Archive for June, 2009
Interest in sea-based health diplomacy is growing. Admiral Stavridis, SOUTHCOM commander and fellow USNI blogger recently argued for the creation of Navy Humanitarian Service Groups to project US smart-power abroad:
“What I am thinking about specifically is centering a group around a hospital ship and then including in that group several smaller ships that bring training capability with them”.
A major challenge with the type of mission Adm. Stavridis is suggesting is logistical: getting patients to the hospital or vice versa. The US Navy’s only two hospital ships are ill equipped for this task. Converted supertankers, both have deep drafts, no well decks, and limited airlift capabilities.
The ideal ship would be the LPD-17, which has a well deck, significant on board airlift capability, and a shallower draft. In fact, the LPD-17 forms the center of Navy Commander Henry Hendrix’ proposed Influence Squadrons. Augmented with a module akin to a field hospital, the LPD-17 could provide a flexible platform for disaster relief and health diplomacy.
Some question the feasibility of operating a field hospital on board transport ships. These critics contend that field hospitals require significant resources (power and water) and supplying adequate amounts onboard would be impossible. However, more than a decade ago the Chinese designed a system to do just that.
Ship 865. Credit: China-Defense-Mashup.com
Ship 865. Credit: China-Defense-Mashup.com
In the mid-90s PLAN developed a “ship-used medical module system” consisting of a series of interconnected shipping containers (similar to many modern field hospitals). The system allows cargo vessels to be employed as hospital ships. China’s little known Ship 865 (pictured) is an example of the medical module system in action, providing a medical facility, landing pad, and even an air control tower.
While the exact capabilities of Ship 865 and PLAN’s medical module system are not known, they provide a meaningful proof of concept. A Navy medical module, combined with the LPD-17, offers the capability and flexibility needed in future humanitarian missions.
Posted by Christopher Albon in Navy, Soft Power | read comments (32)
I originally wrote “Fighting Fires” in map pen on the back of a patrol order I had given to my squad leaders on the afternoon of 26 October 2006. It was later posted online for the three people that read my column. I also read it to my platoon as a response to their friends and family who would lecture them on the rights and wrongs of Iraq…”just tell them you fight fires.” I thought this would be an appropriate follow-on piece to last week’s 58 Words.
My intent with last week’s article was not to say, (as an American) “here’s what happened in Iraq and why it was right,” but rather (as a Marine) “what happened in Iraq, happened…things are going well, it should be talked about more, I’m happy.”
While it is quite appropriate (and important) that the citizen-reader voice his or her opinion on Iraq (a costly issue both in lives and treasure), I don’t think it is appropriate for an active duty Marine Corps officer (like me), to do the same. And so last week I removed myself from the follow-on debate.
The truth is I find great strength in maintaining my bearing as a political agnostic. At least as long as my affinity for Jameson and spontaneous travel are being bank rolled by a paycheck from the Department of the Navy anyway.
Simply put, my duty is to my mission (whatever, wherever and whenever that may be) and my Marines. Period. End of story. So while I won’t comment directly on the after-math of 58 Words, I will share with you something I believed back as a bright-eyed Lieutenant and still believe as I write this as a balding Captain: the men and women of the armed services fight fires…always have, always will. This is a story about Iraq, violence, politics, fires, and going at it with your boots on…
When five firefighters from the San Jacinto Ranger Station were overwhelmed by flames in the Esperanza fires on the 26th of October the first report I heard was that “five firefighters have just died trying to protect an abandoned house.” How sad, I thought. What a shame. How terrible those five men gave their lives for a deserted piece of property.
Later that afternoon an ambitious news team climbed to a canyon bluff overlooking the fire. The footage they captured made my heart stop. The inferno was fierce, violent, and just plain frightening. It consumed acres of arid land in minutes, leaping entire roads, and canyons slowing for a moment, only to catch the wind like a ginger sail and gain speed again towards the next home or terrain feature. There was a certain rhythm to the blaze – the kind of violent rhythm familiar to many Marines – it was the rhythm of chaos and fear. As I watched this footage, paralyzed by the sheer force of what I saw, I realized something about the men who laced up their boots that morning to meet this chaos, something very powerful, and strangely calming:
The men of Engine 57 did not die protecting an abandoned house, they died fighting fires.
This is a very important distinction I think, and it has everything to do with the men and women who put it on the line everyday in Iraq and Afghanistan. On the one hand, yes, the firefighters were in vicinity of an abandoned home when they fell; so in a sense, they died protecting a deserted home. But there’s an important distinction here – they did not die for the home. The home was simply the front line, the line of departure from which these men decided to fight the blaze. That house was the fault line, a professional chasm which divided those who did not have the training, material, and duty to fight fires, and those who did. That day violence put down the five brave men who did.
It’s hard for some Americans to deal with the notion that people in these positions (police officers, firefighters, and military personnel) know exactly what they are putting on the line and the sacrifice that daily hangs in the balance in the routine execution of their duties.
Maybe it’s because some Americans tend to view these things through a complex social lens of politics, materialism, religion, and determinism. Maybe it’s because they heard the same news report I did that morning and didn’t tune in for the footage of the actual fire. Or maybe they saw the footage and still saw it as hollow.
Whatever the case, when the list of dead and wounded come in each day from the front lines of our Long War, these same Americans think what I did when I heard the first the reports of the San Jacinto firemen: How sad. What a shame. How terrible that they gave their lives in such a way, for such a thing, in such a place.
The story of the men of Engine 57 is a reminder to all of us that these men, like those firefighters, were in the offense when they fell, facing head on hundreds of degrees of violence, and chaos, and madness. They died while faithfully executing the duties to which they had so meticulously trained. They died with their boots laced, and their eyes forward. They died on duty.
As reports come in of our protectors killed in action across the world we owe it to their memory to acknowledge perhaps the darkest of truths and the greatest of hopes: That fires and wars will always rage but, as Thucydides wrote, that there are men who see this violence and yet still go out to meet it, is our greatest hope. Hope grows from this dark truth, right from the dark soil of our own human condition: some will only ever see an abandon home in Esperanza, or an impossible democracy in Iraq, while others will see in this very same instance a front line for fighting fires.
Many kinds of people fight fires too…everyday. No doctor, nurse or corpsman, for example, can stop in the middle of a surgery to question the morality of a “just war”. Just as we cannot lay down our rifle during a gun fight. Their morality is that patient beneath their steady hand, and trained eye. Their morality is to heal, not to question why there is healing to be done. A Marine’s is to seek battle, not to ask why there are battles to be had.
And there is something pure in all of this, in fighting fires. There is something pure about a 19 year old with a colt rifle, a dip of Copenhagen, and a raw sense of courage. It’s every bit as pure as our apolitical resignation to our duty as killer and healer, each with an end to our means. Each with doubts and fears and questions, but each with, above all else, a common understanding that beneath these uniforms there lies a heart that cares for something and someone other than themselves.
This is the way our protectors would want to be remembered – it’s the way I would want to be remembered – not piteously, that we were killed by a roadside bomb or a well placed sniper round, not gloriously, as Hollywood depicts, but honestly and without sadness…that we fell in the line of duty with every expectation of our own fate, our boots laced and our eyes forward doing what it was we trained to do all along,
Fight fires.
I was told an interesting fact on Tuesday. Very credible source, but I am unsure how to verify. This is something that I think is rather remarkable.
Out of 52,400 active duty officers in the US Navy, only seven active duty US Navy Unrestricted Line officers* have a Ph.D.
* corrected to include that this statistic applies only to Unrestricted Line officers
Professor Bruce E. Fleming is an English Professor from Annapolis. He has an absolutely powerhouse OP-ED in Sunday’s The Capital.
We have all heard over the last month or so the chorus over how diverse the incoming class at Annapolis is. Well, the devil is in the details – and Professor Fleming lays the whole thing out there to see, smell, and feel.
A “diverse” class does not mean the Naval Academy recruits violinists, or older students (they can’t be 23 on Induction Day), or gay people (who are thrown out) or foreign students (other than the dozen or so sent by client governments).
It means applicants checked a box on their application that says they are Hispanic, African American, Native American, and now, since my time on the Admissions Board of the Academy, where I’ve taught for 22 years, Asians.
Midshipmen are admitted by two tracks. White applicants out of high school who are not also athletic recruits typically need grades of A and B and minimum SAT scores of 600 on each part for the Board to vote them “qualified.” Athletics and leadership also count.
A vote of “qualified” for a white applicant doesn’t mean s/he’s coming, only that he or she can compete to win the “slate” of up to 10 nominations that (most typically) a Congress(wo)man draws up. That means that nine “qualified” white applicants are rejected. SAT scores below 600 or C grades almost always produce a vote of “not qualified” for white applicants.
Not so for an applicant who self-identifies as one of the minorities who are our “number one priority.” For them, another set of rules apply. Their cases are briefed separately to the board, and SAT scores to the mid-500s with quite a few Cs in classes (and no visible athletics or leadership) typically produce a vote of “qualified” for them, with direct admission to Annapolis. They’re in, and are given a pro forma nomination to make it legit.
Minority applicants with scores and grades down to the 300s with Cs and Ds (and no particular leadership or athletics) also come, though after a remedial year at our taxpayer-supported remedial school, the Naval Academy Preparatory School.
By using NAPS as a feeder, we’ve virtually eliminated all competition for “diverse” candidates: in theory they have to get a C average at NAPS to come to USNA, but this is regularly re-negotiated.
There you go. Create a new sub-category (for the USNA) of minority, and have a two-track, separate and unequal selections process. You just increased your diversity. Quod erat demonstrandum.
I highly recommend that you read the whole thing and soak it in. When it comes to getting a handle on how such paternalistic racist policies impact our dialog on race, read some of the comments there as well.
How anyone can defend or be proud of such a blatantly discriminatory policy is beyond me. It sets up young men and women for failure, unfairly stigmatizes minority MIDN and officers who would qualify in a race-neutral environment, it pushes quality cuts to the fleet where lives are on the line (hulls of ships and skin of aircraft don’t care what your DNA is), and on a whole it tarnishes our entire culture of fairness.
In the zero-sum game that is admissions, you can no longer say that we don’t discriminate on the basis of race, creed, color, or national origin. As outlined in Professor Fleming’s OP-ED, we do. It also plants the seed of doubt that if we discriminate at the beginning; do we also continue to discriminate throughout the career path?
Thought these might be of interest to you…
CAPT John Larnerd, MSC, USN, Executive Officer of the Medical Treatment Facility onboard USNS COMFORT (T-AH 20) blogs about the travels and adventures of the USNS COMFORT Hospital Ship as it participates in Continuing Promise ’09, a humanitarian/civic assistance mission to seven countries throughout the Carribean, Central and South America.
David Wood over at Politics Daily writes from Fort Benning,
….For years – decades – basic training has had an unthinking, mechanical logic to it.
“We were dumb, marching privates,” says Sgt. Jermaine Trevillion, who went through basic training here in 1997. Now, after two combat tours in Iraq with the 1st Armored Division, he’s a drill sergeant.
“The training was mindless – here’s the material, memorize it,” says John Calpena, who fought with the 1st Infantry Division in Iraq in 2004-2005. “Today the enemy is always changing his tactics, his operations. We can’t give soldiers mindless solutions. They have to think.”
Full article here.
So it’s midnight on “Monday” where I’m working…
CDR Salamander recommends that I post here about a discussion several folks have been having about the recent details of General Motors’ troubles. There may be something worthwhile to map onto the Navy of today. Phibian provoked some good comment earlier this week with a quote changing “GM” to “Navy” just to see how it fit. It fit rather too well in places. He then asked:
Here is a question; is there a parallel between the path of the USN over the last two decades and that of GM of the last four?
I then made the mistake of forgetting Phibian’s post, but remembering its lesson, when I noticed this via former submariner Gerard Vanderleun of American Digest:
As you probably know, ever since GM was founded, its execs have either been driven by a chauffeur or provided with carefully prepared and maintained examples of the company’s most expensive vehicles. Of course, there are times when the suits must sign off on the company’s more prosaic products. Since 1953, this intersection between high flyer and mass market occurred at GM’s Mesa, Arizona, Desert Proving Grounds (DPG). The execs would fly into Phoenix’s Sky Harbor airport, limo out to the DPG and drive the company’s latest models.
Our agent says that all the vehicles the execs drove were “ringers.” More specifically, the engineers would tweak the test vehicles to remove any hint of imperfection. “They use a rolling radius machine to choose the best tires, fix the headliner, tighten panel and interior gaps, remove shakes and rattles, repair bodywork—everything and anything.”
Did the execs know this? “Nope. And nobody was going to tell them . . . As far as they knew, the cars were exactly as they would be coming off the line. That’s why Bob Lutz thinks GM’s products are world-class. The ones he’s driven are.”
I asked Agent X if the GM execs would ever drive the cars again. Did he know if Wagoner or Lutz dropped in at a dealership to test drive a random sample off the lot? He found the idea amusing.
Well, did the DPG at least send a list of changes to the design and production teams? “The tweaks were never reported to anyone,” he says. “That would’ve been a sure way to kill your career . . . We’d see the cars come back to us after production with the exact same problems.”
What things in the Navy today do we do now that go down that path? I have a possible example or two listed in that post.
Also, I argue that if we can use business cases and rules for some things, we can use them for embarrassing things too. I think there would be value in studying the late-80s Navy like that, and CDR Salamander’s drawing upon GM-related examples might serve as a cautionary tale for our Navy.
This is getting annoying:
In what a U.S. military official calls an “inadvertent encounter,” a Chinese submarine hit an underwater sonar array being towed by the destroyer USS John McCain on Thursday.
The USS John S. McCain, left, anchored at the port of Incheon 40 km west of Seoul, Korea in March 2004.
The array was damaged, but the sub and the ship did not collide, the official said. A sonar array is a device towed behind a ship that listens and locates underwater sounds.
The incident occurred near Subic Bay off the coast of the Philippines.
The official, who declined to be named because the incident had not been made public, would not say whether the U.S. ship knew the submarine was that close to it.
It’s starting to feel more and more like the U.S.-Soviet relationship of the 1950s.
A little while ago I had the opportunity to exchange emails with ADM Stavridis. As someone majoring in a non-technical field yet entering a technical service, I was curious to see what ADM Stavridis had to say on how his undergraduate major (English) served him in the Navy:
I loved my English major and it has helped me immensely throughout my career. Every single day I used the skills I acquired in my major to be a better communicator, analyst, and leader. English majors read with a critical and analytical eye; bound across countless situations and worlds in the books they read; and learn in the process an enormous amount about the journey of life. Reading and studying fiction is really like living many, many additional lives.
Every day I wrote something and communicated to my team; every day I had to analyze problems, most often regarding human personality; and every day I used what I learned as a leader. What I discovered reading Hemingway, Shakespeare, Dostoyevsky, Faulkner, Updike, Forester, McCarthy, and countless other authors shaped my world-view and honed my understanding of the most complex terrain in the world – the human heart.
I then asked him, “If you had to recommend one book for midshipmen to read before commissioning what would you suggest?” His reply:
I’ll give you three, if I may:
“The Sun Also Rises,” by Ernest Hemingway – a sad, haunting story of American ex-patriots living a dissipated life in Europe in the 1920s.
“Master and Commander” by Patrick O’Brian – the first in a series of 20 novels about a sea captain in the early 19th century during the Napoleonic wars. It is a long study of leadership and life at sea, and simply brilliant in every regard.
“All the Pretty Horses,” by Cormac McCarthy – a coming of age novel set in Texas and Mexico in the mid-to-late 20th century.
Truthfully, I have not read any of those books! Summer is always a great time for me to catch up on personal reading–anymore suggestions from the audience? For professional reading, Embedded: A Marine Corps Advisor Inside the Iraqi Army has caught my eye.
Fine Literature...?
Shifting from defense to offense. Joint and combined operations – and all the hard lessons learned. Finding out that training, tactics and procedures can trump an opponent’s better technology – and more hard lessons learned. Surviving on the razor’s edge and prevailing. Innovate, adapt – overcome. All of this and more are gathered together in the collection of battles and engagements called the Solomons Campaign – and coming this fall, we will give it the same treatment we did here with Midway. Plus some.
Watch these spaces for more details - and if you are interested in participating in this project, drop a note to: steeljawscribeATgmailDOTcom with your ideas and suggestions – full credit will be accorded.
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