You’ve come a long way, female service members
October 7th, 2010 | leadership Washington | Posted by Phil Ewing
CNN's Kyra Phillips hosted top military commanders this week at a women's power forum in Washington. // Lt. Laura Stegherr / Navy
Adm. Mike Mullen, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff; Gen. Ann Dunwoody, commanding general of Army Materiel Command; and National Defense University president Vice Adm. Ann Rondeau all appeared with CNN anchor Kyra Phillips this week in Washington to talk about the advances that women have made in the military services. For example, Dunwoody proved that men no longer hold a monopoly on the ability to speak in jargon, buzzwords and Pentagon techno-phrases:
“We are in an asymmetrical environment without front and rear boundaries,” Dunwoody said of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. “Every soldier is in danger. What’s so good about the military is that we continue review those [policies]. The doors continue to open, and policies continue to change to capture the talent of men and women in uniform. All in battle are making sacrifices, and we can never forget that.”
Dunwoody’s answer clearly shows that she has reviewed today’s DoD lexicon from soup to nuts, gotten input from key stakeholders, and moved forward to make a commitment to leverage her resources to achieve broad-spectrum mastery of the full range of idea-delivery tactics, techniques and procedures, in keeping with today’s best practices. And she proves you don’t need to be a man for that.
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?
There’s nothing else she can say
September 21st, 2010 | Congress Washington | Posted by Phil Ewing
Citizen Gaga: The pop songstress rallied this week in Maine in support of repealing "don't ask, don't tell," but her efforts may not be enough. // AP
No question that being an international art-pop phenom brings in a lot of money, but apparently not enough for Lady Gaga to order her own destroyer from Bath Iron Works. Despite Gaga’s rally in Portland this week, Maine Sen. Susan Collins says she’s leaning against permitting a repeal of the ban on open military service by gays and lesbians to move forward in the Senate. But if Bath won’t be building a neon Popsicle-orange USS Gaga (complete with disco-ball radars, a zebra-stripe mast and a topside dance floor in place of a flight deck) neither will the U.S. Navy, Collins seems to be saying.
Collins says she supports repeal of the law known as “don’t ask, don’t tell,” but she wants more time for debate and “more amendments” for the Christmas tree defense bill that congressional Democrats are using as their vehicle for this thing. Unless congressional leaders or the White House can make Collins or other Republican moderates happy by this afternoon, a block backed by Republican Sen. John McCain will likely remain in force and this round of “Repeal or No Repeal” will be over for now.
That might not last for long. According to reports this week, a majority of Americans now favor permitting open service, and according to anecdotal evidence from today’s young-people service members, having gay and lesbian shipmates is effectively a non-issue.
UPDATE: Just as it appeared, Democrats could not come up with enough votes to end McCain’s filibuster, proof that even Lady Gaga’s clout in Washington has its limits.
What do you think? Is the Navy ready for a repeal of ‘don’t ask, don’t tell?’
Life support
September 20th, 2010 | Military Sealift Command Washington | Posted by Phil Ewing
The amphibious transport dock San Antonio, here seen under construction in Avondale, La., has had a tough time in its early career. // Navy
The amphibious transport dock San Antonio sits idle in Norfolk, Va. because of problems that began years ago in the builder’s yard at Avondale, La. Its sibling, New Orleans, was delivered incomplete and ruled “degraded” by the Board of Inspection and Survey; members of its crew told Navy Times horror stories about weekends and holidays spent on the ship trying to get it ready for sea. Every welder, inspector and Navy inspector at Avondale, and its cousin in Pascagoula, Miss., had to be de-certified and then re-qualify last year to work on warships. And so on.
Ah, but that’s ancient history. On Friday, the Navy unveiled a plan to keep Avondale in business for at least the next several years — it will require the yard to finish work on both of the latest San Antonio-class gators under construction there, and move up construction of its new T-AO(X) class of oilers, with the idea that Avondale will bid for the work. The tricky thing is that General Dynamics’ NASSCO yard out in sunny San Diego also was counting on T-AO(X) to fill out its order books down the years, so the Navy’s political favor for Louisiana probably feels more like a knife in the back to Cali.
Then again, NASSCO has been cranking out T-AKE dry cargo and ammunition ships as reliably as the sunrise, and so if, as has been discussed, it turns out that T-AO(X) is just basically a T-AKE with only oiler stuff inside, NASSCO seems like it would have an edge. Shipbuilding expert Tim Colton said as much: “This is, of course, really good news for NASSCO, which is so much more efficient than Avondale that it can be expected to win by a comfortable margin,” he wrote.
That’s assuming Pentagon officials will keep all their promises about efficiency and fiscal discipline. What could also happen is that, from a program of, say, 14 T-AO(X)es — assuming the fleet wants to replace each T-AO in service today — a few will go to Avondale and a few will go to NASSCO, and as long as the local members of congress are happy, who cares about cost and performance, right? It’s all funny money anyway.
The new normal seems awfully familiar
September 15th, 2010 | Congress Washington | Posted by Phil Ewing
Chaff, flares, fancy flying -- can they keep the Navy safe from congressional cuts? // OS3 Kevin Murray / Navy
Defense Secretary Robert Gates has been running at a full sprint, metaphorically speaking, to try to keep ahead of the 535-headed monster known as America’s legislative branch. He has been tossing scraps of meat over his shoulder to try to slow it down: command closures, efficiency efforts and tough talk about the profligate spending in his five-sided office building. But the scraps apparently aren’t enough — a Senate subcommittee voted this week to cut $8 billion from this year’s defense budget, including a whole littoral combat ship, and more snips could be on the horizon.
But y’know what else happened this week? House Reps. Todd Akin, a Missouri Republican, and Gene Taylor, a Mississippi Democrat, announced that they’ve rescued the Navy’s planned multi-year deal on F/A-18 E and F Super Hornets (and E/A-18G Growlers/Grizzlies), which locks the service into a single mega-deal that obliges it to buy every last fighter in its current program. What’s more, Akin and other lawmakers want the Navy to pursue additional multi-year deals and buy still more Super Hornets.
That’s odd … so, even as some members of Congress are pressing for cuts to certain parts of the defense budget, others are advocating the Pentagon spend more! And even as the Pentagon itself tries to get control of its budget, there are lots of forces at work to slow or stop that, too, as described here by big-dog defense analyst Loren Thompson. So even as the reports continue to roll in about tomorrow’s austerity, or a ‘new era’ in the defense game, things seem pretty normal.
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!
The day the Fire Scout went rogue
August 25th, 2010 | Aviation Washington | Posted by Phil Ewing
"Y'know what? No, I am not going to zoom in on the fantail of that unidentified fishing vessel. I want to go see the Washington Monument!" // Navy
It must get really tiresome being a Fire Scout unmanned helicopter. Your human operators are always making you take off, fly your stupid old waypoints, look at boring objects through your Forward-Looking Infrared sensors, and then go back to base (or the ship). Sometimes you want to just… break free, y’know? Well, after more than 1,000 hours in the air for the Navy’s various test models, one Fire Scout finally did:
Navy operators lost control of an unmanned aircraft earlier this month and were unable to regain control before the aircraft entered restricted airspace around the U.S. capital. According to a Navy statement, the incident took place Aug. 2 when, about 75 minutes into a routine test flight, an MQ-8B Fire Scout unmanned helicopter operating out of the Patuxent River test facilities in southern Maryland lost its control link with ground operators. The aircraft then flew about 23 miles on a north-by-northwest course and entered the National Capital Region restricted airspace, part of the Air Defense Identification Zone surrounding Washington, D.C.
Yes! If you had the chance for an exclusive aerial tour of landmark-rich Washington, D.C., wouldn’t you take it? No harm done — Navy controllers reacquired the mischievous bird and, as our senior colleague Christopher P. Cavas wrote, “commanded” it to land, which it did, with no damage, injuries or problems. The Navy blamed a software glitch.
Yeah, right — a software glitch called “ennui.”
The LCS name strategy at work
August 25th, 2010 | leadership Ships Washington | Posted by Phil Ewing
The littoral combat ship Fort Worth under construction in Wisconsin. The city fathers of its namesake met the ship's COs this week. // Lockheed Martin
On Monday we posited that the latest delay in the littoral combat ship program could have some upsides for the Navy, one of which was freeing up time in which to think of some awesome names for the next batch of 15 ships. We got some great suggestions — sarcastic and otherwise — but today brings fresh evidence of just what the brass had in mind with its “medium cities” strategy: Showing the flag.
The Fort Worth Star-Telegram has a story about the commanding officers of LCS 3, Fort Worth, paying a visit to introduce themselves and their ship to their namesake city. Absolutely nothing new about making these kinds of ship-city connections — the crew of the fast attack sub Toledo even got hot dogs out of it — but with a planned class of 55, the Navy seems to hope it can make inroads in many places that aren’t accustomed to their names gracing a warship.
The question is, what governs which name goes where? Arlington, LPD 24, could easily have been an LCS under this scheme, and Coronado, LCS 4, already was the name of an amphibious command ship. Many names that might’ve been good LCS candidates (Boise, Asheville, Scranton) are already taken by Los Angeles-class submarines — which used an identical “if we name ‘em for cities people will like that” strategy. Are there 53 more “medium-sized” cities in the United States worth mining, if many of today’s ships are going to stay around for awhile? What are they?
Or should the Navy change course again and try a different tack? It breaks naming conventions all the time these days, anyway — what about a class named for rivers? USS Ohio? USS Missouri? Oh, wait…
Behind the cyber veil
August 17th, 2010 | Science and technology Washington | Posted by Phil Ewing
Cyber sailors at Navy Cyber Defense Operations Command in Virginia Beach, Va., do their secret squirrel stuff. // MC2 Joshua Wahl / Navy
Even though many details about nuclear weapons are secret, you don’t need a physics degree to understand them: Somewhere under water, somebody aboard the ballistic missile submarine Maryland pulls a trigger, a big thing shoots out and flies someplace, and whatever that place was, it ain’t no more.
“Cyber warfare” isn’t like that: It’s both secret and complicated. No one but its practitioners really knows anything about it, and of course, they’re not talking to the likes of you. But even though those very qualities are what make the military and national security worlds love their incipient cyber roles, they could be putting the U.S. in danger, writes Naval Institute blogger YN2 H. Lucien Gauthier III:
If a nation state purposefully destroyed the Hoover Dam, it would be unequivocal that we would have to respond in kind. However, in a cyber-attack, if the [New York Stock Exchange] was taken offline we would 1) struggle to say who was guilty of the attack and 2) struggle to prove the efficacy of a kinetic/real world response to the attack — does utter economic devastation demand a nuclear response? Is a way of life shattered the same no matter if the cause is nuclear or electronic? … To both effectively protect our infrastructure and project force in this domain we have to have a clear ethical and philosophical foundation from which to act … We are held to the orders of the National Command Authority and the laws of the United States, [so] it is from there we must understand how to proceed. Yet, all I hear is static on the line from the NCA and our jurisprudence.
Hard to get answers to questions when nobody’s allowed to talk about the subject at hand. Moreover, does it seem unsettling that both the Navy and Air Force have approved designs for their relevant cyber-warfare pins, but there’s still “static” about the major philosophical questions of cyber-combat? If, in fact, you find that unsettling, do not read this story about the Pentagon’s to-do list in getting this whole cyber-shootin’ match started.
NYT: Cut the Navy and Air Force
August 16th, 2010 | Washington | Posted by Phil Ewing
These pointy silver airplanes and that big ship with the flat part, or whatever? Cut 'em all, says The New York Times. // MC3 Charles Oki / Navy
The New York Times ran an editorial on Sunday praising Defense Secretary Robert Gates’ attempt at a new round of cuts, and recommending two more places to snip: The Blue Side and the Light Blue Side.
Mr. Gates, a savvy Washington insider, is trying to pre-empt even deeper cuts. He still wants to ensure an annual spending increase 1 percent over inflation for the foreseeable future. That is still too much. He needs to jettison more poorly performing, redundant or anachronistic weapons systems, including nuclear weapons. Once the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan wind down, the administration must look at trimming troop strength, beginning with the Navy and the Air Force.
It’s not the first time the Great Gray Lady has aimed its righteous laser beam at the sea service, but to its credit, the paper was much more careful than it has been in past. The Times’ last editorial calling for deep Navy cuts was riddled with errors and promptly dismissed by knowledgeable observers. One such observer has dismissed The Times yet again — Information Dissemination’s self-described “Conservative Wahoo,” Bryan McGrath, responded thus:
So let me get this straight — we plus-ed up land forces over 100,000 people to deal with Iraq and Afghanistan more effectively, yet when those wars wind down, cuts should begin with the two services that have shrunk in the past ten years? This, even as a chorus of defense experts is taking up the tune of Chinese influence in Asia, and the role of sea and air power in mitigating it? The Times continues to be the nation’s leader in pretentious wedding announcements and stories of the woes of the Hamptons real estate market. National security insight is simply not a forte.
What do you think?