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The Jones Act is hailed by many in the maritime community as an essential lifeline to keep the domestic merchant marine viable. There is an equally vocal argument that it is not just unnecessary, but counterproductive.
Are the assumptions being make by the pro-Jones Act faction wrong?
To discuss the Jones Act from the skeptical school this Sunday from 5-6pm Eastern will be Colin Grabow, a policy analyst at the Cato Institute’s Herbert A. Stiefel Center for Trade Policy Studies.
You can listen to the show at this link or below, but remember, if you don't already, subscribe to the podcast at Spreaker or any of the other podcast aggregators.
If you use iTunes, you can add Midrats to your podcast list simply by clicking the iTunes button at the main showpage - or you can just click here.
Am I a bad navalist if I can't stop laughing at this ... and cannot wait for the video?
Via Joseph Trevithick at The Drive;
The incident occurred in the early hours of Mar. 30, 2020, but Columbia Cruise Services only released an official statement on Apr. 1. The company, which is headquartered in Germany, said the RCGS Resolute was drifting just over 13 miles off the coast of Isla La Tortuga, a Venezuelan island situated some 60 miles off the country's northern coast, when ANBV Naiguatá, also known by its hull number GC-23, approached it. The Venezuelan Navy ship ordered the cruise ship to follow it to Puerto Moreno on Isla De Margarita, located to the east, accusing it of violating the country's territorial waters.
Engineering matters, math is hard, and the law of gross tonnage always applies.
The 403-foot-long Resolute, which is flagged in Portugal, reportedly had a gross tonnage of around 8,445 tons at the time. The ship was laid down in September 1990 and completed in June 1991. Intended for Antarctic cruises, it has a reinforced ice-capable hull.
...
The Naiguatá, which is just over 262 feet long, is a Guaicamacuto class offshore patrol vessel and displaces around 1,720 tons with a full load.
Good seamanship can be harder.
"While the Master was in contact with the head office [in Germany], gun shots were fired and, shortly thereafter, the navy vessel approached the starboard side at speed with an angle of 135° and purposely collided with the RCGS Resolute," the statement continued. "The navy vessel continued to ram the starboard bow in an apparent attempt to turn the ship’s head towards Venezuelan territorial waters."
Columbia Cruise Services does not say what kind of gun was fired or if it did any damage to the Resolute. The Naiguatá has a 76mm main gun in a turret forward of the main superstructure, as well as a pair of 20mm cannons and two .50 caliber machine guns. The crew would also have access to various small arms.
Whatever the case, the steel-hulled patrol ship suffered severe damage from repeatedly ramming the cruise ship, began to take on water, and ultimately sank. Columbia Cruise Services says Resolute remained in the area until it was clear its services were not required to help in the rescue of the 44 crew members. It then continued on, as planned, to the Port of Willemstad in Curaçao.
BZ to the crew of the Resolute ... she's earned her name ... and seems no worse for the wear.
Simply one of the more remarkable moments for a contemporary navy leader I have seen in awhile.
Captain Brett Crozier, USN, Commanding Officer of the USS Theodore Roosevelt (CVN 71), is doing exactly what we have wanted our leaders to do since we started this blog.
Read his full 4-page letter with a few of my thoughts sprinkled here and there over at USNIBlog and tell me what you think.
If you are at a high level of anxiety right now because of COVID-19, you probably need to look at different coping mechanisms. We are weeks from the peak.
There are a lot of places out there that have just plain bad information coming from either bad players, ignorance, malice, or what could be the worst - those on either side trying to find political gain from a pandemic.
Others can Monday morning quarterback or time travel if they wish, but we are where we are & plus or minus a few days, I doubt within a half-standard deviation anyone would have done anything different to bring us to a different place.
The more we know about the virus and the more we have solid metrics coming in from Europe, the better our modeling will be.
I think the best place to go is the CDC. Check on a regular basis as they are updating modeling as more information reveals itself from the data, but the critical takeaway is that we are heading in to the most difficult month.
Mid-April will be rough.
Don't be surprised, unprepared, or paralyzed by panic. Be informed.
These graphs should tell you what you need to know.
There are different responses a navy can take in respond to COVID-19.
You can:
1. Assume readiness risk by pulling ships in, decrease manning/training/etc for a few weeks or months to enable social distancing and stop COVID-19 was spreading crud-like through your battleforce ships.
2. Continue as before because those readiness reports and stop light PPT won't wright themselves.
3. Deploy what you must for critical presence missions, hard operational necessity, or to help the fight against COVID-19.
With our hospital ships MERCY and COMFORT, we have done a bit domestically with #3.
The French don't have hospital ships ... but they are doing something very interesting with their big-deck amphibs in line with #3, via David Axe:
The French navy has mobilized all three of its Mistral-class amphibious assault ships and is deploying them across Europe, Asia and the Americas in response to the coronavirus pandemic.
The mobilization of the assault ships Mistral and Dixmude on March 25, 2020 came just five days after the French fleet sent sister vessel Tonnerre to Corsica to transport coronavirus patients to hospitals in mainland France.
...
French President Emmanuel Macron described (Operation) Resilience as an “unprecedented military operation dedicated to supporting public services and the French people in the fields of health, logistics and protection.”
Mistral will support the French territory of Reunion in the Indian Ocean. The ship already was in the region for training when the government announced the pandemic-relief operation. Dixmude at the time of the announcement was in the Mediterranean Sea but will sail west to aid France’s Carribean territories.
Time to come up with a few COA around this specific question: what do you do with a ship that has an active COVID-19 outbreak?
Another article by David Larter who, it seems, is a national asset. No one covers the Navy more or better.
To combat a growing outbreak of COVID-19 on the carrier Theodore Roosevelt, the Navy has ordered the ship to pull into Guam and have the whole crew of 5,000-plus sailors tested for the novel coronavirus, the service’s acting secretary announced Thursday.
“We found several more cases,” Thomas Modly said in a news conference. "We are in the process of testing 100 percent of the crew of that ship.
“The ship is operationally capable if called upon to do so,” he added, “but we are pulling the ship into Guam. Nobody from the ship will be allowed to leave the ship other than on the pier.”
That is a hell of a fastcruise.
Most of those who have deployed know how a "crud" can pass through a ship. Almost everyone to one degree or another gets it. A ship is an incredibly close-proximity place.
I don't know if keeping 5,000 Sailors on a ship will do anything but cause more people to get sick. You have to eat, you have to keep the ship going, you have to use the head ... and you cannot self-isolate in 75-man berthing.
What can you do? How many berthing barges, YRBM and YRBM(L) do we have available?
I have no idea, but we need to find out. If you can take division by division off ship in to these barges, you can at least break down the total number of Sailors quarantined together into a number of smaller blocks, containing where you can.
That would be the first step I would take as we looked at other options.
We have ships presently deployed who will be coming home to CA, WA, VA, FL and other locations. How many will have outbreaks on the way home? What do you do when a plague ship pulls in to Norfolk or San Diego and thousands of Sailors' families are demanding their husbands, wives, fathers and mothers back?
We will find out sooner more than later.
And no, I won't second guess this decision. No one can see the future. No one has perfect information. It is what it is.
The Roosevelt was last in port in Da Nang, Vietnam, 15 days ago, Gilday said. The decision to go forward with the port visit in early March was made when Vietnam had only 16 total cases, all isolated in the northern city of Hanoi, he said.
We have learned nothing from our foolish habit of burning out Sailors and ships chasing fevered dreams pumped out by over-caffeinated and under-employed mid-level thinkers.
I'm screaming in to the void again over at USNIBlog.
Come by and bring you autotune machine with you.
