and what is it used for again?
The Navy’s troubles continued, compounded by political interference. Commanders knew a decade ago that the Navy SEALs had become too famous for their own good, and that discipline was eroding. The SEALs were deployed almost constantly in the brutal killing zones of Iraq and Afghanistan, and senior officers tried to weed out those who committed ethical violations. But the force was exhausted and overwhelmed.
…
The Crozier incident was one more fireball for the Navy. Crozier was relieved in April after he sent a desperate email about the situation on board his ship to fellow Navy aviators, without first informing the commander of the Theodore Roosevelt’s strike group, his immediate superior.
…and so on. Yes, I know – this is a political year … but here we are.
Then things just get strange;
What’s the best way to fix a Navy that has been so damaged by this series of broadsides? Harlan Ulman, a former Navy officer and prominent commentator, wrote recently that the Navy needs a leader like Fleet Adm. Ernest J. King, the famously hard-nosed admiral who ran the Navy during World War II. But the days of the profane, sometimes belligerent King have vanished. A better World War II model would be Adm. Chester Nimitz, a quiet, cerebral officer who commanded the Navy in the Pacific and took it from the aftermath of the disaster at Pearl Harbor to victory.
We are in the post-National Security Act of 1947 and the mid-1980s Goldwater-Nichols Act world. Even if we had a King or Nimitz, they couldn’t be “King” or “Nimitz.”
We go from strange to a bizarre world of the non-self-aware;
Can Gilday be the leader the Navy needs? He’s off to a rocky start, but he has time to recover if he takes firm command now. He has the Navy version of a perfect résumé, having worked four times for Adm. Mike Mullen, the former CNO and chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. Gilday also worked closely with Gen. Joseph F. Dunford Jr., a former Joint Chiefs chairman, who named Gilday head of the joint staff and recommended him as CNO. Despite misgivings from some top admirals, Gilday was appointed by Richard Spencer, a widely respected Navy secretary who was ousted by Trump as part of the Gallagher affair.
So many of the latent causes of the miasma our Navy is in can be directly traced to Admiral Mullen’s tenure as CNO & CJCS. It was his rack-and-stack of priorities that set the foundation of what followed. I cannot think of a worse example. Also, Richard Spencer tried hard and is respected for his efforts – but the results are a different thing altogether.
So, there we are. For the record, I have zero beef with the CNO. He is a good man in a tough job trying to do his best … but this interview and a few other recent decisions tell me he needs to look hard at his staff and the advice he is getting. He is the boss, so that only goes so far – but he is also only a man. A good man needs a great staff to be an effective man.
We’ll call this a Mulligan. Put Ignatius in the time out chair and review why we went with him … and use opposite criteria next time.
I can’t help wondering that we are running out of Mulligans. No one owes us our mastery of the world’s oceans we’ve enjoyed since WWII, and to an even greater degree since 1991.
Each generation of civilian and uniformed leaders must execute superior stewardship of their inheritance, improve on it, and give the next generation a better baseline than the previous generation received. This is the only way a civilization continues to prosper, and we are failing.
Over the last two decades, our relative power has decreased. This relative decay accelerated by distracted leadership and clumsy program management. One aggregate cohort failure layered on top of another.
Meanwhile, on the other side of the Pacific a new maritime power grows. Already their extensive and expanding shipyards are set to build a fleet with regional superiority of numbers, if not capability. Global presence of equal stature is just a few years to a decade behind that.
Yet, there is the great United States Navy – poised to go where, exactly?
Are we living in our 8:20 phase – our period of global maritime dominance is gone; we just don’t know it yet?
As a final note, if you missed Sunday’s Midrats with Bryan McGrath, we started to discuss this article in the second half of the show.
This week we are returning to a critical topic that, like it's subject, needs an ongoing push. At the very moment that the need for American Seapower advocacy is most critical, it is nowhere to be found.
Are there existing institutions that can refocus their efforts or expand their mandate to do the job - or do we need something new?
Building off his article from earlier this week, our guest this Sunday from 5-6pm Eastern is returning guest, Bryan McGrath, CDR USN (Ret.), Managing Director of The FerryBridge Group LLC defense consultancy.
Bryan grew up in Mount Laurel, New Jersey, and graduated from the University of Virginia in 1987. He was commissioned upon graduation in the United States Navy, and served as a Surface Warfare Officer until his retirement in 2008. At sea, he served primarily in cruisers and destroyers, rising to command of the Destroyer USS BULKELEY (DDG 84). During his command tour, he won the Surface Navy Association’s Admiral Elmo Zumwalt Award for Inspirational Leadership, and the BULKELEY was awarded the USS ARIZONA Memorial Trophy signifying the fleet’s most combat ready unit. Ashore, Bryan enjoyed four tours in Washington DC, including his final tour in which he acted as Team Leader and primary author of our nation’s 2007 maritime strategy entitled “A Cooperative Strategy for 21st Century Seapower.”
Since retirement, Bryan has become active in presidential politics, serving first as the Navy Policy Team lead for the Romney Campaign in 2012, and then as the Navy and Marine Corps Policy lead for the Rubio Campaign in 2016.
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.
There is a test of international law and regional solidarity going on in the Southeast Pacific.
Hundreds of Chinese fishing vessels are waiting right outside the territorial limits of Ecuador's Galapagos Islands.
More over at USNIBlog where I ponder the implications, and pull a possible solution from an unlikely source.
