What price tunes?
September 30th, 2010 | Morale Washington | Posted by Phil Ewing
MU2 Nicholas Jones drummed along with Pride, Navy Band Southeast's rock and/or roll operations unit, back in 2006. // JO2 Christine Hannon / Navy
Here’s a story that came on in legions of Priuses and Volvos yesterday as they inched through traffic back to tastefully decorated, environmentally conscious homes, and it bears revisiting: National Public Radio’s Robert Siegel pitted a grand old grouch of Washington, WaPo institution Walter Pincus, against Marine Col. Michael Colburn, director of the Marine Corps’ “President’s Own” band. The topic: In this era of belt-tightenry, should taxpayers keep spending hundreds of millions of dollars on the military’s hundreds of bands and thousands of musicians?
The Defense Department, Pincus said, is the biggest employer of musicians in the U.S. It has more of them than the State Department has foreign service officers. Many of them have one or more advanced degrees, paid for by Joe and Jane Taxpayer. Does the Navy need all its marching bands, jazz bands, dance bands, “Top 40″ bands, choirs, country and bluegrass bands?
Oh, c’mon, Colburn said. He argued Americans get at least their money’s worth from the President’s Own — and, by implication, from the dozens of other bands — and that they’re critical for recruiting and showing the flag. Moreover, Pincus has clearly never been strolling up the boardwalk on a mid-summer’s night in Virginia Beach and stopped for a Dilly Bar at that giant Dairy Queen and happened to catch a Navy band in the band shell playing swing selections and seen the vacationers from northern New Jersey attempting to dance along.
NPR’s segment won’t settle the issue. And incredibly, the piece also neglected to mention today’s most famous ex-military musician, former Musician 3rd Class Phil Stacey, whose star-making turn on “American Idol” rocketed him to his current heights atop the pop charts.
So what do you think?
The warbird flexes its claws
September 29th, 2010 | Ships | Posted by Phil Ewing
LCS 2 gun: "Blam!" // Navy
If you want the straight dope these days on what’s going on with the Navy’s newest and most unusual ship, you need to bring up its Facebook page. The littoral combat ship Independence has done its first refueling at sea, fired its main gun for the first time, and who knows what else, and the crew has been keeping its fans in the loop all the while.
As neat as it is to see all the original images of the ship’s underway milestones, the photos raise questions as well as answering them. Earlier this year, the Independence rocked and rolled like Keith Richards, even in calm seas — has the crew figured out how to drive or trim the ship for a smoother ride? How did it handle in such close proximity with the oiler Kanawha during its debut RAS? (We do know LCS 2′s crew left its mark on Kanawha’s fuel probe.)
The Independence’s gun is more of a known quantity; it’s the same 57mm weapon as on the first LCS, Freedom, and the Coast Guard’s national security cutters. What’s interesting is that crew members seem to have borrowed some submarine force-style safety harnesses for when they’re working near it underway. Makes sense. Also neat: There’s a video of them shooting the gun.
Bedbugs? Gross!
September 29th, 2010 | Life at Sea Morale | Posted by Phil Ewing
It'd be nice if GM3 Andrey Murry's M203 grenade round, launched during a live-fire exercise on the amphibious assault ship Iwo Jima, killed a whole bunch of bedbugs. // MC2 Zane Ecklund / Navy
This whole bedbug thing… blargh… it’s disgusting. Everywhere you turn these days, it’s bedbugs this, bedbugs that, bedbugs here, bedbugs there — I thought I’d find refuge this morning here in the Cubicle of Excellence, but what did I discover instead? A bedbug awareness and mitigation campaign announced this week by Navy Region Southeast, launched “to ensure a large knowledge base about a little pest that has become more prevalent throughout the United States:”
The small, brown, nocturnal insects survive on the blood of their hosts, which are usually sleeping humans. “Bed” bug is something of a misnomer as they can live just about anywhere, including clothing, carpets, cracks, and crevices. While they are not known to carry diseases like mosquitoes or ticks, they can be difficult to eliminate and can make life miserable for anyone who experiences an infestation. These unpleasant characteristics have made the bed bug an object of fear for many, including military members and their families …
Sailors and their families can take a number of steps to keep bed bugs out of their homes. Travelers can treat luggage with a commercially available, EPA-labeled pesticide developed specifically for these insects. Check hotel rooms for bed bugs and inform the management if any are detected. Keep luggage and personal items off of the floor and hang clothing that is not being worn. When returning home, avoid bringing bed bugs into the home by checking belongings for bugs or eggs, which are both readily visible. Wash affected clothing in hot water followed by drying in a hot dryer, which will kill bed bugs in all states of development. Vacuum bed bugs from box springs and mattresses with a high energy particulate air (HEPA) filtered vacuum. Seal any openings where they have access to the home. Enclose mattresses and box springs in commercially available plastic covers, which will prevent bed bugs from entering and entomb any bugs that are already present.
Yeah, entombing them, I like the sound of that — or, preferably, incinerating them all with a flamethrower. I know it’s an important public health matter, especially for sailors living in close quarters at sea, for example, but still… yechhh.
Can the Navy close the flying boat gap?
September 28th, 2010 | Foreign navies Ships The Middle East | Posted by Phil Ewing
One of Iran's new squadrons of Bavar 2 flying boats prepared to sortie in an official photo. // Iran Defense Ministry via AP
Zounds! That dastardly Chief Commander of Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps, Mohammad Ali Jafari — he’s done it again! First he built a navy with 100 vessels for every one U.S. warship, then he built an indefatigable 60-knot attack craft and now, worst of all, he’s fielding entire squadrons of flying boats! That’s right: If American aircraft try to chase them, they can set down on the water and become boats — but if an American ship tries to chase them, they can take off and become aircraft! Gee willikers! These guys are always one step ahead!
Oh, and it gets worse for the helpless U.S. Navy: In this promotional video, the IRGC describes its new flying boats as capable of hitting “100 knots per hour” and of being “undetectable by any naval or aerial radar.” (A ‘knot’ already means a nautical mile per hour, but skip that for now.) So how many flying boats does the U.S. Navy have to go up against this new threat? A big goose egg, that’s how many. But America’s radio-controlled “hydrofoam” hobbyists may have the solution. When Naval Sea Systems Command gets an urgent needs statement about this capability — and it will — it should start by checking this baby out.
The machine gun-armed Bavar 2 kamikaze flying boats apparently were not designed for survivability: They have open cockpits and exposed motors for their three-bladed pusher propellers — but they could, in theory, become the air component in the swarm attacks we’ve so often discussed. The IRGC seems to be betting that it can sortie more boats — flying and traditional — against a hostile warship than that warship has missiles and ammunition.
Could it work? What do you think?
One of Iran's new Bavar 2 flying boats in action. Doesn't it look exactly like one of these radio-controlled hydrofoam toys? // Iran Defense Ministry via AP
LCS joins the sonar club
September 28th, 2010 | Science and technology Ships | Posted by Phil Ewing
The littoral combat ship Independence, or its descendants, might stream variable-depth sonars from their stern doors if the Navy decides to field them on the LCS of tomorrow. // MC2 Justan Williams / Navy
As you no doubt remember from your March 15 edition of Navy Times, the Navy has been on the hunt for a variable depth sonar to field aboard the littoral combat ship. As you’re about to learn when you click here, now it has found one. Just one, for now, according to Defense News; Euro-defense giant Thales says it has sold a single Captas 4 sonar to the U.S. Navy for testing aboard LCS, as part of the ongoing, Cirque du Soleil -style reimagining of how the ships will work.
At first, LCS wasn’t supposed to have an onboard sonar, or many other sensors of its own — the idea was that unmanned boats, submarines and aircraft would carry them away from the ship to do their work. But a whole bunch of stuff happened and, bottom line, the Navy has had to effectively go back to the drawing board on a lot of this. So one new idea was for LCS to use a sonar of its own in concert with its unmanned sensors, and even to keep a towed array streamed out as it sprinted ahead of a carrier strike group, slowing occasionally to listen for undersea bad guys. Then again, that concept may have changed within the Navy, especially after Adm. John Harvey told Congress he doesn’t want LCS to run with strike groups.
Then again… again… a Thales executive told Defense News it might sell as many as 25 of these sonars to the U.S. Navy, presumably all for use with LCS, so somebody in the Navy still may like the sprint-and-drift ASW scheme. Or, at least, somebody in the Navy was thinking of the very, very busy LCS crews by ordering a sonar that’s supposed to be able to launch and recover itself automatically.
Underway (so to speak) on wave power
September 28th, 2010 | Environment The greenside | Posted by Phil Ewing
A portion of the electricity that powers gear such as AEC Perry Long's P-3 Orion simulator at Marine Corps Base Hawaii now comes from the power of the ocean. // Navy
So maybe this doesn’t carry the same kind of epochal importance as the Nautilus’ famous message, but Navy officials are proud nonetheless: Engineers have hooked up a wave-power buoy to the electrical grid at Marine Corps Base Hawaii, meaning that a portion of the juice now running the barbershop clippers and soft drink machines out there comes from the natural energy of the Pacific Ocean.
“This project demonstrates the Navy and Marine Corps’ commitment to lead the country toward a new energy future. Of the five energy targets I issued in 2009, the most important is that by 2020, half of all the energy we use — ashore and afloat, in the air, on the sea, under the sea and on land – will come from alternative sources,” Navy Secretary Ray Mabus said in the official announcement.
The Blue-Green Team still has a ways to go, and even though the power buoy bobbing out in Kaneohe Bay is now online, it feeds only about 3 to 4 kilowatts into the grid — a fraction of what you need for a base that houses almost 12,000 people. The goal is for the base to be self-sufficient by 2015, says its commander, Col. Robert Rice, which means it’ll likely need more wave, wind or other local alternative sources of energy. Wonder how much electricity you could capture from surfing and hula dancing…
ASW has never been so adorable
September 28th, 2010 | Foreign navies Video | Posted by Phil Ewing
“We kill people, but we have to be nice about it” — so goes a U.S. military saying I’ve heard from Norfolk, Va. to Kabul. But our American troops are amateurs compared to the Japanese Maritime Self Defense Force, which has topped even its own impish cartoon mascot, Prince Pickles, with the heartwarming family day demo you’ll see above.
UPDATE: Check out the left side of your screen starting at about 1:50 — you can just catch sight of a little Aegis DDG moped, complete with SPY 1 arrays and a 5 inch gun!
UPDATE 2: This video gives a better view of the my-size DDG underway, as it were.
All the president’s suds: Faram’s bath in the Iowa’s tub
September 27th, 2010 | Historical | Posted by Phil Ewing
The battleship Iowa's bathtub, rigged for cleanliness operations, in 1984. Two years earlier, when Navy Times' Mark Faram took his bath in it, it wasn't this nice. // PH1 Jeff Hilton / Navy
We got to talking about the battleship Iowa this morning in our weekly staff meeting here at the Center of Excellence, and I mentioned that, among the ship’s other historic qualities, it’s the only U.S. warship in history with its own bathtub — installed to accommodate President Franklin D. Roosevelt when he rode the ship to conferences in Cairo and Tehran in 1943.
“Hey,” came the voice of senior writer Mark D. Faram over the speaker phone from his headquarters in Florida. “I’ve taken a bath in that bathtub.”
Kaplan: America doomed
September 27th, 2010 | China | Posted by Phil Ewing
The Chinese destroyer Quingdao, and the endless flow of other, newer warships, will help China dominate the world, another analyst writes. // Navy
If big-dog world-affairs analyst Robert Kaplan is saying it, it means this thing is for real: Game over. That’s it. We had a good 234 years, but let’s face it, we Americans just can’t keep going anymore — not when China’s unstoppable economy and its burgeoning seapower mean that its influence is spreading across this world like a full glass of pinot noir dropped on a new white carpet.
Kaplan, in a Sunday column in the Washington Post, wrote that China’s growing navy will give it new tentacles with which to envelop the islands of the Pacific, and new power to keep pesky American warships at bay. China’s growing nonmilitary influence, including its international shipping and trade, will cement its new status as king of Earth. There’s nothing we can do, Kaplan seems to be saying: Our never-ending war in Afghanistan, along with the evil news media’s decision to ignore the rise of Chinese power, mean it’s all over but the shoutin’:
America’s preoccupation with the Middle East suits China perfectly. We are paying in blood and treasure to stabilize Afghanistan while China is building transport and pipeline networks throughout Central Asia that will ultimately reach Kabul and the trillion dollars’ worth of minerals lying underground. Whereas Americans ask how can we escape Afghanistan, the Chinese, who are already prospecting for copper there, ask: How can we stay? Our military mission in Afghanistan diverts us from properly reacting to the Chinese naval challenge in East Asia.
The United States should not consider China an enemy. But neither is it in our interest to be distracted while a Chinese economic empire takes shape across Eurasia. This budding empire is being built on our backs: the protection of the sea lines of communication by the U.S. Navy and the pacification of Afghanistan by U.S. ground troops. It is through such asymmetry — we pay far more to maintain what we have than it costs the Chinese to replace us — that great powers rise and fall. That is why the degree to which the United States can shift its focus from the Middle East to East Asia will say much about our future prospects as a great power.
That’s assuming we have any future prospects… if we want any, Bryan McGrath writes, we’d better act now.
Television with stopping power
September 24th, 2010 | Books ordnance | Posted by Phil Ewing
Chief Gunner's Mate Anthony Chatman punished the Pacific Ocean from the fantail of the carrier Nimitz during a live-fire exercise. // MC3 John Wagner / Navy
Our senior Marine Corps Times colleague Gina Cavallaro, author of the hot new book “Sniper: American Single-Shot Warriors in Iraq and Afghanistan,” scored a highly coveted guest spot on Washington’s top weekly defense news TV show, “This Week in Defense News.” You’ll be able to see her Sunday morning at 11 a.m. here in the National Capital Region, Monday everywhere on Armed Forces Network, and online soon here.