Failing the Basic Test of Military Leadership

That is seeing that your guys are cared for. Kegseth has failed that, miserably.

Military families and Congress members are sounding the alarm about an intensifying mental health crisis onboard the USS Abraham Lincoln, as its 5,000 sailors and marines endure a record-breaking deployment at sea tied to the war with Iran. ... Mike Levin, a Democratic member of Congress from California, has sounded the alarm over conditions onboard the warship, which is in its fifth month of combat operations against Iran. He described the lot of the crew on X as “moldy showers, broken toilets, laundry down for weeks, long stretches with no hot water, a meal that came down to half a cup of rice and two tortillas. No soap, deodorant, or toothpaste.”

Steam is generated by the reactor plant and that steam is used to heat fresh water for "hotel use". How it can run out of hot water is beyond my understanding.

So is how the Lincoln can run out of personal care items. It's a fucking aircraft carrier, they can land cargo airplanes on it. It's beyond ridiculous that the conditions on warships in the Gulf theater are this bad.

It's a basic failure of leadership, but that's what you get when the SecDef is a former O-4 who was allegedly booted out of the Army for substance abuse and who qualified for his job by appearing on Fox News, and who has fired competent general and flag officers in favor of promoting sycophants.

There Goes Over $130 Million

All four crew members ejected safely after two Navy jets collided and crashed on Sunday during an air show at the Mountain Home Air Force Base in western Idaho, officials said.

The collision involved two U.S. Navy EA18-G Growlers from the Electronic Attack Squadron 129 in Whidbey Island, Washington, said Cmdr. Amelia Umayam, spokesperson for Naval Air Forces, U.S. Pacific Fleet.

That's about the most expensive variant of the F/A-18. Glad both crews got out. But that ended a few careers.

Trump and Hegseth: Stupid to the Core

They fired the SecNav for failing to do the impossible:

Greg Jaffe and Helene Cooper of the New York Times reported that Trump has been frustrated by Phelan’s inability to fulfill his demand for the first of his new battleships by 2028, an inability caused by the fact that the U.S. shipbuilding industry doesn’t have the capacity to do it. At a Wednesday meeting with Trump, Hegseth and Feinberg convinced the president that Phelan had to go.

The idea that the shupbuilders could deliver a large capital ship in three years or quicker is just a crack-smoking fantasy.

If you feel like taking the time online, look up how long it took to build battleships back in the day. From laying the keel to commissioning, the USS New Jersey, partially built during wartime conditions, took 31 months. The USS Tennessee, built during World War One, took four years, the USS California almost five. One of the reasons why the first years of WW2 were fought with CVEs was that it took longer to build fleet carriers.

Even then, with a far larger shipbuilding industry, we couldn't just poop out capital ships. It's not happening now. It took seven years to build the USS Nimitz fifty years ago and the Navy's trying to get the Ford-class down to eight years' construction time.

Dimbulb Donnie and Whiskey Pete seem to be operating on the mindset that if you want to plow the field faster, you need to beat the mules more. Building complex ships doesn't work that way. That's a fact that's obvious to anyone who can take even a short span of time to educate themselves about building things.

Which is neither one of those fools. The United States has the dumbest, most vapid and mercurial leader of any major power since Kaiser Wilhelm II.

Trumpist Chair-Shuffling Fuckery Continues

Secretary of the Navy John Phelan is leaving his position “effective immediately,” Pentagon spokesman Sean Parnell announced on Wednesday.

"Effective immediately" is never a good sign. Maybe he couldn't drink enough to keep up with Pretty-Boy Pete? Did they catch in in bed with a dead girl, a live boy or, even worse, a reporter?

More to come, once it leaks out from this administration, which is as watertight as a colander.

UPDATE: The acting SecNav believes that witches run California. So clearly, he's not the brightest bulb in the box.

Trump and Hegseth Fuck Up Everything; Logistics Ed.

They can't even supply our sailors and marines with decent food.

The article has photos of some of the shitty food being served up. Add to that, they're not getting mail.

Bad food and no mail will kill morale and retention faster than anything.

Slow Frigates

The Navy is looking at building frigates based on the USCG Legend class.

These ships can maybe to 28 knots. The Knox class could make 30, and nobody ever called them fast.

Anyway, NAVSEA will find some way to fuck them up. They are as bad at designing and producting decent ships as Army Ordnance is at designing rifles.

Billy Mitchell Would Like a Word

President Donald Trump has announced a bold plan for the Navy to build a new, large warship that he is calling a “battleship” as part of a larger vision to create a “Golden Fleet.”

“They’ll be the fastest, the biggest, and by far 100 times more powerful than any battleship ever built,” Trump claimed during the announcement at his Mar-a-Lago resort in Florida.
... He said Monday he will have a direct role in designing this new warship as well.

“The U.S. Navy will lead the design of these ships along with me, because I’m a very aesthetic person,” Trump said.

Donnie the Naval Architect. Right. One might wonder why the Demented Designer didn't insist that the ships include masts for backup.

Very large surface combatants have been obsolete for a century. The proliferation of drones has only increased increased that obsolescence. Ukraine, with no navy to speak of, has used drones, aerial, surface and subsurface, to operationally drive the Russian Navy out the Black Sea. That is, Gentle Reader, a harbinger of the future of surface ship operations no less telling than the sinking of the SMS Ostfriesland.

I don't disagree that American shipbuilding, other than submarines, is a shitshow. But building these Trumpy warships, which might as well be called the Very Large Target Class, is a piss-poor way to remedy that.

The Navy's Turn to Fluff Trump

The U.S. Navy is reportedly planning a lavish parade of its own after a multimillion-dollar military parade earlier this year left President Donald Trump feeling flat.
...
A new report in The Wall Street Journal has intel from the president’s administration that a do-over parade could be in the works—this time taking place at sea.

Trump told his aides that he was disappointed with the marching in the June event, according to the Journal, and was hoping the Navy could deliver a grander celebration.

The president is reportedly “hoping for a shimmering spectacle with seacraft,” the Journal noted.

"Shimmering spectacle"? Has he seen the rust buckets that pass for the surface Navy nowadays?

Wouldn't it be cheaper to use the West Wing slush fund to buy him some hookers on a regular basis?

What's a Little Book-Burning between Friends; USNA Ed.

Good ol' Pete the Drunken Racist has ordered about a thousand books be removed from the USNA library because they deal with issues of race, bigotry and history. A biography of Jackie Robinson and Dr. King's autobiography are on the list of books to be yanked so that the soon-to-be lily-white Christian Middies won't pollute their minds.

Your Sunday Morning Jet Noise

Some footage from The Bridges at Toko-Ri:

It's hard to overstate how hazardous naval aviation was back in the early jet age, even without a shooting war. The carrier decks were relatively short and were built for piston-powered airplanes. It was not uncommon for air wings to lose 20% of their pilots during a cruise.

Not that it's not hazardous anyway, as the crash of Ranger-12 showed.

Gundecking: Newport News Shipbuilding Goes Full Boeing

Shipuilder Newport News Shipbuilding, Va., informed the Department of Justice of faulty welds that may have been made intentionally on non-critical components on in-service Navy submarines and aircraft carriers, USNI News has learned.

[Huntington Ingalls Industries] reported to the Navy that welds on new construction and in-service submarines and Ford-class aircraft carriers were made not following welding procedure, according to a Tuesday memo from Assistant Secretary of the Navy for Research, Development and Acquisition Nickolas Guertin to Secretary of the Navy Carlos Del Toro and Chief of Naval Operations Adm. Lisa Franchetti.

The managers involved in this probably figured that they'd not get caught or that, since they supposedly were "non-critical", that nobody would either notice or care.

But they're wrong. If they want to produce shit and get paid for it, Russian shipyards are probably hiring.

A Perilous Time to Be in the Surface Navy

Not from submarines, mind you. Subs are expensive to buy, expensive to maintain and expensive to operate, given the cost of having well-trained crews. Badly-trained crews can be deadly for the boats. That cost is why one can probably count the navies that can run subs well on two hands and not use all your fingers.

No, I am referring to a development of the Russo-Ukrainian War: The unmanned surface vehicle (USV). Oh, they were around before as experimental stuff, but the Ukrainians rammed that technology to fruition at the sort of development speed unseen since the Second World War. Like the GIs who came up with things like Rhino tank, the Ukrainians are not being constrained by a ossified bureaucracy and their development cycle (idea->design->prototype->test->manufacture) is far quicker than that of the Russians.

The Ukrainian USVs have effectively denied much of the Black Sea to the Russian navy. The Russians can't get close enough to maintain a sea blockade, so Ukrainian grain exports have been continuing. Russian warships have been pushed back to bases far from the fighting.

What makes the USVs so deadly is their construction. They have very low to no freeboard, so their radar cross-section is very low. I would not be at all surprised if the top half of them are made of fiberglass, wood or carbon fiber, all of which are not radar reflective. They are propelled by electric motors and, by normally operating at relatively slow speeds, they would not have loud propeller cavitation, like a torpedo. They are likely undetectable by passive sonar at any meaningful range and, being small, they're not going to show up well on active sonar. There may be an optic mast/antenna that is about as thick as a broomstick and would be made of carbon fiber, again, hard to see on radar.

And they can pack a hell of a punch. A few hundred pounds of explosive, detonating at very close range, will blow a hole in the hull that will sink most ships that do not have good damage control equipment and crews trained for that. Which means that one good hit will kill most merchant ships or Russian navy warships.

It would not be terribly difficult to run enough of them to deny sea access to an area that is somewhat constrained by geography, such as the Red Sea. USVs may be able to loiter for extended periods. The drones could be programmed to know when to return to a designated point for recharging.

The defenses would be the same against torpedoes: Booms and nets. Which means that the ships so protected can't go to sea. The other defense is an alert topside watch, but maintaining the sharpness to look for a broomstick moving through the water on a 24/7 basis is almost impossible. The best time to run such an attack would be at night, which means that the ships have to be well-illuminated to look for a USV at close range.

And the answer to that would be a USV that has a pop-up short-range missile, such as a barrage of RPGs or something similar. Fire those off, discombobulate the crew and then hit with a few contact-USVs.

What does this mean for surface operations? Dangerous waters would be anywhere within several hundred miles of the coastline of an adversary. And if a freighter was converted to be a mothership to launch a swarm of one-way attack drones, the danger radius could be very large.

If the Taiwanese are not going all in on USV drone technology, I would be astonished. Which also means that the PRC's window to mount a successful invasion of Taiwan may be closing for a long time.

A Retirement Benefit for Special Operators -- Dain Bramage?

A pervasive pattern of brain damage has been found in SEALs who have committed suicide.

I've been reading the article and intended to gift it to everyone, but Digby beat me to it.

It's not just blast damage from IEDs. It's brain concussions from, well, everything, including repeated rifle fire. Those blast waves are micro-blasts that the person won't feel, but they do add up. The scientists have been studying the brains of those who have died, but those findings were not disseminated to military leadership to change things.

The SEALs have been serving all of their careers in the War on Terror and, when they hit their forties, the damage adds up and becomes evident. It sounds as though a lot of them are not going to have long retirements.

What I wonder about is the effect of firing thousands of rounds through short-barrelled rifles. The rifles used are not your dad/grandpaw's M-16s with 20" barrels. Even the CAR-15s back in the day had longer barrels than the SBRs that the "special operators" use. The shorter a barrel on a rifle, the louder the report, the more blast and the more of a concussion wave for each shot. I don't know if suppressors mitigate that by a lot and whether or not they use them all the time during training.

We are going to need to build a shitload of care facilities for these guys if we don't want to see them off on their own and killing themselves (and others). We should do everything we can to ensure that "brain-damaged special operator" doesn't become as much of thing as "homeless Vietnam vets" were forty years ago.

We owe those guys no less.

A D-Day Survivor

USS LST-510, still in service as the M/V Cape Henlopen. She runs year-round between New London, CT and Orient Point, NY.

The Bridge Collapse and the Navy

Maryland's DOT apparently does better at maintaining its bridges than the Navy.

This is the wreckage of the bridge, which shows no significant rusting:

Unlike the Navy.

One of the axioms about military equipment is that if the little things are taken care of, it's a reasonable assumption that the big things are also good. It's a matter of pride and professionalism.

VLS and Other Thoughts

Here is the CNO watching a demonstration of a proposed system to reload vertical launch cells at sea:

It's probably well past time that this got done. One of the lessons of modern war has been that the expenditure of ammunition during wartime is almost always at a far higher rate than peacetime planners (or politicians) are willing to accept. Part of that is because complex stuff, which is anything above small arms ammunition, needs to be inspected and reworked to ensure reliability, and that ccosts money, but that's probably not germaine to this post.

In a hot war, those VLS ships are going to be blowing missiles out of the tubes at a rather high rate and, once those rounds are fired, what is left is a rather large ship with less combat ability than a Gearing-class destroyer. That those in WESTPAC would have to withdraw far to the east in order to rearm is crazy.

Incidentally, the need to lift really heavy shit to carriers is why the Navy is stuck with the CV-22 for COD: C-2s can't haul replacement engines for F-35s. But I digress.

The ship that brings out the canisters for reloading should hold them in a vertical position, with the missles connected to a fire-control system. That ship could datalink to a DDG/CG and, in an emergency, the missle ship could command their launch. That probably would be an emergency because the chances are that a resupply ship would not be able to keep up with a warship if speed is called for.

By the way, the Navy's standards sure have slipped if they are demonstrating stuff with running rust to the CNO. It's not a new problem.

Your Sunday Morning Turboprop Noise

COD launch:

Your Sunday Morning Prop Noise

The Grumman TBM "Avenger":

Grumman first built them, that airplane was the "TBF". "TBM" signifies that it was the first torpedo bomber built by General Motors. Legend is that Grumman delivered a TBF to GM that was held together with sheet-metal screws to facilitate studying the airplane. (The Navy wanted Grumman to build F6F Hellcats, which were designed to be Zero-killers.)

The TBF was designed to replace the TBD "Devastator". Avengers could be found in military serive into the 1960s and in commercial service as water-bombers into the 2010s.

Stand By for Lots of Firings

In a bizarre accident, the U.S. Navy suffered an expensive loss over the weekend that saw one of the most technologically advanced fighter jets in the world, an F/A-18 Super Hornet, blown off the deck of the aircraft carrier USS Harry S. Truman. The accident, which took place on July 8 as the ship was sailing the Mediterranean, injured one sailor. An investigation is underway.

Truman, along with the embarked Carrier Air Wing 1, was conducting a replenishment-at-sea in the Mediterranean. During unexpectedly heavy winds, the F/A-18 Super Hornet was blown overboard and into the water. The mission “was safely terminated through established procedures,” according to a Navy press release.

I'd expect that the CO and XO of the carrier will be fired over this, along with the CAG and the CO of the Hornet squadron, unless the investigation shows that the the jet was properly secured to the deck. CDR Accuweather, or whoever is the senior weatherguru on board, may also be gonzo. For the unit commanders, that's the price that gets paid for wearing the command-at-sea pin on the right side of their uniforms.

Two Views of the Moskva Sinking

One view: The Ukrainians exploited a known weakness in Moskva's combat systems suite.

Another view: The ship may have indeed caught fire and sank because massive corruption during overhaul and maintenance without any help from the Ukrainians. This information may be from Russian sources, so it could be suspect.

The truth may be a melange of both views: The Ukrainians did hit the ship and that corruption in the Russian navy ensured that the ship was unprepared to defend itself and cobat the damage.

I once served under a commanding officer who insisted that the last line of defense against a missile was damage control. To say that he harped on being ready in all aspects of damage control would be an understatement.

The other question is whether Putin is using Russia's abysmal performance in the war to remove senior officers. The Russian way has been to arrest (and presumably shoot) senior officers pour encourager les autres. On the other hand, such a system almost guarantees paralysis, as all but the most minor decisions tend to be passed up the chair of command.