Navy Week in the City of Industry
August 31st, 2010 | Aviation Recruiting | Posted by Phil Ewing
It's tricky to bring deep draft warships to Cleveland for Navy Week, but the fleet has other, louder, flashier options. // MC1 Roger Duncan / Navy
Quick personal essay: Way back in the year 2003, I spent an idyllic late-summer afternoon in downtown Cleveland seeing both the sights, including the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame and the Terminal Tower. While walking back to the car under a brilliant, ceiling-and-visibility-unlimited blue sky, I heard a deafening, unmistakable roar — the kind of roar that you only get from a Navy Flight Demonstration Team. Completely by accident, as a random pedestrian, I had stumbled into a front-row seat for the Blue Angels, starting their ballet half above the city and half above Lake Erie. Awesome.
I initially wanted to crack wise about Navy Week in Cleveland, which is taking place even as we speak, and make some kind of joke about how even a Navy of 330,729 people couldn’t fill the void left by The NBA Player Whose Name We Dare Not Speak, but then I thought, hey — take it easy on old Cleveland. Unlike Baltimore, which also is having its Navy Week right now, you can’t bring a sweet Aegis cruiser to the Cleveland lakefront (not that there’s a cruiser in Baltimore either, but it did get two warships) and, to its credit, Cleveland is assembling its own respectable collection of museum ships.
So instead of cool warships, the Navy has to get creative: There’s a column in The Plain Dealer; a special shout-out scheduled for tonight’s Tribe game; and performances by the Fleet Forces Command band, Four Star Edition. And, oh yes, the Blue Angels are coming back, too.
Exeunt McInerney
August 31st, 2010 | Ships | Posted by Phil Ewing
The sea dog and its prize: McInerney proudly towed the now-famous semi-submersible drug-sub it captured in 2008 off Guatemala. // Lt. Justin Cooper / Navy
After more than 30 years, today is the frigate McInerney’s last day in the U.S. Navy. In a ceremony at Naval Station Mayport, Fla., sailors are set to lower the Stars and Stripes for the last time, and then the ship will become the property of the navy of Pakistan, re-christened for its second career as the Alamgir.
Back in the day, McInerney and its siblings were envisioned as lower-cost, compromise warships, designed to trawl for Soviet submarines in the North Atlantic as they escorted the convoys resupplying NATO armies fighting World War III in Europe. That war never happened, and the frigates never performed that mission. But the crews of McInerney and the other figs perfected a million other small-ball, National League-style fundamentals: Saving lives at sea; showing the flag; disrupting smugglers; and who knows how many other such assignments.
There’s no better example of a ship showing its range than the McInerney, which capped its decades in the fleet by training midshipmen; capturing a semi-submersible drug sub; and running the Navy’s first test of its Fire Scout unmanned helicopter. And after all that, the ship will go to its new owners in good shape, skipper Cmdr. Paul Young told Navy Times in May.
“It really boils down to the sailors — they took this ship through the deployment, and it was a very successful deployment, and they have really crafted the product that we’re going to turn over,” he said. “Plus, the material condition of a ship doesn’t happen overnight, so we’ve had a lot of great crews that came before us over the years.”
Problems are just opportunities in which to excel
August 30th, 2010 | Military Sealift Command | Posted by Phil Ewing
The dry cargo and ammunition ship Alan Shepard was one of five ships to suffer generator casualties in August, all of which got right back to work. // ABF3 Justin Sickler / Navy
You have to hand it to Rear Adm. Mark Buzby: Where another commander might have waited months to concede his fleet was dealing with apparently endemic equipment failures, Buzby came right out and announced it — and then used that announcement to brag about his team. Ships across Buzby’s Military Sealift Command have been having generator problems, he wrote in the September issue of MSC’s official magazine, Sealift, but that just gave the engineers the chance to shine:
August has been an amazing month for generator casualties — just ask the engineers on Mount Whitney, Joshua Humphreys, Big Horn, Cape Jacob and Alan Shepard. So what’s to be happy about? It’s the way those engineers — supported by the port engineers and [Military Sealift Fleet Support Command] staff ashore — quickly rallied the repair effort and got the ships back on mission with nary a missed beat. It was really impressive to see how quickly and professionally you tackled those mission-impacting casualties, and in the case of Mount Whitney, two at once! The rest of the Navy is quite jealous of your level of self-sufficiency and well, they should be.
Other observers might take a different interpretation about a rash of generator casualties aboard five ships in a single month — but c’mon! Look on the bright side!
LCS 2 returns
August 30th, 2010 | Photos Ships | Posted by Phil Ewing
Bill Pointer / Navy
After a summer in the yard, the littoral combat ship Independence is back in the water and going places — it took on 64,243 gallons of marine diesel last week from a Fleet and Industrial Supply Center Norfolk fuel barge. Apart from that scaffolding, the Independence looks pretty much the way it did earlier this year on its Florida sojourn, suggesting that most of its changes and upgrades were internal.
Can it now use the enormous overhead crane in its cavernous mission bay? Can it open its huge stern doors? Do its formerly spartan living spaces now have those touches of home — a plaque from the city of Independence, Mo.; some silver from the carrier Independence; a DVD of the documentary “Independence Day” — that make life on a warship so much more pleasant?
We’ll find out and let you know.
Report: Submarines continue to exist
August 30th, 2010 | Royal Navy Submarines | Posted by Phil Ewing
Cmdr. Mark Behning, then of the ballistic missile sub Maryland, explained the principles of submarine operations. Rule 1: No water in the people tube. // Cpl. Anthony Ortiz // Marine Corps
So have you heard about how all these different countries out there have ships that can actually go under the water, not just drive, y’know, on top of it? “Submarines,” they’re called, and, apparently, the hot new thing right now is for one navy’s submarines to try to find and follow another navy’s subs. Crazy, right?
Batten down the hatches
August 27th, 2010 | Carriers Life at Sea | Posted by Phil Ewing
Somewhere in that ocean is the carrier Enterprise, trying to get away from the white swirly part. // Navy
An aircraft carrier like the Enterprise may seem big from up close, but when you zoom out a little, it’s just a tiny dot on the face of the ocean. So when you’re aboard that dot and there’s a storm with winds at 145 miles per hour bearing down on you, you better take precautions:
According to Enterprise’s Meteorology and Oceanography Center, the aircraft carrier should not get directly hit by the storm, but the crew will likely feel the effects due to the ship’s proximity. As the ship moves away from the hurricane, the crew is implementing safeguards to protect personnel and vital equipment from damage. While aircraft carriers do not rock as much as smaller ships, heavy sea states can cause damage. “We should start seeing the effects from Danielle this weekend,” said Lt. Cmdr. Patrick J. Havel, Enterprise’s METOC officer. “We can expect 20-knot winds from the north and 10-foot swells.”
Sailors aboard Enterprise are tying down all loose objects on board to ensure they don’t damage personnel or equipment in the event of heavy rolls. The Navy trains to make stowing for sea, as this process is called, second nature to sailors … “Depending upon how rough the seas are, the damage costs could run into thousands of dollars, and we run the risk of serious injury,” said Hospital Corpsman 1st Class David B. Hall.
Sounds pretty wise, but one commenter on the Navy story wasn’t convinced: “We would consider 20 knot winds and a 10 foot swell a fine day for sail in a 40-ft sailboat. Why is a 90,000 ton, 1,000 foot behemoth in a swivet?”
Probably because it’s got eight nuclear reactors and a wing of strike aircraft and it’s full of bombs and missiles and jet fuel. And nobody likes getting seasick!
Righting the ship
August 27th, 2010 | merchant ships | Posted by Phil Ewing
What does the incoming superintendent need to do to salvage the Merchant Marine Academy, here represented metaphorically? // Rafiq Maqbool / AP
After months of waiting, the Merchant Marine Academy got a new superintendent this week — Rear Adm. Philip Greene, formerly of the Navy’s “irregular warfare” office. He’s a Kings Point alumnus and a licensed master (oceans, any gross tonnage). By all appearances, he’s got his work cut out for him.
The campus of the Merchant Marine Academy is in bad shape these days, according to its capital report (pdf) from last March subtitled “red sky at morning” — which, as we all know, indicates that sailors should take warning. Moreover, unlike the other service academies, Kings Point competes with some six other state merchant marine schools, all of which feed officers into the world of commercial seagoing. In March, when the capital report was unveiled, shipbuilding expert Tim Colton wrote this:
I think the problem is more serious than the condition of the facilities themselves. I think it’s with the academy’s whole reason for existence. What is Kings Point for? Remember that it was an emergency creation in World War II. In addition, we also have six state maritime academies, all fine institutions and all receiving taxpayer support. So, how many merchant marine officers do we need to train every year? … Do we really need seven separate establishments training merchant marine officers — and that doesn’t include the maritime unions’ training schools — or is there some room here for rationalization?
So Greene is taking over an institution that is falling apart and in an identity crisis. We had some great discussion about this when the topic came up at Sea-Air-Space, so it’s worth bringing up again: What’s to be done?
Help the Navy be more efficient!
August 26th, 2010 | leadership Washington | Posted by Phil Ewing
Would it be more efficient if the fleet only had one kind of cheesecake topping? // MC2 Michael Russell / Navy
Listen up, shipmates! Defense Secretary Robert Gates needs YOU to come up with suggestions for how to make this party we call the Defense Department run more efficiently. We need to show all those graybeards over on Capitol Hill there’s no reason for any debilitating budget cuts! But there’s money in it for you — you could win up to a thousand bucks from Uncle Sam!
To get you started, here are a few suggestions from your pals here at Scoop Deck:
- Try to keep costs below $500 per toilet seat, and, if possible, below $400.
- Impose a 65 mile per hour speed limit on fighter jets and helicopters, to help save fuel. And do these carriers need so many arresting wires?
- Instead of firing $1 million Block IV Tactical Tomahawk missiles at terrorist hideouts, send a team of Seabee carpenters to just disassemble them by hand.
- Round up and pulp all copies of the old Blue Ribbon Panel Soup-To-Nuts Review and use them to print a new report on the Blue Ribbon Panel Soup-To-Nuts Review Pulping Initiative.
- Impose a “musical homeports” program, in which aircraft carriers move to randomly assigned coastal cities every 18 months.
- Limit the number of coffee mugs that submariners are permitted to bounce into the water.
Don’t worry! As civilians in the private sector, we’re not eligible for that thousand bucks! Feel free to submit these ideas as your own, and be sure to share your own suggestions in the comments!
Burning down the PowerPoint palace
August 26th, 2010 | leadership Life at Sea | Posted by Phil Ewing
As it is not possible to have an interesting image of a PowerPoint presentation, here instead is an awesome photo of an F/A-18 Hornet. // MC2 Joseph Buliavac / Navy
Anyone who has ever prepared or viewed a PowerPoint presentation — which is to say, everyone connected in any way with the defense of the United States — needs to read Army Col. Lawrence Sellin’s devastating indictment of the military’s slide-deck culture. If you subbed in “admiral” for “general,” and “Navy” for “Army,” would this piece apply on the Blue Side?
For headquarters staff, war consists largely of the endless tinkering with PowerPoint slides to conform with the idiosyncrasies of cognitively challenged generals in order to spoon-feed them information. Even one tiny flaw in a slide can halt a general’s thought processes as abruptly as a computer system’s blue screen of death. The ability to brief well is, therefore, a critical skill. It is important to note that skill in briefing resides in how you say it. It doesn’t matter so much what you say or even if you are speaking Klingon.
Random motion, ad hoc processes and an in-depth knowledge of Army minutia and acronyms are also key characteristics of a successful staff officer. Harried movement together with furrowed brows and appropriate expressions of concern a la Clint Eastwood will please the generals. Progress in the war is optional.
Each day is guided by the “battle rhythm,” which is a series of PowerPoint briefings and meetings with PowerPoint presentations. It doesn’t matter how inane or useless the briefing or meeting might be. Once it is part of the battle rhythm, it has the persistence of carbon 14.
Ffzzzzzzzzzzzzzsehhheeooooooowww…. KA-BLAMM!
What do you think?
H/T: Danger Room
MSC trades up
August 26th, 2010 | Military Sealift Command | Posted by Phil Ewing
Military Sealift Command
Military Sealift Command’s oceanographic survey ships might not be as flashy as your high-speed, high-glamor T-AOEs, and they don’t carry the same air of romance and danger as the cable-repair ship Zeus, but they nonetheless do a vital job: Charting the ocean floor to make sure American and allied ships have the best picture of the maritime domain.
MSC announced Thursday that it has deactivated its oldest survey ship, the John McDonnell, “as part of the effort to streamline survey operations,” according to a statement. “Unlike the Pathfinder class, which is capable of conducting both deep- and shallow-water scans, McDonnell was only equipped with the sensors to conduct shallow-water surveys.”
John McDonnell’s departure will make room for a brand new ship, T-AGS 66, scheduled to begin construction in October. It’ll be the Cadillac of oceanographic survey vessels, and include a new, custom moon pool with which to launch and recover research gear. As for the McDonnell, MSC plans to harvest its 34-foot oceanographic survey launches and field them aboard the remaining six ships in the class.