Archive for the 'Navy' Category
In June and July of last year USNI published my series of posts on William Sims and the Gunnery Revolution. The discussion of innovation inside military has continued at a slow boil. I was recently invited to Tampa to speak at the U.S. Special Operations Command Innovation Conference. It was a great conference and the speakers included a number of luminaries from the innovation and technology sectors of the business world, including Tom Kelley of IDEO and Michael Jones of Google. The auditorium was filled will staff officers, DoD and contract civilians, and the front table was crowded with Senior Executive Service civilians and Flag and General Officers including Admiral McRaven.
The involvement of Junior Officers in innovation has certainly been highlighted in the past year. However, what is the role of the mid-grade or senior officer? And what about an officer’s peers? In my talk at SOCOM, I told the story of “The Gun Doctor” William Sims again, but with a slightly different focus at the end. The story I’ve told you here at USNI about the Gunnery Revolution is the story as Sims himself likely would have told it. It’s the story that appears in many history books. However, when you keep reading, and get into some of the letters and reports of the time, you realize that while William Sims was the driving force, the brains and the brawn behind this innovation, he wasn’t exactly alone. The Gunnery Revolution had an entire cast of supporting characters, including a number of Senior Officers and some staff officers who were Sims’ friends and peers.
Open Minded Seniors
When Lieutenant Sims was on China Station the Commander-in-Chief of the Asiatic Squadron was Rear Admiral George Remy. Remy was a hero of the Spanish American War and was one of the most highly respected officers of the day. He held a position that is roughly equivalent to the Commander of PACOM today. Sims’ reports went through Admiral Remy on their way back to Washington. The Admiral always added an endorsement and it was always a positive endorsement. Sims’ time on China Station wasn’t entirely spent onboard KENTUCKY. After he forwarded the first couple reports to D.C. Admiral Remy ordered him onto his staff aboard the flagship USS BROOKLYN. Sims was given the position of “Special Intelligence Officer,” an invented job that wasn’t on the organizational chart. Remy told him that he had free reign to work on, study, and report on whatever he wanted; from the growing potential for military conflict between Japan and Russia, to comparisons of the designs of foreign warships on China Station, to gunnery tactics, techniques, and procedures. Remy was a key enabler by helping to create the time and space for Sims to do his work.
What’s happening on Tubbatha Reef is covered in detail by Galrahn at Information Dissemination. The facts will, likely, come out in the ensuing investigation. On the off chance that pundits and investigators alike are unfamiliar with the Navy’s history with groundings or ship losses, here are a few things to consider…
October 8th, 1957 – USNS Mission San Miguel (AO-129) runs aground on Maro Reef in the Hawaiian Islands while running at full speed and in ballast. She sinks but her crew is rescued by LST 664.
August 22nd, 1958 – USS Prestige (MSO-465) sinks after running aground off Shikoku, Japan.
July 17th, 1965 – USS Frank Knox (DDR-742) runs aground on Pratas Reef in the South China Sea while underway to Taiwan. The ship is pulled free on 22 August.
November 3rd, 1966 – USS Tiru (SS-416) runs aground on Frederick Reef in the Coral Sea and is freed on 6 November.
February 6th, 1968 – The USS Bache (DD-470) drags anchor off Rhodes harbor, Greece, in hurricane force winds and runs aground on rocks, splitting the ship from stem to stern, but there are no serious injuries. On 17 February the ship suffers further damage in a two-day storm. The ship is so badly damaged, rather than refloated it is decommissioned on 26 February.
September 23rd, 1973 – USNS Sgt. Jack J. Pendleton (T-AKV-5) runs aground near Triton Island in the Paracels and is abandoned.
April 23rd, 1973 – USS Force (MSO-445) catches fire and sinks about 820 miles west of Guam in the Philippine Sea. Seventy crewmen who abandon the Force are picked up the next day by the British merchant ship Spratnes.
May 8th, 1982 – USS Chauvenet (T-AGS-29) runs hard aground on Dauisan Reef in the Cagayan Islands in the Sulu Sea while underway from Subic Bay, Philippines, to survey grounds in Indonesian waters. After two-and-one-half weeks of salvage efforts, the ship is refloated by U.S. Navy salvage teams and towed to the Ship Repair Facility in Subic Bay.
Not all of those COs were summarily relieved. One was court martialed, one was promoted. The others, well, I’m still researching those.
Either way, the CO, XO, and crew deserve some things from us, and from the institution. They deserve that we talk to them forthrightly. That we ask them questions and not act as if this is a dark incident, never to be spoken of. They deserve to be afforded some level of grief counseling, without question, chagrin, or judgement.
The US Navy has not lost a ship in forty years. Let us hope this is a time for learning, educating, and grieving…not one for affixing blame.
Please join us for Episode 160: CHINFO and Peter J. Munson 01-27, 5pm on Midrats at Blog Talk Radio:
In an information driven society wrapped in a 24-hr news cycle, what is the mission, responsibility, and the primary responsibilities of the Navy’s Chief of Information?
Well, you couldn’t ask for a better guest to help flesh out the answer to that question. Our guest for the first half-hour will CHINFO-actual, Rear Admiral John Kirby, USN.
For the second half of the hour we will have returning guest, Major Peter J. Munson, USMC – author of War, Welfare and Democracy: Rethinking America’s Quest for the End of History – a sobering view of how we got where we are, and the underlying trends that will impact the global system, and America’s place in it, for the next half century.
If you can’t make it live, listen or download here or from our iTunes page.
Plans, expectation, and beautiful theories can all be changed, destroyed, or morphed in to radically different futures in the blink of an eye.
Russian Dadaists, Berlin’s avant guard, American segregationists, and in our own parochial time; those who spent their year working of the QDR in 2001; they know how it can happen.
What seems obvious in hindsight is not, for most, that obvious to those closest to it, distracted from it, or willfully floating along in a sea of indifference.
There are times, decision or pivot points for some, where the signs become clear. That steady, darkening, and thickening line starts to burn through the ambient noise. It looks familiar, it is harmonic of what you have seen before – it cannot be ignored. It demands action
You only get the Fleet your nation decides to buy, more people need to accept that … and the political and economic reality we are in.
Former Senator Hagel has been nominated to be the next Secretary of Defense. In an August 2011 interview with The Financial Times’ Stephanie Kirchgaessner, he stated the following;
The defence department, I think in many ways has been bloated.
…
I think the Pentagon needs to be pared down. I think we need the Pentagon to look at their own priorities.
…
There’s a tremendous amount of bloat in the Pentagon, and that has to be scaled back …I don’t think that our military has really looked at themselves strategically, critically in a long, long time. Every agency needs to do that. The Department of Defence, and I’m a strong supporter of this … no American wants to in any way hurt our capabilities to national defence, but that doesn’t mean an unlimited amount of money, and a blank cheque for anything they want at any time, for any purpose. Not at all. Not at all, and so the realities are that the mess we’re in this country, with our debt and our deficits, and our infrastructure and jobless and all the rest, is going to require everybody to take a look, even the defence department, and make a pretty hard re-evaluation and review.
President Obama picked Hagel for very specific reasons, and his views above are not unknown and were part of that. Good people can agree or disagree on the substance of his argument, but that is the fact both sides will have to work with.
Next, let’s look to the uniformed side of the house. In a speech at SNA earlier this week, Vice Admiral Copeman stated the following;
Ultimately, (Copeman) warned, “if you don’t want to get hollow, you have to give up force structure.”
“Resources are going to drop. They’re going to drop significantly,” the admiral said. … “If it were my choice,” Copeman said, “I’d give up force structure to get whole. But it’s not always my choice.”
There are just a few tidbits of I&W to ponder.
In the last few years, we have heard a lot of talk about a Fleet of 313 and now 300. Many of us have been arguing for half a decade that neither is the number we should be looking at, that is not what the nation will fund; 270 to 240 is more likely.
“If we cannot have the navy estimates of our policy, then let’s have the policy of our navy estimates.”
If this is the maritime Zeitgeist for the remainder of this decade, then let’s embrace it. We can’t stomp our feet and hold our breath until the Pentagon turns blue.
How do we best do it? What do we need to preserve – what should we cut – what will we have to get rid of root-n-branch?
What are our priorities?
The smart money on the future is on who the CINC is hiring, what that hire’s recent statements say about his ideas, and what our senior officers are starting to send out trial balloons on to test the winds.
Posted by CDRSalamander in Navy | read comments (17)Tags: Budget Wars, Defense Budget, Maritime Strategy
Episode 158: 3rd Anniversary Show 01/13 by Midrats on Blog Talk Radio at 5pm Eastern U.S.:
Join us this Sunday to celebrate Midrat’s 3rd Anniversary with a free-ranging panel discussion with some of your favorite guests from the past three seasons.
Join your hosts Sal from “CDR Salamander” and EagleOne from “EagleSpeak” with regular guests on the panel; Captain Henry J. Hendrix, Jr. USN; Captain Will Dossel, USN (Ret); LCDR Claude Berube, USNR; and YN2 H. Lucien Gauthier, III (SW) USN.
We will be asking each other questions on the above-the-fold subjects of the last year and what we see in the next.
Join in the chat room for to suggest your own questions as well.
Listen in live here or download it later from here or from our iTunes pages here.
Posted by Eagle1 in Coast Guard, Foreign Policy, History, Marine Corps, Maritime Security, Naval Institute, Navy | read comments (0)
In the course of reading Robert Kaplan’s article in the Wall Street Journal, I had to back up and read this twice.
The Japanese navy boasts roughly four times as many major warships as the British Royal Navy.
Wait … what?
OK, that reality has sunk in over the last decade – but we are still a bit of an Anglophile navy, and even with the Pacific Pivot, we still give the mother country a lot of heft for historical and emotional reasons.
In their constitutional quasi-isolation, Japan’s very real power has
Here is the context;
… in Asia. Nationalism there is young and vibrant—as it was in the West in the 19th and 20th centuries.
Asia is in the midst of a feverish arms race, featuring advanced diesel-electric submarines, the latest fighter jets and ballistic missiles. China, having consolidated its land borders following nearly two centuries of disorder, is projecting air and sea power into what it regards as the blue national soil of the South China and East China seas.
Japan and other countries are reacting in kind. Slipping out of its quasi-pacifistic shell, Japan is rediscovering nationalism as a default option. The Japanese navy boasts roughly four times as many major warships as the British Royal Navy. As for Vietnam and the Philippines, nobody who visits those countries and talks with their officials, as I have, about their territorial claims would imagine for a moment that we live in a post-national age.
The disputes in Asia are not about ideology or any uplifting moral philosophy; they are about who gets to control space on the map.
Silly Transformationalists … dreaming is for kiddies. Get ye back to your history books!
Back on topic though; yes, the facts are clear.
Though you can find +/- difference depending on source, definitions, and recent com/decom; here are the numbers:
Royal Navy:
Helicopter Carriers: 2
Amphibious Ships: 2
Destroyers: 7
Frigates: 13
Submarines: 6-SSN, 4-SSBN
We’ll call that 24.
Japanese Navy:
Helicopter Carriers: 2 (technically 4, all of which are helicopter carrying destroyers. The SHIRANE Class of 2 are only half decks and are really just destroyers. HYUGA Class of 2 are no-kidding helicopter carriers. Two more much larger 19,500 ton ships on the way this decade as well).
Amphibious Ships: 5
Destroyers: 40
Frigates: 6
Submarines: 16-SS
We’ll call that 67. If you are what Salamander defines as “major combatants” then you have 2.8 times, not 4x, but there are lots of ways to count. Perhaps they are looking at smaller ships as well. By either definition though, it should give one pause not only to reflect about the decline of the Royal Navy – but more importantly – the latent and potential power of the Japanese Navy.
Anyone who has worked with the Japanese will agree with me as well that from a professional point of view, they are an exceptionally quality force.
Here is the tie in.
Did you catch this little memo?
Japan’s Defense Ministry will request a second boost to its military budget, according to reports, just a day after the government announced the first Defense budget increase in 10 years.
The boosts, although relatively modest compared with Japan’s overall defense spending, coincide with increasing tensions in the Asia Pacific region.Japan’s Defense Ministry intends to ask for 180.5 billion yen ($2.1 billion) from a government stimulus package – on top of an increase of more than 100 billion yen ($1.1 billion) to its military budget announced earlier this week – in order to upgrade its air defenses, according to the BBC..
Good. Japan needs to continue to do this, and we should welcome the move as long overdue (though don’t get too excited, their larger budgetary problems are even greater than ours). Europe fades, Royal Navy withers … where can the USA look for its major partner at sea?
We don’t have to look far. With the tweaks they are on the road to make in their Constitution – Japan is right there.
Join us at 5pm (Eastern U.S.), 6 Jan 2013, for the first live episode of the new year, Episode 157: “Force Structure and Tipping Points”:What happens when a global maritime power finds itself in a position where it can no longer sustain the global presence it once considered an essential requirement?
The US Navy has been in a period of decline in both numbers and capability for awhile, and as budgetary reality sets in and burn out starts to hollow remaining capabilities – the decline is set to continue for at least another decade.
How far the decline goes until stability sets in is unknown, but what is the best reaction to this reality? Are the lessons one can derive from history that can help policy makers shape direction and priority going forward?
Our guest for the full hour to discuss will be Daniel J. Whiteneck, Ph.D.
Dr. Whiteneck is a Senior Research Scientist at the Center for Naval Analyses. He has directed projects ranging from Tipping Point and the future of US maritime dominance, to the use of naval forces in deterrence and influence operations. He also led studies on naval coalition operations and maritime security operations focusing on counter-piracy and counter-proliferation.
Dr. Whiteneck deployed twice with Carrier Strike Groups for OEF and OIF. His CNA field assignments included two tours on numbered fleet staffs, as well as field representative to the Commander of NATO Joint Command Lisbon in 2004-05. He also did three tours in the Pentagon as CNA Scientific Analyst to N51, N31, and OPNAV DEEP BLUE.
He held academic positions at the Seattle University, the University of Colorado, and the Air Force Academy, before joining CNA. In addition to authoring a number of CNA studies over the past 14 years, he has published articles and book chapters on US and British global leadership and naval operations, NATO’s expansion and operations, and the role of conventional and strategic deterrence against terrorist networks and rogue states after 9/11.
Join us live here or download the show later from Midrats on BlogTalkRadio or from our iTunes page.
As military operations in Afghanistan wind down and pressure to reduce defense spending heats up, policy makers and military leaders must carefully assess how to effectively posture the US military for the challenges of the 21st century. Part of this assessment must include identifying the right mix of general purpose forces and special operations forces.
Given the potential demands for traditional capabilities during the so called “Naval Century”, striking an affordable and sustainable balance between the two-forces must be of particular concern for the Naval Services. A recent CSBA report on strategic choices for the DoD identified Special Operations Forces as one of the four “crown jewels” that should be protected in light of forthcoming austerity measures while reducing the size of the Marine Corps and the number of Navy surface ships.
Over the past several months, two reports from the Congressional Research Service began to scratch the surface on this complex issue. First, Andrew Feickert identified that the increasing demand and expanding role of special operations forces will push up against its self-imposed force endstrength limits, intended to maintain the high-quality of personnel within the SOF community. This creates a greater demand for special operations “enablers” from the conventional forces. This shift will have to occur at the same time reducing the endstrength of the Army and Marine Corps is taking place.
Several years ago I decided to renew my membership with the Naval Institute. I had been retired for about ten years and I found I missed things Naval. Low and behold, the very first issue of Proceedings I received had a whole discussion concerning low mix vs. high mix ship designs and the rationale for that mix. My first reaction was “Good Lord, didn’t we solve that problem with the Spruance (DD963) total package procurement and the low mix Oliver Hazard Perry (FFG-7) class ships” (thus showing my age).
The Spruance class, while initially lightly outfitted did prove one aspect of the high mix design, an unusually long lived hull form. Think of the Ticonderoga Cruiser (CG-47) class and the Arleigh Burke Destroyer (DDG-51) class.
The FFG- 7 ship design had as its one of it’s main features, lower manning by decree. It also sported an integrated combined antenna system that included both acquisition and fire control radars in one device. After some challenges this system became quite useful in close in (Littoral) situations.
Fast forward and we see the same professional discussion occurring today. We see the need for a replacement Littoral Combat ship, and indeed two different ship designs are under contract. Obviously The Arleigh Burke class represents today’s high mix ship and if one believes the articles on the Zumwalt Class Destroyer it will probably redefine the term high Mix. There are still a number of Aegis Cruisers in the fleet and they will be there for some time to come.
Join us at 5pm (Eastern U.S.) on 2 Dec 12 for Episode 152: “Navy Next, Interrupted” on Midrats
Elections have consequences. There are paths not taken, and paths that remain.In the last election, national security was very much kept in the background, but once you peeled away a layer or two and looked carefully, there was a lot of “there there” – and a lot of it involved what to do with the direction of the US Navy.
The erstwhile nautical corner of Team Romney had a direction they wanted to take the Navy.
What was that direction? What informed it, and what were the guiding requirements that shaped their concepts?
For the full hour we will have a Midrats regular, Bryan McGrath on to discuss this and more.
Bryan McGrath is a retired Surface Warfare Officer. He commanded USS BULKELEY (DDG 84) from 2004-2006, and finished his career by leading the team that wrote the nation’s current maritime strategy.
He retired in 2008 and is currently a Washington DC based defense consultant at Delex Systems. From August 2011 to November 2012, he served on the Mitt Romney for President Defense Policy Working Group.
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