Proactively “From the Sea”; an agent of change leveraging the littoral best practices for a paradigm breaking six-sigma best business case to synergize a consistent design in the global commons, rightsizing the core values supporting our mission statement via the 5-vector model through cultural diversity.
When you read modern fiction that takes place in some quasi-Medieval world - things such as Lord of the Rings or Game of Thrones - you sometimes wonder how the authors had the imagination for some of the battle scenes. Then as you read real history, now and then it hits you - these authors did not have to make up much of anything. They just paraphrased what actually happened in our world. When reading about the discovery of the tomb of Suleiman the Magnificent's in Hungary I came across the account of the account of Siege of Szigetvár in 1566, and a Croatian Count in service to the Kingdom of Hungary, Nikola Šubić Zrinski. There is the Count, in his isolated fortress city with ~2,300 of his men facing an army almost 150,000 led by a man almost a legend. What do you do?
Szigetvár was divided into three sections divided by water: the old town, the new town and the castle—each of which was linked to the next by bridges and to the land by causeways. Although it was not built on particularly high ground the inner castle, which occupied much of the area of today's castle, was not directly accessible to the attackers. This was because two other baileys had to be taken and secured before a final assault on the inner castle could be launched.
When the Sultan appeared before the Fortress he saw the walls hung with red cloth, as though for a festive reception, and a single great cannon thundered once to greet the mighty warrior monarch. The siege began on 6 August when Suleiman ordered a general assault on the ramparts, although the attack was successfully repulsed. Despite being undermanned, and greatly outnumbered, the defenders were sent no reinforcements from Vienna by the imperial army.
After over a month of exhausting and bloody struggle the few remaining defenders retreated into the old town for their last stand. The Sultan tried to entice Zrinski to surrender, ultimately offering him leadership of Croatia under Ottoman influence, Count Zrinski did not reply and continued to fight.
The fall of the castle appeared inevitable but the Ottoman high command hesitated. On 6 September Suleiman died in his tent and his death was kept secret at great effort with only the Sultan's innermost circle knowing of his demise. This was because the Ottomans feared that their soldiers would give up the battle if they knew that their leader died, so his death was kept secret for 48 days. A courier was dispatched from the camp with a message for Suleiman's successor, Selim. The courier may not even have known the content of the message he delivered to distant Asia Minor within a mere eight days.
Final battle
The final battle began on 7 September, the day after Suleiman's demise. By this time, the fortress walls had been reduced to rubble by mining with explosives and wood fueled fires at the corners of the walls. In the morning an all-out attack began with fusillades from small arms, "Greek fire", and a concentrated cannonade.[Note 7] Soon the castle, the last stronghold within Szigetvár, was set ablaze and cinders fell into the apartments of the count.
The Ottoman army swarmed through the city, drumming and yelling. Zrinski prepared for a last charge addressing his troops:
...Let us go out from this burning place into the open and stand up to our enemies. Who dies – he will be with God. Who dies not – his name will be honoured. I will go first, and what I do, you do. And God is my witness – I will never leave you, my brothers and knights!...
Zrinski did not allow the final assault to break into the castle. As the Turks were pressing forwards along a narrow bridge the defenders suddenly flung open the gate and fired a large mortar loaded with broken iron, killing 600 attackers. Zrinski then ordered a charge and led his remaining 600 troops out of the castle. He received two musket wounds in his chest and was killed shortly afterwards by an arrow to the head. Some of his force retired into the castle.
The Turks took the castle and most of the defenders were slain. A few of the captured defenders were spared by Janissaries who had admired their courage, with only seven defenders managing to escape through the Ottoman lines. Zrinski's corpse was beheaded and his head taken to the new Sultan while his body received an honourable burial by a Turk who had been his prisoner, and well treated by him.
Powder magazine explosion
Before leading the final sortie by the castle garrison, Zrinski ordered a fuse be lit to the powder magazine. After cutting down the last of the defenders the besiegers poured into the fortress. The Ottoman Army entered the remains of Szigetvár and fell into the booby trap; thousands perished in the blast when the castle's magazine exploded.
The Vizier Ibrahim's life was saved by one of Zrinski's household who warned him of the trap when the Vizier and his troops searched for treasure and interrogated the survivors. While inquiring about treasure the prisoner replied that it had been long expended, but that 3,000 lbs of powder were under their feet to which a slow match had been attached. The Vizier and his mounted officers had just enough time to escape but 3,000 Turks perished in the explosion.
Because of this heroic stand by the Croatians and Hungarians, the Ottomans did not continue their march on Vienna. That gave the West another century to get ready, and to win (with a lot of help from the Poles). People wonder why modern Hungarians build walls to keep out hundreds of thousands of military aged muslim men? National hobby. They knew their mission. They stopped the Ottomans. Fullbore.
PEARL HARBOR (Sep. 4, 2016) Littoral combat ship USS Coronado (LCS 4) returns to Joint Base Pearl Harbor-Hickam after experiencing an engineering casualty while transiting to the Western Pacific. Coronado departed Joint Base Pearl Harbor-Hickam Aug. 26 to continue its independent deployment to the Western Pacific. Prior to departing Pearl Harbor the ship participated in the Rim of the Pacific 2016 exercise. (U.S. Navy photo by Mass Communication Specialist 2nd Class Katarzyna Kobiljak/Released)
Via a tip from my buddy and fellow Paleoblogger Chap, we have a simply sublime outline about how Target blew itself up in Canada. In light of the last week's reminder of some of our Navy's self inflicted wounds, I ask you to give Joe Castaldo's article in canadianbusiness.com a full read; THE LAST DAYS OF TARGET: The untold tale of Target Canada’s difficult birth, tough life and brutal death. In Salamander's world, this article would be fully briefed at the OPNAV and NAVSEA LCS Stand Down (if they had one) at the same time we are having our LCS Maintenance Stand Down. Let me know if you recognize anything;
The company was having trouble moving products from its cavernous distribution centres and onto store shelves, which would leave Target outlets poorly stocked. The checkout system was glitchy and didn’t process transactions properly. Worse, the technology governing inventory and sales was new to the organization; no one seemed to fully understand how it all worked. The 750 employees at the Mississauga head office had worked furiously for a year to get up and running, and nerves were beginning to fray. Three test stores were slated to open at the beginning of March, followed shortly by another 21. A decision had to be made.
Fisher, 38 years old at the time, was regarded as a wunderkind who had quickly risen through the ranks at Target’s American command post in Minneapolis, from a lowly business analyst to leader of a team of 400 people across multiple divisions. Launching the Target brand in a new country was his biggest task to date. The news he received from his group that February afternoon should have been worrying, but if he was unnerved, Fisher didn’t let on. He listened patiently as two people in the room strongly expressed reticence about opening stores on the existing timetable. Their concern was that with severe supply chain problems and stores facing the prospect of patchy or empty shelves, Target would blow its first date with Canadian consumers. Still, neither one outright advocated that the company push back its plans. “Nobody wanted to be the one to say, ‘This is a disaster,’” says a former employee. But by highlighting the risks of opening now, the senior employees’ hope was that Fisher would tell his boss back in Minneapolis, Target CEO Gregg Steinhafel, that they needed more time.
The magnitude of what was at stake began weighing on some of those senior officials. “I remember wanting to vomit,” recalls one participant. Nobody disagreed with the negative assessment—everyone was well aware of Target’s operational problems—but there was still a strong sense of optimism among the leaders, many of whom were U.S. expats. The mentality, according to one former employee, was, “If there’s any team in retail that can turn this thing around, it’s us.” The group was riding a wave of momentum, in fact. They had overcome seemingly endless hurdles and worked gruelling hours to get to this point, and they knew there were costs to delaying. The former employee says the meeting ultimately concerned much more than when to open the first few stores; it was about the entirety of Target’s Canadian launch. Postponement would mean pushing back even more store openings. Everyone else in attendance expressed confidence in sticking to the schedule, and by the time the meeting concluded, it was clear the doors would open as promised. “That was the biggest mistake we could have made,” says the former employee.
...what emerged is a story of a company trapped by an overly ambitious launch schedule, an inexperienced leadership team expected to deal with the biggest crisis in the firm’s history, and a sophisticated retail giant felled by the most mundane, basic and embarrassing of errors.
...
Target ... had simply become accustomed to succeeding. “The company had never really failed before,” ...
...
“The company was pouring in resources left, right and sideways, so it was palpably exciting in Minneapolis,” says a former employee. But there was also immense pressure. “From the very beginning, there was a clock that was ticking,” says the former employee. “And that clock was absurd.” The company did everything it could to remove barriers that might slow progress and to ensure decisions could be made quickly. Timelines were hugely compressed. Building a new distribution centre from scratch, for example, might take a few years. Target was going to do it in less than two years—and it planned to construct three of them.
...
Loblaws started moving to SAP in 2007 and projected three to five years to get it done. The implementation took two years longer than expected because of unreliable data in the system. Target was again seeking to do the impossible: It was going to set up and run SAP in roughly two years.
...
The Mississauga head office, meanwhile, didn’t have a clear picture of how bad the situation was inside stores. The merchandising department’s software often indicated items were in stock, but then the team would field confused and angry phone calls from employees responsible for store operations, demanding to know why they didn’t have products. “We almost didn’t see what the customer was seeing,” says a former employee. “We’d look on paper and think we’re OK. Then we’d go to the store, and it’s like, ‘Oh my god.’”
...
Meanwhile, after a few rounds of store openings, the status update meetings Fisher held at headquarters had turned darkly comic. After the regular rundown of crippling operational problems, the president still ended each gathering with a pep talk of sorts, reiterating how proud he was of the team and all they had accomplished. Despite his stubborn optimism, those meetings had grown more tense too. Everyone knew the launch was a disaster and the company had to stop opening stores so it could fix its operational problems, but no one actually said so. “Nobody wanted to be the one person who stopped the Canadian venture,” says a former employee. “It wound up just being a constant elephant in the room.” There was also a sense of powerlessness. The Canadian expansion was ultimately driven by Minneapolis, and because of the real estate deal hatched by CEO Gregg Steinhafel, the company was committed to opening these stores. Speaking up wouldn’t have changed much. “That’s why, in the end, nobody fell on a sword. Because of the leases, it had to move forward.”
...
“We had so much faith we could solve any problem. If we just work a little harder, we’ll get to the resolution,” says a former employee. “But then the thing in front of you explodes.”
...
Business analysts (who were young and fresh out of school, remember) were judged based on the percentage of their products that were in stock at any given time, and a low percentage would result in a phone call from a vice-president demanding an explanation. But by flipping the auto-replenishment switch off, the system wouldn’t report an item as out of stock, so the analyst’s numbers would look good on paper. “They figured out how to game the system,” says a former employee. “They didn’t want to get in trouble and they didn’t really understand the implications.”
Leadership. It all boils down to leadership, perverse incentives, and the desire for hope to win out over experience. Here is the cold difference. When companies make disabling mistakes, they go out of business and people have to look for work. When a military makes disabling mistakes, they are defeated on the battlefield, at sea, and their nation is put at strategic risk of defeat and collapse, bending the knee to the smarter, stronger power.
Of all the doomed-to-fail concepts that are baked in to LCS, the one that is most infuriating is the manning concept. A classic case of, "Here is your number. Make the rest justify it." - it was strictly an artificially constructed idea force-moded on to our Navy by a toxic, anti-intellectual command climate and kept going through bureaucratic inertia, personal loyalty, and the standard issue careerism tactic of pushing problems to other people's PCS cycle. The last few weeks have been a parade of horrors taking up a lot of space on this blog, but the news is the news. This "quickening of fail" was just a matter of time. As LCS critics have warned for over a decade, once these things start to displace water, you will only be able to hold off the reckoning so long, and then it will all cascade in. Forget chickens, the turkeys are coming home to roost. The response to the series of engineering problems has been disappointing, but understandable. We always knew that when reality showed itself, the only cure to extruding some utility out of the Little Crappy Ship would be seabags full of cash and the blood, sweat, and careers of innocent Sailors. As the forklifts are moving additional pallets of cash, it looks like the system is going after the Sailors. It was bad enough that part of the force-moding of LCS was to simply work our Sailors harder from a normal hard job using the idea that, "100% if fine, but we can get 120% if we just call it something else - how about "hybrid?"" So, here we go. Via our ever-reliable Sam LaGrone at USNINews;
After four combined engineering casualties within the last year, the commander, Naval Surface Forces (NAVSURFOR), “ordered an engineering stand down for every [Littoral Combat Ship] crew to review procedures and standards for their engineering departments,” the Navy said in a statement issued late Monday.
Following recently disclosed engineering casualties on the Independence-class USS Coronado (LCS-4) and the Freedom-class USS Freedom (LCS-1), Vice Adm. Tom Rowden ordered stand down for all LCS crews and the LCS squadron (LCSRON) which was completed on Aug. 31
“These stands down allowed for time to review, evaluate, and renew our commitment to ensuring our crews are fully prepared to operate these ships safely,” Rowden said in a statement.
Again. This is no more a Sailor problem than an overheated engine is the fault of the needle pointing towards the red area of the dial. Where is the OPNAV and NAVSEA stand down? Where is the Clark, Mullen and Roughead call to account? Yes, VADM Rowden, we do need to "review, evaluate, and renew" - but your best bet is to find a way to weld in more berthing. Give our Sailors the time and focus to do their job right and serve their ship and its Navy, and not allow a manning concept to continue based on bad ideas, and a Plan B which is only, "work harder and hope."
“I have asked the Surface Warfare Office School (SWOS) commander to review the wholeness of our LCS engineering education and training to include the testing and retraining of all LCS engineers,” Rowden said.
“This training will occur over the next 30 days and will allow the SWOS leadership to review our training program and determine if other changes need to be made to the training pipeline.”
According to the service, “the required engineering training will be conducted by the SWOS’ engineering team, who will develop both a level-of-knowledge test and specialized training that will be deployed in the next 30 days to the LCS engineering force. The commanding officer of SWOS is also conducting a comprehensive LCS engineering review, which will likely take 30-60 days. From there, more adjustments may be made to the engineering training pipeline.”
I know, lots of word salad and bureaucratic squid ink there. First thing, we have outstanding Enginemen (EN) in our Navy. They are only doing what they have been trained to do and can do inside a 24-hr day. We are talking about training, but the real fix will be in what we are asking them to do.
In addition to announcing the stand down and the retraining, the service also announced following Sunday’s return of Coronado to Hawaii NAVSURFOR sent a team to the ship “to take a holistic look at the engineering program on board. A preliminary investigation will provide an initial assessment and procedural review of the situation, and any shortfalls will be addressed quickly to get the ship fixed and back on deployment,” read the statement.
The word of the stand down and the ongoing retraining for the engineering departments comes ahead of a soon-to-be-revealed LCS review that promises fundamental changes on how both classes are manned, equipped and operated, USNI News understands.
OK. We are welding on a patch until we can get LCS's manning concept back to the intellectual dry-dock. Fair. Now, as I am not through kicking my hobby horse, let's take a trip down memory lane, shall we? We cannot know how we got where we are unless we look at the path that brought us here. From 2005;
The Center for Surface Combat Systems (CSCS) is the lead Learning Center of Excellence for LCS and is working in conjunction with the Center for Naval Engineering (CNE), Center for Service Support (CSS) and Center for Information Dominance on individual schoolhouse training issues. To identify the skills needed to operate the ship, Human Capital Objects (HCO), a detailed description that identifies all work, including watches and collateral duties.
"LCS is the first ship on which manning and training requirements were determined based on the development of Human Capital Objects, leveraging the significant work accomplished in Job/Task Analysis and skills-based assessment," said CSCS Commanding Officer Capt. Rick Easton.
With a total projected crew of 75, the optimally manned Freedom requires that its crew members have skills in more than just their rating. They will have a blend of skills from several ratings, which is creating a new, or hybrid, Sailor.
"Today you have a billet on a ship that's ascribed to an Engineman second class. That means you have a stovepipe you can only put an enginemen in that billet that does enginemen type work based on occupational standards and things of that nature," explained CNE 5 Vector Model Manager Roy Hoyt. "When you want to build a hybrid Sailor, what you're doing now is mixing and matching the flavor of work contained within that billet that becomes your Human Capital Object."
As a result, some of the LCS work requirements such as some scheduled maintenance and repairs are being moved ashore.
"The LCS Task Force that built the Navy's first HCOs selected, based on the approved Concept of Operations, those functions critical to mission accomplishment and then moved remaining functions ashore to be provided through Distance Support," Easton said.
Yes, the BS Bingo has always been thick with LCS;
"Sailors on this Littoral Combat Ship are going to attain various certifications, qualifications, knowledge, skills and abilities that will be resident on their 5 Vector Model, so that in the future when they want to move to another Human Capital Object that is created, they can compare their resume against that position and in many cases may fit better than their contemporaries," he said.
"LCS is without doubt an advanced combat platform that provides significantly expanded opportunity in both operational and technical responsibilities outside of traditional Navy Rating boundaries," Easton added. "Part of the Revolution in Training vision is to expand opportunities for Sailors to grow beyond traditional constructs of today's ratings. LCS provides that opportunity unlike any other platform in today's Navy."
Laugh, cry, or scream. Me? I'm well in to the laughing phase as I quit screaming in 2009, and crying? Well ... their is no crying on the blogger platform. 2008;
Freedom is designed for a "core" crew of just 40 people, supplemented by another 30 or so who accompany "modules" fitted with weapons, sensors and robots. It’s been an open question in Freedom‘s five-year development how a small crew would handle such a large ship, especially if she were attacked. Would there be enough hands to cook, clean and stand watch — never mind fight fires, pump out flooded compartments and repel boarders?
To get the most "bang" from a small crew, the Navy has doubled up their training. Nobody gets assigned to Freedom without years of experience, a proven ability to handle all sorts of tasks, plus qualifications on pistols, rifles and machine guns. The youngest sailor aboard is 26, compared to 18 for most vessels. The Navy calls these cross-trained sailors "hybrids." Passing through the locks was a test for the very first all-hybrid crew. "Even the skipper got into the act, hauling in and resetting fenders set from the bridge wings," Defense News‘ Chris Cavas reported.
When you are busy doing other people's job, you can't bloody well do yours. Yes, I know that is "old think" - but hey;
Even so, Freedom collided with a gate, tearing a gash in her bridge.
Snort. Speaking of 2008, let's quote our buddy John Baggett's NPG school quote of Fleet Forces Command #3 Cardinal rules for LCS;
3. Do not try to compare LCS to legacy platforms. It cannot be manned, trained,
equipped, maintained or tactically employed in the same way. No old think.
"As an engineer I had never stood watch on the bridge before," he said. "It's a lot different from being down below the waterline."
On this ship, multipurpose monitors allow engineers to oversee the entire operation from a seat on the bridge rather than having to stand watch in each engine space.
Out of sight, out of mind, out of ... well ...
Compared to the crews on most ships in the fleet, those aboard the Independence go through more training, do a broader array of jobs and rely more on technology.
As we warned; when everyone is a jack of all trades - then you have a ship where no one is a master of anything. This is known.
But the crew of the Independence wasn't focusing on the future during the two days it spent at sea this past week while traveling from Key West to Mayport.
Instead, it was a chance for the men and women to hone their proficiency at handling the array of jobs that comes with being "hybrid sailors," as well as an opportunity to do things like launching a boat and dropping the anchor, which they had not yet done in the open ocean.
Getting those jobs done with a crew about a quarter of the size of the one on a frigate can be daunting, with sailors jumping between unrelated tasks.
Petty Officer 1st Class Brian Bunch, for example, had barely removed the gear he wore for a fire-fighting drill when he was jogging to the ship's massive mission bay for the boat-launching exercise.
When you ask too much of your Sailors and think that wishes can fix math - you get what we have today. Still in 2010;
Ooley, for example, had to attend engineman "C" school and learn much more about the workings of diesel engines than a normal GSM ever needs to know.
Engineers also regularly stand bridge watches, in fact, as it gets into the fleet, Independence needs to qualify as many of its engineers as possible for bridge work, so the ship can spare its fire controlmen and operations specialists to work radar and monitor the ship's air picture, Renshaw said. For that, the ship has two combat information centers, known as "interior communications centers" in LCS jargon, one of which is located behind a curtain in the pilothouse.
...
And despite the Navy's growing experience with LCS, Independence suffers from the same basic challenge as Freedom: doing the full-time work of a ship at sea with far fewer people than normal.
Chief Engineman (SW) Gary Thomas said that under normal circumstances it might take 50 or 60 sailors to run an engineering plant like Independence has, but instead, it has 10.
"It's no secret here that the e workload is excessive," Garrow S said. "If you didn't have people working overtime, giving it their all...." He trailed off.
This is not a Sailor problem. This did not happen overnight. Learn it. Know it. Live it. What remains in the background but has yet to really break above the ambient noise, is an understanding of "sunk cost" and "opportunity cost." Both are huge in the program, and if as an institution we understood the concepts better we would know that it was wrong not to kill this program in 2008. Wrong to not kill in in 2010. Because of those wrong decisions - can we even kill it now? We may not have a choice. Do the best with what we have been saddled with, but don't add to it by buying more? How do you keep the builders busy so you don't lose industrial capacity? Fun mess we have put ourselves in. Let's all hope LCS gets off the front page for awhile now. I'm tired of kicking it, again.
Over the course of this weekend I found myself thinking of General George C. Marshall, USA, and what we could profit if we could just have his counsel for a few days - but of course that is silly intellectual vanity. It really isn't necessary. He left a vast legacy to draw on. It is all right there. All we have to do is read it. As such, I found myself re-reading his December 11, 1953 Nobel lecture, something I last looked at during Reagan's second administration. You need to read it all, but I'd like to point you to his comments below about the essential importance of the study of history - especially the parts I highlighted. It is almost as if our education establishment decided to do the absolute opposite in some ways - but in others took it all on board, but with a selective substitution of ideology for facts. As our education nomenklatrura is worm-eaten by leftists who hated him from the start, this should not be shocking. As always though, one must ask; why no pushback? Enough of me; here is a man how knows the world as it is.
In this brief discussion, I can give only a very limited treatment of these great essentials to peace. However, I would like to select three more specific areas for closer attention.
The first relates to the possibilities of better education in the various factors affecting the life of peaceful security, both in terms of its development and of its disruption. Because wisdom in action in our Western democracies rests squarely upon public understanding, I have long believed that our schools have a key role to play. Peace could, I believe, be advanced through careful study of all the factors which have gone into the various incidents now historical that have marked the breakdown of peace in the past. As an initial procedure our schools, at least our colleges but preferably our senior high schools, as we call them, should have courses which not merely instruct our budding citizens in the historical sequence of events of the past, but which treat with almost scientific accuracy the circumstances which have marked the breakdown of peace and have led to the disruption of life and the horrors of war.
There may perhaps have been a "last clear chance" to avoid the tragic conflagrations of our century. In the case of World War II, for example, the challenge may well have come in the early thirties, and passed largely unrecognized until the situation was unlikely to be retrieved. We are familiar with specific events such as the march into the Rhineland or aggression in Ethiopia or Manchuria. Perhaps there was also a last clear chance to begin to build up the strength of the democracies to keep the military situation in equilibrium. There may also have been a last clear chance to penetrate to the spirit of the peoples of the nations threatening the peace, and to find ways of peaceful adjustment in the economic field as well. Certainly, had the outcome of the war, with its devastation and disruption, been foreseen, and had there been an understanding on all sides of the problems that were threatening the peace, I feel sure that many possibilities for accommodation would have been much more thoroughly explored.
It is for this reason that I believe our students must first seek to understand the conditions, as far as possible without national prejudices, which have led to past tragedies and should strive to determine the great fundamentals which must govern a peaceful progression toward a constantly higher level of civilization. There are innumerable instructive lessons out of the past, but all too frequently their presentation is highly colored or distorted in the effort to present a favorable national point of view. In our school histories at home, certainly in years past, those written in the North present a strikingly different picture of our Civil War from those written in the South. In some portions it is hard to realize they are dealing with the same war. Such reactions are all too common in matters of peace and security. But we are told that we live in a highly scientific age. Now the progress of science depends on facts and not fancies or prejudice. Maybe in this age we can find a way of facing the facts and discounting the distorted records of the past.
I am certain that a solution of the general problem of peace must rest on broad and basic understanding on the part of its peoples. Great single endeavors like a League of Nations, a United Nations, and undertakings of that character, are of great importance and in fact absolutely necessary, but they must be treated as steps toward the desired end.
We must depend in large measure on the impartiality of those who teach. Their approach must be on a scientific basis in order to present the true facts. The scientists, no matter of what nationality, make a common approach to their problems.
About the best way I can think of to give a nod a man who led a full and funny life would be to play a sample of bits from the movie he was in that I enjoyed the most. Of course ...
