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By popular acclimation - there can be but one FbF this week;
He was at his post on the 44th floor of World Trade Center Tower 1 on September 11, 2001, when a psychotic madman flew a passenger airliner into the building. When the Port Authority came over the loudspeaker in the building and ordered everyone inside to stay put, Rescorla muttered "Bugger that Blimy Poppycock" (or something equally British) under his breath, and flipped his brain right back into Commanding Officer mode. It wasn't his first time dealing with a terrorist attack on his place of employment – in 1993, when a truck bomb went off in the basement of the Tower, Rescorla had evacuated his offices, helping everyone out until he was the last man to leave the building – and he wasn't taking any chances this time either. He grabbed a bullhorn and personally ran up and down the 22 floors that encompassed Morgan Stanley Dean Witter headquarters, quickly and calmly getting everyone out of their cubes and down the stairs. Rushing up and down the building despite the fact that he was 62 years old and dying from terminal bone marrow cancer, Rescorla didn't even consider slowing down until all 2,700 of his co-workers were safely out of the burning building. When he saw how terrified the men and women he worked with were, he went back to his old standby of singing British folk songs to try and cheer them up.
He was last seen on the tenth floor of the World Trade Center, headed up. Of the 2,700 people he had been charged with protecting, all but 6 survived the terrorist attack.
That is only a sliver of the story of a man.
Why you may wonder, do I have as the image the cover of We Were Soldiers Once...and Young
? Well ... take a few minutes to read the full story.
The "Under," like the Deputy Director of the CIA, it is a job with a lot more heft and importance than you'd think just by the title.
Agree or disagree with the former Undersecretary of the Navy on a specific issue if you like, there are a few things that are not in dispute; Bob Work had spent decades thinking hard and deep about the requirements of the being the premier naval power. He had the "street cred," was not afraid to engage his opponents, and had a depth of knowledge and passion about issues he knew intimately and instinctively. When he spoke, you listened closely. He was creative friction in the best meaning of the phrase.
If you were going to disagree with Bob Work - which by the way he was fine with - then you better do your homework. You had to respect the man's knowledge of his craft. People understood that from day-1 he was in office. Indeed, that is why he was chosen.
What was Bob Work's back-o-the-napkin CV before he became The Under?
- NROTC type, commissioned as a 2LT in the USMC in 1974.
- 27 years active duty service in the Marines. Commanded an artillery battalion, then Camp Fuji.
- The first head of the Marine Corps' Strategic Initiatives Group.
- Military Assistant and Special Aide to United States Secretary of the Navy Richard Danzig; retired as a Colonel in 2001.
- Spent the 2000s at CBSA and played around at Georgetown, ONA, and OSD - including work on the 2006 QDR.
- Worked with the Obama transition team and served four years with energy and verve as The Under.
- More of a paper trail than you have time to read.
Well, the job has been gapped for awhile. Amazing, but the SECNAV had his reasons.
We now know who will take the parking space;
Jo Ann Rooney, a former university president and Massachusetts financial attorney with two years’ experience (sic) in the Pentagon, has been nominated to become undersecretary of the Navy, the No. 2 position in the Navy Department.
OK, let's get her back-o--the-napkin CV treatment.
- OCT 12 - present; Huron Consulting Group as a managing directors in the Huron Healthcare practice out of, ahem, Chicago.
- JUN/OCT 11 to JUN 12; Under Secretary of Defense for Personnel and Readiness (acting): 8-months.
- JUL 10 to DEC 10; Mount Ida College, President. Student body 1,300.
- 2002 to 2010; Spalding University, President. Student body 2,000.
- 1996 to 2002; chief counsel, chief operating officer, chief financial officer, and partner of The Lyons Companies in Waltham, Mass. That firm maintained a national practice specializing in estate planning, capital advising, charitable planning, executive compensation, business succession planning, and benefits planning and administration for corporations, individuals and nonprofit organizations.
- Prior to that she was a tax lawyer.
Do with this what you will; I'm done.
I've spent a fair bit of time to see where she is coming from intellectually, and what she has been working on that will serve the Navy well as The Under.
No joy.
In the latest edition of DefenseNews, Andrew Chuter interviews Admiral Sir George Zambellas, RN.
He doesn't actually say, "LCS" - but as we know that LCS is actually just a Corvette; I think we know where he stands.
"At some point, you cannot offset quality for increased scale because if you do, you lose military authority for the utility force you have got. In other words, you are not credible. That is why I have no time for the concept of a police force at sea through corvettes,"
"If you are going to operate a relatively small frigate force, you need to achieve genuine operability across different tasks. lll The danger of the argument of those who say, ' Oh let's have more smaller, less-capable ships is, you immediately constrain your operational and terefore political flexibility. The irony is that the smaller your force, the more you need to invest in high-end, capable ships if you are to remain a serious player in defense,"
Oh, my stars and garters; I'm getting faint.
One final note. There is the #1 RN Admiral and he has four medals and a couple of other thingys. Unlike our 4-stars, he doesn't have a badge for everything and a salad bar going over his shoulder like a North Korean GOFO.
Something else I like about the Brits. Your end of tour award is your next set of orders.
Someone get URR's smelling salts. On a discussion of the lessons from Libya, after ISTAR he says,
The second example has to do with fires from the sea - missiles and guns. Modern precision munitions coming the Navy's way will have a degree of accuracy inland which means you must know exactly what is going on at the other end. ... We need to do better with naval fires ...
Can we get him to help with our strategic re-boot?
Raised in Rhodesia, helo pilot who commanded three surface ships. What's not to like.
Another day in Bahrain when I saw the CNN pic of the tower out of my corner of my eye.
At first no one knew really what happened? Pilot error on such a perfect day ... and then the second plane came it. It all changed, and history woke up from its nap.
As we stumble and stutter our way to a decision in Syria, what are the members of Congress that are veterans of the Long War saying?
I'm discussing over at USNIBlog; stop by and let me know what you think.
UPDATE: FWIW, I'll be live-tweet'n the CINC's speech. If you don't already, you can follow me on twitter @cdrsalamander.
If you have spent that last week or so trying to get your head around the post-structural foreign policy actions of the Obama Administration but have yet to really see what "there" is there - you are not alone.
One of the better pieces I have read in the last day is by Daniel Greenfield. Why is it so much better? Simple my dear fellow, he begins with George Orwell; specifically his short essay, "Shooting an Elephant."
Orwell’s narrator is told of an elephant that has run riot and he dutifully follows up the report. “We began questioning the people as to where the elephant had gone and, as usual, failed to get any definite information. That is invariably the case in the East; a story always sounds clear enough at a distance, but the nearer you get to the scene of events the vaguer it becomes.
“Some of the people said that the elephant had gone in one direction, some said that he had gone in another, some professed not even to have heard of any elephant.”
Substitute chemical weapons for elephant and the story becomes a familiar one.
Eventually, Orwell encounters a dead body and sends back for an elephant gun while a crowd gathers behind him eagerly waiting for him to shoot the elephant. “I had halted on the road,” he writes. “As soon as I saw the elephant I knew with perfect certainty that I ought not to shoot him. It is a serious matter to shoot a working elephant – it is comparable to destroying a huge and costly piece of machinery – and obviously one ought not to do it if it can possibly be avoided.”
It is likewise a serious matter to start a war. But the issue, whether with Obama’s red line or Orwell’s elephant is credibility.
“But at that moment I glanced round at the crowd that had followed me. It was an immense crowd, two thousand at the least and growing every minute. It blocked the road for a long distance on either side. I looked at the sea of yellow faces above the garish clothes-faces all happy and excited over this bit of fun, all certain that the elephant was going to be shot. They were watching me as they would watch a conjurer about to perform a trick. They did not like me, but with the magical rifle in my hands I was momentarily worth watching. And suddenly I realized that I should have to shoot the elephant after all. The people expected it of me and I had got to do it.”
You need to read the whole thing - it really boils things down with a reference point that makes complete sense. It is also deliciously ironic that the best way to see the place Obama has put himself and his nation is through the place of the English Imperial enforcer - the very center of that which Obama was raised and educated to despise.
"When the white man turns tyrant it is his own freedom that he destroys," Orwell warned. In attempting to civilize the Muslim world, we have instead been forced to live by its rulers. We have not brought our order to them. They have brought their order to us.
Our interactions with them take place along the predetermined paths of their choosing. They decide what they want from us and we decide how quickly to give it to them. They decide that we should shoot the elephant and we stand around playing with the elephant gun, hoping that we can avoid this whole mess.
“And afterwards I was very glad that the coolie had been killed; it put me legally in the right and it gave me a sufficient pretext for shooting the elephant. I often wondered whether any of the others grasped that I had done it solely to avoid looking a fool,” Orwell writes.
That is the admission of the moment. We must bomb Syria to avoid looking like fools.
...
It is not so much that bombing Syria is wrong as that the armed forces of a nation cannot and should not be in the hands of men who take serious steps without any conviction that they are doing the best thing for their country, who act only because they are told that it is expected of them. Nothing rots the morale of an army faster than such commanders and nothing destroys a nation faster than the knowledge that, in the words of Hillary Clinton, nothing truly matters but the politics of it.
If we are going to shoot elephants then we should do so for our own reasons. Once we begin shooting elephants because it is expected of us, we become little better than the masters of a hollow empire waiting to be told by the world what to do.
There is one thing we as a nation can do that Orwell's narrator didn't have the luxury of doing - we can walk away and say, "The h311 with it. If you fear the elephant so much, you take care of it. I am going home."
Orwell's narrator took an oath, we didn't. He eventually shot the elephant, and in the end - perhaps we will as well. One way or another, it really doesn't solve any problem and just reinforces the natives' reliance on, and our subserviency to, their own impotence.
We had a little fun a few years back with the Navy's oceanographer when we seemed to be joining whole-hog with global warming cargo cult. Good times, good times.
It wasn't so much the group-think that bothered me, but the ahistorical and anti-intellectualism of it all. Well, that and the subtle whiff of politics that comes with it. As a gumbo, its taste was a bit off.
In that light - I have enjoyed this little bit that came in over the weekend.
There has been a 60 per cent increase in the amount of ocean covered with ice compared to this time last year, they equivalent of almost a million square miles.
In a rebound from 2012's record low an unbroken ice sheet more than half the size of Europe already stretches from the Canadian islands to Russia's northern shores, days before the annual re-freeze is even set to begin.
The Northwest Passage from the Atlantic to the Pacific has remained blocked by pack-ice all year, forcing some ships to change their routes.
A leaked report to the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) seen by the Mail on Sunday, has led some scientists to claim that the world is heading for a period of cooling that will not end until the middle of this century.
...
Long-term cycles in ocean temperature, she said, suggest the world may be approaching a period similar to that from 1965 to 1975, when there was a clear cooling trend.
At the time some scientists forecast an imminent ice age.
"Settled Science," indeed.
This is all silly, in a maddening way. The Earth has always either warmed or cooled. Oceans have always risen and fallen; that is why central Georgia used to be beach-front and a lot of early human settlement is now under a hundred or so feet of water. Anyone who expects the Earth to be static is either delusional or intellectually lazy.
As a result of the Navy and Coast Guard's embrace of this mindlessly political movement, we have found yet another reason to ignore a "unsexy but important" part of our maritime toolkit.
Here is what I do know:
- We are an arctic nation with a significant part of our energy security reliant on that part of the world.
- We are heavily reliant on energy from Canada, another arctic power.
- One of our closest allies, Denmark, is an arctic power.
- We have significant interests in Antarctica.
- As the premier maritime power, we should be leading, not lagging in ice capable ships.
Where do we stand now?
Refurbishing Polar Star remains the Coast Guard’s near-term heavy icebreaker bridging strategy. When refurbished by 2014, Polar Star will be the service’s only operational heavy icebreaker. This important, but venerable platform will serve an additional 7 to 10 years but that is only the beginning of the story. The Coast Guard’s mission requirements, including marine environmental protection, dictate that the service maintain heavy icebreaking capability for the foreseeable future.
In order to fully fund subsequent phases of this project, the Coast Guard believes that a “whole-of-government” approach will be necessary. Obtaining a new, heavy polar icebreaker that meets Coast Guard requirements will depend upon supplementary financing from other agencies whose activities also rely upon the nation possessing a robust, Arctic-capable surface fleet.
Let's put down our Al Gore memorial Great Green Fleet dream-catcher and act like thinking adults about this.
The multiple ice breaking and ice capable requirements are real and significant and our capabilities are almost gone. Even in an era of declining budgets, money can be found.
Would I trade Navy LCS-money for an USCG icebreaker? In a heartbeat. We can even give it a 57mm to make the transformationalists happy.
