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.
It's a Fall Free For All this week on Midrats from 5-6pm Eastern. EagleOne and I will review the major national security issues as we see them in the 1QFY16 and a peek at what we see in the upcoming year. Who knows, we may even take callers.
Join us live if you can 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. 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.
I covered this yesterday SEPCOR, but I can think of nothing more fitting for FbF right before 11 Nov.
Just read it all and soak it all in.
Retired Gen. Jim Mattis, the former head of U.S. Central Command, read Acevedo's citation during a Bronze Star with "V" ceremony at an Oct. 31 Marine Corps birthday ball in Sonoma, California. The former squad leader was credited with leading his Marines on a patrol "through a heavily contended battlespace" during a Nov. 20, 2010, mission in Afghanistan's Helmand province, according to his medal citation.
After his squad was pinned down by intense automatic from small arms fire from six to eight enemy fighters, Acevedo sprang into action.
"Unwilling to allow his men to be pinned down, he gathered ammunition from an adjacent fire team, and without regard for his personal safety, he courageously charged alone across 75 meters of open ground, passing unscathed as the enemy concentrated their fires on him," the citation states.
Sgt. Joshua Acevedo, USMC (Ret) and Gen. James Mattis, USMC (Ret). I just can't add any more. There is so much more here. The picture, venue, and who is doing what - well - nuance. Don't spend a minute longer here - click the link to Lance Bacon's article and read it all. I need to get the Wee'est Salamander to translate this in to Latin for me,
As you read the below, keep this in mind. It is very rare that high dollar studies of already known subjects are done "just because." They are often used as an entering move to change policy and legislation. Don't forget that. So, how tight are out budgets? Not all that tight, it seems. As we flail about trying to figure out what is going on in the world from the South China Sea to Syria, what pray tell would you like the intellectual capital of The Rand Corp. focused on? Hey, look! A black SUV just dumpted a bag of your money and a bunch of notes taken out in your childrens' names out front of Rand. Let's see whose name is on the bag, shall we?
Research for the study was sponsored by the Office of Diversity Management and Equal Opportunity in the Office of the Under Secretary of Defense for Personnel and Readiness, and conducted within the Forces and Resources Policy Center of the RAND National Defense Research Institute, a federally funded research and development center sponsored by the Office of the Secretary of Defense, the Joint Staff, the Unified Combatant Commands, the Navy, the Marine Corps, the defense agencies and the defense intelligence community.
Of course. What is this critically imporant study about?
Planned, large-scale personnel reductions in the U.S. military could inadvertently reduce gains made in the racial and gender diversity of the force since the 1990s, according to a new RAND Corporation study.
...
“One aspect that hasn't been factored in much during past drawdowns is retaining a demographically diverse workforce.”
Before we dive in to the details, remember this: when someone inside DOD talks diversity they only care about race, ethnicity and s3x. They don't care about education, geography, or life experience. That you cannot graph. That you cannot break in to easily manipulated groups. See page 3 of the report where they roughly say the same thing.
In our study, we focus on gender and race/ethnicity, although we include other indi-vidual differences, such as education, in some analyses.
Here is one of the well known facts they bring up again. I has been true for a very long time that the combat arms are overly represented by whites and "hispanics." Support forces are over-represented by blacks. For me, that is a big, "So?" As the Navy taught me, pick your rate pick your fate. Tooth vs tail, and mostly by choice as especially Special Forces and many other challenging areas in combat army, you have to volunteer.
Cuts involving personnel with longer service could adversely affect black personnel, but cuts to personnel with shorter service could adversely affect women. Tightening test standards as part of a strategy to cut recruitment could result in adverse impact on female, black and Hispanic recruits, according to the study.
'Ole whitey seems to be gett'n everyone at every turn. I guess we aren't going to mature, are we? Seriously, it saddens me to see our money being put towards a racial attitude more in line with the mindless bigotry of the KKK, we are better than that as a nation and a military ... but thereyougo. The authors know that all of this is nothing new, but that is OK for them - they are just answering the mail. Those who want the study just need something more and fresh they can wave around to justify their sectarian and race-based obsessions jobs paid for by taxpayers;
The services are limited in how they can use demographic information in a drawdown context. Legal challenges that occurred during earlier drawdowns make it unlikely that the services will pursue demographically driven decisions during a force reduction.
For now. One could also read this as a call for a change in legislation. Rep. Cummings (D-MD) did it to allow race based decisions at the USCG academy (and great shame on today Congress for doing nothing to reverse it), so don't get too comfortable.
...researchers recommend that the military conduct adverse impact analyses prior to making drawdown decisions. This could allow the services to identify interventions earlier in service members' military careers, such as initial career assignment, where they could have a greater long-term impact on demographic diversity. The analyses also can help the services identify whether information and assumptions involved in the force reduction process achieve the goals that the services set for the drawdown.
There you go. Did they sneak that by you? "Interventions" is a call for quotas and race-based assignments early on. Read the report if you'd like. Heck, you and your children paid for it. You can get links to it here and read the abstract. Recommendations mostly just provide job security for a few diversity commissars;
Recommendations
- We recommend that services not be required to make drawdown decisions based on gender, race, ethnicity, or other protected status, given legal restrictions on using demographic information in employment decisions.
- However, the services should anticipate potential consequences of drawdown decisions by analyzing potential adverse impacts in advance of implementing particular drawdown policies. The Office of the Secretary of Defense (Personnel and Readiness) should develop policy and direct that such analyses be performed, with assistance from the Office of Diversity Management and Equal Opportunity in executing these analyses.
- The Office of Diversity Management and Equal Opportunity should validate the services' predecision analytic results, which will require the Defense Manpower Data Center to acquire more detailed data for validation.
You can also read it all in its glory here. All this is in the lap of SECDEF Carter. People need to ask him hard questions about what he is going to do with the recommendations in the report, or what he is going to allow others to do with it.
End comment; doing the final edit and looking at the report once again, I thought again of the huge amount of hard work and intellectual heft dedicated to doing this. Look at all the undercapitalized thought that has gone in to supporting the anti-Assad forces in the last year. The lack of oversight in AFG. Is it pathetic, sad, or criminal? I don't know - but I do know there is no accountability for those cutting the check.
Of course not. I'm discussing one of his latest over at USNIBlog. If you are a fan of LtGen Paul Van Riper, USMC (Ret), we also had him on Midrats that you can listen to him here.
I feel dumb just having to do this, but via John Krempasky, there is a little something to stop some of you from just being silly. For some reason, people are nibbl'n around the edges that the Russian airliner that went down over Sinai was taken by AQ/IS terrorists who got hold of Libyan or Syrian SA-2/3/6 etc. No. Just no. Stop. Go to other theories - this one is bunk. There is a huge step from a manpad to a no kidding air defense long range SAM. One does not simply throw a SA-3 in the back of a Toyota pickup, drive across a nation or two, plug it in to a Honda generator, go from SAFE to ARM, press a button, and nab an airliner over at 30,000 ft going almost 450kts. These are complicated bits of kit that the Soviets/Russians built. They take talented and well trained professionals to maintain them, must less use them in an operational environment. They are also huge. The SA-3 is a bit over 6-meters long. That doesn't even include the deliver truck sized command truck and radar. Anyway, John's link will bring you to the page of a Hungarian who has built a rather fun Soviet/Russian SAM simulator. Play around his place, but as some seem to be in love with the SA-2/3/6 theories, below is a no-sound video of the simulation of the SA-3 hit against the F-117 by the Serbians. If you follow the mouse arrow, you will get an idea of the complicated nature of it all, even for those of us who used to do stuff like this for a living. Where is the checklist anyway ...
Make sure and listen to this week's Warrior Writers Podcast where we discuss the incredibly important decade of the 1940s. Joining me as always will be Naval Academy History Professor Emeritus and noted naval historian Dr. Craig Symonds, and Naval Academy Museum Director Claude Berube. This episode is just one part of a 14-part series will take you decade by decade, starting with the 1870s, discussing the significant naval events and developments that helped shape the US Navy. The podcast coincides with the Naval Academy Museum exhibit: "Warrior Writers: The U.S. Naval Institute" open from September 10, 2015 through January 31, 2016. You can listen to the episode below, get the full archive over at BTR, or better yet, subscribe to the show on iTunes.
I don't do this as much as I did when the blog was young - mostly because as I found out on active duty - most people in the Navy do not care all that much about the classics, theater, architecture or much of the classic "Renaissance Man" liberal arts canon (though I was quite pleased the interest the Front Porch showed in to my self-indulgent dive in to T.S. Eliot last year).
That and people look at you funny when your deployment movies include Pride & Prejudice, but I digress.
Anyway, we're about to go all Shakespeare on 'ya but stick with me a bit - it is germane. I managed to startle the spaniel last night when my internal dialog leaked out with a resounding, "Exactly!" when I read Ian Tuttle's bit over at NRO, Jeb’s Coriolanus Syndrome;
Coriolanus is, of course, the title character of a Shakespeare tragedy, the general outline of which is taken from Plutarch’s Lives. In Shakespeare’s telling, Caius Marcius Coriolanus — virtuous warrior and true aristocrat — runs for consul, the highest elected office in the Roman Republic, at the behest of an ambitious mother. He wins the support of the Roman Senate, but schemers turn the people against him. Not inclined to flatter, he responds by railing against the easily swayed masses, whom he “disdain[s] with cause” for failing to recognize true virtue among them.
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By record and character, he is surely among the most creditable candidates in Republican politics. He would be a responsible executive, if not a flawless one. Then along come Donald Trump and Ben Carson and this foul mood among the voters. The crows peck at the eagles. But Jeb has misread the moment. Conservatives are bucking not because people are curs (though there’s some of that), but because many people feel abandoned by their representatives, if not betrayed, and not on questions of passing interest, but on questions of principle and identity. If that anxiety has alighted on Donald Trump as its spokesman, it is at least in part because more responsible leaders have refused to take it up.
I feel for Jeb, a man I voted for three times and who was an exceptional governor. His time has passed in the last decade and a half - and he knows it. He also has some flaws that did not matter at the State level, but in national office would manifest themselves in a way that would be destructive in the extreme. That is our reality - one his family had no small part in creating starting with 1990 Bush 41's 1990 no-precondition summit in order to avoid an automatic Gramm-Rudman-Hollings cut of only $100 billion. He was completely outfoxed by the Democrats and begat the 1990 Budget Enforcement Act. That fundamental betrayal of a promise by what many saw as one of the most ethical Presidents, injected suspicion and a lack of faith in good governance in to one of the last bastions in the electorate of the good government Boy Scouts. That is why Jeb cannot get traction. It does not really have to do with his brother, it has to do with his father. Let's get back to admittedly one of The Bard's lessor works - but when seen correctly, one of the more uniquely insightful, Coriolanus. You need to first understand the play's political context. This video of Robert Luongo, author of The Power Template: Shakespeare's Political Plays does this better than anyone.
For those who were not aware, a few years ago a slightly modified and modernized version of the play directed by Ralph Fiennes came out.
Highly recommended. The "banish" scene in some ways will reflect Jeb's internal dialog when he has to end his campaign.
Like that? Well, here goes the productive part of your day. The entire 2.5 hr movie. Yes!
, but I digress. 
does this better than anyone.
