Naval Gazing

Good discussion here about what the USS Theodore Roosevelt fiasco shows us about the internal mess that is a now an integral part of "the world's most powerful armed force":

"The response to Crozier’s memo, after it was public, was incoherent. Everybody was saying different things. Modly got on the news and told CNN, We’re working on it, we have a plan in place, which was true because he was in communication with Crozier and his staff at that point. That same afternoon, Modly’s boss, Secretary Defense Mark Esper, got on the evening news and said, I haven’t made any decision and I haven’t read the letter in full. They were nowhere near on the same page. It was the beginning of this massive schism that’s happening right now between civilian and military leadership."

"You see a real difference between how the admirals and the political appointees are dealing with this. The admirals are looking for how to get the sailors off and investigate what happened. But the political appointees, specifically Modly and Esper, seemed like they were completely foundering and looking for a political mitigation tactic that might save them face."

And let's not kid ourselves; it wasn't just the flunkies - this clusterfuck goes all the way up to Head of Grifting:

"Last year, the Navy was roiled by Trump’s call for clemency for Eddie Gallagher, a Navy SEAL who was convicted of keeping war trophy photographs of himself with a dead Iraqi captive. So there was already this sense, when Modly came to the job, that you need to anticipate what the White House wants and carry it out. I think that’s an understanding most administration hopefuls have reached. It could be seen as a bit of a proximate factor for what happened with Crozier."

So as far as "most powerful" goes, while I do not question the sheer weight of metal that the U.S. military has and will continue to bring in the near future, it's worth noting that the track record of military organizations that are beaten into a sort of permanent cringe...

...by being forced to suck up to the whims of their dictators...

...is not a good one.

The Plague Ship Meets The Ship of Fools

The facts seem pretty plain.

Over the last several weeks the COVID-19 showed up aboard the USS Theodore Roosevelt, CVN-71. Ships, and especially warships, are hothouses for infectious disease; cramped quarters, packed with juicy sailors, little or no opportunity for separation or sterility. Unsurprisingly, the ship's officers' were concerned for the epidemic spread of the disease.

It seems highly likely that the ship's captain requested that his higher permit the carrier to go into port and offload much or most of it's crew to prevent such spread. It's also likely, given the equally-hothouse "wartime" mindset of the current U.S. armed forces, that the higher at whatever level, refused permission.

The captain then mass-mailed a letter spamming his chain of command to, effectively, shame them into allowing him to debark his crew. I have no idea whether the captain knew his message would get out to the general public but I have to think it was at least in his mind, given that presumably he had already gone through his superior and been refused.

The resulting furor allowed the TR to port in Guam and the sailors to be debarked.

The captain was then relieved with cause.

Several days later the Acting Secretary of the Navy made a speech to the crew of the Roosevelt justifying his decision to relieve their captain.

Those are what we know of the facts.

So.

First, the SECNAV was entirely within his rights to relieve the ship's captain. Regardless of the urgency of his request, he did it in such a way as to embarrass his superiors and his service and that, any GI will tell you, is Death for a professional officer. The captain must have known this when he sent his mass e-mail and, I hope, also knew what the likely consequence would be.

Now, that said, the captain's request for evacuation was, to my mind, sound. As he pointed out, despite the ridiculous war footing We the People have allowed our nation to be set on since 2001, we are not, in fact, "at war". There is no mission that must be accomplished that requires the sacrifice of the welfare of the troops. There is no reason to assume that this warship could not have been docked, cleared, her crew tested and the infected quarantined, the vessel scoured clean, and then re-crewed and returned to duty. There is not need to have conducted some sort of amateur biology experiment by allowing an epidemic disease to infect the entire ship's company in pursuit of "herd immunity" or some such notion as was apparently the Navy's intent.

And then there's this.

It's kind of difficult to way what's the slimiest about this little screed that the Acting SECNAV pumped over the ship's intercom system to the crew of the TR. Is it the SECNAV whining about all the hate he's gotten for relieving their captain? Is it the ridiculous boilerplate about how the evil Chinks were tricksy and deceptive but the Navy is always truthful and you can trust us, really, I swear, truly, I-shit-you-not, to care about you? Was it where he called the O-6 "stupid" and "naive"? Or where he claims that he gave his personal word that no sailor would have to die unnecessarily? Or the part where he brings Joe Biden (WTF? Seriously?) into this totally-not-political oration?

Or was it later, when he claimed that he hadn't talked to the POTUS and wasn't ordered to relieve the TR's captain but was, rather, so shit-scared of getting Trumpenrage about the bad press that he shitcanned the captain before Comrade Stalin could drop by and joke with him about how cold it was in the gulags this time of year..?

Or is it now? Now, after the dumb fucking cluck has been beaten over the head with his idiotic blabber and realizes what a goddamn ass he's made of himself:

Jesus fucking wept.

When I was in the active service us grunts would talk about our officers and which ones we'd be the first to shoot in the back if it came to wart. Because although we realized that war meant some of us would die, we also knew that some of our "leaders" were dumber than a bag of fucking hammers and were likely to, if given the opportunity, get us killed not to accomplish the mission or for the good of the country but for some damn, dumb mistake or some ridiculous fuckup they were too goddamn stupid or egotistic to recognize as such. And that getting a better replacement for a dead lieutenant or captain was easier than trying to get the thimblewit relieved.

Well.

Secretary Modly has done his work, as he sees it. And I won't pretend that he didn't have grounds for relieving the captain of the Roosevelt. Every professional soldier or sailor knows what happens when you expose your superiors to public ridicule or wrath.

He did what he felt he had to do and fell on his sword for his crew. Fine.

The real question now is...what should We the People do about a meeching little shitweasel like Acting Secretary Modly?

What should his fate be?

What does he deserve?

And what will become of us if we are not infuriated if he does not - as he will not - receive it?

Update 4/7: The slimy little bastard resigned after being a lightning rod for anger at his sliming an officer who was willing to burn his career to protect his crew and hectoring a crew who are already infested with the Plague.

I'd call it a "happy ending" except Trump will replace him with another sycophantic GOP oxygen-thief. That's what we've got, here in the Plague Year.

HIJMS Kirishima, 2019

Interesting footnote to the Second Naval Battle of Guadalcanal; a second underwater archeological investigation of the wreck of the battlecruiser Kirishima, sunk in the action I wrote up back in November 0f 2012. The wreck was discovered in 1992, but the return allowed for substantially better observation of the ship.

If you recall, this was one of the handful of surface gun actions in WW2, in which the new battleship USS Washington hammered the old battlecruiser:

"USS Washington slid through the night, a great gray steel ghost. She had tracked a large radar target but held her fire, unsure of whether the object was friendly or enemy. Finally she was within 9,000 yards, and Kirishima lit off her searchlights and fired on South Dakota. Washington's gunners immediately opened up and pasted the living shit out of the old battlecruiser; at least nine 16" shells and probably something like 40 6" projos impacted within minutes. Kirishima lit up like a balefire. Her rudder was jammed hard over to port, hundreds of her crew were dead, many more maimed or injured. Within minutes the elderly battlecruiser was transformed from a fighting ship into a wreck."

Based on the new investigation it sounds like Washington's shooting was better than we'd thought:

"I believe that it is safe to say that Kirishima was struck between 17 and 21 times by 16-inch projectiles and between 17 and 20 times by 5-inch projectiles." (Lundgren, 2019)

One of the intriguing sidenotes I found in this article was the observation that one of the major contributing factors to the destruction of the Japanese battlecruiser was it's projectile load.

The primary mission of the IJN task force that November night was to bombard and destroy Henderson Field, therefore Kirishima carried a large number of the "Type 3" bombardment projectiles. These were thinner walled than the typical armor-piercing 14" projo but, more critically, were filled with a different explosive.

Both her forward ("A" and "B") turrets were hit hard, and both barbettes - the armored column chambers where projectiles and propellants are stored - were penetrated. Here the USN projectiles would have exploded, and very likely caused sympathetic detonation of the IJN projos.

"Within Turret "A" barbette - assuming the Japanese had pre-positioned ten Type 3 projectiles per gun in advance of the battle - the barbette structure would hold twenty projectiles prior to the battle. Turret‘"A" fired three times during the battle, expending six shells and thus leaving at minimum fourteen projectiles within the barbette and hoists when it was destroyed. Using the figures above, each projectile contained over 44 lbs (20 kg) of incendiary material of which 18lbs. (8.2 kg) was magnesium. With an estimated fourteen projectiles within barbette one ("A" turret barbette) this single compartment had 252.3lbs (114.4kg) of magnesium powder available to burn within barbette." (Lundgren, 2019)

Magnesium is a whole different cat than the usual nitrocellulose explosive. It burns hot, really hot, like 3,000-degrees hot, and can't be extinguished without CO2 firefighting chemical foam.

So the implication is that 1) Washington's 16-inch guns hit and penetrated both Kirishima's forward turrets, and 2) along with wrecking the turrets and killing the guncrews, the USN hits 3) ignited the Type 3 bombardment ammunition, producing the immense flames - burning magnesium can flare as much as 15-20 feet high - that were reported by both Japanese and American sailors. Those fires would have quickly made the battlecruiser unfightable as at the same time more large-caliber hits below the waterline were sinking her.

Worth reading the whole thing.

Ruling the Waves..?

Rob Farley has a post up at the National Interest discussing the current expansion of the PRC's People's Liberation Army Navy (PLAN), comparing that to the Great Power navies of the past century.

He asks whether the PLAN can succeed in advancing the PRC's geopolitical ends compared to the Imperial German, Russian (and Soviet), Imperial Japanese, and United States navies.

It's not a bad little article, but I think it asks the wrong question.

I'd start, rather, with the question "Does (fill in the blank nation) need a blue-water navy?"

Two of the four examples Farley picks - Germany and Russia/the Soviet Union - were primarily continental powers and as such the answer seems obviously "No". As such their fleets were superfluous at best and, for Germany, disastrous at worst; dragging Wilhelmine Germany into a naval arms race with Great Britain that diverted resources that the Reich could have put to better use.

The "good cases" would seem to be the maritime empires, Japan and the U.S.; both depend on overseas trade, both are isolated by oceans, at least partially in the case of the U.S., both had, or have, imperial ambitions.

Oddly, Farley chooses to ignore two other great maritime empires.

The "success" is, obviously, the British. Britain obviously needed a blue-water navy, and, in general, did pretty well with it. Unsurprisingly that naval power disappeared with the Empire, but it had a hell of a good 400-odd-year run.

Spain, on the other hand, needed a fleet but always seemed to find its ambitions were greater than its capabilities. Someday I should really find a good Spanish naval history to understand why the Dons never managed to figure out what the British seemed to manage so effortlessly. But clearly, lacking a fleet capable of long-range power projection helped doom the Spanish colonial empire, whether from foreign enemies like the U.S. or from colonial revolt.

So.

Looking at the historical examples, and the current geopolitical needs of China, I can't really see how putting time, money, and effort into a big fleet helps them.

Anyone willing to take the counterpoint?

Let's discuss.

Bell-bottom trousers, coats of navy blue...

About the only thing that makes me laugh harder than wing-wipers all decked out in camouflage outfits is when squids do it.

I mean, those cammie suits'll make you SO hard to see on that ginormous fucking hunk of steel out in the in a fucking hole in the water, right?

What, blue cotton shirts and dungarees too much not-like-a-video-game for ya, Navy? They worked just fine when grandpap went out to sink the Imperial Japanese Navy.

I think what irks me about this nonsense is what some of the other waitstaff over at MilPub have complained about; that this isn't what services at war do, and, at least in theory the armed services are out fighting in various less-paved portions of the world even if the nation as a whole (outside of Victor Davis Hanson's prion-disease-addled brain) isn't. This also, IMO, isn't what services with a better grasp of their actual mission do; this is an artifact that ISTM that our armed services are infected with something that you see a lot if you look around the United States - that it's "better to look good than be good".

I realize that this is an extreme effect of selective observational bias, but...to me the impact of all this fussing about appearance give the impression that We the People (and We the Armed Forces) care if you are terrific at something only if it gets out there in the news, or into social media.

Oh, and the solution to the USN's cammie-pant problem?

Put all the gobs in GREEN cammie outfits.

FFS, people. You're fucking sailors!

Why not be proud to look like 'em?