Even in the Most Autocratic Nations, You Can Find Heroes

Just amazing;

One of the first Chinese doctors who tried to warn the world about a new coronavirus died on Friday from the illness, prompting an outpouring of sorrow on Chinese social media, as Beijing declared a “people’s war” on the fast-spreading outbreak.

Li Wenliang, 34, was an ophthalmologist at a hospital in Wuhan, the city hardest hit by the outbreak.

He and seven others were reprimanded by Wuhan police last month for spreading “illegal and false” information about the coronavirus after he warned doctors on social media about seven cases of a mysterious new virus to try to help other physicians.

Many ordinary Chinese people on social media described Li as a hero and a tragic figure, reflecting the incompetence of local authorities to tackle the emergence of the virus early in the outbreak.

Just a Retired 2xFOS'd LCDR, eh?

Perhaps this should have been a FbF ... but sometimes you have to wonder - what are the universal constants of our Navy culture?

Who can make the best use of it?

When it too late to make any meaningful use of it?

Who defines a failed officer or a successful career?

Not who ... but what?

Pondering over at USNIBlog ... just make sure and bring your facemask and grass skirt.

Is Lucy, tee'n up the Ball for Charlie Brown Again?

Beware of the Good Idea Fairy riding in to save you on the back of a unicorn.

How many times will we have to go through this cycle? 

Have we learned anything? I hope so. 

We have a new Fleet Structure Assessment on the way that is going to try to describe how we get to 355 by 2030.

This is great ... this is welcome ... but this is worrisome as I am hearing things that are giving me an eye twitch.

I think Meghan is trying to trigger me, but here we go;

“We haven’t done a really comprehensive force structure assessment in a couple of years; 2016 was the last one. So we started on a new path for that last fall, and what we’re finding in that force structure assessment is that the number of ships we need are going to be more than 355. And when you add in some of the unmanned vessels and things like that that we’re going through experimental phases on, it’s probably going to be significantly more than [355],” he said.

“There are certain ship classes that don’t even exist right now that we’re looking at that will be added into that mix, but the broad message is, it’s going to be a bigger fleet, it’s going to be a more distributed fleet, it’s going to be a more agile fleet. And we need to figure out what that path is and also understand our topline limitations, because no one wants a 355-plus fleet that’s hollow, that we can’t maintain. So we’re looking at balancing all those things.”

Wait ... we need to define "new" here. "New to the USN" or "new" as in PPT thick? I'm sorry, I'm not sure how we get anything in numbers by 2030 that can come from a fresh design;

Marine Corps and Navy officials at various conferences have suggested that the services are narrowing in on the Offshore Support Vessel as a model for what they want. Having several OSVs instead of one dock landing ship (LSD), for example, might be able to carry the same number of Marines but distribute them across the littorals instead of concentrating them on one hull – which defensively makes them harder to target and offensively allows them to be more agile under the Distributed Maritime Operations and Expeditionary Advance Base Operations concepts.

This has promise. There are some solid designs already out there.

If you are looking for numbers fast that have limitations, but are built here and have bite, we can look at the Ambassador MK III, I guess.

We are a a decade-and-a-half away from my call for PLAN SALAMANDER to license build an already building ship until we can get our act together for a domestically designed platform - but that is the only way to get there.

Tons of FREMM? I assume we will find out sooner more than later what magical class of ships this is going to be, but it can't be a clean sheet design. It can't be fully of "cutting edge" technology that as of the second month of 2020 is only PPT thick....can it?

No, really - it can't be. We've seen this movie before.

Like April 2012?

...where do we find ourselves with LCS. They are coming to the Fleet - in mass. More show up every few months. No mission modules. No actual proof of concept. Still slathered with technology risk and some things we do know; only 4-months deployable in an 8-11 month new normal .......... all disjointed and still not getting me closer to where I want to be - I want to be proven wrong, but so far I am only being proved right with each passing fiscal quarter. Each fiscal quarter I also see those who careers, reputations and ego are wrapped up in LCS act like the below when they have to explain away hard facts - and rely on hope.

We are a few years past the point of stopping all the damage LCS will cause in opportunity cost ... but not too late to mitigate its full impact. We won't be able to stop at 24, but not too late for 36. If we get all 55, it will be too late. We will have paid Bentley prices for a Yugo.

Heck ... Jan 2010 when we were looking at the NNFM and Reforming the Confederate Navy?

- Build DDGs at a limited rate, sufficient to keep one shipbuilder’s line open, and to keep technology current, but with the intent of reducing the Aegis force to 30 warships within 25 years. The steady state force of 30 ships costs $60B, so the SCN per year for a 30-year combat life is $2.0B.
- Introduce several affordable frigate designs of 2,500 to 3,000 tons and about 25 knots, with the goal of creating a force of 90 ships at a unit cost of $400M. Essential features are at least eight upgraded TASMs (tactical Antiship Missiles), strong close-in defense, and a modern ASW suite. The ships will emphasize sea strikes and ASW. Each must carry a helicopter or pair of UAVs.
- Design and build simple corvettes carrying about 50 land-attack missiles—upgraded TLAMs as it were. They are not fast, but 25 knots is desirable. They operate in silence, with any radiating platform being in the air or scores of miles away. Because of their simplicity and American shipbuilder design experience with stealth properties, the first design will probably be very much like the final one.

Merely for completeness we include here a component of 20 auxiliaries. The numbers and costs are unchanged from the 313-ship Navy plan.

Good googly moogly we have lost a decade spinning our wheels.

I will keep an open mind here - but there are firm constraints and restraints to get to 355 by 2030 ... with new platforms.

Words mean things ... and I will hold further critique in abeyance until I see how we are defining "new." 

How a Nation Uses Her Power in the Face of a Pandemic

Power is a funny thing. You can tell a lot about both a person and a nation by how they use that power.

There is the primary indicator, how they act, and there is the secondary indicators – often the most telling – of how others who are under their power or feel threatened by it, act.

A nice clarifying thing about pathogens, they don’t care about politics. They cannot be spun, negotiated with, bluffed, or co-opted. They just are. They are existence personified; they just will to exist.

Human DNA is full of the effects of our existence with pathogens. Though really bad ones may only happen every few generations or centuries, they are a regular occurrence on the planet’s timescale.

All this is known, but another thing that is known is that human ego, ignorance, greed, and the desire not to have their picayune plans interfered with by external forces has an equally long record of making the inevitable become even worse.

All of that is coming together in the response to the latest pathogen coming out of China; the coronavirus.

In the natsec world, we are aware of how China is using graft, greed, and a bit of bluff to build bases and influence through the world. It has also been clear, the Islamic world’s reaction to the Uighur suppression a point on this trend, that the Chinese have made it clear in back-channels that they will not take anything that makes China or the CCP look bad in a positive light WRT future support. They are exporting Chinese control of press and message to other countries.

Hannah Beach at the NYT has a nice view of this phenomenon. Some examples:

In Myanmar, loudspeakers broadcast advice from Buddhist monks: Seven ground peppercorns, exactly seven, placed on the tongue will ward off the coronavirus spreading across Asia and the world.
In Indonesia, Terawan Agus Putranto, the health minister, advised citizens to relax and eschew overtime work to avoid the disease, which has killed more than 360 people and infected more than 17,000 others, mostly in China.

…

And in Cambodia, Prime Minister Hun Sen told a packed news conference on Thursday that he would kick out anyone who was wearing a surgical mask because such measures were creating an unwarranted climate of fear.
…
“Our greatest concern is the potential for the virus to spread to countries with weaker health systems,” said Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, the W.H.O.’s director general

Bingo. If this gets loose in the mega-cities of the Indian subcontinent or Africa, there will be no holding it back. Their governments and civil society simply are not as strong as they are in China.

The best hope is that the concern about this virus is overblown. That is only hope, and by the time we know one way or the other, it will be too late.

We will see.

Pray for hype - as corrupt nations cannot contain anything.

The economic and societal impact of a 1919 Flu like pandemic is unquestionably a national security concern.

Fullbore Friday

A nation deep in war. A nation at crisis. A nation on the edge of starvation. A nation drained of its military aged men.

A retired naval officer of middling grade and no significant record, brought out of retirement who liked games.

A bunch of young women with nothing but smarts, an ill-fitting uniform and a desire to serve.

An empty room.

Together, they would save the lives of thousands ... and perhaps their nation's freedom.

On the first day of 1942, Gilbert Roberts, a 41-year-old retired British naval officer turned game designer, arrived at Derby House, in Liverpool, for his inaugural meeting with his new boss, Sir Percy Noble.

The admiral was greying but still youthful, and wore his authority with, as one observer put it, “naturalness.” That day, however, Noble was in a hostile mood.

“I thought the Admiralty were sending me a captain,” he said, woundingly. Noble explained that he had been instructed to give Roberts the entire top floor of Derby House, comprising eight rooms. There, using wargames, Roberts and his team of Wrens, young members of the Women’s Royal Naval Service, were to get to work on the problem of the U-boats which had, for the past three years, sunk millions of tons of essential food and fuel making its way from the east coast of America via merchant ships.
...
His plan was simple. Using the floor as a giant board, the Western Approaches Tactical Unit, or WATU, would design a game that approximated a wolfpack attack on a convoy in the Atlantic. One team would play as the escort commanders, the other as the U-boat captains.
...
Seeing the battle from a crow’s-nest perspective above the board, a question formed in his mind. If the U-boats were firing from outside the perimeter of the convoy, as was widely believed, how had HMS Annavore, which was in the center of the convoy, been sunk? Might it be possible, he wondered, that the U-boat had attacked the ship from inside the columns of the convoy?

There was, he reasoned, a simple way to prove his theory.

“Hold everything,” Roberts told his staff, as he rushed into his office to make a phone call.

Roberts picked up the receiver and asked the operator to put him through to the Flag Officer Submarines in London, hoping to speak to its chief of staff, an old friend, Captain Ian Macintyre.

To Roberts’ astonishment, the flag officer himself, Admiral Sir Max Horton, picked up.

Roberts explained who he was and asked Horton if he might be permitted to ask a question. During the last war, Roberts asked, would you ever have crept among the ships of a convoy to fire a torpedo?

“Of course,” replied Horton. “It is the only way of pressing home an attack.”

“Thank you, sir,” said Roberts, then hung up.

Step Into History: Learn how to experience the 1963 March on Washington in virtual reality

It was late, but Roberts asked Jean Laidlaw, a 21-year-old woman responsible for statistical analysis, and one of the younger Wrens, Janet Okell, to stay behind with him to reset the plot and run a new game on the giant board. They hurriedly reset the game.

Read it all.

Fullbore.

Hat tip SAP.

Europeans Need to Grow Up

If you want to understand the world, you need to read widely ... and for an American, that means to actively seek out non-Anglosphere writers, perspectives, and opinions.

It makes things so much clearer.

One of the fun parts of the Trump administration is that it teased out already existing European - and especially German - antipathy towards the USA, especially in their political/media class, that we had not seen since Bush43 was in office. Yes, there are great friends of the USA in Germany ... but as I learned living amongst them, just below the surface with a plurality of them - they have "issues."

They hate us, but they are dependent on us. The two are in a way probably connected, but enough of that.

In a great article over at EstonianWorld by Sigmar Gabriel, a former German foreign minister, and Michael Hüther, the director of the German Economic Institute, you have a nice sample of the present mindset of the Boomer leadership of Germany;

The European Union, and particularly Germany, have yet to rise to the challenge posed by the United States’ retreat from global leadership. But, given the new competition from China, together with Russia’s renewed great-power aspirations, the Western countries must find a way to cooperate more closely.

Just because they keep saying that, does not mean it is true.

Retreat? No ... just tired of doing other people's job for them.

Perhaps we are investing less time in areas of the world where we simply don't see the juice worth the squeeze. If we were really retreating, then why would the authors write this later on in the article;

If Europe does not wake up to the realities of the new Sino-American rivalry, it could find itself in a position of geopolitical irrelevance. In fact, there are already signs of Europe’s declining global significance. Wars and conflicts along the European periphery are increasingly being decided by other powers, with Europe playing no discernible role in their resolution.

Bingo. Europe is not the world.

We are still engaged in the world, we have just moved our attentions towards areas of greater importance. I don't think the Continental Europeans have fully hoisted on board that a critical mass in the USA have realized that Europeans have grown rich and lazy under our umbrella only to provide sloth and distain in return ... so we will let them take more responsibility for their own business.

Along those lines, the authors are sniffing at action items they can do to help the collective Western effort on our little planet;

...five issues seem vital. The first is Germany’s relationship with the US, which is now under severe stress. The elephant in the room is Germany’s failure to increase its annual defence spending to 2% of GDP, as agreed at the 2014 NATO summit in Wales. For obvious historical reasons, Germany is hesitant to become Europe’s de facto military power. Were it to meet its spending commitment, it would be allocating €80 billion ($89 billion) per year to the Bundeswehr, which is €46 billion more than what France spends.

For well over a decade on this blog we have been asking Germany to grow up and join the family of nations as a full partner. Trust us, we fully believe that today's Germany has regained her position as a respected and valuable member - indeed a critical member - of Western Civilization. WWII is almost out of living memory. We're all friends now. Your neighbors and friends are not afraid of a democratic Germany pulling her weight. We actually want her to. Heck, the Balts would love to host at least a division of German infantry and armor ... again.

Step up.

The second big issue is US-EU relations. The immediate challenges facing America and Europe have changed over the past seven decades. Most recently, Russia has expanded its sphere of influence into Crimea, eastern Ukraine, and the Sea of Azov, and China has begun to assert economic and technological dominance in Eurasia.

The USA has no issues with the EU. The EU though, keeps trying to make drama. Let's trade and work together on those things that benefit us both. We are more than happy for the EU to take the lead contra-Russia. The bear is your neighbor after all. Again, we're cool with that. 

As for China, it is clear what she wants to do. Don't let yourself fall for her ham-fisted efforts. You have agency, national interests and free will. As demonstrated by your politicians ear-deep in Russian corruption in the energy sector, you do have some easily purchased power centers, but again - that is within your control if you so wish.

Step up.

Amid deteriorating economic security and social cohesion, populist and nationalist movements have exploited voters’ anxieties by promising to defend the homeland against cosmopolitan elites and the multilateral institutions that have underpinned politics and economics since World War II.

Notwithstanding populist rhetoric, economic globalisation has, in fact, created prosperity and reduced poverty and opened up new development opportunities around the world. But without the West’s support, this system cannot be sustained.

What we need now to open up new possibilities for the world order is a globalisation of civil society, and to remind people and communities that the state is still capable of acting effectively. That starts with investing more in education, research and infrastructure, while striking a balance between cross-border cooperation and respect for cultural idiosyncrasies.

No, what you need to do is listen less at Davos, and more to your own people.

The center-left and center-right have failed the people in the center, so they are looking elsewhere. Protect your borders. Don't import an underclass. Show pride in your national character and history. That is all the "populists" are doing, answering the call that your establishment thinks is too "icky" to address. You don't even need to go in full throttle, just meet them halfway. Do that, and the fringes on both sides will go back to being single-digit parties.

...the third issue: Russia. Here, the EU’s pursuit of a balanced policy has created friction within the transatlantic alliance, as exemplified by the tensions over Nord Stream 2, a joint Russian-German pipeline project. In the German government’s view, Nord Stream 2 is fundamentally an economic issue. After all, German, French and other European companies have invested heavily in the project; in any case, it would be a grave political mistake to intervene in the private European gas market.

Still strange how they see that. When you see "transatlantic" they mean USA. The USA cannot be more concerned about European security more than the Europeans are ... oh, wait ... sure we can. That is part of the problem.

The core issue is that we know that if the Europeans hand the Russians a sword - the Russians will use it against the Europeans. It is amazingly obvious ... but the German leadership - as we've blogged about here - have been bought by the Russians - and the German elite in politics and the media defend each other. Some people in power need to be willing to lose some friends.

The last part of the quote above is almost beyond parody - just look at who is running the NORD STREAM project ... it is soaked in politics and politicians - from former Chancellors to former GDR Stasi leadership.

Private my ass.

I think the authors know this all too well, but are either too scared or polite to say so. Once again, they contradict themselves;

...a better way to secure Europe’s energy supply would be to expand and further integrate Europe’s natural-gas infrastructure, while building more terminals for liquefied natural gas. That way, no country – be it a member state or close partner – could be held hostage as a result of its dependence on Russian energy.

Yes, but what is being done to do that?

Things get better in the article the further you go;

... the fourth issue is China, which has made clear that it seeks a revision of the international balance of power. For its part, the Trump administration rightly challenged China on trade. There can be no “fair trade” when a country that does not play by the same rules as everyone else organises two-fifths of the global economy.

China lavishes subsidies on its industries, limits access to its markets and routinely violates intellectual-property rights. Moreover, China’s model of authoritarian state capitalism poses a double challenge, because it represents both economic competition and an alternative political model. As such, the EU and America urgently need to devise clear, mutually agreed rules for dealing with China.

We cannot wait for the EU and America to create the perfect together. Both can move faster alone. Let the EU and the USA get a "good" on the books now individually, and then work towards a "perfect" together. China is already 2-moves ahead of both of us. We need to move now. In the interim, keep China out of your 5G.

This should have been a realization at the top - but this isn't an issue as much as a statement of reality;

The fifth major issue is Europe’s role in the wider world. If Europe does not wake up to the realities of the new Sino-American rivalry, it could find itself in a position of geopolitical irrelevance. In fact, there are already signs of Europe’s declining global significance.

Relative decline.

Europe has a static to shrinking population with stagnant economies, importing net drains on economic growth from Africa and the Middle East. East Asia on the other hand, while having demographic problems on their own, have growing economies and per-capita GDP not overburdened by welfare state underclasses.

They are larger populations climbing out of poverty - not importing it. They are just growing stronger in relative terms ... which builds mass in real terms.

The article ends, surprisingly, in Salamanderland;

For good reasons, the EU has long resided beneath the US security umbrella, with the union effectively remaining on the sidelines. But that geopolitical conception of Europe is an American artefact, based on the Marshall Plan. As NATO’s first secretary-general, Hastings Ismay, famously put it, the purpose of NATO was “to keep the Russians out, the Americans in, and the Germans down.”

Much has changed since the 1950s. Today, we Europeans are only gradually beginning to understand that we must adapt to the geopolitical realities of the twenty-first century. The Atlantic era is giving way to the Pacific era. Europeans must harbour no illusions that all will turn out well on its own. Now is the time to muster the courage and the will to take responsibility for our strategic interests.

Yes. Good. Nice.

European NATO, starting with Germany, needs to invest its fair share. 

Europeans need to focus on the legitimate concerns of their citizens, not what the strap-hangers in Davos and Brussels feel would make them feel better. 

Europeans need to give their people security, not let their governing elites line their pockets with Russian and Chinese graft.

If Europe can stop from importing its own destruction, it will be fine. If its politicians will stop focusing on each other's virtue signaling, and instead focus on the standard of living and quality of life of its working citizens, they will be even better.

That would be pretty good advice for the USA as well.

The Lessons from Germany's Hollow Force

When you have a military overbuilt for the money you spend to man, train, and equip it properly ... and roll in a bit of mismanagement and overconfidence by industry ... you have ... the German experience.

Does that parallel or perhaps give a benchmark to our performance?

I'm pondering over at USNIBlog. 

Come on by and ponder with me.