Help identify this helicopter
February 8th, 2010 | Aviation Life at Sea Photos | Posted by Phil Ewing
We're trying to find out more about the colorful artwork on the tail of this H-60 Seahawk helicopter, observed in Port-au-Prince // Sheila Vemmer / Staff
Check out the highly colorful, highly unusual tail on this S or MH-60 Seahawk, which was snapped at the airport in Port-au-Prince by veteran Navy Times lenswoman Sheila Vemmer. This is for all you rotor-heads out there: Do you recognize this helo? We’d like to find out what squadron it came from and learn more about its awesome tidal-wave-and-octopus livery.
If you can help, please leave a comment below or drop us a line at the Inbox of Excellence.
Snowpocalypse now
February 8th, 2010 | Life at Sea Maritime operations Ships | Posted by Phil Ewing
Thanks to this weekend's snowstorm, the crew of the destroyer Cole got an extra weekend at home before a seven-month deployment // MC2 Joshua Glassburn / Navy
Your friends at Military Times, just like everybody else here in the National Capital Region, have been beaten down by this weekend’s record snowstorm. Cars are caked with ice, their doors frozen shut; the roads have either become impassable with slush or turned into dangerous, friction-free runways; and even Scoop Deck’s favorite deli, around the corner from the Center of Excellence, is closed today “because of extreme weather.”
However, you can say this for the storm: It gave the crew of the destroyer Cole a few extra hours to be home with their families and friends over the weekend. The ship was originally scheduled to sail last Friday for a seven-month pirate-patrol/maritime security mission, but the departure was postponed because of worries about snow. Unpleasant as it can be to say goodbye to loved ones going away in a big warship, it sounds even worse to do so in a driving snowstorm. A spokeswoman for Surface Forces Atlantic confirmed this morning the Cole was on schedule to leave today.
Hope they didn’t have a lot of snow to shovel off … it was hard enough to get cars loose this morning — imagine trying to clear off a destroyer.
Your correspondence just got a lot saltier
February 5th, 2010 | Historical Washington leadership | Posted by Phil Ewing
Now you can use the image of a naval hero when you send a birthday card to your aunt // MCC John Lill / Navy
Let’s say, just for the sake of argument, that you sent and received messages written on paper, taken or delivered once a day, by a federal employee, six days a week. (Even though you can reach everyone you know instantaneously using cheap, almost universally accessible consumer electronics technology.) Well, you’d need some kind of other, smaller piece of adhesive paper indicating you had paid for your message to travel from you to its recipient, right? Right. So what’re you gonna use, some kind of picture of a flower? No, that’s why you need these guys.
The Navy and the Postal Service on Thursday unveiled four new “stamps” — as the smaller paper proofs-of-purchase are known — with the images of some guys who should be very familiar to readers of the Deck. Vice Adm. William Sims, Adm. Arleigh Burke, Lt. Cmdr. John McCloy and Ship’s Cook 3rd Class Doris Miller are all pictured on the Postal Service’s new set of stamps, enabling you to include a little bit of Navy when you mail in the check for the gas bill. Unless you pay it online.
Low end v. high end and fleet of tomorrow
February 4th, 2010 | Liberty Ships Washington leadership | Posted by Phil Ewing
Navy Undersecretary Bob Work pointed out this week that for the cost of one destroyer, you can get a whole Riverine Squadron. This is RivRon 2, in Iraq, in 2007 // Navy
Our high-end colleague Antonie Boessenkool has a must-read story about some of the remarks that Navy Undersecretary Bob Work has been making this week out in San Diego, on his views of the Navy’s future budget and strategy needs. Take this gem, for example:
“The bottom line is, the [irregular warfare] stuff doesn’t cost a lot,” Work said. “You can buy a riverine [naval boat] squadron for a lot cheaper than you can buy a DDG-51 [destroyer]. … If you look at the increasing capacity for irregular warfare that we’ve had since 2006, it’s very, very impressive.”
But the fight for budget dollars will get tougher in future years as the U.S. government turns its attention to deficit reduction, Work said. The worst-case scenario is that that could change the nature of the Navy fleet, but that’s at least a far-off possibility….
“The whole competitive dynamic in the naval competition for the last 100 years has been based on a dominant Navy, a global Navy,” he said. “And if we lose that … then regional powers could actually start to say, ‘OK, I’ll take you out. I’ll actually get into a competition with you.’ We don’t want to do that, so I think the debate will be, at what point do you have to say we just can’t keep a global Navy? We’re not there yet.”
And that’s not all — wait’ll you read the historical context Work gave for the Navy’s enduring shipbuilding woes:
“Quite frankly, the Department of the Navy lost its technical authority in the ’90s. We lost too many professionals and we didn’t have a disciplined requirements process. It became more a thing where you could hang as many requirements on a specific ship as you wanted rather than a disciplined process” involving tradeoffs in requirements.
“We lost the ability to tell when our programs were really in trouble, because we didn’t have the right [amount] of oversight,” he said. “We lost the expertise to say, ‘We’re now in trouble. How do we fix it?’
Check out the full story here.
The blue-green team in Haiti: Work continues
February 4th, 2010 | Aviation Maritime operations Photos Ships The greenside | Posted by Phil Ewing
Lance Cpl. Tyler Woodard, of the 22nd MEU, swung with a friend Monday in Port-au-Prince // MC3 Samantha Robinett / Navy
The Haiti humanitarian relief mission no longer dominates the cable-news TV networks these days, and the Navy has already withdrawn some of the ships — notably the carrier Carl Vinson — that were first to respond. That doesn’t mean the work has stopped, though. The Bataan and Nassau Amphibious Ready Groups, and the 22nd and 24th Marine Expeditionary Units, are still on station hauling supplies, distributing aid and helping out with the recovery.
“Professionals study logistics”: With the dock landing ship Ashland tied up at Naval Station Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, sailors and Marines broke down palleted shipments from ISO containers and loaded them aboard. Gators like Ashland, designed to send Marines ashore against a contested beach, have instead been tasked as cargo ships, picking up supplies and using their landing craft to deliver them. // Navy
When supplies reach the task force off Haiti, they’re broken down again and often hand-delivered, as was the case for these air crewmen from HSC 26, the “Chargers,” who carried food and medicine from their MH-60S Seahawk onto the hospital ship Comfort. // MC2 Kristopher Wilson / Navy
Big-birdfarm: The amphibious assault ship Nassau cruised off the Haitian coast and displayed its aviary of really large aircraft, including MV-22 Ospreys and CH-53 Sea Stallion helicopters. Organizers have prized both as useful for delivering large quantities of supplies; the Nassau’s Ospreys have even flown cargo flights from Gitmo straight to Haiti. // MC1 W. B. Swoboda / Navy
Three services in one? What color would the uniforms be?
February 4th, 2010 | Royal Navy | Posted by Phil Ewing
The Royal Navy aircraft carrier Illustrious trained in 2007 with the U.S. carriers Dwight D. Eisenhower and Harry S. Truman. British dependence on U.S. seapower could increase as the U.K.'s defense woes endure // MC2 Jay Pugh / Navy
In addition to Anglophilia and a frank admiration for the tremendous heritage of Nelson, Jellicoe, et al., Scoop Deck likes to write about the Royal Navy because a case could be made that it represents a possible future for the U.S. Navy. Cut, shrunk, starved, downsized and sometimes humiliated over the past 30 years, today’s lot for the ships that fly the White Ensign is what happens, some argue, when people who stop caring about or even understanding seapower see no problems with letting it atrophy. Advocates worry about populations coming down with “sea blindness.”
Things for the U.S. Navy aren’t nearly as dire yet, and the latest step under consideration in Great Britain is inconceivable for the U.S. military: British commanders are considering merging their three services — the Royal Navy, British Army and Royal Air Force — into some kind of new mutant super-service, according to this must-read story in The Telegraph. As an added bonus, the piece quotes a man with a hilarious name: Air Chief Marshal Sir Jock Stirrup, chief of the Defence Staff:
[Said Stirrup]: reorganising the services could be part of a radical reordering of the country’s defences. The air force is thought to be the service most likely to lose out in any restructuring. Sir Jock spoke as ministers published a green paper conceding that Britain cannot afford all of its current defence commitments, and will in future become more reliant on allies like the US and France to conduct military operations.
On that score, there’s another story in the U.K. today about how the Royal Navy will ask France to contribute escorts for its two new aircraft carriers, because the British likely won’t be able to afford them.
Which brings up the other reason why it’s worth paying attention to whatever happens with the U.K. military services — if British ships get into a jam out there somewhere, American sailors could be called in to get them out of it.
The Navy’s unmanned (war)ship
February 3rd, 2010 | Maritime operations Science and technology Ships Submarines The deckplates | Posted by Phil Ewing
DARPA's unmanned "robo-frigate" will be designed to track quiet diesel-electric subs, like this Russian Kilo-class boat, while providing continuous updates of their location // NATO
In keeping with the long-term trends in the fleet, this was only a matter of time: The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency is looking to build a completely unmanned surface ship that will cruise the oceans looking for submarines. DARPA has a request for proposal out this week on an “Anti-Submarine Warfare Continuous Trail Unmanned Vessel” — or as The Register succinctly termed it, a “robo-frigate” — with some of the following characteristics:
They’ve got mail!
February 3rd, 2010 | Navy Officers Personnel leadership | Posted by Lance Bacon
Scoop Deck just spent an awesome week with the hard-working staff at Navy Personnel Command in Millington, Tenn. You’ll be seeing the fruit of this visit in coming editions of Navy Times. In the meantime, here are a few comments that really caught our attention:
- “We receive and process 7 million record updates annually.” – Dwight Stanton, deputy, Personnel Info Management Department. (For the record, that’s more than 19,000 letters every day. The personnel bubbas told me this mail alone weighs in at 130,000 pounds annually. That weight is equal to 356 links of anchor chain, 52 Humvees, three pre-boneyard F-14s, or one Trident II missile. So if they don’t get your fix in 24 hours or less, well, just keep that in mind.)
- “During boards, we only work half-days. That’s 7 a.m. to 7 p.m.” – Capt. Eric Anderson, director of Officer Career Progression
- “We must have rock-solid integrity in the promotion system.” – Capt. Leo Falardeau, a 38-year Mustang who heads up Career Progression.
- “Eleven ensigns are needed to build one captain.” – Capt. John Schultz, head of Military Community Management.
- “Comparing the Navy’s promotion system to the other services is like comparing apples to bicycles.” – Katie Suich, Public Affairs Office
- “Why do we treat people like they’re going into a different Navy?” – Cmdr. Daniel Harris, director of the Career Transition Office, describing new efforts to make the active-to-reserve transition easier.
- “Up until 1996, everyone was a water-walker.” – Chris Zaller, director of the Selection Board Support Division, on changes made to correct grade inflation.
The budget and its discontents, vol. 2: Are we the Soviets?
February 3rd, 2010 | Blogs Congress Washington leadership | Posted by Phil Ewing
"Keeping my hands steady at the helm, I will pilot the ship of state to smoother, safer waters, comrades!" // davno.ru
The drumbeat continues online for including the Pentagon — with Navy programs inevitably singled out — in the federal government’s proposed spending freeze over the next three years. By continuing to increase the budget for the Defense Department even as the rest of the country feels the squeeze, the U.S. government is as bad as old Soviet Union, the argument goes.
Or so editorialized the Orange County Register, even as it praised Defense Secretary Robert Gates for “cutting” DDG 1000 — Do people not understand the Navy is still building three of them? And that Navy officials made the cuts themselves months before Gates’ infamous announcement last April? — in a piece that accused DoD of continuing the us v. the U.S.S.R. mentality:
What we have is a military still built to meet the challenges of the Cold War some two decades after the Cold War ended. With no prospective enemy that comes close to posing a challenge in air or naval power, in an era when the challenge comes from stateless terrorists who can best be countered by improved intelligence, nimble special forces and relatively inexpensive unmanned drone aircraft, we are spending as if the Soviet Union were still around and threatening us on every front.
The comparison came up again in a comment over at New Wars, which linked to another post with a specific list of weapons or programs the Pentagon should pare back. Specifically, guest blogger Lawrence J. Korb wrote that the Navy should only build two Zumwalts and just one Virginia-class submarine per year, to save money.
What say you? Is the Obama administration running the Pentagon as though we were still in the bad old days?
You’re out of uniform, snowmate!
February 3rd, 2010 | Aviation Life at Sea Photos | Posted by Phil Ewing
MC2 Mike Lenart / Navy
ABH3 Marcialiced Arrendondo, left, and ABAN Christina Marszalek built a snowman from the accumulation on the flight deck of the amphibious assault ship Kearsarge last week while the ship was underway off the East Coast. The concept of building a snowman on a big-deck gator immediately brought to mind another awesome idea: Wouldn’t it be cool if they set up this snowman beneath a Marine Corps AV-8B Harrier as it came in for a vertical landing? How long would it take for it to the plane’s jet engine to vaporize poor BMSN Frosty?