The buildings in the “regimental area” of Camp Lejeune, North Carolina are modest, post-war brick buildings that, to the visitor’s eye, look more or less alike.  Yet, each of the Marine Regiments of the Second Marine Division has its own storied history and battle honors.  As Captain J. W. Thomason wrote in his Great War masterpiece Fix Bayonets, these histories represent

“…traditions of things endured and things accomplished, such as Regiments hand down forever.”

There are symbols of these honors for one to see, if you know where to look.  On a thousand trips past those symbols, one never failed to make me pause and reflect.  On the headquarters building for the Second Marine Regiment hangs their unit crest.  The crest contains only three words.  They are in English and not Latin, and they are not a catch phrase nor a bold proclamation of a warrior philosophy.  They are simple and stark.  Across the top of the unit crest is the word “TARAWA”.  And at the bottom, the grim admonition, “KEEP MOVING”.

It was 66 years ago on this date that the Second Marine Division began the assault on Betio Island, in the Tarawa Atoll.  The island, roughly two thirds of the size of my college’s small campus, was the most heavily fortified beach in the world.  Of the Second MarDiv, the 2nd Marine Regiment landed two battalions abreast on beaches Red 1 and Red 2.  The assault began what was described as “seventy-six stark and bitter hours” of the most brutal combat of the Pacific War.   More than 1,000 Marines and Sailors were killed, nearly 2,300 wounded, along with nearly 5,000 Japanese dead, in the maelstrom of heat, sand, fire, and smoke that was Betio.

Assault on Betio's Northern beaches

Marine Dead on Beach Red 1

I will not detail the fighting for Betio here, as there are many other sources for that information.   Nor will I debate whether the terrible price paid for Betio was too high.   What cannot be debated is the extraordinary heroism of the Marines and Sailors who fought to secure the 1.1 square miles of baking sand and wrest it from the grasp of an entrenched, fortified, and determined enemy.   The fighting was described as “utmost savagery”, and casualties among Marine officers and NCOs were extremely high.   As one Marine stated, initiative and courage were absolute necessities.  Corporals commanded platoons, and Staff Sergeants, companies.

Marines assault over coconut log wall on Beach Red 2

The book by the late Robert Sherrod, “Tarawa, The Story of a Battle”,  is a magnificent read.  Another is Eric Hammel’s “76 Hours”.    Also “Utmost Savagery”, by Joe Alexander, who additionally produced the WWII commemorative “Across the Reef”, an excellent compilation of primary source material.    For video, The History Channel produced a 50th anniversary documentary on the battle, titled “Death Tide at Tarawa”, in November 1993.  I also highly recommend finding and watching this superb production.  It is  narrated by Edward Hermann, and interviews many of the battle’s veterans, including Robert Sherrod, MajGen Mike Ryan, and others, who provide chilling and inspiring commentary of the fighting and of the terrible carnage of those three days.

Master Sgt. James M. Fawcett, left and Capt. Kyle Corcoran salute Fawcett's father's ashes on Red Beach 1. MSgt Fawcett's father landed on Red 1 on 20 Nov 1943.

Tarawa remains a proud and grim chapter in the battle histories of the units of the Second Marine Division.  Each outfit, the 2nd, 6th, 8th, and 10th Marines, 2nd Tank Battalion, 2nd Tracks, and  miscellaneous support units, fought superbly against frightful odds and a fearsome enemy.   It is on the Unit Crest of the 2nd Marines, whose battalions paid the highest price for Betio, that the most poignant of those histories is remembered.    Three simple words:  “TARAWA;  KEEP MOVING”.

Posted by UltimaRatioReg in Marine Corps, Navy, history | read comments (0)

For those who are not fully updated or familiar with the latest case of racial discrimination at the USNA, this time involving the Color Guard, please click here to get up to speed, and then come back.

As former Pennsylvania Senator Rick Santorum stated this morning in the Philidelpha Inquirer,

‘It’s not a critical national-security matter when a few white male midshipmen almost get bounced from a color guard. After the Fort Hood killings, however, we should look at the military’s blind commitment to “diversity” and see if it’s blinding us to the obvious – and the dangerous.’

I encourage everyone to read the full article – but the danger he refers to is not the direct danger of an officer with a gun killing his fellow servicemembers wholesale – but is the broader danger an aggressive, exclusionary, close-minded, and corrosive philosophy can have on an institution’s culture – a culture that requires a meritocracy infused with candor to excel in peace and war.

First of all – at the core – what core competency of the Navy is a diverse Navy supposed to represent? One would hope that an organization that serves a nation would reflect its peoples diverse background as a natural by-product of the removal of all barriers to entry based on race, creed, color, or national origin.

The problem is – life is not that simple, clean, or easy.  A percentage-to-percentage reflection of a nation’s diversity rarely occurs naturally, even if it is free of institutional discrimination. For reasons that fill up entire library shelves; socio-economic, cultural, family habits and traditions towards education, careers goals, and family structures vary wildly in such a diverse nation as ours.

Especially in high skilled areas of our economy that require a meritocracy due to the financial, life-and-death, or innate performance requirements of the profession; pure balanced diversity is the exception – not the norm. A simple walk through the Doctor’s lounge at your local hospital, a Silicon Valley research facility, a bio-medical lab in the Research Triangle Park, a Los Alamos laboratory, a nuclear power plant, a NFL locker room, or a hedge fund golf outing will show you that even in an open and fair society – perfect diversity is the exception not the rule – and perfect diversity does not equate with mission success.

Where we run into problems is when we refuse to accept reality – when we game the system – when we sell little bits of our soul in order to buy something that cannot be honestly purchased or to curry favor with important people. In a zero-sum game based on objective criteria used to achieve the best possible outcome, when an external factor – in this case race, creed, color, or national origin - is brought in that has nothing to do with the objective criteria, and is used to select a set-group of personnel defined by the external factors, what must be sacrificed to achieve that external factor’s percentage goals are those objective criteria. You intentionally sub-optimize your organization by dilution – replacing high objective criteria scores with low objective criteria scores.

In the case of Midshipmen – when you take out any pure athletic criteria used to bring in some MIDN – the objective criteria can very broadly be broken down to two areas; academic potential and leadership potential. To expand the number of the external factor driven aspects, you have to decrease the acceptance threshold of your objective criteria for those specific external factor sub-groups. As shown by the USNA’s own data – those tradeoffs have been made and continue to be made – specifically to increase self-identified minority MIDN numbers (in addition to the number of those minority candidates who made it using the objective criteria alone). To meet that external factor requirement – a #1 priority as we have been told – lower academic and leadership potential is accepted on the front end (and can be advertised high and low, far and wide) with the hope that enough of the sub-optimal group can maintain minimum standards and make it out the back end.

Of course, that means that some applicants that met the objective criteria of academic and leadership potential will not be accepted – but we have made the decision that higher percentages of minority MIDN are more important than academic and leadership potential. In the zero-sum game that is admissions – that is the first decision we made to discriminate on the basis of race, creed, color, or national origin.

As our MIDN have learned in their first few years exposed to the Navy – that is not the only time racial discrimination takes place.

There are organizations at Annapolis that are voluntary and represent USNA and the Navy.  They get their picture taken; this has become a problem.

For instance, the “face of the Navy” that the USNA Gospel Choir and the USNA Crew team show are very different. Is that a problem? No, not really. It is only a problem if, at your core, you see race and racial politics in everything you do – regardless of the reality you live in. The MIDN and their generation don’t care – but they soon learn that those above them do. They care a lot.

This is where we reach another decision point; and we decide to discriminate – selectively.  Where Gospel and Crew get a pass – lower profile perhaps – others do not.

You have in the USNA Color Guard a high profile voluntary organization that individual MIDN have spent years building seniority and experience to provide the most professional military bearing to represent the Navy to the nation. Groups such as the Color Guard pride themselves in being a meritocracy of shared discipline, shared values, and shared rewards. They are good because they are fair. They excel because they function on objective criteria – sustained superior performance. At least – that is what they thought.

In late OCT, we had the uniformed leadership at USNA decide that in order to artificially create something they desired to be true, that they would actively intervene and discriminate against two Midshipmen based on their race and gender.

This is fact. This cannot be defended. USNA has tried to spin it. Sandbag it. Confuse the issue with the now infamous “8v6″ saga. What it has not tried to do is explain its actions in any logical and consistent way.

I think it says a lot about the Navy’s Diversity initiatives when we have to hide them, spin them, sandbag them – and when we get caught out in the open – we do something quite Soviet; we issue a gag-order to those discriminated against and their peers after the story breaks. That should cause a moment of self-reflection.

For three weeks on, this story continues to boil. The fact that the USNA discriminated on the basis of race has not been disproved, and the official denials are self-conflicting and debunked. The MIDN involved are not permitted to speak. The relationship between the Commandant of Midshipmen and his Midshipmen has been drastically changed from one of mutual admiration to mutual distrust.

In a larger sense, why has such a small example of what we have seen so often had so much traction? Well, primarily it is because we can identify a name and a face to the innocent party. As opposed to “X number in the reject pile,” we have two MIDN who are soon to be commissioned and in our Fleet. Two MIDN who know personally that they can be discriminated against on the basis of their race and wonder, “When will I be discriminated against again?”  Argue that point if you wish, but put yourselves in their shoes; it happened to them once, why won’t it happen again?

Is this really where we want to be as an institution? Does this bring great credit upon the Naval Service? Is there another way?

What is the solution? As with most hard and complicated problems, the answer is simple. Live up to our standards. Demonstrate the innate integrity and fairness of our Navy. Implement a policy that is simple for the PAO, Commandant, and the Midshipmen to understand – and then carry it on to the Fleet. Have a policy that is easy to defend. One you are proud to defend and don’t have to hide from. One you can defend directly with simple, basic words.

Have a policy that we do not discriminate on the basis of race, creed, color, or national origin. We do not make selections, limit, expand, or track the professional progress of our Sailors based on their race or ethnicity. Simple. Done. Move forward.  Prove it by removing all reference to a Sailor’s racial or ethnic background.  Remove all pictures from the all boards.  Remove all doubt.  They are of limited utility anyway, as we know – names, pictures, and faces are a poor way to understand self-identified race and ethnicity anyway.

Excise and redistribute the BA/NMP for almost all of our branch of the divisive Diversity Industry to other UICs related to supporting Sailors at sea and Marines ashore.  The UCMJ has all we need to deal with bigots.

Will there be pressure from the larger Diversity Industry and their backers in Congress? Absolutely – they have jobs to keep and grievances to feed. Will there be a change in the ethnic makeup of those selected for officer programs? Probably. Some racial and ethnic groups will go up – some will go down – some may stay the same. If you have objective criteria – then you shouldn’t care. The Sailors don’t care. They just want someone to treat them fairly, do their job, execute the mission, be a leader, and bring them home from combat intact.

In any event, with more and more mixed-race citizens and minority percentages as a result of immigration patterns in the last 50 years – it will mean less and less with each passing year. That is a good thing. Like we did in the Truman Administration – why don’t we get ahead of the curve on this issue. This is not a time to be stuck in 1971 – we need to get ready for the second decade of the 21st Century.

For those who will object to the change, again – look for the reasons brought up at the beginning of the post; socio-economic, cultural, and family habits and traditions towards education, careers, and family structures. None of these are within the control of the US Navy – nor should they. What can we do? We can ensure that we reach out to all communities in the US – something the Recruiting Districts should already be good at. We could expand JNROTC, as is being done – to help local educators build the academic and leadership potential that is in every community.

Most of all – we should have faith in our people and our institution. Create a fair, just, and admirable institution – and the best will come to you. What would their ethnicity and race be? Who cares – they’re the best. The best attract the best of all colors.

If you value performance, potential, and excellence – that is what you will put your efforts towards – and is what you will get.

If you value race and ethnicity and make your decisions based on that – then you will get what all cultures that emphasize race and ethnicity get; strife, conflict, division, and unending episodes of racial and ethnic discrimination.

As a last note, we all know that these little – and large – “Diversity decision” issues are nothing new in the Navy. We have all, myself included, been party to them. With a wink, a nod, and perhaps a taunt-jawed acceptance – we have all gone along with it. With time and progress however, don’t all archaic theories and methods reach the point that they are no longer valid and usefull?

As with segregation in the past, don’t we have to eventually reach a point were we stop and conduct a little self-reflection? When do we reach the point where we say, “No. This must stop. This has gone on long enough. We are a good, honest, fair, and open institution. Discrimination in any form is beneath the honor and dignity of our Service. This will go on no longer.”

Good people with the best intentions made some hard decisions trying to fix a problem they were sold as a requirement. So hard, it seems, that decisions were made to “bend the curve” and take short cuts using methods that, in the end, they cannot defend and cannot survive the light of day.

As we look towards the second decade of the 21st Century, where next year’s class of Midshipmen were born as Bill Clinton and George H.W. Bush challenged each other in the 1992 election – can we say, “Enough,” or will we have to wait for the next episode where we hide, mumble, spin, and blanch at what we have become?

Posted by CDRSalamander in Navy | read comments (20)

Every year, millions of Oslo vehicles roll over these nondescript metal plates. Put down by workers to cover road construction, they lay undignified and unnoticed. But, there is history in these plates. They belong to Tirpitz.

Tirpitz sunk on November 12, 1944, an event brilliantly described last week by UltimaRatioReg. After the war, the Lonely Queen of the North was cut up and sold as scrap. A few of her armor plates were sold to the Norwegian Road Authority, who to this day use them in Oslo as temporary road surface. It is an anonymous but noble end to an august vessel.

Posted by Christopher Albon in Navy, history | read comments (4)

A few of us (here and over at Galrahn’s site) have been banging the drum for the last few years re. the potential threat posed by China’s ASBM (Anti-Ship Ballistic Missile) which appears to be a variant of the DF-21 (itself, an apparent derivative of the Pershing II MRBM). There has been limited releasable (e.g., unclassified) information from DoD agencies, most of it in the annual DoD report on China’s capabilities. What little else can be gleaned from the open press is primarily Chinese in origin and oft times, in Chinese. Most of the extensive writings have tended to be more generalistic as a result, focusing at the strategic-political level on the implications and challenges such a weapon would pose in a future Taiwan Straits scenario (or some other that takes place at or inside the first island chain). Chief focus has been on the aspect of sea denial to US carriers and the attendant impact that would have on providing tactical airpower in the face of land-based PLAAF forces conducting bluewater ASUW and land attack strikes. The most recent open press article was that found in the May 2009 issue of the Naval Institute’s Proceedings

With the autumn 2009 issue of the Naval War College Review, that body of knowledge has been significantly expanded via two articles. The first, “Using the Land to Control the Sea?” (link directly downloads a PDF of the article) addresses the larger technical and political challenges, opening with an argument is a familiar to readers of this and the aforementioned blogs:

For China, the ability to prevent a U.S. carrier strike group from intervening in the event of a Taiwan Strait crisis is critical. Beijing’s immediate strategic concerns have been defined with a high level of clarity. The Chinese are interested in achieving an antiship ballistic missile (ASBM) capability because it offers them the prospect of limiting the ability of other nations, particularly the United States, to exert military influence on China’s maritime periphery, which contains several disputed zones of core strategic importance to Beijing. ASBMs are regarded as a means by which technologically limited developing countries can overcome by asymmetric means their qualitative inferiority in conventional combat platforms, because the gap between offense and defense is the greatest here.

Today, China may be closer than ever to attaining this capability. In addition to numerous outside reports suggesting Chinese efforts in this area, technical and operationally focused discussions on the topic are appearing in increasing numbers and in a widening array of Chinese sources, some clearly authoritative. This suggests that China may be close to testing and fielding an ASBM system—a weapon that no other country currently possesses, since the United States relinquished a distantly related capability in 1988. In the view of Chinese and Western analysts, even the mere perception that China might have realized an ASBM capability could represent a paradigm shift, with profound consequences for deterrence, military operations, arms control, and the balance of power in the western Pacific.

Discussion that follows is worth the read, but of particular interest is the end analysis where the authors contemplate the impact a range of US responses would have, spanning from indifference to measured and then major response,and what the implications would be if the Chinese were to go ahead and conduct an operational tes:

Responding to the unprecedented strategic challenge presented by an ASBM capability would require the American military and civilian leadership to face hard truths, and continue to develop innovative new capabilities. The United States has many options here, and it must be prepared to exercise them. The most perilous approach would be to neglect such military innovation while continuing to insist that the United States maintained its ability to keep the peace, when in fact the military capabilities that underpin that ability were diminishing, at least in a relative sense. Such a discrepancy between rhetoric and reality would erode America’s regional credibility and fuel Chinese overconfidence. The prospect of documenting that discrepancy publicly might motivate China to conduct a demonstration of an ASBM; a successful test could create the impression that American power projection capabilities—and the regional credibility that depends on them—had been dramatically diminished. Managing the proper response to this potential “game changer” will demand close scrutiny from scholars, analysts, and policy makers alike, as it will critically influence America’s place in the Pacific for decades to come.

Two events point to the efficacy of such a scenario: one, the operational ASAT test conducted in 2007 and the other (and used by the authors) – the bombing tests off the VACAPES prompted by General Billy Mitchell and carried out by Army and Navy aircraft against stationary capital ship targets. In the case of the former, it clearly illuminated not only China’s tchnological capabilities, but some have said that it also demonstrated a certain ascendancy of the military and its ability to veto civilian policy makers who were not favoring an operational test. In the case of the latter – there were major budgetary, policy and even changes in tactics as the nascent Army Air Corps received substantive funding boosts, the Navy began to seriously investigate the use of dive bombers as a means to attack ships and other nations, notably Japan, began to redraw their force structures.

But what of the system itself? How much of it is real and how much is just vaporware? Maskirovka designed to confuse and direct US allocation of forces and funding down blind alleys? The second article, “China’s Antiship Ballistic Missile: Developments and Missing Links” (same warning as above re. the hyperlink) takes a systemic approach to assessing this ’system of systems’ by an extensive analysis of available open-press Chinese literature. It is worth noting that when conducting a content analysis, one not only focuses on what is found in the body proper of individual texts, but as that body grows, there are larger trends and directions that can be ascertained and from which, judgments as to the status and progress of a program may be made – even absent declaratory supporting statements. As the authors point out, for example, early literature tends to view the problems presented in the complex kill chain of an ASBM with a wider aperture, with wide-ranging, generalist discussions that identify problem areas. As sub-groups of supporting literature grow in number while parsing ever-finer details, say in developing algorithms used to detect, identify and track large surface vessels using space-based assets, or there is wider discussion of the problems associated with exo-atmospheric maneuvering while maintaining targeting (as is the case in the civilian space program and the problems associated with unmanned docking), the fact that such bodies of literature exist lends credence to assessments of the state of development and deployment of a weapons system.

Beyond the ASBM, the authors see far-reaching impacts on the larger military capabilities and force structure. Developing, building and deploying an operational ASBM with all of the technical, operational and even political challenges posed along the way would have reverberating effects throughout – from Command and Control, to multi-spectral imaging, rapid re-targeting, battle assessment and more – every bit a modern revolution in military affairs and industry as the US experienced in the late 80’s and 90’s with technology crossovers from the space and micro-computer industries.

Points to ponder while working on a “balanced” approach to forces…

(cross-posted at steeljawscribe.com)

Posted by SteelJaw in Navy | read comments (7)

Manned fighter vs. UAV – who would win?  Lots of conjecture in the open and closed press at the moment as we move ever hesitatingly towards more autonomous operations.  Still, in one sense, the debate took upon itself flesh and blood (and aluminum and hydraulic fluid) in the skies over Southern California in the summer of 1956.

It all began with an F6F drone that was operating autonomously, just not by design.  Following the war, F6Fs were plentiful and being replaced by newer versions of the F4U Corsair and F8F Bearcat (briefly) and in short order, by the first generation of carrier-based jet fighters like the FH Phantom and the FJ Fury.  During the war and afterwards, the Navy was very much involved with development of drones and unmanned aircraft in its pursuit of long-range cruise missiles.  As such, considerable expertise was gained in unmanned aircraft command and control, which was readily applied to the spare F6Fs, which themselves, became a plentiful source of unmanned drones for gunnery and missile practice.

Except the command and control part sometimes didn’t quite synch. . .we pick up the story via BoB Wilson, on the staff of the Antelope Valley Press:

Read the rest of this entry »

Posted by SteelJaw in Air Force, Aviation, Navy | read comments (3)