HG S2 (Intel Bot)

Americas BAE Systems won a $13.5 million order, which provides for the ALR-56M radar warning receiver, C-130J Block Cycle F, operational flight program and mission data file generation updates and system services. Work will take place in Totowa, New Jersey. Expected completion date will be August 16, 2024. Raytheon won an $11.2 million contract modification for Total Ship Computing Environment Lab hardware for modernization/technical refresh and Conventional Prompt Strike to support DDG 1000 Class combat system activation, sustainment and modernization. Work will take place in New Hampshire, Rhode Island and Massachusetts. Expected completion will be by November 2023. Middle East & Africa The US Army awarded Versar Inc. a $7.6 million deal for fire and electric safety assessments. Bids were solicited via the internet with seven received. Work will take place in Kuwait. Estimated completion date is March 31, 2025. Europe Apparently, Cyprus has inked an agreement with Israel to acquire the latter’s Iron Dome air defense system, the Cyprus edition of the Kathimerini daily has reported. The exact number of systems being acquired was not disclosed, however. It will be used to defend the island against Turkish drones in particular. Kathimerini says Chief of the National Guard Lt. Gen. Demokritos Zervakis had a close up look at the Iron Dome during a visit to Israel this March. The US on Friday announced it will send a slew of new weapons to Ukraine as part of a $775 million package, including new drones, armored vehicles and artillery. The shipments indicate that Washington and Kyiv expect hard fighting on the ground in the coming weeks. For the first time, the US is sending 15 ScanEagle surveillance drones to help the Ukrainians spot and correct the precision artillery and rocket strikes that have taken a toll on Russian forces in recent weeks. Asia-Pacific The US and South Korea have begun their biggest joint military drills in years – a show of force that is expected to raise tensions with an increasingly hostile North Korea. The exercises, known as Ulchi Freedom Shield, are being seen as a sign of the allies’ determination to restore large-scale training after they had cancelled some regular drills and scaled down others to facilitate nuclear talks, and because of the Covid-19 pandemic. Today’s Video WATCH: Cyprus reportedly strikes deal to purchase Israel’s Iron Dome system View the full article

Americas Pacific Shipyards International won a $17.2 million contract modification for the accomplishment of post shakedown availability (PSA). The PSA is for one Arleigh Burke Class guided missile destroyer (DDG 120). The USS Carl M. Levin is the 70th destroyer overall for the class. Work will take place in Hawaii. Expected. Completion will be by September 2023. The Naval Sea Systems Command, Washington, DC, is the contracting activity. Lockheed Martin Space won a $11 million deal for long-lead time material and the labor, planning, and scheduling necessary to support the fiscal 2023 Trident II (D5) missile production schedule. The contract award also benefits a Foreign Military Sale to the United Kingdom. Fiscal 2022 weapons procurement (Navy) in the amount of $9,7 million will be obligated on this award. Work will take place in Florida. Estimated completion date will be September 30, 2027. Middle East & Africa Israel’s Elbit Systems has received two contracts to upgrade main battle tanks (MBTs) for an international customer valued at $240 million. The first contract, worth $60 million, requires the firm to complete the work within two years. The second contract, for $180 million, requires the upgrades over a period of four years. According to the deal, the Israel-based company will also provide advanced electronic suites to modernize the vehicles. Europe Austria’as new army chief of staff Rudolf Striedinger wants to invest in air defense as well as new tanks. New jets additionally to the country’s Eurofighters cold be a possibility, according to Striedinger. He is counting on a higher budget and also wants to strengthen the militia. Striedinger has yet to be inaugurated as the army’s new chef of staff. The Czech Republic will receive six second-hand AH-1Z and two UH-1Y helicopters from the United States. The European nation will only have to pay for the costs of transfer and modifications done to the rotorcraft. It had placed an order for four AH-1Z and eight UH-1Y helicopters and those aircraft are due to be delivered starting next year. It was previously reported that Czech wants to buy additional helicopters from Bell after Russia attacked Ukraine. The country had also donated its Mi-24 attack helicopters to Ukraine, creating an operational gap. Asia-Pacific An exclusive news report by Yomiuri Shimbun says the Japanese government is considering having over 1,000 of its long-range cruise missile that is under development. These missiles will be stationed from the Nansei Islands to Kyushu, with the aim of bridging the “missile gap” with China. The missile will be based on the improve Type 12 anti-ship missile and could enter service in FY 2024. Today’s Video WATCH: AH-1Z Viper Super Charged Air Assault Helicopter View the full article

The Russo-Ukrainian War of the last six months is reminding everyone - I hope - that war in a large measure does not change. Yes, some new technologies and ideas comes in that no one appreciates the value of until proven on the field of battle, some established technologies and ideas no longer work, and that process of integrating battlefield lessons often determines who gets better results over time. At the end of the day, it is taking ground, keeping ground, and positioning yourself for more. Thinking of that reminded me of a FbF from 4.5yrs ago that I thought I would bring back this week. One of the enduring characteristics of WWI was the amount of blood that was shed over and over and over for such small bits of land. So it was again in March of 2015; French Commander-in-Chief General Joffre considered it vital that the Allied forces should take every advantage of their growing numbers and strength on the Western Front, both to relieve German pressure on Russia and if possible break through in France. British commander Sir John French agreed and pressed the BEF to adopt an offensive posture after the months of defence in sodden trenches. Joffre planned to reduce the great bulge into France punched by the German advance in 1914, by attacking at the extreme points in Artois and the Champagne. In particular, if the lateral railways in the plain of Douai could be recaptured, the Germans would be forced to evacuate large areas of the ground they had gained. This belief formed the plan that created most of the 1915 actions in the British sector. The attack at Neuve Chapelle was an entirely British affair – the French saying that until extra British divisions could relieve them at Ypres, they had insufficient troops in the area to either extend of support the action.It is one thing to see the map of a battle as you see in the upper right hand part of the page - but here is a bird's eye view of the battlefield today. Driving through this now, it is an incredibly beautiful part of Europe - not the hellscape it was. Neuve Chapelle village lies on the road between Bethune, Fleurbaix and Armentieres, near its junction with the Estaires – La Bassee road. The front lines ran parallel with the Bethune-Armentieres road, a little way to the east of the village. Behind the German line is the Bois de Biez. The ground here is flat and cut by many small drainage ditches. A mile ahead of the British was a long ridge – Aubers Ridge – barely 20 feet higher than the surrounding area but giving an observation advantage. ... The attack was undertaken by Sir Douglas Haig’s First Army, with Rawlinson’s IV Corps on the left and Willcock’s Indian Corps on the right, squeezing out a German salient that included the village itself. The battle opened with a 35 minute bombardment of the front line, then 30 minutes on the village and reserve positions. The bombardment, for weight of shell fired per yard of enemy front, was the heaviest that would be fired until 1917. ... Three infantry brigades were ordered to advance quickly as soon as the barrage lifted from the front line at 8.05am. The Gharwal Brigade of the Indian Corps advanced successfully, with the exception of the 1/39th Gharwal Rifles on the extreme right that went astray and plunged into defences untouched by the bombardment, suffering large losses. The 25th and 23rd Brigades of the 8th Division made good progress against the village. There were delays in sending further orders and reinforcements forward, but by nightfall the village had been captured, and the advanced units were in places as far forward as the Layes brook.As was often the case in WWI - this 1915 battle was an experiment that hopefully informed future tactics. The price for this little wedge of land?Casualties The British losses in the four attacking Divisions were 544 officers and 11,108 other ranks killed, wounded and missing. German losses are estimated at a similar figure of 12,000, which included 1,687 prisoners....and the lessons? It demonstrated that it was quite possible to break into the enemy positions – but also showed that this kind of success was not easily turned into breaking through them. The main lessons of Neuve Chapelle were that the artillery bombardment was too light to suppress the enemy defences; there were too few good artillery observation points; the reserves were too few to follow up success quickly; command communications took too long and the means of communicating were too vulnerable. One important lesson was perhaps not fully understood: the sheer weight of bombardment was a telling factor. Similar efforts in 1915 and 1916 would fall far short of its destructive power. History tells us that we will again see larger-scale, heavy-casualty, nation-exhausting wars again. We are actually overdue for one. Like the decades of relative peace that followed Napoleon, so we too have enjoyed a long peace after the Cold War. Human nature and habits are unchanged. This will come again, but when? Next week, next year, next decade? Where? No one really knows, but what we can know is that it will most likely be a surprise. It will not be a short war. It will not be an easy war, and the world that comes after will be a foreign world than that existed before some nation's best and brightest thought they could control events. Oh, and speaking of lessons, LongLongTrail forgot this one that History got. We'll see this again too; The slowness and inaccuracy of communication between the front lines and the corps headquarters—the army had no wireless technology, and telephone lines at the front were usually cut or destroyed by enemy fire during battle—caused Lieutenant-General Sir Henry Rawlinson, the corps commander, to order a fresh advance when support troops were unprepared. In the confusion, some artillery even opened fire on friendly infantry. By the late afternoon, forward units were attacking without adequate artillery support or effective coordination, in failing light, against a hardening German defense. ... ... it (was) incredibly difficult for commanders on both sides to know where and when to effectively deploy their reserve troops. General John Charteris, director of military intelligence under British commander Alexander Haig, took another sobering lesson from the battle, writing that “England will have to accustom herself to far greater losses than those of Neuve Chapelle before we finally crush the German army.”View the full article

Americas Rolls-Royce won a $1 billion deal, which provides intermediate, depot-level maintenance and related logistics support for approximately 210 in-service T-45 F405-RR-401 Adour engines in support of the US Navy. Work will take place in. Mississippi, Texas, Florida and Maryland. Estimated completion will be in July 2027. General Atomics Aeronautical Systems, Inc. (GA-ASI) has successfully integrated the Pratt & Whitney Canada PT6 E-Series turboprop engine on the MQ-9B. “Integrating their PT6 E-Series engine onto our MQ-9B SkyGuardian® aircraft offers an alternate option for future customers that includes a 33 percent increase in power, dual channel electronic propeller and engine control system, as well as all the benefits of the PT6 engine family,” said GA-ASI President David R. Alexander. The MQ-9B is currently powered by the Honeywell TPE331 but the PT6 is a more popular engine that can be found on the PC-7, PC-21, King Air and T-6 II Middle East & Africa According to Jane’s, the first four sites for Saudi Arabia’s Terminal High Altitude Area Defense (THAAD) systems are expected to be completed by the end of 2026 and all seven by April 2028. A Request For Proposal by the US Army gave the estimate completion date for a storage facility for THAAD ballistic missile interceptions at Al Kharj as January 2025. The THAAD terminal (formerly theatre) high-altitude area defence missile system is an easily transportable defensive weapon system. It uses hit-to-kill technology whereby kinetic energy destroys the incoming warhead. The Biden administration on Tuesday stopped short of threatening additional penalties following reports Turkey plans to receive the second batch of the Russian S-400 missile defense system. Turkey initially purchased the S-400 in 2017, plunging its relationship with the U.S. into crisis. As a result of the deal, the Trump administration expelled Turkey from the F-35 program. Europe The German Air Force has sent a fleet of aircraft around the world for its first-ever deployment to the Indo-Pacific region, a move meant to demonstrate its operational capability during two regional exercises and to show solidarity with its allies there. Six Eurofighter jets — painted with the flags of Germany, Singapore, Australia, South Korea, and Japan — left Neuburg Air Base Monday afternoon followed by four A400M multirole aircraft, and three A330 multirole tanker transport aircraft. Asia-Pacific he United States and South Korea will begin their biggest combined military training in years next week in the face of an increasingly aggressive North Korea, which has been ramping up weapons tests and threats of nuclear conflict against Seoul and Washington, the South Korean military said Tuesday. Today’s Video WATCH: THAAD Overview View the full article

What the RAF was doing is not new. What the RAF was doing is not isolated to the United Kingdom. Via SkyNews this is what broke earlier this week. (NB: first reports and all - as you will read downpost); The head of RAF recruitment has resigned in protest at an "effective pause" on offering jobs to white male recruits in favour of women and ethnic minorities, defence sources have claimed. The senior female officer apparently handed in her notice in recent days amid concerns that any such restrictions on hiring, however temporary and limited, could undermine the fighting strength of the Royal Air Force (RAF), the sources said. Official racial discrimination is wrong. It does not matter who the group being discriminated against is. They said the service was attempting to hit "impossible" diversity targets. The defence sources accused Air Chief Marshal Sir Mike Wigston, the head of the RAF, of appearing willing to compromise UK security at a time of growing threats from Russia and China in pursuit of albeit important goals such as improving diversity and inclusion. The diversity industry is not about equal opportunity. It is not about making organizations better or stronger. It is about job security, grievance mongering, and power. At least the UK seems, at the moment, to have civilian leaders at least say the right things; The recruitment claims prompted a response from Rishi Sunak, one of the two contenders vying to be the UK's next prime minister. A spokesperson for the Sunak leadership campaign said: "The only thing that should matter in recruitment is the content of your character, not your sex or the colour of your skin. "That the Ministry of Defence would allow Britain's security to potentially be put at risk by a drive for so-called 'diversity' is not only disgraceful, it is dangerous." However, as we know here, the commissariat does not care. They have their advocates, their levers of power, and they know they can lie without worry. What is going to happen? Fire them? LOLOLOL... An RAF spokesperson disputed the allegations. "There is no pause in Royal Air Force recruitment and no new policy with regards to meeting in-year recruitment requirements," the spokesperson said. "Royal Air Force commanders will not shy away from the challenges we face building a service that attracts and recruits talent from every part of the UK workforce. "As with the Royal Navy and British Army, we are doing everything we can to encourage recruiting from under-represented groups and ensure we have a diverse workforce. "The Royal Air Force has a well-earned reputation for operational excellence that is founded on the quality of all our people. We will always seek to recruit the best talent available to us". Word salad that does nothing but up the ante...and of course they are lying to you ... as they can't even get their story straight; ...responding to questions from Sky News on the issue, a spokesperson for the Ministry of Defence said: "Operational effectiveness is of paramount importance and no one is lowering the standards to join the Royal Air Force. The RAF recruits for many professions and, like the rest of the armed forces, is determined to be a force that reflects the society it serves to protect." In the end, as on this side of the pond, the uniformed leadership are either true believers or broken souls. To effectively fight back against institutional discrimination the diversity bullies are pushing, you need new leaders who are immune to name calling, and a different set of incentives and disincentives for the mushy middle. Admiral Sir Tony Radakin, the head of the armed forces, used his first public speech in-post last December to stress the importance of striving for better diversity. He said this was not "about wokefulness. It is about woefulness. The woefulness of too few women. The woefulness of not reflecting the ethnic, religious and cognitive diversity of our nation." The MOD has announced it aims to increase the ratio of female recruits coming into the armed forces in general to 30% by 2030 from around 12%. The RAF - which was the first of the services to open all roles to women and already has the highest ratio of females - is aiming to go further. It wants the ratio of female air force recruits to hit 40% by the end of the decade - more than double the current level. The target for ethnic minorities is to reach 20% of all air force recruits within the same timeframe, up from around 10%. Yet the RAF must also hire enough people in the right trades to meet its "operational inflow requirements" - the number of new personnel needed to ensure the service can carry out the full range of tasks it has been given to help keep the UK and its allies safe. Clearly they are as lacking over in the Mother Country as they are here. Today, two days after the above report ... the RAF officially replied. Ahem. The boss of RAF recruitment has said she is 'unashamed' of the force's diversity targets, amid claims that it has effectively paused its recruitment of white men. Air Vice-Marshal Maria Byford, chief of staff personnel and air secretary, said that recruiting more women and ethnic minorities would result in 'a better service in the long run'. This is amazingly not satire; Air Vice-Marshal Byford, one of the most senior ranking women in the military, told The Times that she had 'slowed down' recruitment processes for all candidates after failing to meet diversity targets. She said: 'I want the best people. So I need the best people to join to achieve the best they can during their service career and we get... what we need from an operational capability perspective. 'And if I can include more women and more people from different backgrounds in that, I think I have a better service in the long run. It's ok. It's not you. Go ahead and re-read that again. Diagram the sentences if you need to. No shame. 'We are unashamed about doing that because I think that's a good thing.' At present, RAF candidates can be put forward for training immediately after they meet the requirements of the 'first past the post' type-system, rather than being merited on how well they perform in certain stages of the process. The Vice-Marshal, who has served in the force for more than 30 years, said the RAF will look at how to use 'positive action' legally so recruits who have passed the basic requirements to join the force can be selected on merit as well as their gender and ethnicity. She confirmed that women could be picked over men if they were underrepresented in that role and they had met the required standards. Notice she says, "think" a lot? That is a subjective qualifier...because the objective data simply do not tell you that. I am sure the UK's data is similar to ours, well hidden in Millington and elsewhere. As we have referenced before, the facts do not give you that answer. You can "think" and "feel" all you want - but the facts are facts. There has been a fierce backlash to the recruitment from former military personnel as well as politicians, who have claimed that the recruitment pause 'is an example of pandering to political correctness'. Former health secretary Sajid Javid said it would be 'complete nonsense' if the RAF has paused recruitment of white males. He told Sky News: 'I don't think any organisation, whether it's the RAF or any other public or private organisation, should be recruiting on the basis of one's race. ...but what is anyone going to do about it? Well, we have words at least. It is a start; Colonel Richard Kemp, a former commander in Afghanistan, said: 'This idea of diversity now dominates the thinking of senior leaders in all of the Armed Forces. 'They have become seized by the need for political correctness over the need for combat effectiveness and that could be damaging to our national defences. 'This is an example of pandering to political correctness; the diverse make-up of the Army is important but it's definitely not the most important.' At the very end, you can find the heart of the issue here that needs to be fleshed out; Conservative MP and member of the Commons defence committee Richard Drax – also a former Army officer – said that while he supported more women and ethnic minorities joining the Armed Forces, he was 'nervous of any discrimination'. He said: 'Although I have been assured there has been no lowering of standards, I suspect that the RAF is manipulating the quota figure. 'There is a surplus of people trying to join the force therefore they are without doubt discriminating.' I guess I'm the one to do it, so here we go. In an all volunteer force in a nation of people with free will, you cannot force the metrics to work while maintaining standards. You simply cannot unless you make aggressive actions based on preferential treatment or exceptions towards favored groups or worse - discrimination - against disfavored groups. Besides the cancerous sectarianism of such systems in the zero-sum game that is accessions, it creates a perpetual problem down the career path that - by design - will do nothing but ensure an ongoing crisis that will demand more diversity commissars and greater discrimination. The only way to get lower represented numbers in play without doing truly obnoxious actions like, "$20,000 enlistment bonus for self-identified ethnic group-A; $2,000 for group-B; nothing for group-C," you will have to lower objective entry standards for your "preferred" group. Here is how that dynamic works - and why such sectarianism must be opposed at all levels. Having watched this intake-bias in practice, what develops is cohort performance deviation that manifests itself later in everything from time to qualify in your warfare specialty and advanced qualifications, to competitive rankings, to promotion (when only performance is measured). If you desire all groups to be the same to make the metrics look good on a PPT slide, further pressure for additional preference/quotas must be forced on the system. It gets worse over time and more obvious. If you believe that objective success criteria (education, standardized tests, etc) are indicators of future success, the process goes like this. First let's break a recruitment population in to three "Cohorts," and then inside these groups let's divide them in to performance quartiles where the 1st quartile has the highest objective criteria scoring, and the 4th the lowest. For demonstration purposes, we will break these up geographically, by US States; - In Cohort-A (let's call them people born in Kentucky) you have "too many" of in the service based on the US population. You simply must have fewer of them, but darn it - the people from the Bluegrass State simply love serving their nation, the bastards, and keep signing up. Break them up in to the four quartiles we outlined above. Best in the 1st, "most challenged" in the 4th. - In Cohort-B (let's call these people born in Tennessee) you "don't have enough of. " It seems that the Volunteer State simply is not volunteering enough. Must be the strong market in Nashville or something. They are divided in to quartiles as Kentuckians are. - In Cohort-C you have your control group. Cohort-C is a random collection of people from all 50 states, including those born in KY and TN. They are also broken in to quartiles. Now we need to recruit for 1QFY23 coming up in six weeks. In your control group, Cohort-C - as you only want the best - you do what is best for your organization; you do not hire from the 4th quartile. They don't get an offer letter. It just so happens that to meet your intake requirements quartiles 1-3 will get you that number, so all three are given offers. Over time the best will work things out in competition with each other down the career path. Some 1st quartile will fail, some 3rd quartile will rise to the top, but as you have decades of hard data on this, you know that the 1st quartile will as a group have much better qualification times, rankings, promotion rates, and job performance than the 2nd. The 2nd over the 3rd, etc. Your objective criteria are, on average, very good determinations of success. Then you have the problem with your boss and his PPT slides. There is a problem with Kentuckians and Tennesseans. States must be represented in equal proportion to the nation as a whole. You have too many Kentuckians and too few Tennesseans. If you had your way, you would do the same thing with the good people from KY and TN that you did with Cohort-C. You really don't want the 4th quartile of either and - because you trust decades of experience with your objective criteria performance predictors - you'd refuse to send them an offer for employment. However, to make the boss's PPT metrics work, you have to decrease the number of Kentuckians. The only way to do this is to not make any offers for those in the 3rd quartile of Kentuckians. Problem solved there. However, that still does not give you enough Tennesseans. As you can't force any more to come in, the only option you have is to dig into the top of Tennessee's 4th quartile to get the numbers to make metrics where you want them to make the boss happy with his PPT. Your problem is solved. As for following problems down the road where your outflow is another's inflow, well, hope for the best. Not your problem. Not reflected on your FITREP. That is how you get your "entering metrics" to work ... but it has an echo effect down the road. Let's now look at the three cohorts' average odds for professional success looks. Cohort-C is right in the middle with the average score. Kentucky has only 1st and 2nd quartile quality people in the service. Their average is significantly higher than any other Cohort. Tennessee's service members not only includes 3rd Quartile, but a non-zero number of 4th quartile personnel. Their objective scoring on criteria for success relative to the other cohorts is much lower. This will manifest itself down the career path. On average, Tennesseans will qualify slower, be of less utility for shorter periods of time in their jobs as a result. As such they will be competitively ranked lower and promote at lower rates unless external efforts are made to adjust the numbers to meet certain "goals." Of course, that is exactly what will - and what does - happen. As things go down the road, Cohort-C looks at people from Kentucky as a bunch of rockstars and wonders what, exactly, is wrong with people from Tennessee. It seems that more issues come from people with a Tennessee drivers license than anyone else. The people from Kentucky start to think they are special and the people from Tennessee start to think there is something either wrong with them or the system. An unfortunate byproduct of this activity is that 1st and 2nd quartile members from Tennessee - even though they are just as good as 1st and 2nd quartile members from Kentucky and the rest of the nation, will be assumed to be lower performers because such objective difference are not just readily seen --- the organization is well aware of the special considerations given to people who just happened to be born in Tennessee. That is the long term insidious nature of forcing quotas in this system. Instead of supporting equality, it forces a system of advantages and disadvantages based on sectarian lines. No nation, and unquestionably no military, has ever been successful promoting such divisions among its people. None. H/t Deborah Haynes. View the full article

Americas Tyonek Global Services won an $11 million deal for the B?1B Advanced Digital Test Station. The B-1B Lancer, also known as “The Bone”, is the US Air Force long-range strategic bomber developed by Rockwell International, now Boeing Defense And Space Group. The deal provides contractor logistics support services. Work will be performed in Warner Robins, Georgia, and is expected to be completed by August 7, 2027. Sierra Nevada won a $9.6 million contract modification, which provides for the integration of a temporary Line of Sight Data Link-16 capability on HC-130J aircraft using portions of the Airborne Mission Networking. Work will take place in Colorado, Arizona, Georgia, Florida and California. Estimated completion date is October 15. 2023. Middle East & Africa VSE Corp. won an $86 million deal for Foreign Military Sales supportability follow-on technical support to provide eligible foreign navies access to a broad range of life cycle support, systems upgrades, systems integration, and other related efforts associated with the transfer and acquisition, operation, and maintenance of naval vessels and systems within their inventory. This ceiling increase is necessary to support an urgent sole source delivery order to VSE Corp. to provide material and labor in support of overhaul, maintenance, and repair of the Egyptian Navy long range maintenance plan schedule for four Oliver Hazard Perry-class frigates (FFG-7 class ships), four fast missile crafts, and two mine hunter coastals. Estimated completion will be by March 2023. Europe The Yomiuri Shimbun says that Britain and Japan have decided that their next-generation fighter aircraft will share a common airframe and that the development plans are in final stages. The Japanese newspaper based its information on anonymous government sources. It says both countries’ requirements are nearly identical for their next fighter. It will lead to production efficiency and reduce costs. Italy might become a partner with defense giant Leonardo producing the jet’s radar with Mitsubishi Electric Corp. Babcock International has started a post-life extension (LIFEX) on the UK’s Royal Navy’s Type 23 frigate HMS Argyll at Babcock Devonport’s Facility. It is the first Type 23 to begin its post-LIFEX upkeep, adopting a new innovative approach to re-certification at the Frigate Support Centre (FSC). Babcock will be overhauling key equipment and carrying out design changes for new capabilities such as communications upgrades and mixed crewing. Asia-Pacific The Sri Lankan Air Force (SLAF) officially inducted a Dornier 228 maritime patrol aircraft into service at SLAF Base Katunayake on August 15. The aircraft is donated to Sri Lanka by India and the High Commissioner of India to Sri Lanka attended the ceremony as well. Today’s Video WATCH: Slovak MiG-29 in action, part 12, go around and landing in pair by sunset and at night View the full article

So, how is your week going? The Navy wants to shed 39 ships in Fiscal Year 2023, with the first ship set to depart on Halloween. The list, which includes five guided-missile cruisers Armed neutrality is a good thing - it keeps an enemy at bay. Being hostile while you are actively disarming yourself? That is begging for a whoop'n. Inaction. Inattention. Slavish devotion to process. Entitlement. Distracted leadership. That is how we got here – a destination we slid to this century on a carpet of happy-talk, half-truths, and aspirational time-buying. First, let’s start with a statement that I could have made myself. Via David Sharp at AP; Adm. Mike Gilday, chief of naval operations, defended the proposal that emphasizes long-range weapons and modern warships, while shedding other ships ill equipped to face current threats. “We need a ready, capable, lethal force more than we need a bigger force that’s less ready, less lethal, and less capable,” he said Monday at the Navy League's Sea-Air-Space symposium in Maryland. I would always want three effective warships as opposed to five worn out, worm-ridden with unpublished CASREPS, partially manned and maintained Command at Sea billets … but it didn’t have to be this way; this was a choice. Anyway, this is just another way to say, "Divest to Invest" which is a kinder-gentler version of "Do More With Less" etc that we've all seen before. We should have five warships - and need eight - but we don’t – and we are barely through the first 5th of The Terrible 20s. We did not get here by accident or by the action of external forces - but by decisions the Navy made. No one is allowed to be surprised. We are a dozen years past the announcement of “The Terrible 20s.” So the structural challenges of this decade were known a few PCS cycles before they began to manifest themselves in spades. Generations of leadership have been happy to let their Sailors be worked down to the bone in undermanned, rusty, poorly maintained ships on extended deployments with ships only partially mission capable. Little effort was made to promote either a replacement for Goldwater-Nichols, push back against the Ottoman-effective “Joint” requirements. Less effort was made to bring the critical importance of sea power has in enabling the standard of living and place in the world of the American people enjoy to the ears of the American people. We lost an entire generation of naval developments with programs like CG(X) that failed to launch, programs like DDG-1000 that failed to transition, and programs like LCS who exist only to mock our claim to be the world’s premier naval power. In some areas, we aren’t even that anymore. No. As we covered earlier this month, the Navalist institutions have failed their moment and we are drifting rudderless into a minefield while those with the charter to provide and maintain a navy remain at their cocktail parties reminding each other how wonderful and influential they are, and in a potlatchesque onomastic orgy of feather-nesting – the future be damned. We have wallowed in failure so long, we have forgotten how we got there. How about a little Front Porch unintended call-out? Some detractors proclaimed littoral combat ships to be the Navy’s “Little Crappy Ship,” but that’s not fair, said defense analyst Loren Thompson. “It’s not a little crappy ship. It does what it was supposed to do. What it was supposed to do isn’t enough for the kind of threats that we face today,” said Thompson, from the Lexington Institute. In the Navy’s defense, threats shifted swiftly from the Cold War to the war on terror to the current Great Power Competition in which Russia and China are asserting themselves, he said. If you have to bring out Loren to defend you, you've lost the LCS argument. I mean, really people. As was even mentioned early on in this article, LCS was designed for a post-Cold War threat. This reads as satire, but it is serious as people think it is informed, objective opinion quoted in the article. It isn't. If we can't speak truth, we sail in a sea of lies and feast on a layer of error on top of error. Enough of that rant, I am probably losing you ... let us behold the spawn of The Terrible 20s. There are three stories here, all different, and all damning to the leadership of our Navy the last quarter century … but mostly the leadership of the first decade of this century. They begat the child the present leadership is having to raise – and still tell us what a great baby-daddy they are. First let’s look at the list from NAVADMIN 181/22. The three stories are the neglected unsexy but important, the worn out, and the snake-bit. 1. The Unsexy but Important: The USNS ships range from 8 (Glenn) to 50 (Gordon/Gilliland) years old with an average of 36.2 years. Most should have been replaced years ago, but ... well ... you know. As a side note, if anyone knows the background on the T-ESD going away so young, let us know in the comments. I can't find anything. 2. Worn out: The SSN were both ~36-yrs old, the CG averaged 35 years old, and the LSD 33 years old. The way we use our fleet units, if after 30-yrs you can't replace them 1-for-1 then that is your fault. The PC's are 28 years old on average ... way beyond what those wee ships should be. Is the CNO right about these? Sure ... but don't say, "... less ready, less lethal, and less capable." - just be honest and say, "...worn out, unrepairable, and too dangerous to ask Sailors to go to war in." Be clear and direct. Be at least as blunt as we were defending the writings of Kendi. 3. Snake-bit: the Little Crappy Ship is little, crappy, and should probably be called a hulk. Average age here is 4.7 years, the youngest just 2 years. No one has been held to account. No one. If you are new to the LCS debacle of think the Front Porch is taking too much credit, well...here is almost 2-decades of commentary here on LCS. We were right from the start. Something useful is being made with the Independence Class with more money and fewer expectations, but what an opportunity cost this misadventure has consumed. In what has been a bad decade for the US Navy’s relationship with Congress – and an exceptionally bad year when our senior leadership expended what was left of institutional good will defending racial essentialism – it appears that the powers that be insist it wants to pick a fight with the organization that feeds them. That is just picking a fight. I'm all about picking fights, but this isn't the right one. U.S. Rep. Elaine Luria, D-Virginia, was more blunt, tweeting that it “sucks” to be decommissioning so many ships, especially newer ones. “The Navy owes a public apology to American taxpayers for wasting tens of billions of dollars on ships they now say serve no purpose,” she said. Rep. Lauria (D-VA), the surface-nuke that she is – knows what time it is – and can mock the lame and weak as only a surface nuke can. So, add this to your folder of affirmative failures of vision and verve. U.S. Rep. Rob Wittman, R-Virginia, suggested the ship cuts were “grossly irresponsible” when the U.S. Navy has dipped from 318 ships to 297, while the Chinese fleet has grown from 210 to 360 ships over the past two decades. Milley said it's important to focus on the Navy's capabilities rather than the size of its fleet. “I would bias towards capability rather than just sheer numbers,” he said. Milley doesn't know the difference between a MK-41 and a SeaRAM. What happened to "distributed lethality?" Nothing to the concept, it just seems that our leadership lacks the ability to have a sustained baseline strategy that lasts longer than a FITREP cycle and instead invents new buzzwords to chase around like a catnip addled kitty after a laser pointer. That and it is shamed by the empty piers LCS, DDG-1000, and CG(X) begat our already cursed decade of decline. The 2020s were going to be hard whatever we did, but by our collective action, we have made it worse. The US Navy has earned a long, painful, and distinguished period of oversight from Congress that will hopefully result in a wholesale rebuild of our shipbuilding people, process, and procedures. If not, well ... the US Navy and the nation it serves had a good century in the sun. A hoot while it lasted. What follows will not be a hoot. View the full article

By Mark Harris; Helion, Warwick, UK, (2021). Reviewed By Capt. Richard Dick, USN (Ret.) Harwich Submarines in the Great War is the detailed story of the 1914 British overseas submarine campaign. “Detailed” really does not do the author justice. Mark Harris’s research is little short of astonishing. He has plumbed British, German, and French archives, the papers of Adm. Roger Keyes, RN (Commodore in Charge, Submarine Service, 1912-1914), and the British and German official histories to tell the story, in depth, of every British offensive submarine patrol in the North Sea in 1914 (and the 1914 Baltic patrols) from the outbreak of war in August through the end of the year. He has reconstructed and drawn corrected charts for each patrol. He discusses every British senior officer connected with the campaign, every submarine commanding officer (including relevant comments from their fitness reports), many subordinate officers in the more than 20 British (and one French) submarine wardrooms, and key crew members of each vessel. Harris focuses on the men but includes more than enough of the technical characteristics and details to enable the reader to understand the constraints, capabilities, and weaknesses of these, the first British submarines to be used in combat outside U.K. coastal waters. At the outbreak of war, the Royal Navy concentrated its newest and most capable submarines, the D and E classes, at Harwich on the North Sea as the 8th Submarine Flotilla. The flotilla was part of the Royal Navy Submarine Service, under the command of then-Commodore Roger J.B. Keyes. The E Class would become the most famous British submarines of the war, thanks largely to the exploits of two of Keyes’ commanding officers, Lt. Cdr. Max Horton and Lt. Cdr. Martin Naismith. The E class boat was crewed by three officers and about 27 enlisted men. On the surface, diesel engines propelled it at a maximum speed of 15 knots for about 2600 miles. Submerged, battery-powered electric motors could take the boat up to about 65 miles at 5 knots. Armament consisted of four to five 18-inch torpedo tubes (one or two in the bow, one in the stern, and one each firing athwartships to port and starboard) and 8-10 weapons (the vessels carried no deck gun). E Class units were being fitted during 1914 with radio (good to about 50 miles). The 181 foot submarine was divided into three or four watertight compartments and could submerge to a design maximum depth of 100 feet (although boats exceeded this on several occasions). The only effective sensor system was visual detection, either from lookouts on the surface or through the mediocre periscope when submerged. By December 1914, E Class units were operating at sea up to 18 days. Food was generally canned, monotonous, and often served cold, since the oven and hotplate consumed precious battery power submerged. Crews spent much time on the surface, often in the teeth of North Sea winter gales that smashed bridge screens and sometimes bent bow planes. Harris describes meticulously the people, doctrine, and training of the submarine force. He acknowledges that in 1914 the 8th Flotilla sank few German ships (the scout cruiser SMS Hela and the torpedo boat destroyer S-116) while losing three of its own units. However, he highlights the real achievement of the 1914 campaign– by December, the major surface units of the German High Sea Fleet had been largely confined to port and most of their at-sea training had been shifted to the Baltic. Fear of British submarines largely drove these changes. While the major units could and did deploy for fleet actions, they had vacated the North Sea for routine operations. Harris is a prodigious researcher and an effective (if not thrilling) writer. He has illustrated the book with a number of excellent photographs and his own very good charts. Harwich Submarines is apparently his first book; hopefully his subsequent work will live up to the very high standards he has set in this work. Captain Dick is a retired submariner; he also served over 29 years in the defense intelligence community. Mark Harris is a military historian who studies World War I naval matters. He previously worked in the financial services sector, but now focuses his historical research on sifting new nuggets from familiar archives and memoirs. Harwich Submarines in the Great War: The First Submarine Campaign of the Royal Navy in 1914. By Mark Harris (Warwick, UK: 2021). The post Harwich Submarines in the Great War: The First Submarine Campaign of the Royal Navy in 1914 first appeared on Naval Historical Foundation. View the full article

The “Out Years” is fantasy. It is a place where people wishcast the future they want. Let’s take a quick look at this gem from the Annual Long-Range Plan for Construction of Naval Vessels for FY 2007. How'd that work out for us? From that report looking forward nine years to 2016, it shows us having spent money on building in that time period … what exactly? Seven (7) DD(X), aka DDG-1000, and six (6) CG(X). Yeah … so be careful trusting these documents. That is why I simply refuse to listen to anyone’s pontifications on 2040 or 2045. Come on people. It’s insulting. Let’s stick with that template of 9-years above, it's bad enough. From today that window would get us to 2031. Depending on who you talk to, that is either in the center or slightly right of center of the period expected to be the time of greatest danger with conflict over Taiwan with the People’s Republic of China. It also plays well with the issues we raised with the Hudson Institute’s Bryan Clark on Midrats last Sunday. As men smarter than me have said, there are no magic beans. By the end of the decade there will be no “new” deployable program that will be able to change the fight west of Wake except on the margins in year-1 of any war. We will fight, +/-, at the end of the decade with what we have displacing water and making shadows on the ramp today. There are things that we have right now – at or near IOC – that may, if given the proper resources and focus, be significant additions to our combat power by the end of the decade. I’d point you to Sunday’s Midrats for a series of platforms and capabilities that fit that bill, but today I want to focus on one that really got my attention – mostly because it is a historically proven force multiplier, engines. Throughout aviation history marginal existing aircraft were made good, and good aircraft made great simply by updating engines. In recent history, two example stand out. First the USAF re-engined its KC-135s; The re-engined tanker, designated either the KC-135R or KC-135T, can offload 50 percent more fuel, is 25 percent more fuel efficient, costs 25 percent less to operate and is 96 percent quieter than the KC-135A. On the Navy side of the house, there was the re-engined F-14; Navy Secretary John F. Lehman Jr. went on to say the TF30 engine “in the F-14 is probably the worst engine-airplane mismatch we have had in many years. The TF30 engine is just a terrible engine and has accounted for 28.2 percent of all F14 crashes.” … In 1987, F-14s began receiving new engines in the General Electric F110, which offered more thrust and eliminated many of the reliability problems associated with the TF30. These improved F-14Bs and the subsequent F-14Ds were very much the Tomcat of Top Gun fame, and as a result, you’ll often find Tomcat fans dismissing the TF30’s woes as a problem specific to the F-14A in the early days of operation. See the pattern? What does this have to do with any future conflict with China? The self-inflicted vulnerability of our airwing and its well-known retreat from range with a deck full of short-legged strike fighters with no organic tanking (sorry, buddy tanking does not count) needs to be fixed at sea or balanced ashore. While there is a chance to get a fair number of deployable unmanned tankers by the end of the decade, that is about the only thing we have on the horizon. Mindless dithering, entitlement, and sloth means our new carrier capable aircraft won’t be ready for the fight. What do we have that, possibly, might be able to help ashore for the USAF aircraft we will need beyond the finite number of heavy bombers and the delicate inventory of stand-off weapons they carry? Though there are questions if it could be installed in the USN’s F-35C due to space constraints with the tailhook, and unquestionably can’t fit in the F-35B … for the land-based F-35A an engine replacement via the Adaptive Engine Transition Program (AETP) could provide a 25-30% increase in range. Pratt & Whitney is testing its new XA101 Adaptive Engine Transition Program powerplant and expects to conclude testing its two examples by the end of next year, company military engines division president Matthew Bromberg revealed in an interview. He expects that two-thirds of the technology developed from AETP could find its way into earlier engines now flying with the Air Force. The company is “thrilled” to have two options available for the Air Force and F-35 partners to choose from for an upgrade to the fighter’s propulsion system, Bromberg said. GE Aviation has developed the XA100 AETP engine as a competitor to Pratt & Whitney’s version. Testing of “our first new fighter engine in 30 years … was successful,” Bromberg said. The first XA101 and its twin will shuttle back and forth between Pratt & Whitney’s facilities and the Air Force’s Arnold Engineering Center in Tullahoma, Tenn., for the next year or so, generating more data. The Air Force and F-35 Joint Program Office will use the data to help decide whether the F-35 should get an all-new powerplant—one of the AETP engines—or take Pratt & Whitney up on its offer of an enhanced version of the F135 engine already in the F-35 fighter. Pratt & Whitney succeeded in achieving the AETP’s goals, which were to obtain 10 percent improvement in thrust and 25 percent improvements in both fuel efficiency and thermal management, Bromberg said. “We know we can do that,” he said. Range and endurance is a primary driver for any conflict in the Pacific. If we need more range inside 5-10 year window, AETP is one of the few ways I can see it happening. I can think of fewer programs ready to go that seem more critical if the USAF is going to be able to join the fray in a manner we need them to. The timeline is tight, but take what you can get. Time is short … and so is the range of our aircraft. All hail the F-35D. View the full article

Americas A new F-35A was delivered to Edwards Air Force Base on August 1 for assignment with the 461st Flight Test Squadron (FLTS). It is the first of six F-35As that the squadron and the F-35 Lightning II Integrated Test Force will use to test the Technical Refresh 3 and Block 4 configurations. For all three variants of the F-35, the 461 FLTS is the lead developmental flight test unit for sensors, weapons, and software. BAE Systems Land & Armaments won an $88 million contract for Amphibious Combat Vehicles (ACV). The total cumulative face value of the contract is $1,910,796,347. This contract modification procures labor and material for the Amphibious Combat Vehicle Mission Role Variant Medium Caliber Cannon (ACV-30) for post-critical design review design and development, production representative test vehicles, and support for test activities. Marine Corps Systems Command, Quantico, Virginia, is the contracting activity. Work will take place in California, Maryland, Norway, Pennsylvania, South Carolina, California, Minnesota, Michigan, Phoenix, New Mexico, Italy and Mississippi. Estimated completion date is July 2025. Middle East & Africa Vertex Aerospace won a $62.8 million deal, which provides for organizational level and authorized intermediate level aircraft maintenance, logistics support, and limited repair of common support equipment for three KC-130J aircraft for the government of Kuwait. Kuwait flies its three KC-130Js on a mix of transport and tanker missions. Work will take place in Kuwait and Mississippi. Expected completion will be in August 2027. Europe Slovakia’s Minister of Defence has refuted media reports that the country’s MiG-29 fighters have been transferred to Ukraine. “Our MiG-29 fighters are not in Ukraine. This is false information. They are still at Slia?,” Jaroslav Na? was quoted as saying. He added that an official retirement ceremony for the MiG-29s will be held on Aug. 27 at the Slovak International Air Festival. Asia-Pacific Philippine officials are considering a US offer to provide heavy-lift helicopters like its widely used Chinooks after Manila scrapped a deal to buy military choppers from Russia due to fears of Western sanctions, the Philippine ambassador to Washington said Monday. Then-President Rodrigo Duterte approved the cancellation of the signed deal to buy 16 Russian Mi-17 helicopters due to concerns over possible Western sanctions, which could hamper fast bank transfers of the income Filipino workers send home from the U.S. and other Western countries, Ambassador Jose Romualdez said. About 100 aircraft and 2500 military personnel from 17 nations will arrive in Australia’s Northern Territory in mid-August to commence Exercise Pitch Black 2022. The German Air Force is set to travel to Australia to make its debut in the country’s multi-national exercise, marking the first time the German and Australian forces have trained together. Today’s Video WATCH: Slovak MiG-29 in action, part 12, go around and landing in pair by sunset and at night View the full article

To build the Navy we need, the one thing we have to get right is - and this seems obvious - to successfully build ships. A lot of them. Easy to type, hard to do. While we have had many well-documented troubles this century, we also have some notable successes that give hope we can do it right when we want to. Returning today with another top-shelf guest post, Bryan McGrath picks up the conversation with a reminder of what we did get right, and what we need to do with that institutional capital. Bryan, over to you. When a “Murderers Row” of Navalists (Hendrix, Salamander, Work) all take to the interwebs within the same week to opine on the recent pathologies of American naval shipbuilding, one is forced to take note. As I toil and scribble in the same lanes as these fellows, I feel called to add my thoughts to the mix, some of which track well with theirs, some of which are not well-aligned, and some of which touch on issues their essays chose not to address. Their flurry of essays provides occasion to reflect upon the state of naval shipbuilding in the United States. With China’s naval expansion proceeding at an alarming pace and multiple studies converging on the finding that the U.S. Navy is too small, America must build more warships. This need is complicated by recent, well-documented descriptions of delays, cost overruns, and technical failures, raising questions about whether the United States is up to the task. This essay asserts that it is, but only if tough lessons are implemented, sufficient resources are applied, common sense is embraced, and political will is demonstrated. Some of this my esteemed colleagues touch on, some they do not. The Acquisition Kluge The first thing to consider before we bend any steel or take to the computer-aided design software is that the acquisition of Navy warships exists within a complicated cauldron of interlocking systems and stakeholders to include executive branch policy making, legislative branch resourcing, Department of Defense/Navy budgetary prioritization and strategy-making, and industrial base concerns, to name only a few. There are no silver bullets, there are no magic beans. The act of acquiring warships is hard, and countless trade-offs among and within these systems are a feature, not a bug. This complex kluge creates numerous perverse incentives among the stakeholders. At the national level, we are unable to make coherent grand strategy, and so what kind of and how big a Navy we need devolves to slight deviations from the Navy we have, even when that Navy is patently insufficient. When the Navy does seek to develop a new class of ship, it consistently understates both the cost of the first in class and the life-cycle costs that it will incur. Why? Because everyone involved has an interest in keeping “sticker shock” from derailing the acquisition, including Congress. Better to get the program up and operating and ask for more money later than to drive away interest in a program due to its expense. Compounding this kabuki is the problem of immature designs, and much of the blame here belongs in the Pentagon. Whether one points to Secretary of Defense Rumsfeld’s “transformational” edicts to both the FORD Class CVN program and the DDX program (now the DDG 1000) resulting in the parallel integration of numerous immature technologies, or the similarly “transformational” decision to provide potential LCS vendors with “performance specifications” rather than “design specifications” (resulting in brittle supply chains and the introduction of one-of-a-kind and unproven technology in main propulsion USS ZUMWALT (DDG 1000) and combat systems), the pathologies of all three programs (CVN, DDG 1000, and LCS) are in part the result of immature designs incorporating unready, untested, and unsupported technology. Additionally, as part of the post-Cold War move to favor “efficiency” (over effectiveness), the Navy’s own technical community was dramatically down-sized, resulting in a situation in which it attempted—under pressure from OSD and from its own questionable decision-making—to oversee the development of increasingly complex warships with unfamiliar technology utilizing a workforce that was not up to the task. This was a recipe for failure, and three ship classes suffered as a result. Is All the News Bad? Reading the thoughts of my friends Jerry Hendrix, Bob Work, and Commander Salamander on the turmoil in naval shipbuilding of the past two decades provides a depressing but incomplete picture of the status of American warship building. The United States is at this moment, building several classes of ships that are the envy of the world-- effectively and efficiently--to include the VIRGINIA Class attack submarine, the ARLEIGH BURKE Class destroyer, and two classes of large amphibious ships (LPD and LHA). The Navy and the Congress possess such confidence in these ships that they are routinely acquired in batches, rather than with individual contracts for each hull. What is the difference in these ships and the three (CVN, DDG 1000, LCS) discussed earlier? The simple answer is that they are mature programs with generally stable designs. The ship pictured below at its recent commissioning ceremony--USS FORT LAUDERDALE (LPD 28)—is the beneficiary of years of construction experience and what the industry calls “learning”. More efficient processes are created, early design problems are overcome, and real costs decline the longer a production line remains open. The VIRGINIA Class SSN, DDG51 class, and the LPD 17 class all had early problems to overcome, but the Navy and the shipyards—with considerable oversight from Congress—worked those problems out and put the programs on a steady course. As of this writing, it appears that similar conditions are prevailing in the construction of follow-on FORD Class CVN’s. The point here is that America CAN build ships; it builds GREAT ships. But given the pace of China’s Navy buildup and the considerable number of new and newly modernized ships in the pipeline, how can the Navy and other stakeholders in the acquisition process behave differently to achieve positive results earlier rather than later? What Is to Be Done? In his recent guidance to the Navy’s Surface Forces called “The Competitive Edge”, VADM Roy Kitchener USN (Commander U.S. Naval Forces) identified ten “new or modernized platforms” that will join the fleet or be in construction over the next ten years. Those platforms are: ZUMWALT-Class Destroyers (DDG 1000) with Conventional Prompt Strike (CPS)ARLEIGH BURKE Class Guided Missile Destroyers (Flight III)ARLEIGH BURKE Class Guided Missile Destroyers (Flight IIA Modernization)LCS Lethality and Survivability UpgradeCONSTELLATION-Class Guided Missile Frigate (FFG 62)Light Amphibious Warship (LAW)Medium Unmanned Surface Vessels (MUSV)Large Unmanned Surface Vessels (LUSV)SAN ANTONIO Class Amphibious Transport Dock (LPD 17 Flight II)Next Generation Guided Missile Destroyers (DDG (X)) This is a considerable amount of complexity entering the fleet in the next decade, and unless lessons from the past twenty years of frustration are implemented among all the various stakeholders, that frustration will continue. Here are several suggested focus areas: Design Maturity. Civilian and uniformed leadership of the Navy should be required by Congress to certify design maturity and maturity of new technologies prior to proceeding to construction. Concurrency must be avoided at all costs, and new capabilities should be developed and proven in land-based test facilities PRIOR to introduction. Exceptions would include corrections of obvious mistakes, and changes to ships that are built at wider intervals (like aircraft carriers and amphibious assault ships). Of note, well into the Biden Administration’s second year, the Navy does not have a Senate confirmed Assistant Secretary for Research, Development, and Acquisition (ASN RDA), nor has one been nominated. Additionally, Congress must play a constructive role here by providing funding for design and testing to support Navy acquisition timelines and for additional land-based test capacity (an unsung Congressional achievement of late). These funds are often harvested and re-applied elsewhere, which causes acquisition delays (at best) and at worst—contributes to design immaturity as the Navy rushes to meet production schedules. The best of all cases from a Congressional oversight standpoint is to provide the design and testing resources when they are requested but to relentlessly hold the line on construction until satisfied of design and technology maturity. Long lead-time material must be closely managed to ensure availability. Requirements Discipline. When and if this country becomes serious enough about force structure to seat a Senate-confirmed official at ASN RDA, that individual must be utterly ruthless in shooting down the good idea fairy, even if that fairy appears in khaki with several stars on the collar. Multiple iterations of mature designs should be constructed to reap pricing benefits, with (as stated above) changes and capabilities proved and binned awaiting a new “tranche” of ships into which they will be integrated. A Virtuous Cycle of Stability and Investment. There is, within the latest Navy 30 Year Shipbuilding Plan, discussion of industrial base concerns in both the surface and submarine shipbuilding narratives, with no less an authority than the CNO casting doubt. Building multiple VIRGINIA Class SSN’s and the COLUMBIA Class SSBN simultaneously will surely flex the submarine industrial base, but the suggestion that there is not additional capacity in the surface industrial base is misplaced (although skilled workforce issues impact shipbuilding as much as most other industrial concerns). Where there are serious problems is within the supply chain, as tier 2 and 3 suppliers exit their businesses in response to inconsistent demand signals from the Navy. This inconsistency is important to the entire industry, as publicly held businesses must answer to shareholders who would (rightly) question capital investments driven by the behavior of their monopsonic partner. Leverage Hot Production Lines. Both tier 1 shipyards (HII and Bath Iron Works) are transitioning to the Flight III DDG line of ARLEIGH BURKE Destroyers—HII from building Flight II’s, and BIW from building DDG 1000’s. The first hull at HII is nearing completion, and the first at BIW is under construction. Hot production lines also exist in the LPD 17 program and the LHA program. The Navy should plan to and budget for AT LEAST 2 SSN’s a year (in addition to the required SSBN program), 2 large surface combatants a year, 1 LPD 17 every other year, 1 LHA every four years and 1 CVN every five years. USS FORT LAUDERDALE (LPD 28) For those hearkening back to paragraph three where I stated “…what kind of and how big a Navy we need devolves to slight deviations from the Navy we have…”, be advised that what I suggest above is just a part—a large part, but just a part—of the building program we need. We (the kluge cited earlier) have dithered long enough on unmanned platforms on and under the ocean, and the dearth of new Medium USV acquisitions in the President’s FY23 budget is concerning. A third of the 2045 fleet is to be unmanned, and if we hope to get there, we need to start bending metal, much of which will be done at more modestly sized yards. And then there is the new frigate. Compete the CONSTELLATION Class As Soon As Possible. It is difficult to see in the Navy’s plans a desire to bring on a second yard to build the CONSTELLATION Class frigate any time soon. Whether this is an architecture decision, a resource decision, or a risk decision is not known to me, but it is logical to assume that if the Navy is to grow larger in the coming years, more of these ships must be built. The design chosen by the Navy—while based upon a successful European hull—is considerably different from the parent design, in no small measure due to requirements for survivability driven by NAVSEA. Those requirements are often seen as onerous, but one important fact distinguishes STARK, SAMUEL B ROBERTS, PRINCETON, TRIPOLI, MCCAIN, and FITZGERALD from MOSKVA, and that is that only one of these ships went to the bottom. That the yard chosen to build CONSTELLATION has never built a ship of this size and complexity before is even more reason to expeditiously compete the design among the other building yards, both to get to at least four hulls per year and a means of backstopping production risk. Some would caution against this path, citing the need for the Navy and its shipbuilding partner to “learn” from the first hull. While there is indeed learning to be done, there is precedent worth considering in the transition from building CG 47’s to DDG 51’s. Bath Iron Works won the contract for the ARLEIGH BURKE, and Ingalls began construction on BARRY two years after ARLEIGH BURKE construction began, with the yards competing on hulls and multi-year procurements ever since. Like I said earlier, shipbuilding is hard. But it is harder when costs are consistently and predictably under-estimated (I’m no math major, but there seems to be a fudge factor suggested here), when the key policy and oversight positions are not filled, when construction begins before plans are ready, when considerable changes are made from hull to hull without discipline and testing, and when there are dramatic swings in shipbuilding plans that frustrate coherent capital investing. The nation needs a larger Navy; it needs more of the same and it needs more of different. It needs capacity and capability. It needs more and more predictable resources. More than anything else though, it needs this country’s national security decision making elite to walk away from any notion that the Navy the nation needs can be had on the cheap, that other instruments of government can make up for what the Navy does every day around the world, and that we can “technology” our way out of the seapower deficit we are in. Winter is coming. Bryan McGrath is the Managing Director of The FerryBridge Group LLC. He has clients in government and industry. His public writing and speaking represents his own opinions. View the full article

Americas Bath Iron Works won a $35.4 million contract modification for lead yard support effort for the DDG-51 Class Guided Missile Destroyer program. Work will take place in Maine. Estimated completion will be in June 2023. The Naval Sea Systems Command, Washington, DC, is the contracting activity. General Dynamics won a $59.8 million modification for multiple items used in the Abrams Main Battle Tank, Stryker Family of Vehicles, Light Armored Vehicle Family of Vehicles, Cougar, Buffalo and RG-31. The M1 Abrams is a third-generation American main battle tank designed by Chrysler Defense and named for General Creighton Abrams. Work will take place in Florida. Estimated completion date is July 29, 2029. The contracting activity is the Defense Logistics Agency Land and Maritime, Columbus, Ohio. Middle East & Africa The German defense ministry said Friday it had suspended most of its operations in Mali after the local military-led government denied flyover rights to a UN peacekeeping mission. “The Malian government has once again refused to give flyover rights to a flight planned today” for the rotation of personnel on the ground, a ministry spokesman said at a regular press conference. In response, Germany had decided to “suspend until further notice the operations of our reconnaissance forces and CH-53 (helicopter) transport flights.” Europe In an interview with Finnish daily Iltalehti, Estonia’s Minister of Defense Hanno Pevkur says his country will integrate its coastal anti-ship missile system with Finland. This will create a choke point for Russian warships in the Gulf of Finland. The widest point of the gulf is 120km and the narrowest is just 52km. The Blue Spear anti-ship missile has been ordered by Estonia and it has a range of 290km. Finland currently deploys the MTO 85M, which is the Saab RBS 15 anti-ship missile. The Hellenic Air Force will soon send a letter of request (LOR) to the United States for the upgrade of 38 F-16C/D Block 50 fighters to the V variant. These fighters will be upgraded at Nea Anchialos Air Base while two Greek F-16s have completed their upgrade to the F-16V standard and will soon be used to train pilots. Older F-16 Block 30s that are in Greek inventory will not undergo the upgrade process. Asia-Pacific The Australian Department of Defence unveiled the Bushmaster electric protected military vehicle (ePMV) reflecting an effort, it said, to ensure the Australian Army is ‘future ready’. The prototype was showcased on August 10 at the Chief of Army Symposium, a three-day event in Adelaide. The vehicle was developed by the Australian Army’s Robotic and Autonomous Systems Implementation & Coordination Office (RICO), working in collaboration with an Australian company, 3ME Technology, which specialises in lithium-ion battery systems for mining and military vehicles, and the DoD’s Defence Science and Technology Group (DSTG). Today’s Video WATCH: Here is The New Generation of High-Tech, Heavily Armed DDG 51 Flight III Destroyers View the full article

All it takes is a quick look at a map or a quick read of history to understand that any conflict in the Western Pacific will be dominated by naval forces, logistics, control of the air, and the ability to sustain all three. Extending our conversation on Midrats this summer about the challenge from China, this Sunday from 5-6pm Eastern returning to Midrats will be our guest Bryan Clark, a senior fellow and director of the Center for Defense Concepts and Technology at Hudson Institute. The starting point for our discussion will be the report he co-authored with Timothy Walton, Regaining the High Ground Against China: A Plan to Achieve US Naval Aviation Superiority This Decade. Before joining Hudson Institute, Bryan Clark was a senior fellow at the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments (CSBA) where he led studies for the Department of Defense Office of Net Assessment, Office of the Secretary of Defense, and Defense Advanced Research Products Agency on new technologies and the future of warfare. Prior to joining CSBA in 2013, Mr. Clark was special assistant to the chief of naval operations and director of his Commander’s Action Group, where he led development of Navy strategy and implemented new initiatives in electromagnetic spectrum operations, undersea warfare, expeditionary operations, and personnel and readiness management. Mr. Clark served in the Navy headquarters staff from 2004 to 2011, leading studies in the Assessment Division and participating in the 2006 and 2010 Quadrennial Defense Reviews. Prior to retiring from the Navy in 2008, Mr. Clark was an enlisted and officer submariner, serving in afloat and ashore submarine operational and training assignments, including tours as chief engineer and operations officer at the Navy’s Nuclear Power Training Unit. Join us live if you can, but it not, you can get the show later by subscribing to the podcast. If you use iTunes, you can add Midrats to your podcast list simply by clicking the iTunes button at the main showpage - or you can just click here. You can find us on almost all your most popular podcast aggregators as well. View the full article

At the end of the day, when we are all called home, how would you want to be remembered? As a naval officer, what legacy do you wish to leave? Few mortals know the day and time, but if you are looking for a benchmark, you would be hard pressed not to look to Captain Paul Rinn, USN and say, "That. Him. There." As skipper of the frigate Samuel B. Roberts, Capt. Rinn took his crew into the war-torn Persian Gulf where they joined other U.S. warships protecting Kuwaiti tankers that had been reflagged as American vessels during the Iran-Iraq War. Returning from a convoy on April 14, the frigate struck an Iranian contact mine, which blew a massive hole in the hull. The explosion broke the Roberts’s keel and knocked out its electrical power. The ship immediately began taking on water. But Capt. Rinn had prepared his crew for such an emergency, crew members recalled, and over four grueling hours they saved the vessel, which the Navy repaired and kept in service for another 27 years. The fight to save Samuel B. Roberts remains a case study in combat preparedness and a model emulated by successive generations of commanding officers, said Bryan McGrath, a retired U.S. Navy destroyer captain and consultant. “Captain Rinn had enormous influence in the way that captains who commanded after him approached their job,” Capt. McGrath said. “What we all heard from our captains and what we all heard from the training pipeline was a similar story: We’re going to practice this over and again, until it’s perfect. And then we’re going to practice it perfectly over and over again. “That’s what I told my crew maybe 500 times. That is the legacy of Paul Rinn and the lessons that came out of Samuel B. Roberts: They were ready. They had prepared. They had actually thought through things. And they performed when it was most important.” We unexpectedly lost Captain Rinn last week; Paul X. Rinn, a Vietnam War veteran and ship captain who in 1988 led a desperate effort to save a U.S. Navy vessel from sinking after it struck an Iranian mine, died Aug. 3. He was 75. His inspirational leadership in the face of crisis made him an icon among fellow sailors long after his retirement at the rank of captain in 1997. He served 29 years in the Navy and settled in Fairfax Station, eventually turning full-time to lecturing on military leadership and shipboard operations at the service’s professional schools and elsewhere. Capt. Rinn died unexpectedly while in Boston for a speaking engagement, his family said. A cause of death was not provided. Very nice job by David Larter and Brad Pensiton. You should take the time to read the whole obit. If you didn't catch the interview we did with Brad on Midrats about his book on Captain Rinn's crew and the Sammy B., No Higher Honor. You can catch the podcast here. View the full article

The legal system works at the speed of smell, but we are getting closer to what may be one of the most important civil rights cases to come in front of the Supreme Court in the last half century. There are new readers coming to CDRSalamander every day, so once again let me set the foundation. The cornerstones are rather simple but essential for our wondrously polyglot experimental republic to survive; persons deserve to be judged as individuals; individuals deserve equal opportunity; people deserve to be judged by the content of their character, not the color of their skin; no favor should be given to nor ill-favor placed on any person based on something they can do nothing about – their race, creed, color, or national origin, etc. With that out of the way – it really should be self-evident, but the excessively emotive on this topic sometimes need a reminder – let us get back to the subject of todays DivThu. The case in question is Students for Fair Admission v. President and Fellows of Harvard College & the University of North Carolina that is finally on the docket of SCOTUS. In summary, universities have shamefully been discriminating against different ethnic groups in favor of those they deem more desirable. Merit, objective criteria for success, academic excellence, and all those things one would expect to be determining factors are not what is driving the zero-sum game that is admissions. No, the diversity industry (those who derive financial, power, or psychological gain from promoting discrimination), have their metrics and they must be met. Turning their stated goals on it head, they are not about equal opportunity or the elimination of discrimination or sectarian division, instead they have decided that they want to use these evil methods to pursue their own goal; equity. Stuck in a mid-20th Century mindset, they desire to legally be able to discriminate against people born in the 21st Century based on their race, creed, color, etc while at the same time, picking a desired group that they want to give preferential treatment to based on self-identified criteria. Regulars of DivThu know the extended commentary. New people can click the “Diversity” tab to review if they wish. This is where the military comes in. It didn't have to weigh in on this political topic - but ideologs decided they needed a shield of political retired General and Flag Officers ... so be it. Shots fired. Let the battle be joined. As we have documented through the last two decades – the military (especially at the service academies) have protested that they do not discriminate in admissions, but of course we know they do. Many of us have seen the data. As the data became known, then the excuses and smoke screens came out, but in the last half decade or more as the light of truth became brighter on their actions, they decide to turn in to the skid and claim, “Yes, we discriminate. Discrimination is a good thing. We will keep doing it. You will like it, and if you protest against our bigotry we will call you a bigot.” You know the drill. In this case that involves college admissions, the natsec left decided that they would service-shame the civilian side of the house by gathering a bunch of retired senior officers to – and this is the amazing part – say, “Universities need to be allowed to discriminate, because if you don’t let them discriminate, then we won’t be able to discriminate. We love discrimination and we will lose all our wars if we can’t continue.” Strange flex, and I’m taking a little artistic license with their verbiage, but there it is. Well, some interesting things have come out that connect two cases, one from 2015, and the other the one that is the subject in today’s post. I’d like you to look over two amici curiae. The first one from 2015’s Fisher vs. University of Texas at Austin. You can read the details of the case here. There was an amici curiae filed in 2015 that you can read here signed by 34 retired senior officers, a former Senator and Medal of Honor recipient, and one of Bill Clinton’s Army Secretary, Joe Reeder. Remember that name…he is one of the major players in the 2015 and 2022 efforts. In their amici curiae they state; In Grutter, Justice O’Connor, writing for the majority, stated: It has been 25 years since Justice Powell first approved the use of race to further an interest in student body diversity in the context of public higher education. . . . We expect that 25 years from now, the use of racial preferences will no longer be necessary to further the interest approved today. 539 U.S. at 343. History may prove Justice O’Connor’s prediction prescient, but the day that racial preferences are no longer necessary to achieve student body diversity in the context of public higher education has not yet arrived. That was always a great gift to those who have been fighting this fight for so long. At last, a high profile “Ref. A” out in the open so that no one is silent due to a whole variety of reasons, that, yes, the military does discriminate. People – though a shrinking pool of the ideological and ignorant – still claim that this does not take place, but even those who did not see it firsthand now at least had a Ref. A. to push So, we now have Students for Fair Admission v. President and Fellows of Harvard College & the University of North Carolina. If you need the details of that case, click here. We have a 2022 amici curiae for this case as well with Joe Reeder and his law firm again at the front. We have this time 35 (33 retired GOFO plus Sen. Kerry and Reeder) signing on vice 36. Their Summary of the Argument seven years later from Fisher reads in part; Prohibiting educational institutions from using modest, race-conscious admissions policies would impair the military’s ability to maintain diverse leadership, and thereby seriously undermine its institutional legitimacy and operational effectiveness. Amici respectfully request that, in considering whether to reverse decades of precedent affirming the constitutionality of such admissions policies, the Court will continue to consider how such policies enable the military to serve our Nation’s security interests. What a gift to truth. Their policies can never survive the light of day. They can try to defend it – but especially as our nation becomes even more mixed-heritage – as the people are WAY ahead of the entrenched sectarians – fewer people are going to see any positive attribute to having government institutions line up with some outdated “one drop” rule, or look the other way to red in tooth and claw racial self-identification fraud for fun and profit. Nope, however, there are some retire GOFO who are quite happy to. Let’s look at those 34 GOFO who signed on in 2015 and see which way the wind is blowing. Of those 34 GOFO, 15 returned to sign the 2022 document. Huh. What about the other 19? Well, three have passed away (Clemins, Griffith, and Neal) and one LTG Becton, USA (Ret.) is 96 years old. That leaves 15 who decided that 2022 is a different time and it was time to reassess. Those who signed on in 2015 but did not return in 2022 were Abizaid, Brown, Casey, Dunwoody, Fogleman, Giambastiani, Keane, Maddox, Magnus, Powell, Prueder, Regni, Rondwau, Schwartz, and Tilelli. The highest profile the non-repeats are Abizaid, Casey, Fogleman, Keane, & Powell. That begs the question, "What caused them not to join?" They will have to answer that on their own. Who are the repeat defender who are doubling down on pro-discrimination? Blair, Christman, Clark, Hill, Inman, Jumper, Lennox, Lyles, Mullen (of course), Myers, and Oelstrom. Look aback at who the high-profile non-repeats are. That is quite the group who did not return. Who replaced them? Abbot, Bolden, Bostick, Brooks, Carter, Caslen, Dunford, Haney, Johnson, McRaven (of course), Miller, Robinson, and Scaparotti. Who is high-profile in this group? Dunford, McRaven, and Scaparotti I think. This is a great filtering mechanism to see who is who in the zoo, so to speak. A Salamander Pardon to 2015 alumni will be provided to those who did not show up in 2022, and BZ to a few high profile people whose name is not on either and will given a respectful nod to. However, to come back in 2022 knowing the details of what this case is … that is just plain clear as day what these people support. Noted. A final note, an organization called Veterans for Fairness and Merit also submitted an amici curiae for the latest case. You can read it in full here, but of note; remember the alumni from 2015? General Ronald R. Fogleman, USAF (Ret.) is on that amici curiae. He saw the light and didn’t just demur, put his name to it. BZ. Watch this case. It is time that we meet the promise of our nation’s founding and to address the reality of the 21st Century. The time for racial discrimination and preferences is over. No more sectarianism. View the full article

Americas Lockheed Martin won a $12.9 million deal for AEGIS design agent field engineering services. Aegis is an integrated missile guidance system used on US Navy and allied ships to protect the battle group. Work will take place in Virginia, California, Hawaii, Japan, Washington and California. Estimated completion date is in September 2023. The US Army is integrating a 20 kW-class laser weapon system into its new Infantry Squad Vehicle (ISV) to help soldiers down smaller unmanned aerial systems (UASs), according to the director of the service’s Rapid Capabilities and Critical Technologies Office Lieutenant General Neil Thurgood. The three-star general spoke at the Space and Missile Defense symposium about a host of programmes under his purview including directed energy initiatives. At the event, he announced that senior service leaders recently approved the development of an Army Multi-Purpose High Energy Laser (AMP-HEL) prototype that they want completed by the end of September 2023. Middle East & Africa Mali on Tuesday received military jets and a combat helicopter from Russia. During a ceremony, L-39 and Sukhoi-25 jets as well as Mi-24P helicopter gunships were displayed. No information was disclosed about the conditions for acquiring the gunships. Previous Russian arms deliveries made public this year, were helicopters and surveillance radars as well as mobile radar systems. Europe Babcock International has signed it’s second deal in a fortnight to aimed at offering Israeli technologies for British defense programs. The British company’s latest agreement with Israel Aerospace Industries and its subsidiary Elta Systems is aimed at proposing a radar for the Defence Ministry’s Serpens program. The Spanish military took delivery of a THeMIS robotic vehicle, made by Estonia’s Milrem Robotics, to gauge how unmanned ground technology can improve operations of its ground forces, the company announced August 9. The evaluation comes as some European armies are in the market to equip their soldiers with robots for anything from cargo carrying to surveillance and attack missions. Asia-Pacific Taiwan’s army held another live-fire drill Thursday after Beijing ended its largest-ever military exercises around the island and repeated threats to bring the self-ruled democracy under its control. China announced carrying out fresh military drills around Taiwan Monday, days after US House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s visit to the island escalated tensions between the two powers. Today’s Video WATCH: Mi-24P In War Thunder : A Basic Review View the full article

Americas BAE Systems Information and Electronic Systems won a $13.5 million order, which provides for the ALR-56M radar warning receiver, C-130J Block Cycle F, Operational Flight Program and Mission Data File Generation updates and system services. Work will be performed in Totowa, New Jersey, and is expected to be completed August 9, 2024. Boeing won a $278 million ordering agreement for the procurement of F/A-18 aircraft consumable parts. This is a five-year base contract with one five-year option period. The performance completion date is August 8, 2027. Using military service is the Navy. Type of appropriation is fiscal 2022 through 2027 defense working capital funds. The contracting activity is the Defense Logistics Agency Aviation, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. Boeing has provided over 430 F/A-18E/Fs to the Navy since the early 2000s. The aircraft serves as the frontline strike fighter of the service branch, supporting air combat operations from aircraft carriers. Middle East & Africa Several types of previously unseen armoured vehicle and unmanned air vehicles (UAVs) were displayed during a parade held by the Armed Forces of Côte d’Ivoire (FACI) on August 7. TV coverage of the parade in Yamoussoukro to commemorate the 62nd anniversary of the country’s independence showed it included 20 of the FACI’s new Otokar Cobra II light armoured vehicles (LAVs), including an ambulance and a recovery vehicle. Europe Lockheed Martin won a $524 million modification, which increases the ceiling to procure long-lead time materials, parts, components, and effort for the production of seven Lot 15 F-35A aircraft, two Lot 15 F-35B aircraft, seven Lot 16 F-35A, and two Lot 16 F-35B aircraft for the government of Italy. Work will take place on Texas, California, the UK, Italy, Florida, New Hampshire, Maryland and Japan. Estimated completion will be in June 2025. Asia-Pacific South Korea’s government stressed Wednesday it will make its own decisions in strengthening its defenses against North Korean threats, rejecting Chinese calls that it continue the polices of Seoul’s previous government that refrained from adding more US anti-missile batteries that are strongly opposed by Beijing. The differences between South Korea and China underscored a reemerging rift between the countries just a day after their top diplomats met in eastern China and expressed hope that the issue wouldn’t become a “stumbling stone” in relations. Bilateral ties went downhill in 2017 when South Korea installed a missile battery employing the THAAD, in response to nuclear and missile threats from North Korea. The Philippines has scrapped an order for 16 Russian military helicopters, an official confirmed Wednesday, following reports former president Rodrigo Duterte decided to cancel it due to US sanctions on Moscow. Manila agreed in November to pay $228 million for the Mi-17 helicopters, as it seeks to modernize its military hardware. Today’s Video WATCH: Philippines cancels Russian helicopter deal due to US sanctions View the full article

Was it Ukrainian Special Operations forces? Did the Ukrainians operationalize their Grom SRBM? Did the USA sneak in some ATACMS along with HARM missiles to strike Saki Airbase in Russian occupied Crimea? My bet is in that order, and in time we will find out … but there is one thing I do know for sure; this is just another reminder that this regional conflict is telling us a lot about what we need to understand about the future of war that will manifest itself in the likely big war to come in the Western Pacific. Multiple explosions on Tuesday rocked a Russian air base in occupied Crimea — killing at least one and wounding several others, Russian authorities said. Videos circulating on social media purported to show large explosions at a military airfield in the Saki district of Crimea, a disputed peninsula annexed by Russian forces in 2014. Russian state media reported one death at the airfield, and at least five wounded. “We have blasts at the airfield. All the windows are broken,” Viktoria Kazmirova, deputy head of the occupation government in Crimea, told Russian outlet TASS. Local residents reported hearing 12 explosions coming from the base. Russian officials said the explosions were caused by the detonation of several ammunition stores. Not unlike how the Spanish Civil War gave hints to what WWII would look like, the Russo-Ukrainian War today is showing shadows of what is to come. From drones, to highly accurate long range precision fires by conventional ballistic and cruise missiles, to exceptionally well-trained special forces – if you have a high percentage of your air forces, supply depots, maintenance facilities, and ammunition magazines within range of your enemy – if they have the ability, they will attack them. If you concentrate your forces, you distill your operational risk to an essential vulnerability too attractive not to attack. The Russians are lucky that the pre-war Ukrainian government and its blinkered Western advisors did not have the Ukrainians properly ready for the war that came this February. America and her allies do not have that luxury in the Pacific west of Wake. There is no larger power who will send us meaningful amounts of aid to cover our peace time distraction. The People’s Republic of China’s rocket forces have our bases covered. You can safely assume that the PRC’s clandestine services are good and well set. They know what needs to be done. They have been preparing for decades and the Russo-Ukrainian War shows they were on the correct path. If we continue to assume that we will be able to have access and use of these fixed facilities in any future conflict for more than a day or two, we are setting ourselves up for an inability to operate forward. Yes, this is an election season, but time is short and our leaders need to act now. We need to start to better distribute our risk, faster – especially maintenance and rearming. Otherwise, we will find ourselves – once again – pushed back east of Wake and south of New Guinea for the second time in a century in the opening months of a global war that will last years – one fate does not guarantee we will win this time. Photo credit NZHerald. View the full article

Americas General Dynamics Land Systems won a $99.8 million deal for M1 Abrams tank sight units with containers. This was a competitive acquisition with one response received. The M1A1/2 Abrams main battle tank is manufactured by General Dynamics Land Systems. Work will take place in Alabama. Estimated completion date is December 31, 2029. The US Navy has carried out a demonstration of the MQ-8C Expeditionary Advanced Base Operations (EABO) concept during Exercise Resolute Hunter. The exercise took place at San Clemente Island from June 21 to July 1. HSC-23 flew the unmanned rotorcraft for 23 hours during this period. It had taken off from Point Mugu and flown to San Clemente before control was handed over to a Portable Mission Control Station (MCS-P) deployed there. “Fire Scout is the Navy’s only unmanned helicopter with the ability to deploy from a ship or land with ISR&T at the extended range required for future warfighting,” said Capt. Dennis Monagle, Fire Scout program manager. Middle East & Africa The US Army awarded Textron Systems a $9 million modification for an Aerosonde MK4.7 aircraft. Work will be performed in Hunt Valley, Maryland, with an estimated completion date of September 27, 2023. Fiscal 2021 Foreign Military Sales to Nigeria in the full amount were obligated at the time of the award. Europe The Czech Republic starts negotiations with Israel to purchase three Heron drones including ground control stations, data terminals, and shipping containers. The acquisition comes as part of the Czech Army’s “Capability Building Concept,” an initiative to build up the service’s unmanned aerial vehicles (UAV) capabilities for aerial reconnaissance, combat support, and ground unit protection. Asia-Pacific An air combat training programme for Australia’s Boeing F/A-18F Super Hornet and E/A-18G Growler aircrews has been upgraded and extended. The Australian Department of Defence (DoD) inked a new five-year, $76.4 million contract to enhance the ground-based training of pilots and personnel. Austal has delivered its second of eight Evolved Cape Class patrol boats to the Royal Australian Navy after completion in Henderson, Western Australia. The ship was commissioned as the ADV Cape Peron under the Commonwealth of Australia. The first of its class, the ADV Cape Otway, was delivered to the navy in March after 18 months of construction. The six remaining units are still under production at the shipyard, with a scheduled completion in 2024. Today’s Video WATCH: Never Underestimate the F/A-18 Block III Although It’s Not a Stealth Fighter Jet View the full article

Captain Rinn following his talk about Operation Ernest Will and the Samuel B. Roberts to Dr. Winkler’s Middle East Operation course at the USNA in 2019. The Naval Historical Foundation mourns the loss of Capt. Paul X. Rinn, an individual who embraced history as Surface Warfare Officer, a factor that likely contributed to the survival of his ship – the guided missile frigate Samuel B. Roberts (FFG-58) – when she hit an Iranian-laid mine on April 14, 1988 in the Persian Gulf. Captain Rinn’s embracing the heritage of the previous two ships to carry the Samuel B. Roberts name was eloquently told in Bradley ***ton’s No Higher Honor: Saving the USS Samuel B. Roberts in the Persian Gulf (Naval Institute Press 2006). Inspired by those Sailors who crewed the destroyer escort Samuel B. Roberts (DE 413) that took on Vice Admiral Kurita’s battleline off Samar in October 1944 during the battle of Leyte Gulf, Captain Rinn’s bluejackets “did not give up the ship” in keeping with the Navy’s finest traditions. Born in 1946 in the Bronx, Rinn entered the Navy through Officer Candidate School after attaining a degree from Marxist College. Following his commissioning in 1968, Rinn served in the destroyer Sarsfield (DD 837) that took a turn on the gun-line off South Vietnam and then served as a military advisor in Southeast Asia, managing a harrowing escape from Cambodia in 1975 as that country fell to the Khmer Rouge. After serving a tour his department head tour in the frigate Blakely (FF 1072), Rinn spent the last years of the 70s as an exchange officer with the Canadian Navy before he attended the Naval War College and simultaneously attained an MBA from Salve Regina University. Back to sea in 1981 as the XO of the frigate Bowen (FF 1079), Rinn continued to earn sea pay as the Chief Staff Officer of Destroyer Squadron 36 before receiving ordered to be the pre-commissioning CO of the Samuel B. Roberts. As the planking owning skipper, Rinn prepared his crew for assignment to the Persian Gulf where the U.S. Navy escorted American-flagged merchant ships during Operation Ernest Will. Rinn acted aggressively when Iranian forces challenged the shipping lanes. Rinn later came to realize the Iranians exploited that aggressiveness against him and his ship. In retaliation for the mining of Rinn’s ship, President Reagan approved of Operation Praying Mantis. April 18, 1988 would prove to be a devastating day for the Iranian Navy. Given his recent real-world experience Rinn led the Navy’s Surface Ship Combat Readiness and Survivability office in the Pentagon. Promoted to captain in 1990, he served as Executive Assistant to the Deputy Chief of Naval Operations for Surface Warfare. Rinn’s taking command of the guided missile cruiser Leyte Gulf (CG 58) in 1994 fell near the 50 th anniversary of that battle for which the ship was named. Returning to the Persian Gulf in Leyte Gulf, Rinn was the commander of the Iraqi Oil Embargo Task Force in the Red Sea and later Embargo Commander and Strike Commander in the Northern Persian Gulf. Following his tour on Leyte Gulf, Rinn served as a Special Assistant to two successive Chiefs of Naval Operations: Admirals Mike Boorda and Jay Johnson. Retiring from the United States Navy in 1997. He took an executive vice president position at the international consulting firm Whitney, Bradley and Brown, retiring again in 2012. As an active member of the Surface Navy Association, Rinn chaired that organizations History and Recognition committee and organized the annual History Night during the annual Surface Navy Association annual symposium. Rinn himself was inducted into the Surface Warfare Hall of Fame in 2008. Additional honors bestowed on Captain Rinn in addition to numerous military awards included receipt of the United States Congress’s 1989 National Day of Excellence Award, the 1989 Stephen Decatur Award for Operational Excellence and the 1995 U.S. Navy League John Paul Jones Award for Inspirational Leadership. Captain Rinn’s funeral service will be at 1100 on Friday, 12 August, at Saint Raymond of Penafort Catholic Church in Springfield, Virginia. The post Mourning the Loss of Captain Paul X. Rinn USN (Ret.) first appeared on Naval Historical Foundation. View the full article

By Matthew J Garretson, Friends of Naval Aviation, Pensacola, FL (2021). Reviewed by Ens. Sydney M. Willis, USN Blue Angels Decades Vol: 1 is a comprehensive history of the Blue Angels, the Navy’s Flight Demonstration Squadron, through the view of primary documents in their archives. The book transforms a collection of documents into a coherent timeline of the Blue Angels’ history. Mathew Garretson, the author, lets the documents speak for themselves and only adds captions to each providing more context or stories that connect them to make a cohesive timeline. Garretson is a naval historian who focuses primarily on aviation and is the print historian for the Blue Angels association. He has published numerous articles and one other book on aviation, Vought A-7 Corsair II: Legends of Warfare. Blue Angels Decades is unique because many of the sources included have never been collected or published in the history of the Flight Demonstration Squadron. The book is an excellent broad history for the casual aviation history buff but also serves as a research source for anyone studying the Blue Angels. The first volume of the planned eight-volume series is organized by year and covers the first ten years of the Squadron’s existence. Each year starts with a written introduction by Garretson outlining the significant events and any additional facts about that year. The Blue Angels tour card for that year’s season follows the introduction and provides an outline for that section. Every year is organized chronologically by event or related media and anecdotes between events. The organization works well for a book of so many different primary sources and makes it feel as if you are the one exploring the Blue Angels’ archives. The accomplishment of Blue Angels Decades is how Garretson is able to provide just enough captions and background to the sources to give detail and also fill in the gaps between the sources making it a cohesive timeline. In the book you can find newspaper clippings detailing their shows, flyers, plans of maneuvers, details of each aircraft they flew, personal photos, and stories from the pilots. The book opens with a foreword by a Blue Angels alumnus, Capt. Gil Rud, USN (Ret.), adding credibility and emphasizing the influence the Blue Angels, current and former, had on this book. Then the timeline begins in 1946, detailing the beginning of the Naval Flight Demonstration Team. They were not designated as a squadron yet and did not receive their Blue Angels moniker until 1947. Some of the highlights of the book are tidbits of information about the Blue Angels that could only be found in the archive or by talking to a former pilot, such as the creation of some of their famous maneuvers, documents about when they began performing the United States Naval Academy’s “June Week,” and more solemnly the personal stories about some of the fallen Blues of the decade. Garretson did a great job compiling so many different sources about the Blue Angels from the Naval Aviation Museum’s Blue Angels archives, his own collection, and from former Blue Angels and their families, but it is a lot. This is not a book one could sit down and read cover to cover, because to get the full effect of the documents included you might spend hours on a few pages reading the newspaper clippings and the stories and captions provided. However, the book is great for two things, casually flipping through and learning about the Blue Angels and as a resource for researching them. Blue Angels Decades brings the archives to you and would be perfect for the amateur historian or a student or academic beginning their research. Ensign Sydney M. Willis is a recent graduate of the U.S. Naval Academy. A lifelong pilot and aviation advocate, Garretson serves as the Managing Editor of Publications for the Air Traffic Control Association, Executive Director of the A-7 Corsair II Association, and as the Print Historian for the Blue Angels Association. Blue Angels: Decades, 1946-1955. 1. Vol. 1. 8 vols. By Matthew J Garretson (Pensacola, FL: 2021) The post Blue Angels: Decades, 1946-1955. 1. Vol. 1. 8 vols. first appeared on Naval Historical Foundation. View the full article

By Ken W. Sayers, McFarland Publishing (2021). Reviewed by Jeff Schultz Ken Sayers’s U.S. Navy Patrol Vessels: A History and Directory from World War I to Today provides a thorough look at the multitude of patrol vessels from the mid-19th century USS Michigan to the modern Cyclone-class which have served the United States Navy in varying capacities since World War I across many oceans and waterways. Sayers, a former USN officer who served on a Pacific Fleet destroyer, at the Pentagon, and later worked for IBM, assembled this 550-page tribute to the lesser US Navy surface combatants from the World Wars, into the Cold War conflicts and even the modern day. Sayers argues although widespread and utterly unsung, “patrol vessels punched above their weight,” [1] and due to their overlooked contribution, deserve more attention which thankfully they now receive. This ambitious volume is divided into acknowledgements, preface, glossary, introduction, bibliography, and index. In between, there are thirty-one chapters supported by many black and white photographs organized alphabetically primarily by hull type, while the last few chapters are more varied topics like “Patrol Potpourri” and “Patrol Vessel Transfers.” Sayers follows a general pattern of providing important details about each ship type and then offering “select” or “summary” histories to allow discussion of certain examples of the various ship classes without being able to offer comments on necessarily every vessel due to the occasionally vast number, although some chapters do offer individual histories. Owing to the many chapters covering thousands of varied surface craft below destroyer size, a handful of examples will be highlighted to show the range and detail of his analysis of these smaller but vital combatants which range alphabetically from the Patrol Air Cushion Vehicles (PACV), to chapters like the Experimental Patrol Rescue Escorts (EPCER), the Patrol Gunboat Hydrofoils (PGH), the River Gunboats (PR), the Motor Torpedo Boats (PT), the Fast Patrol Boats (PTF), and finally to the Coastal Patrol Yachts (PYc) which grace the pages of this exhaustive work. In Chapter 3 Sayers discusses the steel-hulled 173-foot-long submarine chasers (PC) of World War II meant to relieve heavier escorts from coastal and harbor duties. A photo features PC-564, which fought in a little-known March 1945 battle against Kriegsmarine minesweepers off Granville, France in a surprise raid from the starving German-occupied Channel Islands. This vessel, although run aground, later served the US Navy as training vessel USS Chadron until finally transferred to the South Koreans in 1964 as Seoraksan. [41] In Chapter 9 Sayers explores the Patrol Craft Fast (PCF) or “Swift” boat which proved itself in the innumerable South Vietnamese coastal and riverine settings. These off-the-shelf oil company support aluminum-hulled vessels filled the gap between the smaller Patrol Boat River (PBR) [Chapter 2] and the Asheville-class Motor Gunboats (PGM) [Chapter 19] that operated offshore. PCFs conducted patrol, troop insertion, and surveillance missions such as during Operation Market Time, among many other tasks. PCFs were among the many vessels handed over to the South Vietnamese Navy as part of Nixon’s Vietnamization program. [122-133] In Chapter 12, Sayers forays into the River Rouge Plant’s Eagle Boats (PE) which occupy a convoluted place in World War I history as Henry Ford’s mass-produced contribution which contrary to his grandiose claims, did not arrive in time for the war, nor were that easy to produce. Some served in the 1919 Allied Intervention in North Russia, with the Coast Guard during Prohibition and in World War II. The only Eagle lost to enemy action, Eagle 56, escorted convoys and sank in the Gulf of Maine in 1945 due to a U-boat attack. [158-167] In Chapter 15, Sayers examines the Prewar Gunboats (PG), including the USS Wilmington (PG-9), which served the US Navy almost 60 years, spanning two centuries. Starting with the Spanish-American War, the storied gunboat later spent WWI in the Pacific until 1922, then the Great Lakes in the 1930s, was renamed Dover and served as convoy escort and gunnery training vessel until war’s end. [204-205] In Chapter 25, Sayers delves into the thirty-two Patrol Yachts (PY) used by the US Navy in the World Wars. Of particular interest is USS Isabel (PY-10), which is significant for service in both major conflicts but also because much of that service was in the Pacific Ocean and nearby waterways. In a far-reaching and outsized career Isabel fought U-boats in World War I, served as flagship of the Yangtze River Patrol, conducted a secret pre-World War II reconnaissance mission off Japanese-occupied Indochina, survived hostile air attacks, escorted convoys, nearly missed Imperial Japanese naval forces multiple times and served as a training vessel for Allied submarines operating from Fremantle, Australia. [372-375] Lastly, in Chapter 28 “Patrol Potpourri,” Sayers profiles the Hiddensee, an ex-Volksmarine (East German) Tarantul I guided missile patrol craft, which after German reunification came under US Navy control in 1991. This interesting floating Cold War artifact served as a test platform for several years and is now a museum ship in Massachusetts for visitors to enjoy. [434-435] Ken Sayers’s U.S. Navy Patrol Vessels: A History and Directory from World War I to Today should find a wide audience, not only among veterans, their families, and researchers alike but also naval enthusiasts. Detailed access to over 3,000 US Navy vessels spanning such a wide range of American history makes this a prized encyclopedic gem that demonstrates the importance of these overlooked “bantam warriors” [246] in an accessible and coherent manner. Jeff Schultz teaches at a community college in northeastern Pennsylvania. Ken W. Sayers is a former naval officer who served on board a Pacific Fleet destroyer escort and in the Pentagon on the staff of the Assistant Secretary of Defense (Public Affairs). An IBM veteran, he lives in Ridgefield, Connecticut. U.S. Navy Patrol Vessels: A History and Directory from World War I to Today. By Ken W. Sayers (Jefferson, North Carolina: 2021) The post U.S. Navy Patrol Vessels: A History and Directory from World War I to Today first appeared on Naval Historical Foundation. View the full article

Last Wednesday I had a few observations on Jerry Hendrix's latest article over at National Review, “The Navy’s Littoral Hubris.” Yesterday in comments, a man familiar to readers here, former Deputy Secretary of Defense Bob Work, weighed in with some counterpoints that I feel need to be brought above the fold for your consideration. With his permission, I've copied his comments in full. There are the bones of one hell of a book here in six short paragraphs. Bob, over to you; As he always does, my good friend Jerry writes a compelling, well written post. However, I think he misses an important point. The problems the Navy has faced has less to do about technological hubris and more with incompetence in developing cost-informed requirements and executable support processes. Let's start with the Ford CVN. Back in the day-- around the time of the 1993 Bottom Up Review, long before the word transformation had found its way into Pentagon thinking--the Navy and Air Force were competing for the "rapid halt" mission. The thinking went that the enemy could launch an invasion of allied territory at a time of their own choosing. The job of the Joint Force was to halt the invasion as quickly as possible through intense guided munitions bombardment. The Air Force argued the best way to do this was using bombers and regionally based aircraft, which enjoyed a big advantage in sortie rates from land bases. The Navy was intent on proving they could match sortie generation rates from forward deployed carriers. To do that, they needed a new electromagnetic catapult system; an electromagnetic arresting system; new high speed low drag elevators, etc etc etc. They called for these new capabilities with no clear understanding of the cost to get them, or a sensible land-based prototyping and testing approach to work out the bugs before shipboard integration. It is true that OSD demanded that all the new technologies be incorporated into the first ship of class of the new CVNX (later Ford), rather than inserting them over the first three hulls. That caused a technology integration overload. But the original sin was setting new requirements with no clue how much it might cost to get them. Then came the DD-21, aka DD(X), aka DDG-1000. The surface community knew that the 31-ship Spruance class was going to start decommissioning starting in 2005 (that was the plan, anyway). The community needed a plan to replace them. The community was also tired of taking a back seat behind the carrier and sub forces, a circumstance they were force to tolerate throughout the long Cold War. And it wanted to get in on the rapid halt mission. The arsenal ship was a conceptual start point. But the surface community wanted something even more exotic. So they called for a stealthy surface ship with deep magazines--missiles, or guns, or both. OSD was not the one pushing the stealth design. That was all Navy. And, in the end, the Navy designed a 15,000-ton battle cruiser with a hull that was literally too expensive to produce. The ship suffered the same technological overload at the Ford class, but the over-spec-ing of the ship was all Navy, not OSD. Again, these were sins of the Navy. The LCS is a more complicated story. OSD told the Navy that OSD would not support their DD(X) unless there was a smaller combatant in the Navy's battle force. The Navy decided to get out of the frigate business during the 1997 QDR--again, a Navy decision. This meant the smallest surface combatant in the 21st century fleet would have a full load displacement of nearly 9,000 tons (DDG-51 Flt I). OSD didn't think the Navy could afford to build and maintain such a fleet. They were, of course, spot on...see fleet of today. The ONLY requirement OSD levied on the LCS program was that the Navy needed to be able to build three of the ships for the same cost as a DDG-51. And guess what? The Navy hit that mark. We just forget about it--and how important a metric it was. Cost aside, the crewing, training, maintenance and deployment process decisions were all the Navy's to make. But every choice ultimately proved to be beyond the ability of the surface community to execute them. This was a case of process, not technological, overload. It appears the surface community may be finally figuring things out on the ship. But no objective review of the LCS fleet transition plan would conclude anything other than it was abysmally bungled. The reason I think we have to remember these vignettes is we need to ask ourselves if we are about ready to repeat the process. IT DOES NOT MATTER THAT THE NAVY CHOSE A PROVEN DESIGN FOR FFGX. The Navy is cramming as many requirements and capabilities into the FFGX hull as they can. Eric Lab at CBO is convinced the Navy has once again overspec'd the ship and underestimated the costs to build it. I hope he is wrong. But if we can't build a minimum of two FFGXs for the cost of a DDG FltIII, it is not clear it is worth the cost, or the smaller fleet it will inevitably lead to. Robert O. Work spent 27 years on active duty as a Marine artillery and MAGTF officer. He is a former Undersecretary of the Navy and Chief Executive Officer of the Center for a New American Security. He served as the Deputy Secretary of Defense alongside three Secretaries of Defense spanning both the Obama and Trump administrations. View the full article

Americas Lockheed Martin won a $10.4 million contract modification to convert six AGM-158B missiles to test assets and nine weapon systems simulators. Work will be performed in Orlando and is expected to be completed October 31, 2024. The AGM-158 JASSM (Joint Air-to-Surface Standoff Missile) is an autonomous, long-range missile developed and produced by the Lockheed Martin. Raytheon Missiles & Defense won a $57 million modification to exercise options for the Over-the-Horizon Weapon System (OTH-WS) Encanistered Missiles. OTH-WS was announced in May 2018 with a total value of $847.61 million. It is intended to provide a long range anti-ship, over-the-horizon offensive anti-surface warfare capability to USN. The system comprises an operator interface console, Naval Strike Missile and the missile launcher, the DoD announced on August 5. Work will take place in Norway, Arizona, Germany, Kentucky, Texas and Arkansas. Estimated completion will be by September 2025. Middle East & Africa A ceasefire between Israel and Palestinian militants in the Gaza Strip appears to be holding. The truce followed three days of violence with Israel targeting the Palestinian Islamic Jihad (PIJ) and militants firing rockets into Israel. At least 44 Palestinians died in the most serious flare-up since an 11-day conflict in May 2021. On Monday, Israel began lifting its blockade of the Strip, allowing the first fuel tanks to enter. Europe English maritime technology firm Kraken Technology Group has inked a memorandum of understanding with Thales for the ongoing development and systems provision for Kraken’s K50 maritime precision engagement platform. The collaboration includes the development of “advanced composite high-performance craft and hybrid powertrain solutions,” which will be built at a new engineering center. Thales will also potentially integrate a range of sensors and weapons equipment into the K50. Asia-Pacific China announced more military drills in the seas and airspace around Taiwan, a day after the scheduled end of exercises launched in protest against US House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s visit to the island. China’s Eastern Theatre Command said on Monday that it would conduct joint drills focusing on anti-submarine and sea assault operations – confirming the fears of some security analysts and diplomats that Beijing would continue to maintain pressure on Taiwan’s defences. Taiwan will hold live-fire military drills this week simulating a defense of the island against a Chinese invasion, officials said Monday, as Chines carries our new exercises around its neighbor. The island’s forces will hold anti-landing exercises in the southernmost county of Pingtung on Tuesday and Thursday, the Taiwanese army said. Today’s Video WATCH: AGM-158 JASSM Air-Launched Cruise Missile View the full article

The US military and her Commonwealth allies lost over 10,000 men killed in the Solomon Islands Campaign in WWII. Over 40 USN ships were sunk, 800 aircraft shot down. We killed almost 90,000 Japanese, sunk over 50 of her ships, and destroyed over 1,500 of her aircraft to kick her out. You should know the map and the names. How many warships do we have named after this campaign from battles to those who fought in it? How have we honored this legacy? How have we maintained this legacy? We've been reporting on our lack of stewardship in the islands of the Western Pacific for years now, and things are getting more attention, but still do not seem to be getting much better as, step by step, the People's Republic of China keeps advancing. The latest news? Chinese state-owned company is negotiating to buy a forestry planation with a deep-water port and World War II airstrip in Solomon Islands amid persistent concerns that China wants to establish a naval foothold in the South Pacific country. A delegation from China Forestry Group Corp. visited the plantation that covers most of Kolombangar Island in 2019, asking questions about the length of the wharf and depth of the water while showing little interest in the trees, Australian Broadcasting Corp. reported on Monday. The board of Kolombangara Forest Products Ltd., the takeover target known as KFPL which is owned by Taiwanese and Australian shareholders, wrote to the newly elected Australian government in May warning of the “risks/strategic threats” posed to Australia by such a sale, the ABC reported.If that name does not ring a bell, let me help you out a bit.On August 2, 1943, Moses and Koete were part of a team of eight scouts, working as indigenous guerrilla fighters, saboteurs, and spies behind enemy lines, feeding information on the movements of the Japanese back to the Allies. After witnessing an explosion at sea before dawn on August 2, they searched the atolls around Kolombangara for survivors of what they assumed to have been a shipwreck. On August 4 the scouts found the survivors, terribly dehydrated and sunburned, but alive. It transpired that a Japanese destroyer had cut an American torpedo boat in half and the surviving American crew had been swimming between atolls for days. This crew was led by a young lieutenant called John F. Kennedy.There is a lot of American history here - not that our professional historians teach it all that much anymore as opposed to their trendy group-think causes of the quarter. Also, what do you notice on this map? There she is, Vella Gulf ... as in the Battle of Vella Gulf;In Vella Gulf shortly before midnight, with the two divisions in formation 4,000 yards apart, they probed Blackett Strait; then turned north along the Kolombangara coast. Soon, radar contact was made with four Japanese destroyers carrying reinforcements for Kolombangara and closing on a course for Blackett Strait at a relative speed of nearly 50 knots. Less than ten minutes later, Division A-1 had maneuvered into position—exactly as planned—and fired 24 torpedoes. As it turned away to evade any Japanese response, Division A-2 crossed ahead of the oncoming Japanese formation to attack from a new direction. After what seemed like an eternity, Division A-1’s torpedoes hit all four Japanese ships, blasting the first three and holing the rudder of the fourth. Division A-2 promptly opened gun and torpedo fire, completing the destruction of the three destroyers while the fourth, unseen, got away. The two divisions lingered, trying to pick up survivors but they refused rescue; Division A-2 then followed Division A-1 in retiring down the Slot, having sustained no damage or casualties. The Battle of Vella Gulf, the U.S. Navy’s first independent destroyer action in the South Pacific, marked a turning point in American surface warfare. Coming a full year after the Guadalcanal landing, it showed that our weapons worked, that our doctrine was sound and that a surprise torpedo attack—delivered by destroyers as the primary attack unit—could be devastating to the enemy.We like that battle because we won - where a a few months earlier the Japanese got a "W" at the Battle of Klomangara. That is why we have a USS Vella Gulf (CG 72) and not a USS Klomangara. Why does this matter today - these old battles? The Solomon Islands were worth hundreds of thousands of lives last century for a reason. Nations may change in power dynamics in the Pacific, but geography does not. Look at the Pacific from the Chinese perspective and it all makes sense. If you want to delay the American navy from threatening your seaboard, you make her fight her way there. If you want to threaten SLOC between North American and Australia, you have to control the Solomons at a minimum. This is all known, or should be known. The Chinese sure know it. Chart credit to Rhodes Cartography. View the full article