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.
While the larger Navy comes to terms with serious funding and structural changes needed to address the future budgetary reality - some people are still building empires. While they are doing that - they are making a mess of our language and culture. Consolidation is good ... but words matter. Perfect example; when someone says "21st Century Sailor" - what do you think of? Well, one would hope that you, like me, would have images of highly trained, motivated and well led men and women doing the best they can as part of a team focused on the seas that surround our nation, and the security that focus brings to the American people ... or sump'n like that. Well, if you do - I guess you're just a fool. No, our Navy seems to have a different vision of its 21st Century Sailor.
RMKS/1. THIS NAVADMIN ANNOUNCES THE ESTABLISHMENT OF NAVY'S TWENTY-FIRST CENTURY SAILOR OFFICE (N17). 2. N17 IS A NEW DIRECTORATE RESPONSIBLE FOR THE INTEGRATION OF THE NAVY'S OBJECTIVES FOR SAILOR PERSONAL AND FAMILY READINESS, PHYSICAL READINESS, SUBSTANCE ABUSE PREVENTION, SUICIDE PREVENTION, SAPR, EQUAL OPPORTUNITY, AND HAZING PREVENTION POLICY. RDML TED CARTER HAS ASSUMED THE DUTIES AS DIRECTOR, N17 EFFECTIVE 1 JUNE 2013.
So, - we have let N1 take ownership of the brand, "21st Century Sailor." As a result, what image now brings to mind is someone whose family life is a mess, is out of shape, and is a suicidal, substance abusing racist who is inclined to sexually assault someone while hazing them. Yep, great messaging. RDML Carter - one of the last Phantom Phlyers in our Navy with 6,150 flight hours deserves a much better job. I wish you a short cycle on this set of orders - Lord knows I wouldn't wish this job on anyone. Good luck Shipmate. Folks, here is the whole message. Bask in it.
R 041113Z JUN 13 FM CNO WASHINGTON DC TO NAVADMIN INFO ZEN/CNO WASHINGTON DC BT UNCLAS QQQQ SUBJ: ESTABLISHMENT OF NAVYS TWENTY-FIRST CENTURY SAILOR OFFICE (OPNA V N17) UNCLASSIFIED/ FM CNO WASHINGTON DC//N09// TO NAVADMIN INFO CNO WASHINGTON DC//N09// UNCLAS NAVADMIN 153/13 MSGID/GENADMIN/CNO WASHINGTON DC/N09/JUN// SUBJ/ESTABLISHMENT OF NAVY'S TWENTY-FIRST CENTURY SAILOR OFFICE (OPNAV N17)// REF/A/DOC/OPNAV/APR 2013// AMPN/REF A IS TASK FORCE RESILIENT FINAL REPORT// PAGE 02 RUEOMFL2573 UNCLAS POC/[redacted], TOM/OPNAV/N17D/TEL: (703)604-[redacted]/DSN: 664 OR EMAIL: THOMAS.[redacted](AT)NAVY.MIL// RMKS/1. THIS NAVADMIN ANNOUNCES THE ESTABLISHMENT OF NAVY'S TWENTY-FIRST CENTURY SAILOR OFFICE (N17). 2. N17 IS A NEW DIRECTORATE RESPONSIBLE FOR THE INTEGRATION OF THE NAVY'S OBJECTIVES FOR SAILOR PERSONAL AND FAMILY READINESS, PHYSICAL READINESS, SUBSTANCE ABUSE PREVENTION, SUICIDE PREVENTION, SAPR, EQUAL OPPORTUNITY, AND HAZING PREVENTION POLICY. RDML TED CARTER HAS ASSUMED THE DUTIES AS DIRECTOR, N17 EFFECTIVE 1 JUNE 2013. 3. SPECIFICS. N17 WILL INITIALLY INCLUDE THE FOLLOWING BRANCHES: A. TOTAL SAILOR FITNESS BRANCH (N170). N170, PREVIOUSLY N135F, WILL MANAGE THE POLICIES THAT BUILD AND SUSTAIN RESILIENCE IN THE FORCE. N170 WILL BE COMPRISED OF: NAVY ALCOHOL AND DRUG ABUSE PROGRAM (NADAP) (N170A); PHYSICAL READINESS (N170B); AND FAMILY READINESS (E.G., COMMUNITY SUPPORT, FAMILY ADVOCACY, EXCEPTIONAL FAMILY MEMBER, AND RETIRED AFFAIRS POLICIES) (N170C). B. SUICIDE PREVENTION BRANCH (N171). N171, PREVIOUSLY N135H, WILL MANAGE POLICY AND PROGRAMS ENCOMPASSING SUICIDE PREVENTION AND RESILIENCE INITIATIVES. N171 WILL ALSO INVESTIGATE EVENTS, COLLECT DATA, AND PROVIDE LESSONS LEARNED AND RECOMMENDATIONS TO INFORM NAVY PAGE 03 RUEOMFL2573 UNCLAS SUICIDE PREVENTION EFFORTS. C. SEXUAL ASSAULT PREVENTION AND RESPONSE (SAPR) BRANCH (N172). N172, PREVIOUSLY N135S, WILL MANAGE POLICY TO PREVENT AND RESPOND TO SEXUAL ASSAULTS. N172 WILL COORDINATE SAPR INITIATIVES WITH NAVY STAKEHOLDERS ON BEHALF OF N1, NAVY'S SAPR EXECUTIVE AGENT. D. SEXUAL HARASSMENT PREVENTION AND EQUAL OPPORTUNITY BRANCH (N173). N173, PREVIOUSLY UNDER N134, WILL MANAGE POLICY FOR PROGRAMS TO PREVENT SEXUAL HARASSMENT (N173A) AND PROMOTE EQUAL OPPORTUNITY (N173B). SAPR AND SEXUAL HARASSMENT WILL BE MORE CLOSELY ALIGNED TO ENHANCE COOPERATIVE EFFORTS AND INTEGRATION OF THESE PROGRAMS TO PROMOTE A POSITIVE COMMAND CLIMATE. E. HAZING PREVENTION BRANCH (N174). N174, PREVIOUSLY N137, WILL TRANSITION TO N17 AS THE LEAD FOR NAVY HAZING POLICY AND TRACKING OF CASES. 4. CASUALTY, MORTUARY AND PRISONER OF WAR/MISSING IN ACTION (POW/MIA) PROGRAMS, PREVIOUSLY N135C, ARE REALIGNED UNDER COMMANDER, NAVY PERSONNEL COMMAND (PERS-1). 5. THE REALIGNMENT BEGINS IN JUNE 2013 AND WILL BE COMPLETED PRIOR TO JANUARY 2014 TO IMPLEMENT RECOMMENDATIONS OF REFERENCE (A). 6. ESTABLISHMENT OF THE N17 ORGANIZATION WILL PROVIDE FOR MORE COORDINATED AND STREAMLINED EFFORTS IN SAILOR RESILIENCY AND READINESS PROGRAMS TO SUPPORT THE MEN AND WOMEN OF OUR NAVY. 7. VICE CHIEF SENDS.// BT NNNN
As a final note - it is still lame to have to "INFO ZEN/CNO WASHINGTON DC" yourself.
WASHINGTON (AP) — President Barack Obama’s top national security adviser Tom Donilon is resigning and will be replaced by Susan Rice, the U.S. ambassador to the U.N. who has been a lightning rod for Republican criticism over faulty explanations for the attack that killed four Americans in Benghazi, Libya.
Donilon has been a key foreign policy adviser to President Barack Obama. But the 58-year-old had been expected to depart sometime this year, with Rice seen as the likely candidate to replace him. Her selection is sure to anger congressional Republicans, who have accused the administration of inconsistency and a cover-up in the Benghazi attacks.
Rice, a close Obama confidante, came under withering criticism from Republicans as part of the investigations into the deadly attack on a U.S. compound in Benghazi. Relying on talking points from the intelligence community, Rice said in television interviews that the attacks were likely spontaneous, which was later proven incorrect.
I've never been a big fan of Donilon, but the Rice selection sends the wrong message. It looks like political loyalty is the highest factor, and that is just not what the nation needs as the National Security Advisor.
Congress will take a close look at the Pentagon’s $34 billion Littoral Combat Ship program and may consider restrictions on the Navy’s $2 billion request to buy four vessels in fiscal 2014, Representative Randy Forbes said.
Forbes, chairman of the House Armed Services Committee’s seapower panel, said today that any decisions would await the final report from an LCS review by the Government Accountability Office. A draft of the GAO study said Congress should consider slowing the program’s funding because the Navy is buying ships faster than it can test their design and performance.
That last bit hints on one of the many primary flaws with LCS - it simply is all based on hope, the perfection of foresight, and a negation by will of technology risk. That isn't a proven record of success, and it is an important lesson for future programs. OHP, SPRU, and TICO were imperfect programs, but the balance of their systems were proven when they got underway underway. Aegis was buggy at the start - but at least TICO had two 5" guns that worked, LWT that functioned, etc ... etc ... etc.
LCS? A void where NLOS used to be, and 57mm and 30mm guns that are still not ready for war at sea. The mission modules? Child please. More promises. SPRU was designed to grow in to her open spaces - not degrade with each bolt on. As for OHP in her time - her record stands on its own.
Forbes said he’s not prepared to act based on the draft, which the Navy is reviewing. When the final report is published, he said, “we are going to take some action.” Any definitive congressional action is probably months away, he said.
Forbes’s seapower panel approved the Navy’s fiscal 2014 request for four ships on May 21, before the GAO draft said the Navy is buying vessels before it’s completed “technical studies that raise fundamental questions” about the ship.
Actions? Hmmmm ... something tells me we are going to move south again. For a maritime blogger - LCS: the gift that keeps on giving.
Hmmmmm .... I like the intent, but let's see what comes out the other end. Here - I have an idea as an ice breaker: we will no longer have Commands be asked to produce awards packages for any awards offered by outside entities, i.e. the annual Left-Handed Lithuanian-American Lesbian Linehandler of the Year award given by the Association of Naval HR Puffnstuff Fans. Seriously though, why are the nukes getting this tasker? Not that I object - just curious what justifies the distraction from their core (pun intended) competency.
Take a deep breath ... because some of you - MTH call your office - are going to be upset. Join me in a little bit of bone picking with the CNO. I first got wind of something that made me nod with approval in the latest Armed Forces Journal;
... the service is embracing — or re-embracing — the Cold War-era discipline known as emissions control.
In a recent exercise, for example, the crew of the aircraft carrier Nimitz practiced turning off all its trackable emissions, from radars and navigation systems to computers and even Wi-Fi. What initially took an hour eventually took just three minutes.
It’s a skill once employed against the Soviet Navy, then left to atrophy. Now it is being championed by Adm. Jonathan Greenert, chief of naval operations. “What our potential adversaries are bringing in, more than anything else, is something that finds and tracks a radar,” Greenert told attendees at the Navy League’s Sea-Air-Space convention. “If you control your own emissions, you control the future of warfare.”
Maybe, maybe not. But resurrecting EMCON is a good step.
No kidding. EMCON is one of those things in the last decade and a half we got overconfident on; lazy and sloppy - so it is outstanding news that we are making an effort to, sigh, re-invent the wheel. Wheels are good. It looks like we are going to re-learn EMCON. Good; BZ to all and trophies for everyone. My second thought was what happened to "those guys" who used to give us a good "EMCON Audit," for the lack of a better description, to let us know if we are REALLY conducting EMCON? I hope we fully utilized those guys, otherwise we are just doing the EMCON equivalent of writing our own FITREP. All those bluetooth devices and such .... good though, very good start. Then I found the speech the above quote came from; the CNO's speech at the Sea Air Space Lunch on 08 April 2013. Like all well mentored Evangelicals, when someone quotes you a Chapter and Verse, make sure and go to the original text and read then 10 Verses before and after so you can get the proper context. Well, that is when Tigger became Eeyore again. The quote;
But you’ve got to change the mindset. The kids have got to understand the
significance of it because we haven’t really looked at this for well, generations. So many of them sort of understand it. If they’re a cyber warrior they get it big time. But the day - to - day people out at sea, we really haven’t laid that out for them. They don’t understand the idea of real EM hygiene.
They know cyber hygiene now. They know how to put a thumb drive in, at least many of them do, and insert their own virus. But similarly, we’ve got to understand you don’t just turn stuff on. You just don’t start radiating, rotating and radiating.
When I get the intel summaries today and they find out somebody’s got a new whatever, by far what our potential adversaries are bringing in, more than anything else, is some [inaudible] finds and tracks a radar or something that provides a seeker, is a seeker that is outside our frequency band, low probability of intercept, something that we just [inaudible], we don’t have there.
It’s not a new boom as much. It’s in a whole new realm. That’s kind of where a lot of our potential adversaries are going.
You go to school today. If you’re going to study Tomahawk Land Attack Missiles, you’re going to employ it on a ship. Forty weeks. Today if you go to school, we send our kids to school, and you’re going to look at what’s called a SLQ-32 which is our electronic warfare main piece of gear, to a two week school. So we’ve got to get kind of the mindset changed out there and see what we think about it.
No, no, no, and damblit, no! 1. Stop calling young Sailors "kids." These are men and women, all Sailors. Don't sound so bloody patronizing to those who put their lives on the line every day, and tomorrow you may order to kill and be killed, it is disrespectful. 2. It hasn't been "generations" it has been singular - "Generation." We stopped taking EMCON seriously when I was a mid-grade LT, the mid-1990s. If you consider that a generation takes leadership control when they are at roughly the 30-yr of service mark; that would be the earliest cohort who started service in 1965. That would be ... yes; the Baby Boomer generation. Funny, for a generation that spent the balance of their career in the Cold War, one would think they would cling to EMCON - but oh well, I guess they were going to try to transform out of that hard work. Let's see, Gen-X hits the 30-yr mark in about three years .... 'Nuff said. 3. It isn't that "the kids" don't "understand" EM hygiene - it is that their leadership has not made it a priority and trained them on it. If you fail INSURV, you don't say, "The kids just don't understand PMS .... " Really. Don't blame the younger generation - they are fine - it is the leadership's priority for the last couple of decades that is the issue. 4. So, intel is reminding us that our potential enemies are learning institutions that won't just sit there and let us kill them? You mean they won't grant us supremacy in all warfare areas? How is that fair? Really? What great insight; that must rate a warfare pin or something. 5. TLAM school takes as much time as from Pearl Harbor to the Battle of Henderson Field? Ummmm .... which one is that again? 40-weeks? Really? As for the SLQ-32 at 2-weeks; I'm OK with that. If you don't like the product - revamp the curricula. BTW, SLQ-32 has been around since the 1960s and the program to replace it was started in the 1990s, I think. I'm not sure how many cancels and restarts we are on this, but SLQ-32 will be around awhile longer methinks. I'm sorry, but I'm in a nit-picking mood. If this wasn't the CNO - the most senior uniformed officer in the Navy - and from a navy.mil URL, then perhaps it wouldn't bother me; but .... who is approving the transcripts from the CNO?
So years and year ago, the Cold War, we actually had our mission control down pat. That’s a picture of the America in a fjord, way back in the ‘70s, early ’80s, where we snuck this thing upunder [MCON] and parked her up there. We measured very closely if anybody knew that ship was being followed of [inaudible], if anybody could track this thing, and we found that they couldn’t. We were pretty good at [MCON] and we’ve gone away from it. Now we need to get back.
So recently we took the Nimitz and we said okay, we’re going to, in an exercise called Valiant Shield. We said we want you to turn all of your [EN] stuff off. So they said, in [inaudible] condition and whatever. It took over an hour to get everything turned off. You turn the big stuff off, and it starts coming down, and somebody’s going what the hell is that? Somebody turn that off. What is that? It’s anything from WiFis to computers to you name it that we’re pulling out there.
Hey, I love what they did for VALIANT SHIELD, and I hope they do it as a normal part of workups - but can we first of all take care of something a 1943 WAVE YN3 would never let cross her desk? Sub-par Staff work people. It is EMCON not MCON. Never say your boss is [inaudible], that is just rude. Talk to the Staff, they'll tell you what he meant. If this is what we do for our top officer, what are we doing for lesser mortals? Very bad messaging. Oh, speaking of EMCON and aircraft carriers - we've got EMALS all patched up now? How about with rail guns in the future? With a red hat; targeting with nothing but EW ... a little sporty, but very effective.
Narrow seas, unseen mines, punitive expeditions, and "come as you are" ASUW on the sea and in the air. Yes, it has been a quarter-century, but little has changed since the USS SAMUEL B. ROBERTS (FFG-58) struck a mine, and in retribution, the US Navy launched Operation PRAYING MANTIS. The tactical and operational aspects of each, as well as combat leadership, remain constant even while the tools may have changed a bit. To discuss this an more, our guest for the full hour this Sunday, June 1st from 5-6pm Eastern, will be Brad Peniston, author of "No Higher Honor: Saving the USS Samuel B. Roberts in the Persian Gulf," recently released by the Naval Institute Press in paperback and on Kindle.
Join uslive if you can so you can join with the usual suspects in the chat room and offer up your questions for our guest, but if you miss the show you can always listen to the archive at blogtalkradio.
An American daredevil has defied health and safety warnings to win the annual Cheese Rolling competition.
Kenny Rackers, 27, travelled more than 4,000 miles from Colorado Springs to a steep hill in Gloucestershire to take part in the world-famous event. The estate agent, who wore a US stars and stripes morph suit, had travelled to the UK to compete in the race having seen previous events on the television.
“I came over specially for this and I did what I had to do to win,” he said afterwards. “It feels great, I trained a long time for this and got hurt on the hill practising. I came three days early and I took a bad spill, but I came to win and that’s what I did. I came 3,000 or 4,000 miles just for this race. I put it on my bucket list and today it was to win and that’s what I did.”
