OK CNO, now then Break in to Open Revolt to Get the Forces we Need

Some strong words towards China from the CNO at the end of last week that isn't quite getting the play it would in a normal years.

Almost Salamandereaque:

America's military must be ready to respond to a potential Chinese invasion of Taiwan that could come before the end of this year, the head of the US Navy has said.

Admiral Michael Gilday, chief of US naval operations, was the latest senior US military official to indicate heightened alarm over Beijing's intentions towards the island.

"So when we talk about the 2027 window in my mind, that has to be a 2022 window or potentially a 2023 window. I can't rule that out. I don't mean at all to be alarmist by saying that. It's just that we can't wish that away."

The admiral said the US Navy had adopted a "fight tonight" mentality in response and should become ready quicker, prioritising lethality and the size of the fleet.

...

Adm. Gilday said: "It's not just what President Xi says, it's how the Chinese behave and what they do. And what we've seen over the past 20 years is that they have delivered on every promise they've made earlier than they said they were going to deliver on it."

To be prepared, the US should "maximise domestic production rates of weapons that really matter in a fight" and "give industry a clear set of predictable, stable funding".

Those are good, clear, direct and actionable words, but are we going to see consistent focus and follow-through? Will we have more Flag Officers continue to reinforce these statements?

More importantly - will we skate along the appropriate lines inside the DC beltway to advocate for the maritime and aerospace requirements to answer the bell ... now?

The Eeyore Leadership Model for Our Navy

To paraphrase Papa Salamander's favorite saying, "No one owes you a Navy."

It has been eight decades since there was such a great gulf between the Navy our republic needs to meet a growing threat and the Navy its leadership was planning to have.

As we discussed a month ago, the institutions everyone is relying on to make the future fleet have failed their moment in time. 

Another reminder broke above the ambient noise last week, and it wasn't an easy read for navalists looking for firm leadership who - at least in words - give the impression that they have not given up the fight for what we know we need should conflict come in the next decade west of Wake.

Good thing I listened to AEI's scholars Hal Brands and Michael Beckley on The Remnant Podcast to discuss their recent book Danger Zone: The Coming Conflict with China. Folks smarter than me get it ... but it was a little discouraging that they sounded as frustrated - or more - than I am to what looks like a disaster we are sleepwalking in to. 

It isn't that the SECNAV and CNO don't know what time it is - they get better briefings than I do - they just seem to have thrown in the towel and are not up for the fight.

The SECNAV sounds, well, like he wishes he took a different job. Looking at his All Hands Message last week, well ... this isn't quite, "Join me in the battle to get our Navy the resources it needs." battle cry to inspire navalists;

....enhance our strategic partnerships, across the Joint Force, industry, academia, and nations around the globe. Those partnerships are critical in everything that we do. There’s no doubt in my mind about it. 

I don’t know that we’ll be able to ever match one for one, the number of ships that China is producing. But what I do know is that we can build a very large ‘Navy’ made up of all the ships of all our allies and partners around the globe working together collectively as one, in support of our mutual interests.

So, the Navy needs adopt a passive posture to continue to bend the knee to the Army's Cult of the Joint, publicly traded companies who have payrolls to meet, the grievance studies department at Oberlin College, and act-2 of Mike Mullen's wildly successful "1,000 Ship Navy™?"

Really?

Well, if that didn't make you proud and want to recommend to young men and women to join the Navy, this should do it;

...we must all speak up, speak out, and take action to eliminate sexual assault, sexual harassment, and racism from every part of our force. 

Disrespectful remarks, jokes, and actions contribute to an environment that increases the risk of assault, it weakens our force, and puts our Nation at risk.

Well, that message was almost designed to depress, so let's see what surge of energy the CNO provided to everyone as we get ready ponder the 1-year anniversary of our greatest national dishonor since the fall of Saigon;

“We have an industrial capacity that’s limited. In other words, we can only get so many ships off the production line a year. My goal would be to optimize those production lines for destroyers, for frigates, for amphibious ships, for the light amphibious ships, for supply ships,” Gilday said at a Heritage Foundation event.

“We need to give a signal to industry that we need to get to three destroyers a year, instead of 1.5, that we need to maintain two submarines a year. And so part of this is on us to give them a clear set of – a clear aim point so they can plan a work force and infrastructure that’s going to be able to meet the demand. But again, no industry is going to make those kinds of investments unless we give them a higher degree of confidence.”

Asked by USNI News after the event if the reason the Navy isn’t ready to send that signal to industry is because of funding, Gilday said, “it depends on the class of ships. Sometimes it’s affordability. Sometimes it’s industrial capacity.”

There is no reason why we should continue to play lip service to an obsolete system created at the creaking end of the Cold War 40-years ago and intellectually vapid Cult of the Joint that goes with it.

We don't have creative friction, we have complacent concurrence. 

We need someone, anyone really, to help build a pulse that will drive Congress towards a modern version of the Naval Expansion Act, 14 June 1940.

The CNO is close...very close...but like the SECNAV this is passive - diluted of vigor, and drive. 

We either have a moment of greatest threat from China or we do not. 

If we do, we need to act as such. If not, then by all means, maintain course and speed.

Post script: As I found out this AM as this post was in draft, our friend Jerry Hendrix is seeing the same need outlined a few lines above. Give it a read.

Diversity Thursday

A foundation stone of DivThu for over a decade and a half is this simple concept: in a multi-ethnic and multi-racial nation, the most destructive thing that can be done by leaders who value it is to encourage people to divide themselves along racial, ethnic, or other sectarian lines. No society in human history has ever prospered by doing so,

Martin Luther King Jr. was right, the only solution is to judge someone by the content of their character and not the color of their skin.

We once extended this concept to include race, creed, color and nation origin. Not only is that the only way to promote unity, and from that unity receive national strength and cohesion, but also it is fair. Regardless of what you personally do in the course of your life, you cannot change your race, creed, color or national origin. Well, honestly you can't.

It is bad enough when division is done on a personal basis, but what if it is done on a government directed basis? We've seen that before. It was ugly and hateful then, it is ugly and hateful now.

What if such discrimination isn't just promoted by your government, but is considered one of the most important things your military should be focused on?

We know that promoting sectarianism does not produce unity and peace in a nation, why would it be thought of as something that would promote good order and discipline in a military?

It doesn't, but people promoting it don't care. They have other agendas to pursue. There is a small cohort in it as well meaning but wrong people - but the vast majority are in it for the most crass reasons; a paycheck, status, or power, all woven in with resentment and grievance. The most pitiful are those who are scared of people with status and power, or are terrified they might be called a name. We've discussed at length here. New readers can click the Diversity tag below to catch up if they need to.

In the last year, as things have gone pear shaped in this area, some good news and leaders have started to appear to push back. Slowly but firmly some political leaders are stepping forward. These include Sen. Tom Cotton (R-AZ) is one, and Rep. Mike Gallagher (R-WI).

Both of these gentlemen are deeply involved in defense issues, and served as officers in the Army and USMC. They get the danger. They know the terrain.

I'd like you to take in Rep. Gallagher's recent speech on the topic he recently gave at Hillsdale College.

Here are a few pull quotes from the transcript. He's taking no prisoners;

...in his first week on the job, Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin ordered a 60-day stand down to confront “extremism,” forcing all commanding officers to spend a day discussing extremism using a PowerPoint presentation prepared by the Joint Staff that included Ted Talks asking “What is up with us white people?.” Austin also created a new position, “Senior Advisor for Human Capital, Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion.” He hired a man named Bishop Garrison for the position and to run his “Countering Extremism Working Group.” And though Secretary Austin could not define extremism when questioned by the House Armed Services Committee (HASC) five months after his extremism stand down, Bishop Garrison can. Rather than focusing on violent or illegal behavior, his past Tweets brand all those who voted for former President Donald Trump as extremists and racists. 

Well get back to Garrison at the end of the post;

The U.S. Military Academy at West Point likewise required cadets to attend a seminar on DEI and promoted presentations on “White Power at West Point” and “Understanding Whiteness and White Rage.” When questioned about this by HASC members on June 23, 2021, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff General Mark Milley said he was personally offended by the accusation that the military is woke and he defended DEI instruction, saying: “I wanna understand white rage, and I’m white, and I wanna understand it...I’ve read Mao Zedong, I’ve read Karl Marx, I’ve read Lenin. That doesn’t make me a communist.” 

Admiral Mike Gilday, the Chief of Naval Operations, recently included Ibram X Kendi’s How to Be an Antiracist on his “Professional Reading Program,” which is supposed to help sailors “outthink our competitors.” Kendi, a “leading historian” according to one Ted Talk included in Secretary Austin’s PowerPoint on extremism, has called Supreme Court Justice Amy Coney Barrett a “white colonizer,” argues that capitalism is “essentially racist,” and warns “racism has spread to nearly every part of the body politic…threatening the life of human society with nuclear war and climate change.” Kendi also calls for the creation of a Department of Anti-racism “comprised of formally trained experts on racism and no political appointees…empowered with disciplinary tools to wield over and against policymakers and public officials who do not voluntarily change their racist policy and ideas.” When questioned by HASC members on June 15, 2021 about why he included Kendi on his professional reading list, Gilday accused his critics of “trying to paint the United States military, in this case the United States Navy, as weak, as woke…I do know this: our strength is in our diversity and our sailors understand that.”  

Milley’s and Gilday’s comments get to the heart of the matter. When Chairman Milley compared reading Woke texts to reading Mao and Lenin, he unwittingly gave away the game. We read Mao and Lenin to understand our enemies and their tactics. We do not read Mao’s Talks at Yan’an for ideas of how to better run our military. Yet that is precisely how Milley and Gilday are approaching these Woke texts: as useful tools to help better run the Pentagon because of platitudes such as “diversity is our strength.” 

Bingo. Exactly correct. We have two options here with CJCS and CNO:

    1. They don't know this, in which case they are woefully out of their depth and are being malignantly supported by their staff.

    2. They do know this, in which case they are incredibly destructive people holding responsibilities outside any sane nation would allow them to have.

It should be noted that here Milley and Gilday are not simply pointing out that America’s e pluribus unum melting pot is an asset for U.S. military recruitment and that we should be proud that we live in a diverse nation with a diverse military. Nor are they making the narrower argument that, as the recent wars in Iraq and Afghanistan illustrate, a dearth of specialized linguistic and cultural skills can cause death on the battlefield, and there are certain diverse competencies such as fluency in Mandarin or facility with cyber warfare that we must further develop so we are better prepared to beat the CCP in a future war. They are instead asking us to embrace a brand of identity politics that is fashionable on the Left right now, one which judges people explicitly by the color of their skin rather than on their merits as individuals. 

Yes, it is that simple.

Remember Task Force 1 Navy?

They are also making specific and dubious claims about racial and gender diversity based on bad social science. To illustrate this point, consider the recent comments of the chief of Navy personnel, Vice Admiral John Nowell, Jr., who suggested we need to reinstate photos for selection boards so skin color can factor into promotion. Nowell also asserted “we know that diverse teams that are led inclusively will perform better.” This claim appears to come from a “Task Force One Navy (TF1N)” report commissioned after the death of George Floyd. Though TF1N concedes the Navy is more diverse than the U.S. population, it offered approximately 60 DEI recommendations, including de-emphasizing the use of standardized academic tests for Navy recruits, “bias awareness training” for all promotion board members, and developing a “subjectivity mitigation tool” to combat unconscious biases. 

TF1N even quantifies the assertion that “diversity is our strength”, saying “diverse teams are 58 percent more likely than non-diverse teams to accurately assess a situation.” Here TF1N cites a 2014 article from the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences studying price bubbles in experimental markets. The experiment used 180 strangers “trained in business or finance” whose exposure to “diversity” meant briefly sitting white traders in a waiting room with other traders, where “at least one of the [other traders] was an ethnic minority.” These test subjects then made fake stock trades alone in their “separate cubicles” through a computer terminal. So contrary to TF1N’s portrayal, the study says nothing about teams (decisions are made alone by individuals) and nothing about assessing “situations” (it is about pricing and purchasing decisions).

TF1N also claims “gender-diverse organizations are 15 percent more likely to outperform other organizations and diverse organizations are 35 percent more likely to outperform their non-diverse counterparts.” This claim is completely inconsistent with the extant literature on gender,  as recent meta analyses show 0 to negative effects for gender. Yet TF1N selectively cites a single 2015 McKinsey study called “Diversity Matters.” McKinsey’s study uses a modified version of something called “the Herfindahl–Hirschman Index (HHI)” to quantify the racial composition of company boards and claim racial diversity correlates with greater Earnings Before Income and Taxes (EBIT). Yet McKinsey’s HHI formula is such that a company with one white, one Native American, one Latino and seven black members would score as less diverse than a board with six white and four black members. McKinsey’s correlation is also likely weak because they lump their data on 366 public companies into quartiles, comparing only the bottom quartile to the top quartile and thereby conveniently omitting half the data set. 

How any serious person in uniform can support TF1N again after this simple but fact filled take down, I have no idea. I guess they can try, but I don't recommend they try it on The Hill,

It should alarm us that the same military leaders we trust to train our sons and daughters for war are building their DEI agenda upon a foundation of fringe history and shoddy social science. Their underlying assumption that we can generalize (questionable) findings from academia and the private sector to the specific business of asking young men and women to kill and be killed for their country is an assault on common sense. Furthermore, those who view DEI as a harmless addition to the many annoying, administrative things the military must do ignore recent evidence demonstrating initiatives such as implicit bias training either are ineffective or actually intensify inter-group hostility. 

There you go. One of the top people in Congress on military issues. He gets it. 

In summary;

With such a poor empirical and methodological foundation, at best DEI will waste servicemember time and taxpayer money. At worst, DEI will undermine the foundation of our modern, all-volunteer force. This force is by design an exclusive, not inclusive, organization. We are lucky to draw from a diverse population, but we do not want the U.S. military to look like a representative sample of the population. We want it to be the best and the brightest. The U.S. military is an elite and meritocratic organization where only the most fit, disciplined, and lethal individuals should thrive, regardless of skin color. For this reason, the military obsessively measures things like pullups, marksmanship, and a general ability to endure pain. Put differently, diversity may be a strength for America, but it cannot be an organizing principle for the Pentagon. Actual strength—physical strength, mental strength, and overall end strength—is our strength. 

The above are only a few paragraphs from a much longer speech. Lucky for you, we have the video.

Freshen up your coffee or adult beverage of choice, or set it up it so you can listen to it on your commute today, and watch it for yourself. As the cool kids say, "like and share."

This needs broad distribution and support. There are lot more battles to be fought to get to where we need to be. We need to reward bravery and good behavior, and support every friend we have.

A couple of additional items. Our friend Kristina Wong is writing on the same topic. Take time to give it a read.

Also, back to this Bishop Garrison character. It looks like he sees a shadow on his rice bowl. Give this summary a read, you paid for a it.

Diversity Thursday

Once again we are faced with two options: 1) the CNO is fighting as best he can to slow roll the forces of hate and division that are trying to turn his service in to an organization beset by strife, division, and sectarianism by saying the right words to keep the worst at bay while waiting for the tides to shift or; 2) the CNO is a true believer, more woke than woke – and he is going to drag everyone down with him.

I am open to either option – or perhaps a 3rd “useful idiot” – but the CNO is not an idiot. He is a smart, hardworking, and talented man. As such, we must default to 1 or 2. 

Things are leaning towards 2.

“My goal is to put the Navy in a place over the next 20 years where we’re the most diverse service in the DoD,” Gilday said during a “State of the Navy” event hosted Thursday by Defense One.

“I think it’s going to be a long-term effort to get us where we need to be with respect to a diverse force,” Gilday said. “And where, you know, we ultimately have a force where respect is part of everybody’s DNA, right?”

OK, let’s top there. Putting aside the irony of his use of “DNA,” read again what he said.

In essence, he claims that the organization he leads and was part of for over three decades, does not represent everyone. Really?

That is a bold claim. I hope he has some data to back up such an inflammatory comment against his service.

The ultimate goal, he said, is for the force to respect diversity — which not only encompasses racial and gender diversity, but experience and varied backgrounds. That will require the Navy to modify how it recruits, retains and manages talent to remain competitive.

“I think that if organizations don’t have that mindset, they’re not going to be competitive in this century,” Gilday said

Nope. He doubles down. In the CNO’s mind, he leads a bigoted service. 

Huh.

Not what I saw for two decades, but perhaps I served with a more enlightened, better cohort of Sailors than he does.

Do we have some facts to look at supporting his statement?

...more than 41 percent of of enlisted sailors are people of color — the highest ratio of all the branches of the military. They comprise nearly 23 percent of officers in the Navy, behind the Army’s nearly 27 percent ... Black male and Black female enlisted recruits comprise a higher percentage of enlisted accessions than are represented in the civilian workforce of 18- to 44-year-olds...white, Asian and Hispanic enlisted recruits make up a smaller percentage of accessions than are represented in the civilian workforce.

Ummm…who wants to tell him? If anything, these numbers say our Navy isn’t recruiting enough “whites,” Asians, or “Hispanics”…if your goal is to “look like America” – whatever that means.

But the military as a whole lacks racial diversity among higher ranks. Based on data from the Congressional Research Service, the study found that nearly 90 percent of general or flag officers in 2018 were white, and nearly 80 percent of all officers were white.

And there we go - some problems are more problematic than others. 

As we have described for over a decade and a half here, the problem is not the Navy, it is the US educational, criminal, and cultural group differences that are the initial filters before anyone even gets near their first officer recruiter. 

The Navy cannot affect those three things. We are customers of our nation’s systems, not a producer of them.

To help retain a diverse population of sailors, the report advises the Navy to examine the structure currently in place for promotions, detailing and milestone job opportunities. It suggests expanding the diversity data included in the records of selection board proceedings and several other submissions in an attempt to foster transparency.

Yes, they want to put the pieces in place – including returning photos into selection boards – in order to be able to move towards hard quotas based on self-identified race and ethnic classifications; a system that throughout human history only leads to division, sectarianism, and conflict.

“If anything, we’re getting more diverse, not less diverse and we need to welcome it, we need to embrace it,” 

Again, the “need to.” We do. We did. We are. Does he know the Navy he leads?

There are few places better than the military for accepting talent regardless of the DNA source. It is something we should be proud of, but instead our leaders pretend just the opposite it true.

The CNO’s vision of his own organization isn’t just wrong, it borders on slander.

Diversity Thursday

The last few Thursdays we've pushed back rather hard on the Chief of Naval Operations, Admiral Gilday, USN. 

To be frank, he's earned it not just from me, but from Congressmen, Senators and commentators all over. 

If you recall, we tried to warn him back in February that his addition of the book "How to be Anti-Racist" by the highly problematic Ibram X. Kendi was a mistake.

In the end, his defense of his choice and the excuses he gave - and those of the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, General Milley, USA - have been hollow mostly because their is nothing on the list that promotes the "critical thinking" they say they want, or attempts to get a full view of the challenge. Instead, there is just one partisan and sectarian side of the argument provided and defended. That is the essence of advocacy, not inquiry. 

That is not shocking when one considers the diversity industries taxpayer funded permanent nomenklatura they injected in to staff and advisory positions. Senior leaders foolishly take their advice, mostly out of fear.  

The USN and US military senior leadership has, rightfully, been seen as taking sides - and in so doing, taking a side that assumes the worst of them, their service, and the nation we all serve.

If they were really interested in an objective discussion - and an argument could be made this is highly counter productive exercise regardless of how they do it reading list wise - then their would need to be balance.

What could have been done to provide at least an attempt of neutrality? Another world view.

Better yet - and Kendi is mostly emotion driven - a view based on fact and scholarship.

If Kendi must be on the list, then he should be balanced with the like of Charles Murray. The book, his latest, Facing Reality: Two Truths about Race in America.

This book is presently the #1 Best Seller in Discrimination & Racism

What is the book about?

The charges of white privilege and systemic racism that are tearing the country apart float free of reality. Two known facts, long since documented beyond reasonable doubt, need to be brought into the open and incorporated into the way we think about public policy: American whites, blacks, Hispanics, and Asians have different violent crime rates and different means and distributions of cognitive ability. The allegations of racism in policing, college admissions, segregation in housing, and hiring and promotions in the workplace ignore the ways in which the problems that prompt the allegations of systemic racism are driven by these two realities.

What good can come of bringing them into the open? America’s most precious ideal is what used to be known as the American Creed: People are not to be judged by where they came from, what social class they come from, or by race, color, or creed. They must be judged as individuals. The prevailing Progressive ideology repudiates that ideal, demanding instead that the state should judge people by their race, social origins, religion, sex, and sexual orientation.

We on the center left and center right who are the American Creed’s natural defenders have painted ourselves into a corner. We have been unwilling to say openly that different groups have significant group differences. Since we have not been willing to say that, we have been left defenseless against the claims that racism is to blame. What else could it be? We have been afraid to answer. We must. Facing Reality is a step in that direction.

If you are not familiar with Charles Murray, he holds the F. A. Hayek Emeritus Chair in Cultural Studies at the American Enterprise Institute and is an author of multiple books.

As you ponder another book, while you are driving to work and back today, I would offer to you a recent podcast by Matt K. Lewis where he interviews Charles Murray for a little over 45-minutes. They get to the book a little more than halfway through the show, but I encourage you to listen to the whole thing.

You can listen to it at this link, or use the embedded show below.

 

Diversity Thursday

Today we're going to build off of last week's DivThu that was focused on the CNO, Admiral Giday, USN.

We are going to tie in the connection between Critical Race Theory, Antiracism, and Marxism - topics everyone is talking around for reasons best explained by them if you can get them to actually answer a question.

If you missed last week, click here and read it, watch the videos, then come back,

We'll leave last week at the House, and go to the CNO in the Senate in this remarkable exchange with Senator Tom Cotton (R-AR).

The CNO did not answer the question. He just repeated talking points from last week. He brings up unrelated topics ... as if Kendi's work has anything to do with critical thinking, China or Russia.

No other side contra to Kendi's world view is on the reading list that one can reference to have a discussion about the issue, or "think critically." There is no balance here at all. The CNO has chosen a side. He has become political on a domestic issue, dragging his Navy along with him. 

The CNO has read Kendi, I'll take him at his word, and by all indications is a true believer. Hoist that onboard and accept it. I have.

From here on out it is important to remember that when the CNO uses the words, "racism" and "equity," he does not define it as you and I do - but as Kendi does,

In his book,"How to be an Antiracist," Kendi defines racism as;

Racism is a marriage of racist policies and racist ideas that produces and normalized racial inequities. 

Next, equity: 

Racial equity is when two or more racial groups are standing on a relatively equal footing. An example of racial equity would be if there were relatively equitable percentages of all three racial groups living in owner occupied homes...

Apply that concept to nuclear power school, medical schools, as well as biathlon and NBA teams. You can only get there by using a 1920's KKK definition or race married with strict quotas.

That is the remedy being injected right in to the veins of our Navy.

What a shame. Many (D) oppose the Navy because a larger Navy was a Trump thing, and as such it must be opposed and resisted because orange man bad. Now we have many natural allies of our Navy on the (R) side not all that sympathetic to other issues the CNO may bring up because in word and action, the Navy now seems the most woke of all the services.

Then again, maybe not. Perhaps we have a savior.

Then this Wednesday we had the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, General Milley, USA up in the House. 

Again, we have unrelated talking points that clearly show that they do not know what they are reading, if they have read it in full. Mostly the Chairman and CNO sound like they are just repeating what their briefers from the DOD/DON branch of the diversity industry told them. "White rage?" That isn't in Kendi, and wasn't about the events of 1/6/21. There are all sorts of strange defections here. Watch it yourself.

He brings up Mao, Marx, and Lenin. Huh. Funny he should say that.

I want to bring to your attention a 4-minute segment from a podcast by Jonah Goldberg from last week. You can listen to the full podcast here if you want, but this segment from ~the 16-20 minute mark are germane. 

Here's the transcript;

“The Ibram X. Kendi, I think that’s his name, the foremost guy in this anti-racism stuff. That’s basically,  if that is what we are calling Critical Racism theory, right, which is that, this anti-racism thing that it doesn’t matter wether if you don’t bigotry in you heart, that if you don’t affirmatively support what he and his milieu of activists define as anti-racist policies, then you are objectively racist. 

And, people keep asking why does this has anything to do with, why do people call this Marxist, actually I was had a long conversation with my wife about this the other day. To the extent it draws on Marxism, which it does as a matter of intellectual history, even though I doubt one in a thousand people who talk about Critical Race Theory as a good thing could explain to you what its roots in Marxism are, but it goes back to this idea of Material Conditions that is in Marx and a lot of Marxist thought.

It’s very much like this anti-racism stuff in this way. It used to be Marxists when they had their conferences or  gave their speeches or whatever, that would say, “It is objectively true that…”, right, and they would argue that, “it is objectively true” because they liked to use the phrase “It is objectively true..” because it conjured, it drew upon the myth that Marxism was scientific. This has nothing to do with one person’s opinion or a contest of values, they always liked to steal authority on the cheap by claiming it was scientific. 

That’s largely gone now, but instead what’s left is this same sort of Marxist argument they used to make which is that if you were not with the program of the communists or the socialists or whatever, and you had a point of view that wasn’t for the revolutionary overthrow or radical revolutionary transformation of society, then you were objectively on the side of the ruling class, the aristocracy, the industrial class or what Randy Weinegarten called the ownership class. 

That’s where this whole thing about class consciousness comes out of in that is where you are part of the proletariate, the working class, the lumpen proletariate, all those kind of things, once you achieve class consciousness, once you actually see the exploitation inherent in the system, then of course you will act in solidarity with the other members of your class for the overthrow of the established order, and if you don’t agree with all of that, then you are objectively on the side of the oppressors. 

So that’s the psychological-rhetorical trick that Critical Race Theorists use or at least Anti-racist theorists use when they talk about race insofar that they say that we have a monopoly on the truth. We have a monopoly on what constitutes racist policy and not racist policy and if you don’t affirmatively side with us in pushing anti-racist policies, and philosophies, and ideas, then you are objectively on the side of racism and it doesn’t even matter whether you are personally racist, because you are on the wrong side of the defining Material Conditions of how society is organized. 

That would be wrong enough and bad enough except for the fact that because most of these people don’t actually understand that that they are mimicking Marxist arguments, they take it an step further in they say that not only are you on the side of racism, but you must actually be a racist in your heart if you disagree with us."

Interesting times we find ourselves in. You were warned here every Thursday.

---

UPDATE: Highly recommend everyone take a time to listen to or read the transcript of the recent Hugh Hewitt interview with Rep. Michael Waltz (R-FL) on Chairman Milley's comments.

---

UPDATE II - Electric Boogaloo: This Solzhenitsyn quote seems germane.

“And he who is not sufficiently courageous to defend his soul — don’t let him be proud of his ‘progressive’ views, and don’t let him boast that he is an academician or a people’s artist, a distinguished figure or a general. Let him say to himself: I am a part of the herd and a coward. It’s all the same to me as long as I’m fed and kept warm.”

Diversity Thursday

Today we return to the subject of the addition to the CNO's reading list of a book that openly calls for the most sectarian view of race. Worse, it calls for the official application of racism in to official policy.

For those who have not read his book, let me pull out how Ibram X. Kendi defines things in his book, "How to be an Antiracist," the book in question. 

Words mean things, and when people redefine words, you need to pay special attention;

 

Now operationalize that concept in your mind every time in our Navy you hear, "equity." From Flight Surgeons to Nuke Power School - operationalize the above concept and how, once people read this CNO recommended book, they move to reflect that in how we do business.

Outside our Navy, by that example everything is racist from medical school, to the NBA, cattle ranching, and the music world.

To accept that definition is to either encourage unending sectarian conflict and activated "one drop rule" discrimination based on race, creed, color, national origin, etc ... which naturally, will lead to sectarian conflict.

To inject Kendi's world view is to invite conflict. Indeed, that is exactly where it wants to go. Chaos and conflict are opportunities for those who desire power and control.

Now to yesterday's hearing. 

You can watch the full hearing here or here, but below is a cut specifically to the 01:08 point where the CNO is asked about the disgraceful addition of the divisive and sectarian Ibram X. Kendi to his reading list.

It is one thing to see the obviously flustered CNO try to maneuver around his own minefield, but I think it is much more revealing to read the transcript;

Congressman Lamborn (R-CO): "Admiral Gilday, I have to ask you about something first, that I'm concerned about and a lot of people in the civilian world. I sent you a letter with two dozen people on it concerned that you recently added several books to the Navy's professional reading list promoting Critical Race Theory and one of these books is Ibram X. Kendi's "How to be an Antiracist" and it argues that the entire American system is corrupted from top to bottom by racial prejudices which account for all differences in outcomes in out society and one sentence out of that book says that, "The only remedy to past discrimination is present discrimination. The only remedy to present discrimination is future discrimination." Now, I understand that this is a voluntary reading list, but how does exposing to our Sailors to the idea that they are either oppressors or the oppressed, and that we must actively discriminate to make up for past discrimination improves our Navy's readiness and lethality for great power competition?"

CNO Gilday: "Sir, initially you mentioned Critical Race Theory. I am not a theorist, I'm the Chief of Naval Operations, but I can tell you is factually on a substantial enough of time talking to Sailors there's racism in the Navy just like racism in our country and the way we're going to get after it is to be honest about it and that's what we're doing and that's one of the reasons that book is on the list doesn't mean I have any expectation that anybody believe or support everything that Mr. Kendi states in his book. I don't support everything that Kendi says, but the key point here is the Sailors in our Navy, we have to be able  to think critically. They have to be able to look outwardly at China and Russia and they have to understand what these societies, why those societies who are potential dangers to the United States inwardly. We have to understand ourselves and we have to understand critically that we value diversity, and I thought okay..."

Lamborn: "Admiral, I agree that we should have a robust and a great discussion and any racism uprooted and taken away. I absolutely agree and I endorse that, but should we have future discrimination? Do you, don't you disagree that particular statement, do you?" 

Gilday: "Sir, I have to look at the context of it. I'm not trying to be evasive, but I don't, as I mentioned, I don't support everything Kendi asserts, I don't believe everything that I read. I think that I hope, I think that everyone has to be in a position to weigh facts from fiction. Even our Sailors, they're bombarded every day from misinformation, much of it comes from China and Russia on this issue that's getting in our national psyche. I'm trying to get after it in the Navy."

Lamborn: "OK, well I hope that's one statement you don't endorse and maybe we can follow up on that."

There is so much to unpack here, and so much that is revealing. I can't cover it in one post, and if you've watched the clip and read the transcript, the problems with the CNO's response and understanding are self-evident.

Let me pick my top issues.

Theory: I'm sorry, but the CNO specifically and Flag Officers in general damn sure better be theorists. That is their job.

You have to understand and execute the practical application of theory; just war theory; deterrence theory; recruitment theory; etc. The oft mentioned, "Project Overmatch" is a theory. Alliances are based on theory. Most of what the late great Wayne Hughes taught us was theory.

Sorry, that dog don't hunt CNO.

Kendi: OK Admiral, now let's get to why of all authors you have Kendi on your list. If you don't support all of what Kendi asserts, what do you support that he asserts such that you would put it on your reading list? If you want Sailors to think critically, where are the books out there that provide a different view than Kendi on the topic of how to address racism so our Sailors can critically weigh his ideas against others? If that is your desire, then you've failed. If that isn't your desire, then it is clear what you are doing - endorsing political sectarianism - intentionally or unintentionally.

Misinformation: What specific examples of misinformation that our Sailors see daily on racism is coming from China and Russia that you think Kendi's work is helpful with? Are people entitled to state that the ideas, examples, and opinions about the USA - its people and institutions - in Kendi's book are themselves "misinformation?" 

This very revealing exchange - there have been more and I hope there will be more - clearly tells us we have one of two things, or both: 

1) Either the CNO is fully engaged in Kendi's view of our nation and it's people, or... 

2) ...he has decided to let the Navy's branch of the diversity industry bully him in to including his and similar works so they will not raise trouble and call him nasty names.

Either answer to the above is unacceptable.

Yes it matters. The United States of American is an experiment in self-governance by a gloriously polyglot people. The only way this will work is if the people see themselves as Americans first, and believe that their government will treat them as individuals; equal to all other citizens. We've spent the entire history of our republic striving to get better at this ideal and have been more successful in this regard than any other nation in the history of the world. 

As we approach the middle of the 21st Century, if we turn from the concept of judging people by the content of their character instead of their race, creed, color, national origin, or other sectarian divisions, and turning back towards lower-brainstem sectarianism, we are heading to a very dark place. No society that encouraged sectarianism amongst its people has ever survived. It always leads to division, and usually rivers of blood.

To inject that view in to a nation's military, as opposed to suppressing it, is the height of foolishness and greases the path towards self-destruction.

---

UPDATE: Later on in the hearing, Rep. Banks (R-IN) also weighed in to the topic. 

The CNO comes off even worse.

 

A Graduate Level Class on Efficiently Grilling the CNO

No, this isn't Rep. Luria (D-VA) week on CDR Salamander, though it is playing out as such ... but my post that was going up today is going on the back burner so we can bring up this jewel ... dare I say a Salamanderesque episode as uploaded by our friend Herb Carmen from today's HASC hearing.

I'll let Rep. Luria take it from here.  If we could have another dozen or so like this on The Hill, that would be great. Thanks.

Now, dig deep in to the point she's making here. Our Navy got in the pickle it is right now from overpromising and underdelivering; by acting like a salesman for the defense industry, vice a customer of same.

More of this is needed ... and on THU we'll have an earlier exchange with a different member of Congress that we'll cover.

CNO is Heading in the Right Direction

Gina Harkins over at Military Times yesterday has some great quotes from CNO Gilday. He is saying things most readers here will be happy with. 

It would have been ideal for a CNO 10-12 years ago to have said most of the following – because it was as true then as it is now – but we’ll take today over another decade’s wait. 

We need to look for action and follow through, but this is all very sound stuff;

"I don't mean to be dramatic, but I feel like, if the Navy loses its head, if we go off course and we take our eyes off those things we need to focus on ... I think we may not be able to recover in this century," Gilday told reporters Friday, ahead of the document's release. "Based on the trajectory that the Chinese are on right now -- and again, I don't mean to be dramatic -- I just sense that this is not a decade that we can afford to lose ground."

The Long Game is real and we are reaping what the Age of Transformationalism sowed. We cannot fix the errors of the past, but we can change the direction we are heading in now as we set up for the future. 

  

We have not just lost a decade, in a very real sense we lost the better part of two if you want to be picky. However, a decade ago it was clear what the errors were in the first decade of the 21st Century, it just took a decade for it to soak its way up to the top. 

More evidence that we “get it;”

"... I am more interested in getting it right in a deliberate fashion than I am getting it fast."

I take that to mean a greater respect for technology risk and throwing away the snake oil of “jumping generations” and all that crap. The above comment is especially good as it takes aim at those who, either ignorant of the past or arrogantly thinking it no longer applies, were heading full speed in a Transformationalist mindset that begat LCS and DDG-1000 with unmanned systems. The technology is just not mature enough, from engineering to weaponeering. 

We have a lot more testing to do.

Buying large numbers of unmanned vessels by the mid-2020s is "unrealistic," Gilday told reporters. Instead, by the end of the decade, sailors "must have a high degree of confidence and skill operating alongside proven unmanned platforms at sea," he said.

Exactly. We also seem to be taking a few bites of crow and returning to our core competencies;

"This includes divestment of experimental Littoral Combat Ship hulls, legacy Cruisers, and older Dock Landing Ships," he wrote. "It also includes divesting non-core Navy missions like Aegis-ashore. Transferring shore-based Ballistic Missile Defense sites to ground forces enables Sailors to focus on their core missions at sea and frees up resources to increase our lethality."

FREEDOM Class LCS should be mothballed as soon as practical. That and the other steps will allow us to re-capture Sailors towards higher value uses of their time and talents. No, it won’t be easy … and neither will the money;

"It may not be as smooth of transition as everybody wants," he said, "... [but] we need to divest from some of these capabilities that are becoming very expensive to maintain." The Navy is transforming at a time when military leaders are bracing for possible budget constraints. Gilday said he doesn't expect any sort of plus-up. President-elect Joe Biden has acknowledged that the military is facing threats it hasn't seen since the Cold War, but slammed President Donald Trump for abandoning fiscal discipline when it came to defense spending.

Will everyone please stop using the “T” word, except when used ironically or as an insult? Thanks. 

In addition to money, the last 10-20 years has seen a lot of wasted money, personal/professional capital, and warfighting ability because … our leaders decided other things were more important – or they just were well meaning people who had the wrong approach. Either way, we are … no kidding here … out of time.

…Gilday said there is no time to waste in pushing ahead with … investments in public shipyards, dry docks, maintenance facilities and aviation depots that he says are overdue for upgrades.

That last bit – the “unsexy but important” is something we can and should do immediately. It looks like that is the plan. 

Actions we must do now; stop double-pumping. Stop more than 6-month deployments. That wasn’t addressed in the article … but I thought I throw it in here for good measure. 

Good words; let’s see action.

Crossposted to substack.

Are we living in the 8:20 of American Seapower Dominance?

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.

SECNAV & CNO on TR and Captain Crozier

In place of FbF today - a rare occurrence - I offer to you the below, the best link I can find to the statement and press conference today. Worth your time and pondering.

I would ask this; watch thing not from an internal USA point of view, but from an external point of view. 

LIVE: @SECNAV & @USNavyCNO provide an update on the results of the @therealcvn71 command investigation https://t.co/s0GgPZkWYd

— Department of Defense 🇺🇸 (@DeptofDefense) June 19, 2020

A Review of FRAGO 01/2019: A Design for Maintaining Maritime Superiority

If you want to know what the new CNO is thinking about our Navy, its place today and the direction he wants to lead it, the best thing you can do is read his guidance to the fleet.

In a returning guest post here, Bryan McGrath provides his perspective on the CNO's guidance. Bryan, over to you.

---

Having assumed the job of Chief of Naval Operations approximately 100 days ago, ADM Mike Gilday has released authoritative guidance informing Navy leadership (and the rest of us) of his priorities. Despite its unwieldy name, FRAGO 01/2019: A Design for Maintaining Maritime Superiority is a clear, concise, and important indicator of how Gilday intends to lead the Navy, and its clarity and purpose should help re-establish confidence in the Navy after a series of newsworthy leadership transgressions in the past few months.

Gilday has retained his predecessor’s approach by issuing a “fragmentary order” to the December 2018 “Design for Maintaining Maritime Superiority 2.0”, likely a gesture designed to reinforce stability and continuity, but one which unfortunately results not only in the aforementioned unwieldy title, but also diminishes its stand-alone qualities. This really is a different document than its predecessor, and it deserves to be recognized as such. Adopting one of the briefing tools of the Naval Aviation community, let’s get to a brief “goods and others” analysis of this document.

Goods

Right out of the chute, this document continues to tie the direction of the Navy firmly to great power contention, primarily on the “high end” of the conflict continuum. Great powers are building and operating fleets that should focus our attention as much as the Navy’s contributions to Joint warfighting and power projection currently do. Gilday recognizes this (as did his predecessor).

Next, it is clear that the CNO and the Commandant of the Marine Corps are closely aligned when it comes to greater integration of their Services. General Berger’s July 2019 “Commandant’s Planning Guidance” broke new ground in naval thinking at the Service Chief level, and Gilday follows up by embracing a concept of “Integrated American Naval Power” that signals his assent to the partnership.

Moreover, Gilday promotes a welcome sense of urgency in his messaging, not the urgency of bureaucrats tracking metrics showing 3% increases in efficiency, but the urgency of a leader who recognizes the security environment demands it of us. One area drawing serious CNO-level attention is ship depot level maintenance, and his dissatisfaction with the poor record of ships completing their maintenance periods on time. The post-Cold War era drove us to an approach to depot level maintenance that stressed efficiency, an approach that seems to have succeeded in defining the minimum industrial base and workforce required to support the fleet, a minimum that is not being met. We must begin to think again in terms of great power competition, a thought process that values effectiveness over efficiency, margin over “just in time”, and redundancy over sufficiency. We are not going to “lean” our way through this.

Gilday recognizes in this document the limitations of the Optimized Fleet Response Plan’s (OFRP) “supply-driven” approach to force generation, which was another triumph of the culture of efficiency over effectiveness. It is clear that the Navy is back in the demand-driven force generation business, with Gilday calling for an assessment of the OFRP in measured tones that seem to spell considerable change on the horizon, the kind of change that is implicit in the direction for Dynamic Force Employment contained in the National Defense Strategy.

Gilday’s sense of urgency extends to the subject of fleet operations, concepts of operations, and large scale naval exercises. We will get a taste of this next year in “Large Scale Exercise (LSE) 2020”, but the CNO seems (rightly) to be calling for extensive exercises of this nature on a recurring basis. Implicit in this fleet-centric approach is the CNO’s dedication to networking and command/control to enable it. His emphasis in this document on digitization and integration of space, cyber, and electronic warfare reveals his understanding that USN/USMC integration will not occur until the Navy can successfully integrate its own forces across the warfighting domains.

Recognizing that shore infrastructure has become a bill-payer for current operations, the FRAGO raises the visibility on crumbling shore-side infrastructure that is an essential part of the greater fleet architecture and signals the CNO’s interest in properly resourcing it.

Others

Well, first, there’s the name. But I repeat myself.

Next (and really, only), there is the elephant in the room, and that is the simple truth that the concepts driving naval integration (Distributed Maritime Operations (DMO), Expeditionary Advanced Base Operations (EABO), and Littoral Operations in a Contested Environment (LOCE) ) are (1) not derived of an Operational Architecture for Fleet Operations, (2) not supported by a coherent systems architecture that allocates functionalities across an ensemble of systems, networks and platforms, and (3) not supported by a set of validated operational requirements. There is no organization in the Department of the Navy with the authority, staffing, and resources to perform any one of these three functions, yet all three must align in order for CNO’s vision of Integrated American Naval Power to become a reality. And if we were to imagine that such organizations existed to carry out the functions above, we would still be without an acquisition organization capable of carrying it all out.

What I’m suggesting is that we are trying to build a 21st Century Navy with a 20th Century bureaucracy, and I’m sorry to say the bureaucracy should be different and larger than it is now. Great power competition merits it. First, OPNAV N9 should subsume all functions currently within the OPNAV N6 portion of N2/N6, as the DCNO for Warfare Systems (N9) surely should sit atop the requirements development process for Fleet Warfighting, and in the process, determine where trades among capabilities should be made at the domain and cross-domain level. The continued distinction among things that are “combat systems” and things that are “intelligence, surveillance, and targeting” systems is no longer relevant in warfighting, system design, or acquisition. Reflecting this merge, the acquisition community must also reform.

Accordingly, the Navy should establish a four-star systems engineering organization akin to what the Missile Defense Agency does within that more narrow set of operational requirements (although the requirements would be derived at OPNAV and USMC). This new command would work hand in hand with both OPNAV N9 and the Marine Corps Combat Development Command (MCCDC) to create and monitor fleet level systems architectures, with authority over all Navy and Marine Corps SYSCOMS and PEOs. The Admiral or General in charge would serve an extended term of office (akin to that of the four-star at the Bureau of Naval Reactors) and would have the authority and resources to move money across the architecture to speed up promising developments, shore up lagging areas, or capitalize unexpected technology maturation.

Because authority, funding, and acquisition responsibility for achieving the vision of a Fleet Tactical Grid or a Naval Operational Architecture is divided among numerous resource sponsors and technical authorities, authority and responsibility are diluted and progress is made in spite of the bureaucracy rather than as a result of it. One sentence on page 7 distills this whole issue for me: “This will include fielding high-return technologies such as directed energy (OPNAV N9) and electronic warfare (OPNAV N2N6).” Why two different organizations are responsible for fielding these two fundamental aspects of modern warfare escapes me.

Conclusion

Other than the one, pretty substantial other, I don’t have much to say bad about this document. I like it better than any of the more recent efforts of this kind by CNOs, and I am very comfortable with the course it sets for the Navy. My criticism of it is of course, unfair, as CNO Gilday did not set out in this document to propose a bureaucratic reorganization of the Navy. I do wish that he had dropped a hook in it for such change, like he did in announcing an assessment of OFRP.

That said, we now have both Service Chiefs in the Department of the Navy aligned on a new, more integrated, and more muscular American Seapower. Both seem to realize that this means changes up and down the chain of command and across their respective service enterprises. The next step is for the two of them and their soon-to-be common superior (the Secretary of the Navy, when confirmed) to get religion and start educating OSD, the Hill, and the American public about what Integrated American Naval Power is and why it is the critical to protecting and sustaining our national interests and continuing prosperity. More, faster, please.


Bryan McGrath is the Managing Director of The FerryBridge Group, and he counts the Navy among his consulting clients. The opinions contained herein are his own.