Post-Election Natsec Hotwash - on Midrats

 

Every election cycle provides a preview of what advocates for national defense and sea power will have on their side - or not on their side - in the next Congress.

New people arrive, experienced people leave, and priorities, agendas, and advocacy will shift change with them.

What can we expect in the next Congress based on changes we see and those national security issues waxing or waning in the mind of legislators and their counterparts in the Executive Branch?

Politics matter.

Our guests for the full hour Sunday from 5-6pm Eastern to discuss the implications of this years election in the national security arena, will be Claude Berube and Derek (Dirk) Maurer.

Claude Berube, PhD, is the author of “On Wide Seas: The US Navy in the Jacksonian Era” and several other books. He has worked on Capitol Hill, in the defense industry, and the Office of Naval Intelligence. A Commander in the US Navy Reserve, he is currently assigned to a unit with Navy Warfare Development Center. Since 2005 he has taught in the Political Science and History Departments at the US Naval Academy.

Dirk Maurer currently is Vice President at Layer 8 Security, & a Visiting Fellow at the National Security Institute at George Mason University's Antonin Scalia Law School. He is the Former Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense for Defense Continuity and Mission Assurance and as DASD for Countering Weapons of Mass Destruction. and was DASD for Defense Support and Civil Authorities during the George W. Bush administration

Mr. Maurer has served on multiple Senate committees and in the personal offices of three Senators. He retired from the Marine Corps Reserve after twenty years. He received a bachelor’s degree from the University of Washington and a Juris Doctorate from Georgetown University Law Center.

Join us live if you can, but it not, you can get the show later by subscribing to the podcast. 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. You can find us on almost all your most popular podcast aggregators as well.

Fullbore Friday

Yes, in America - for some reason I simply do not agree with - we took what was for the rest of the West, Remembrance Day, and turned it in to Veterans Day.

Yes, we have Memorial Day - which in the larger scheme of things is our "Remembrance Day" - but especially after living for years in Europe, I came to see the 11th of November as something else than what I grew up with.

WWI was such a stupid and unnecessary war. The two empires that dragged the rest of the West and its auxiliaries in to this meatgrinder, the Austro-Hungarian Empire and the Russian Empire, were destroyed by the end of the war. Their culture, empires, and dynasties disintegrated and disaggregated.

The German Empire - who joined simply because it had a treaty and could not stop the momentum to war - was also disintegrated and disaggregated in a way that set the conditions for what could subjectively be described as the world's most educated, cultured, and advanced nation to start the next world war a decade later.

The British Empire - who joined the scrap for reasons not unlike the German Empire - was bled white, and never really recovered.

The French Republic - who again joined in by a sense of duty and was unable to control their momentum to war - like the British were bled white and whose soul was even further weakened to the point she simply could not rise to the occasion when required a decade later.

That does not even begin to describe the horrors of the Italian or - apocalyptic like - the Serbian/Balkan experience. 

As Americans, I think we miss a lot by changing the meaning of the 11th of November: the end of the West's civil war that resolved little but did sow the seeds for a century of bloodletting and political nightmares at the throat of our species. Nightmares whose echoes still haunt us.

We don't think enough about The Great War. We should.

So, the American in me says to my fellow veterans ... I see you. The Westerner in me is, just, well, sad and humbled at the absolute sacrifice and bravery of millions, and the utter evil and incompetency of leaders in the early 20th Century who could not stop themselves from destroying almost everything.

So many lives spent to gain the world we have today. Is it better or worse than it would have been otherwise? Not known, but the price we paid is almost incalculable. 

Diversity Thursday

This week I want to return to our topic from last week, the critically important case presently with the US Supreme Court, Students for Fair Admission v. President and Fellows of Harvard College & the University of North Carolina. 

I'm going to bring out an extended pull quote from the Amicus Brief of Veterans for Fairness and Merit. You can read it all at the prior link, but this is coming from pages 27-28.

It makes so many of the points we have been making here for the last 18-years about the raw and unfair racialist policies our military practices in general, and our service academies do in particular. 

We have said for years to all who would listen that these sectarian policies could not survive the light of day - the primary reason DivThu exists. While DivThu is but a flickering candle in the wilderness, the battle at SCOTUS is a WWII BB's searchlight.

I'll bold those parts that I find particularly important and, to be transparent, validating for the stand we have taken here. I don't take joy in this being fact. Indeed, I am saddened not just by those people denied an opportunity in the USA simply based on their race, but I feel sorry for those who were set up to fail by being admitted in to programs they simply were not able to compete in. Equally damaged are those who would have been admitted in a color-blind admissions process anyway but will always be under a shadow placed there by racialists who simply had to make their metrics look a certain way - innocent teenagers be damned.

I also feel sad for our institution - living a lie for decades. Our Navy and its leaders have all been soiled with this institutional lie.

The Front Porch should be content that we now have such supporting fires. This is out in the open and not just 'Ole Sal you can reference. You can now ask questions to power quoting Amicus Briefs full of footnotes.

Regardless of what happens when the ruling comes out, take the "W."

The Service Academies’ Experience With Racial Preferences Illustrates This Threat To National Security.

Military academies, once the gold standard for excellence and personal accountability, now fully reflect this trend of racial preferences diluting merit. Data from West Point and the Naval Academy demonstrate that racial identity plays a significant role in admissions, and, as a result, minority students are disproportionately failing at these schools.

For example, research conducted on 1990s admissions data from West Point showed there were “155 Asian rejectees (43 percent) and 1,647 white rejectees (33 percent) who ha[d] both math and verbal SATs equal to or higher than the black admittee math and verbal SAT medians . . . [and] 160 Asians (38 percent) and 2,626 whites (37 percent) [were] rejected by the U.S. Military Academy who attained a class rank equal or better than the rank of the black admittee median.”

This same research paper used similar admissions data from the United States Naval Academy to estimate the odds of acceptance at the Academy based on the applicant’s race. Using “ethnic group membership, gender, SAT scores, and high school rank as predictor variables,” the researchers estimated that the “black-to-whites odds of admission are 4.44 to 1, the Hispanic-to-white odds are 3.32 to 1, and the Asian-to-white odds are 0.67 to 1.2.”57 These racial disparities reflect significant harm to less favored races seeking admission.

Another researcher who examined data provided by the U.S. Military Academy found similar results.

His examination of demographic data for the classes of 2000 to 2020 showed substantial differences in standards, specifically, substantially lower scores and higher admissions rates for Black individuals, and to

a lesser extent Hispanic individuals, compared to White and Asian individuals. 

The author concluded that the academy intentionally seeks racial diversity and is willing to alter its admissions standards to achieve it.

The same study found that performance for cadets who graduated tracked demographic SAT trends, with the composite grade point average (for academic, military, and physical performance during the 4-year period, called “CQPA”), averaging 3.06 for Asian individuals, 3.02 for White individuals, 2.76 for Hispanic individuals, and 2.51 for Black individuals. Attrition rates followed the same trend, with the Asian rate at 17%, the White rate at 21%, the Hispanic rate at 24%, and the Black rate at 31%.

The researcher concluded that, in deliberate pursuit of class composition goals, the Academy employs race-based admission strategies and that these strategies include extension of “preferences to minority candidates who, on average, have significantly lower SAT scores than non-minority candidates who have higher SAT scores.” He also noted that Academy racial diversity admissions (“class composition”) goals are explicitly identified.

The researcher further showed that, to achieve class composition goals for minorities, the Academy admits “marginally qualified candidates with a known and higher probability of failure [and that] marginally qualified candidates are failing by the Academy’s own metrics.” 

He further concluded that “more marginal performers are graduating into the Army *** [while] marginally qualified candidates [as cadets] consume resources to try to get to graduation, and take up slots that other, available, better qualified individuals could have filled.

The researcher further observed that “[t]here are real and tangible costs to pursuing the diversity strategy, and no supporting quantifiable argument [is] offered for pursuing the strategy.”

He concluded that the academy “is deliberately seeking and tolerating low performance and accepting high failure rates that hurt cadets to meet arbitrary student body composition goals by skin color.” When the data are examined critically, the researcher observed, it is clear that this strategy yields “worse outcomes” than would result if racial preferences were not used.

This harmful emphasis on race is also reflected in the Navy’s recent decision, described above, to cease “blind review” of personnel files by officer promotion boards after the blind reviews led to fewer minority promotions than before. If the objective is to find the most qualified candidate, it is unclear how a photograph’s revealing race or ethnicity is relevant to a promotion selection decision—as opposed to being guided in that decision solely by the record of the officer’s experiences and performance reports—would further this goal. Although the officer promotion procedure is distinct from the admissions procedures at service academies, statements like these by high-ranking military officials reveal a leadership mindset toward training and selecting officers that values race for its own sake, rather than merit.

In short, in the military as elsewhere, as the Chief Justice wrote in Parents Involved in Community Schools v. Seattle School District No. 1, treating racial balancing as an end in itself would effectively ensure that race will always be relevant in American life, and that the “ultimate goal of eliminating entirely from governmental decision-making such irrelevant factors as a human being’s race will never be achieved.” And in the military setting, racial balancing affirmatively harms rather than promotes national security.

Welcome to my Post-Fall of Kherson JOPG

Usually things flow from here to twitter, but now and then I pop something off that - knowing that not everyone who reads CDRSalamander is on twitter - deserves to flow the other way.

As a Navy guy who spent almost half a decade doing an Army guy's job as an operational planner, a few ideas popped in to my head this AM about "what next" in Ukraine.

Generally I'm not a fan of winter offensives, but when they work - they work. I am even more not a fan of wasting momentum when your larger enemy is on the back foot.

So, three Courses of Action for you to consider ... with absolutely no Commander's Intent or Higher Direction and Guidance ... but when has that ever stopped a core Joint Operational Planning Group's Core Planning Team from sketching some ideas out?

We all need plans to deviate from:

With the fall of Kherson seeming to be a matter of days, what do you do with the momentum if you are the Ukrainians?

You have to plan a winter offensive.

Salamander COA-A: "Liberate the Partisans"
/1 pic.twitter.com/gfOWZ4p6fi

— cdrsalamander (@cdrsalamander) November 9, 2022

With the fall of Kherson seeming to be a matter of days, what do you do with the momentum if you are the Ukrainians?

You have to plan a winter offensive.

Salamander COA-A: "Liberate the Partisans"
/1 pic.twitter.com/gfOWZ4p6fi

— cdrsalamander (@cdrsalamander) November 9, 2022

COA-C: "Big Bet"

Growing in risk and assumptions about UKR capabilities - but a good staff offers an aggressive option in case there is unwritten higher D&G that is driving that direction.

BT

NNNN pic.twitter.com/L1kCgRPywK

— cdrsalamander (@cdrsalamander) November 9, 2022

LaPlant Goes Salamander

For the last two decades here we have reminded people that - as much as one can on this net - they need to look hard at their magazine inventory and bounce that off REALISTIC (not official) expected wartime expenditures. Congress is mostly kept in the dark on this, and worse - people in uniform pimp vignettes and wargames that almost seem designed to minimize requirements.

Our concerns have been hand-waved for years, often by the people you would usually rely on to push warfighting concerns to the front.

The cold hard fact is we simply cannot sustain a large conflict for very long - especially with our best, most accurate and long-legged standoff weapons.

One of the best immediate byproducts of the Russo-Ukrainian War is that more people are starting to see how even the "Arsenal of Democracy" has not properly prepared for war. 

We have let production lines go cold without replacement, let inventories barely able to sustain peacetime requirements, and have consolidated and windowed industry to the point it can't flex even if it wanted to.

In to the conversation comes Undersecretary of Defense for Acquisition and Sustainment Bill LaPlante.

It looks like the Legislative Branch wants to pick up this ball and run with it ... but it needs to be sustained. There is a lot of work to do.

Read this twice;

For Pentagon acquisitions, LaPlante said, the crisis in Ukraine ought to inject a new focus on whether a weapon is easily mass produced and functions as well as whether troops can be trained on it quickly ― and whether it’s applicable in the Pacific.

Those factors should be part of conversations about the viability of developmental projects that rely on emerging technologies or nontraditional avenues like the Defense Innovation Unit and other transaction authorities.

“If somebody gives you a really cool, liquored-up story about a DIU or OTA, ask him when it’s going to production; ask him how many numbers; ask him what the [unit cost] is going to be; ask him about work against China,” La Plante said. “Ask them all those questions because that’s what matters.”

“The tech bros aren’t helping us too much in Ukraine; they want to,” he added. “Ukraine is not holding their own against Russia with quantum [computing], they’re not they’re not holding their own with [artificial intelligence]. They’re not ― whatever your favorite gadget is. It’s hardcore production of really serious weaponry.”

Did you catch that? He wants the "good" now because the much promised "perfect" will never show up, and if it does, it won't be of much use.

We need serious money buying serious weapons that can be used at war NOW. Not 2035. Not 2040.

Now.

Better late than never ... but good people have known this for a long time, they just didn't have the wind at their back. Now they do.

Get to work. Make it happen.

NATO's Next Leader: Serious Times Need Serious Leaders

Regardless of how seriously you take national and alliance security issues, never forget that both are worm-ridden with unserious people who only see defense structures as an exceptionally pliable organization with lots of money that can be used for other purposes.

Always remember this. If you forget, they will remind you. Case in point today.

After the Cold War, NATO remained in place for a couple of reasons. First was that the major nations of the West had over the decades developed a comfortable habit of 80/20 meshing our security concerns and capabilities together. Institutional inertia, yes - but more than that; in fits-and-starts we saw a stability almost unheard of in Europe for its history as there was more of a focus on working together with the powers on the other side of the Atlantic, than finding reasons to distrust or ignore each other.

Secondly, even with the Soviet Union gone - national memory did not forgot that it was just the Russian Empire under new leadership and though some of its captive nations managed to get free of Moscow's orbit - the Russians were still here. NATO was a good hedge.

So we find ourselves three decades after the fall of the Soviet Union where, as expected, the Russians are once again on the march of conquest they have been on after pushing the Mongols back east.

In a position not dissimilar to the USA from 1939-41 against the Axis powers, NATO nations today are bankrolling and arming the Ukrainians in the defensive war against a Russian imperial war of conquest in the mindset that it is best to fight the Russians with Ukrainians on the Dnieper than with Poles and Americans on the Vistula.

In spite of a couple of tight moments in the Cold War and even a spark or two at the end of the last century in the Balkans, 2022 finds NATO at its greatest moment of threat of stumbling in to war due to our support for Ukraine. Well meaning people can argue the wisdom of this, but we are we are - and it will continue.

The public lead of NATO is the Secretary General, presently my older and less good looking doppelgänger Jens Stoltenberg, the former Prime Minister of Norway. He's been in the job for 8-years and is looking to move on to a new position. He may extend for a year, but there is a move to replace him - even at this critical moment.

The position of Secretary General requires a deft combination of good coalition political experience, peer respect, personability, and a turn-key knowledge of alliance and European security issues. It is not a place for on the job training, figureheads, or personalities who don't understand the exceptional complexity of European politics. 

This is why the present Secretary General was a former Prime Minister. He predecessor was Anders Fogh Rasmussen, the former Prime Minister of Denmark who held the job for over five years. Before him, Jaap de Hoop Scheffer, former Dutch Minister of Foreign Affairs. Since the fall of the Soviet Union, in addition to the individuals mentioned above, we had a former British Defense Minister, Spanish Minister of Foreign Affairs, Belgian Minister of Foreign Affairs, and a German former Defense Minister.

Do you see a common thread there? Of course, a serious organization of such importance has to be led by serious people who are ready for the job on day-1. This is not a NGO or think tank - you screw this up and you can help start of world war.

So, via NYT, as a war wages in Eastern Europe and NATO is looking for a new Secretary General, what is the focus?

The behind-the-scenes jockeying for who should succeed Jens Stoltenberg has begun in earnest, with a focus on women.

Here's the CV:

While the officials cautioned that these are early days, and very often the names that surface first do not survive the bargaining among NATO’s 30 members, they said one prime candidate has surfaced in Washington: Chrystia Freeland, 54, the Canadian-Ukrainian deputy prime minister and finance minister of Canada.

Ms. Freeland, 54, a former journalist (who is married to a reporter for The New York Times), has also been Canada’s foreign minister. Her advantages are considerable: she speaks English, French, Italian, Ukrainian and Russian; she has run complicated ministries; she is good at news conferences and other public appearances; and she would be the first woman and first Canadian ever to run NATO. 

The fact that word is on the street that the primary filter here is if someone is XX vs XY would be laughable if not so destructive. There is absolutely nothing wrong with a woman being Secretary General, but that should have nothing to do with the decision. The fact is leading with that as the first criteria, any woman selected as Secretary General this round, would - rightly - always have a shadow over them for this simple fact that they did not get the position on merit - but simply an attempt to signal virtue to ... well ... fellow members of the woke left in the West, I guess. NATO's potential enemies will only be encouraged by such an act. 

This does nothing for NATO or women - and it degrades both by the process.

That being said, as her name is being floated, let's look at Freeland. Many US citizens may recognize her from her very undiplomatic interactions with the Trump Administration. It wasn't just Trump, but something worse that seeps out. Even during the Biden Administration, her not-so-subtle sniffs of standard issue leftist Canadian anti-Americanism. It crops up on a regular basis. It only gets worse when she deals with Americans to the right of Bernie Sanders.

In NATO, you need someone who is a subtle politician - again with experience working in a vigorous multi-party coalition with highly different views, priorities, and goals. That is why Europeans make such good Secretary Generals. While Canada also has a parliamentary system, it and its parties are VERY different than the European model. Freeland only gets partial credit here.

There is also the issue of temperament. Read the links above. Freeland likes to pick fights, often in public. Worse, she seems to enjoy - again as most standard-issue Canadian leftists do - in making snide comments about the government and people of the alliance's largest monetary and troop contributing nation - the United States of America.

The Secretary General of NATO has to be someone by temperament and habit seen as a non-partisan person toward the USA so that they can work with American administrations from all political parties. Freeland has significant issues with the American Republican Party in general and American conservatives in particular. That alone should be enough for serious alliance nations from Poland to Great Britain to be against her as a possible candidate. In summary; Freeland does not possess the skills or temperament for the position.

Now is not the time for such frivolity. 

The last reason - and the most important reason for me - that Freeland should not be the Secretary General will be recognizable to regular readers here. It has nothing to do with her as a person, but her nation, Canada. 

I love Canada and Canadians - but this is not personal, this is business. Serious alliance business. Simply by the numbers, Canada has not earned the position.

Review my post from September if needed, but Canada spends ~1.3% of her GDP on defense. This is WELL below NATO's 2% minimum. Only Slovenia, Belgium, Spain and Luxembourg spend less.

We are well past being polite to alliance members who refuse to pull their fair share of the burden. Canada simply has not put herself in the position to reward any of her political elite with the position of Secretary General, man or woman.

If anything, a public point should be made that the nationals of nations below the 2% threshold will not be taken in to consideration for this or any other high-level uniformed or civilian role in NATO.

If a security alliance wants to send a signal to the world about its serious understanding of place and time, then first we would want to pick a person from a nation who has earned a spot. Secondly, that nation should have a perspective useful in this time and place - pick an experienced Polish politician.

Fullbore Friday

There is no such thing as a "normal watch," especially on Nov. 22, 1975 onboard the USS BELKNAP (CG-26);

We were on plane guard. They put us on a plane guard because their TACAN was down. We had been making this same maneuver to port eight or nine times a day – from the start of the turn to completion was 3600 yards. This time we made a turn to starboard. I’ve read the investigation report, so even though I was down in the fire room, I’ve since come to know what happened up on the bridge. With the lights of the carrier looking the same, there was confusion, and miscommunication, and we made a right-hand turn this time, and the arc was half of what it had been for the last 15 or 20 times. We were going to stop, let them go past us, come across the wake, and get back in position, but we couldn’t determine what their position was. So, I’m in the phone booth, and the next thing I know, we’re getting all these bells. I said, “Okay, everybody, be alert.” Usually on this shift there is nothing going on—no exercises or drills, and the off-watch crew is watching the movie. I was actually writing a letter to my wife and I put it down in the phone booth. The engineering spaces are very noisy, and the phone booth is a place where you could talk. I saw the shaft stop, and I said, “What the hell’s going on?” So I told the guys, “Everybody pay attention. Something’s going on.” And then they called “Captain to the bridge! Captain to the bridge!” on the 1MC general announcing system. I knew they would normally pass the word, “Commanding Officer, your presence is requested on the bridge,” and only if they couldn’t reach him on the phone, or send the messenger to find him in time. But I knew from when I was on Blandy, going to Viet Nam, that “If you hear this terminology, you know there’s a serious problem.” So, I said, “Okay, everybody, get up. Get up. Get ready. Something’s gonna happen.” And then all of a sudden the ship started to shudder, and I thought, “What’s going on?” And I looked over to the stack periscope. With the periscope, you can look out to see whether you’re smoking or not. And usually, if you were smoking it gets black at the bottom and it goes up to the top. What we didn’t know down in the fire room at that time was that when we hit, JP-5 fuel lines were cut up on the carrier, and fuel poured down onto our ship, and into the air supply for ventilating the engineering spaces. We had combination stacks and masts, called macks. All that fuel came down into the after mack. The forward mack never got any oil on it. All that fuel came down MY mack, and they estimated like 18 hundred gallons.

Required reading of an interview with a great Sailor, BT1 Andrew Gallagher.

Hat tip Sean. First published May 2016.