Navy

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AN 8 26

Trump often attacks Democrats as being unsupportive of the military — a claim they aggressively push back against. But five and one-half months into the war with Iran, officers serving in the U.S. Navy are, according to i Paper reporter Simon Marks, feeling increasingly frustrated and feel like Trump and Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth are turning their backs on them.

"Families say the mental health of sailors is now at immediate risk," Marks reports in the UK-based i Paper. "They reported at least one incident in which a crew member was prevented by his colleagues from jumping overboard."

Marks describes conditions aboard the USS Abraham Lincoln, a warship where the crew is "plagued with a potentially deadly morale problem."

"Back in April, barely a month into Donald Trump's war with Iran, sailors serving on the nuclear-powered aircraft carrier started grousing on social media about dwindling food supplies," Marks explains. "Images sent to spouses and parents were leaked to the media and appeared to support claims that the ship's supplies were coming under growing pressure. Some 'meals' consisted of little more than a handful of boiled carrots and two dried-out slices of unidentifiable meat. Sailors aboard the nearby USS Tripoli were also lodging similar complaints. At the time, Hegseth denied any problems existed, claiming that the vessels had more than 30 days of food supplies for their crews ... But four months later, the crisis has intensified."

Marks, noting recent reporting from the Stars and Stripes, points out that families of U.S. Navy members addressed their worries during a recent town hall event in San Diego.

"Families reportedly warned Acting Secretary of the Navy Hung Cao that they were increasingly fearful of suicides among the men and women serving aboard the carrier, which has been at sea for more than 250 consecutive days, more than 40 of them engaged in combat with Iran," Marks writes. "Last month, the Lincoln set a new record, having spent longer continuously at sea without a port call than any U.S. aircraft carrier in history…. The 5000 men and women aboard the carrier say food and basic hygiene supplies are running low, physical and mental exhaustion is setting in, and letters and care packages sent from home have failed to reach the ship for months."

A U.S. Navy member quoted in the Stars and Stripes warned, "Our mental health and physical health is in danger. We need help."

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kaki

AN 11 24

President-elect Donald Trump’s decision to nominate as the U.S. Secretary of the Navy a financier, art collector, and MAGA megadonor with no military experience is coming under fire.

“It is my great honor to announce John Phelan as our next United States Secretary of the Navy!” declared Trump in a statement, deviating from his usual habit of acknowledging their status as a nominee. “John will be a tremendous force for our Naval Servicemembers, and a steadfast leader in advancing my America First vision. He will put the business of the U.S. Navy above all else.”

Trump claimed, “John has excelled in every endeavor, from founding and leading Rugger Management LLC, to co-founding MSD Capital, LP, the Private Investment Firm for Michael Dell, CEO of Dell Technologies. His Record of Success speaks for itself – A true Champion of American Enterprise and Ingenuity!”

The Independent noted, “According to the U.S. Code,the secretary of the Navy shall be appointed ‘from among persons most highly qualified for the position by reason of background and experience.'”

Phelan “donated $834,600 to Trump’s joint fundraising committee, Trump 47,” back in April, according to The Hill. In August, at his $38 million Aspen estate, Phelan hosted a “$25,000 to $500,000 a couple” fundraiser that reportedly generated $12 million for Trump.

“The dinner, which Trump reportedly flew in for on a private jet once owned by disgraced financier and convicted pedophile Jeffrey Epstein, was held at the $38 million home of art collectors and investors John and Amy Phelan, with Texas Gov. Greg Abbott, Rep. Lauren Boebert (R-CO), gambling mogul Steve Wynn, and billionaire Thomas Peterffy also in attendance,” The Daily Beast reported. “There were about 100 attendees at the event, which required couples to pony up $500,000 to serve on the host committee or at least $25,000 to attend at all.”

“If confirmed,” The Military Times reports, “Phelan would be the first permanent Navy secretary without military experience since 2009, when Donald Winter finished up his three-year term in the role. Unlike Winter, who previously had worked within the Pentagon and on Navy contracts at major defense firms, Phelan has little public connection to the sea service.”

Winter was nominated by Republican President George W. Bush.

“Of the 26 men to be confirmed as Navy secretary over the last 70 years, all but six have been veterans,” The Military Times also noted.

Critics are pointing to Phelan’s lack of relevant experience.

Paul Rieckhoff, the veterans’ activist and founder of Independent Veterans of America, Iraq and Afghanistan Veterans of America (IAVA), and Righteous Media, blasted Trump’s pick.

He warned, “of course, Phelan has not served in the Navy. Or any other branch of military service. But he is a big Trump donor. The least qualified and most overtly political cabinet in American history continues to expand. And #OurEnemiesAreCelebrating.”

Veteran foreign policy journalist Laura Rozen, pointing to Phelan’s bio at the nonprofit Spirit of America and the London School of Economics and Political Science, writes, “Harvard MBA, art collector, manages fund of Michael Dell’s money. dont see anything in his bio that has any national security.”

Kevin Baron, the award-winning military journalist and former executive editor of Defense One, responding to a report on Phelan’s nomination, wrote, “Who?”

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sec of def and navy repeated change.fire/quit acting?

https://www.alternet.org/2020/07/the-dystopian-fantasy-of-robotic-warfare-may-soon-become-a-reality/

us navy, accel amplify?

On March 26th, the coronavirus accomplished what no foreign adversary has been able to do since the end of World War II: it forced an American aircraft carrier, the USS Theodore Roosevelt, to suspend patrol operations and shelter in port. By the time that ship reached dock in Guam, hundreds of sailors had been infected with the disease and nearly the entire crew had to be evacuated. As news of the crisis aboard the TR (as the vessel is known) became public, word came out that at least 40 other U.S. warships, including the carrier USS *Ronald Reagan* and the guided-missile destroyer USS *Kidd*, were suffering from Covid-19 outbreaks. None of these approached the scale of the TR and, by June, the Navy was again able to deploy most of those ships on delayed schedules and/or with reduced crews. By then, however, it had become abundantly clear that the long-established U.S. strategy of relying on large, heavily armed warships to project power and defeat foreign adversaries was no longer fully sustainable in a pandemic-stricken world.

Just as the Navy was learning that its preference for big ships with large crews — typically packed into small spaces for extended periods of time –was quite literally proving a dead-end strategy (one of the infected sailors on the TR died of complications from Covid-19), the Army and Marine Corps were making a comparable discovery. Their favored strategy of partnering with local forces in far-flung parts of the world like Iraq, Japan, Kuwait, and South Korea, where local safeguards against infectious disease couldn’t always be relied on (or, as in Okinawa recently, Washington’s allies couldn’t count on the virus-free status of American forces), was similarly flawed. With U.S. and allied troops increasingly forced to remain in isolation from each other, it is proving difficult to conduct the usual joint training-and-combat exercises and operations.

In the short term, American defense officials have responded to such setbacks with various stopgap measures, including sending nuclear-capable B-1, B-2, and B-52 bombers on long-range “show-of-force” missions over contested areas like the Baltic Sea (think: Russia) or the South China Sea (think: China, of course). “We have the capability and capacity to provide long-range fires anywhere, anytime, and can bring overwhelming firepower — even during the pandemic,” insisted General Timothy Ray, commander of the Air Force Global Strike Command, after several such operations.

In another sign of tactical desperation, however, the Navy ordered the shattered crew of the TR out of lockdown in May so that the ship could participate in long-scheduled, China-threatening multi-carrier exercises in the western Pacific. A third of its crew, however, had to be left in hospitals or in quarantine on Guam. “We’re executing according to plan to return to sea and fighting through the virus is part of that,” said the ship’s new captain, Carlos Sardiello, as the TR prepared to depart that Pacific island. (He had been named captain on April 3rd after a letter the carrier’s previous skipper, Brett Crozier, wrote to superiors complaining of deteriorating shipboard health conditions was leaked to the media and the senior Navy leadership fired him.)

AD REMOVED FOR SUBSCRIBED USER

Such stopgap measures, and others like them now being undertaken by the Department of Defense, continue to provide the military with a sense of ongoing readiness, even aggressiveness, in a time of Covid-related restrictions. Were the current pandemic to fade away in the not-too-distant future and life return to what once passed for normal, they might prove adequate. Scientists are warning, however, that the coronavirus is likely to persist for a long time and that a vaccine — even if successfully developed — may not prove effective forever. Moreover, many virologists believe that further pandemics, potentially even more lethal than Covid-19, could be lurking on the horizon, meaning that there might never be a return to a pre-pandemic “normal.”

That being the case, Pentagon officials have been forced to acknowledge that the military foundations of Washington’s global strategy — particularly, the forward deployment of combat forces in close cooperation with allied forces — may have become invalid. In recognition of this harsh new reality, U.S. strategists are beginning to devise an entirely new blueprint for future war, American-style: one that would end, or at least greatly reduce, a dependence on hundreds of overseas garrisons and large manned warships, relying instead on killer robots, a myriad of unmanned vessels, and offshore bases.

Ships Without Sailors

In fact, the Navy’s plans to replace large manned vessels with small, unmanned ones was only accelerated by the outbreak of the pandemic. Several factors had already contributed to the trend: modern warships like nuclear-powered aircraft carriers and missile-armed cruisers had been growing ever more expensive to build. The latest, the USS Gerald R. Ford, has cost a whopping $13.2 billion and still doesn’t work to specifications. So even a profligately funded Pentagon can only afford to be constructing a few at a time. They are also proving increasingly vulnerable to the sorts of anti-ship missiles and torpedoes being developed by powers like China, while, as events on the TR suggest, they’re natural breeding grounds for infectious diseases.

Until the disaster aboard the Theodore Roosevelt, most worrisome were those Chinese land-based, anti-ship weapons capable of striking American carriers and cruisers in distant parts of the Pacific Ocean. This development had already forced naval planners to consider the possibility of keeping their most prized assets far from China’s shores in any potential shooting war, lest they be instantly lost to enemy fire. Rather than accept such a version of defeat before a battle even began, Navy officials had begun adopting a new strategy, sometimes called “distributed maritime operations,” in which smaller manned warships would, in the future, be accompanied into battle by large numbers of tiny, unmanned, missile-armed vessels, or maritime “killer robots.”

In a reflection of the Navy’s new thinking, the service’s surface warfare director, Rear Admiral Ronald Boxall, explained in 2019 that the future fleet, as designed, was to include “104 large surface combatants [and] 52 small surface combatants,” adding, “That’s a little upside down. Should I push out here and have more small platforms? I think the future fleet architecture study has intimated ‘yes,’ and our war gaming shows there is value in that… And when I look at the force, I think: Where can we use unmanned so that I can push it to a smaller platform?”

Think of this as an early public sign of the rise of naval robotic warfare, which is finally leaving dystopian futuristic fantasies for actual future battlefields. In the Navy’s version of this altered landscape, large numbers of unmanned vessels (both surface ships and submarines) will roam the world’s oceans, reporting periodically via electronic means to human operators ashore or on designated command ships. They may, however, operate for long periods on their own or in robotic “wolf packs.”

Such a vision has now been embraced by the senior Pentagon leadership, which sees the rapid procurement and deployment of such robotic vessels as the surest way of achieving the Navy’s (and President Trump’s) goal of a fleet of 355 ships at a time of potentially static defense budgets, recurring pandemics, and mounting foreign threats. “I think one of the ways you get [to the 355-ship level] quickly is moving toward lightly manned [vessels], which over time can be unmanned,” Secretary of Defense Mark Esper typically said in February. “We can go with lightly manned ships… You can build them so they’re optionally manned and then, depending on the scenario or the technology, at some point in time they can go unmanned… That would allow us to get our numbers up quickly, and I believe that we can get to 355, if not higher, by 2030.”

To begin to implement such an audacious plan, that very month the Pentagon requested $938 million for the next two fiscal years to procure three prototype large unmanned surface vessels (LUSVs) and another $56 million for the initial development of a medium-sized unmanned surface vessel (MUSV). If such efforts prove successful, the Navy wants another $2.1 billion from 2023 through 2025 to procure seven deployable LUSVs and one prototype MUSV.

Naval officials have, however, revealed little about the design or ultimate functioning of such robot warships. All that service’s 2021 budget request says is that “the unmanned surface vessel (USV) is a reconfigurable, multi-mission vessel designed to provide low cost, high endurance, reconfigurable ships able to accommodate various payloads for unmanned missions and augment the Navy’s manned surface force.”

Based on isolated reports in the military trade press, the most that can be known about such future (and futuristic) ships, is that they will resemble miniature destroyers, perhaps 200 feet long, with no crew quarters but a large array of guided missiles and anti-submarine weapons. Such vessels will also be equipped with sophisticated computer systems enabling them to operate autonomously for long periods of time and — under circumstances yet to be clarified — take offensive action on their own or in coordination with other unmanned vessels.

The future deployment of robot warshipson the high seas raises troubling questions. To what degree, for instance, will they be able to choose targets on their own for attack and annihilation? The Navy has yet to provide an adequate answer to this question, provoking disquiet among arms control and human rights advocates who fear that such ships could “go rogue” and start or escalate a conflict on their own. And that’s obviously a potential problem in a world of recurring pandemics where killer robots could prove the only types of ships the Navy dares deploy in large numbers.

Fighting from Afar

When it comes to the prospect of recurring pandemics, the ground combat forces of the Army and Marine Corps face a comparable dilemma.

Ever since the end of World War II, American military strategy has called for U.S. forces to “fight forward” — that is, on or near enemy territory rather than anywhere near the United States. This, in turn, has meant maintaining military alliances with numerous countries around the world so that American forces can be based on their soil, resulting in hundreds of U.S. military bases globally. In wartime, moreover, U.S. strategy assumes that many of these countries will provide troops for joint operations against a common enemy. To fight the Soviets in Europe, the U.S. created NATO and acquired garrisons throughout Western Europe; to fight communism in Asia, it established military ties with Japan, South Korea, South Vietnam, the Philippines, and other local powers, acquiring scores of bases there as well. When Afghanistan, Iran, Iraq, and Islamic terrorism became major targets of its military operations, the Pentagon forged ties with and acquired bases in Afghanistan, Bahrain, Djibouti, Iraq, Kuwait, Oman, Saudi Arabia, and the United Arab Emirates, among other places.

In a pandemic-free world, such a strategy offers numerous advantages for an imperial power. In time of war, for example, there’s no need to transport American troops (with all their heavy equipment) into the combat zone from bases thousands of miles away. However, in a world of recurring pandemics, such a vision is fast becoming a potentially unsustainable nightmare.

To begin with, it’s almost impossible to isolate thousands of U.S. soldiers and their families (who often accompany them on long-term deployments) from surrounding populations (or those populations from them). As a result, any viral outbreak outside base gates is likely to find its way inside and any outbreak on the base is likely to head in the opposite direction. This, in fact, occurred at numerous overseas facilities this spring. Camp Humphreys in South Korea, for example, was locked down after four military dependents, four American contractors, and four South Korean employees became infected with Covid-19. It was the same on several bases in Japan and on the island of Okinawa when Japanese employees tested positive for the virus (and, more recently, when U.S. military personnel at five bases there were found to have Covid-19). Add in Camp Lemonnier in Djibouti and Ahmed al-Jaber Air Base in Kuwait, not to speak of the fact that, in Europe, some 2,600 American soldiers have been placed in quarantine after suspected exposure to Covid-19. (And if the U.S. military is anxious about all this in other countries, think about how America’s allies feel at a moment when Donald Trump’s America has become the epicenter of the global coronavirus pandemic.)

A world of recurring pandemics will make it nearly impossible for U.S. forces to work side-by-side with their foreign counterparts, especially in poorer nations that lack adequate health and sanitation facilities. This is already true in Iraq and Afghanistan, where the coronavirus is thought to have spread widely among friendly local forces and American soldiers have been ordered to suspend joint training missions with them.

A return to the pre-Covid world appears increasingly unlikely, so the search is now on big time for a new guiding strategy for Army and Marine combat operations in the years to come. As with the Navy, this search actually began before the outbreak of the coronavirus, but has gained fresh urgency in its wake.

To insulate ground operations from the dangers of a pandemic-stricken planet, the two services are exploring a similar operating model: instead of deploying large, heavily-armed troop contingents close to enemy borders, they hope to station small, highly mobile forces on U.S.-controlled islands or at other reasonably remote locations, where they can fire long-range ballistic missiles at vital enemy assets with relative impunity. To further reduce the risk of illness or casualties, such forces will, over time, be augmented on the front lines by ever more “unmanned” creations, including armed machines — again those “killer robots” — designed to perform the duties of ordinary soldiers.

The Marine Corps’ version of this future combat model was first spelled out in Force Design 2030, a document released by Corps commandant General David Berger in the pandemic month of March 2020. Asserting that the Marines’ existing structure was unsuited to the world of tomorrow, he called for a radical restructuring of the force to eliminate heavy, human-operated weapons like tanks and instead increase mobility and long-range firepower with a variety of missiles and what he assumes will be a proliferation of unmanned systems. “Operating under the assumption that we will not receive additional resources,” he wrote, “we must divest certain existing capabilities and capacities to free resources for essential new capabilities.”Among those “new capabilities” that he considers crucial: additional unmanned aerial systems, or drones, that “can operate from ship, from shore, and [be] able to employ both [intelligence-]collection and lethal payloads.”

In its own long-range planning, the Army is placing an even greater reliance on creating a force of robots, or at least “optionally manned” systems. Anticipating a future of heavily-armed adversaries engaging U.S. forces in high-intensity warfare, it’s seeking to reduce troop exposure to enemy fire by designing all future combat-assault systems, including tanks, troop-carriers, and helicopters, to be either human-occupied or robotically self-directed as circumstances dictate. The Army’s next-generation infantry assault weapon, for instance, has been dubbed an optionally manned fighting vehicle (OMFV). As its name suggests, it is intended to operate with or without onboard human operators. The Army is also procuring a robotic utility vehicle, the squad multipurpose equipment transport (SMET), intended to carry 1,000 pounds of supplies and ammunition. Looking further into the future, that service has also begun development of a robotic combat vehicle (RCV), or a self-driving tank.

The Army is also speeding the development of long-range artillery and missile systems that will make attacks on enemy positions from well behind the front lines ever more central to any future battle with a major enemy. These include the extended range cannon artillery, an upgraded Paladin-armored howitzer with an extra-long barrel and supercharged propellant that should be able to hit targets 40 miles away,and the even more advanced precision strike missile (PrSM), a surface-to-surface ballistic missile with a range of at least 310 miles.

Many analysts, in fact, believe that the PrSM will be able to strike at far greater distances than that, putting critical enemy targets — air bases, radar sites, command centers — at risk from launch sites far to the rear of American forces. In case of war with China, this could mean firing missiles from friendly partner-nations like Japan or U.S.-controlled Pacific islands like Guam. Indeed, this possibility has alarmed Air Force supporters who fear that the Army is usurping the sorts of long-range strike missions traditionally assigned to combat aircraft.

A Genuine Strategic Redesign

All these plans and programs are being promoted to enable the U.S. military to continue performing its traditional missions of power projection and warfighting in a radically altered world. Seen from that perspective, measures like removing sailors from crowded warships, downsizing U.S. garrisons in distant lands, and replacing human combatants with robotic ones might seem sensible. But looked at from what might be called the vantage point of comprehensive security — or the advancement of all aspects of American safety and wellbeing — they appear staggeringly myopic.

If the scientists are right and the coronavirus will linger for a long period and, in the decades to come, be followed by other pandemics of equal or greater magnitude, the true future threats to American security could be microbiological (and economic), not military. After all, the current pandemic has already killed more Americans than died in the Korean and Vietnam wars combined, while triggering the worst economic downturn since the Great Depression. Imagine, then, what a more lethal pandemic might do. The country’s armed forces may still have an important role to play in such an environment — providing, for example, emergency medical assistance and protecting vital infrastructure — but fighting never-ending wars in distant lands and projecting power globally should not rank high when it comes to where taxpayer dollars go for “security” in such challenging times.

One thing is inescapable: as the disaster aboard the Theodore Roosevelt indicates, the U.S. military must reconsider how it arms and structures its forces and give serious thought to alternative models of organization. But focusing enormous resources on the replacement of pre-Covid ships and tanks with post-Covid killer robots for endless rounds of foreign wars is hardly in America’s ultimate security interest. There is, sadly, something highly robotic about such military thinking when it comes to this changing world of ours.

Michael T. Klare, a TomDispatch:{ regular:(style="box-sizing:border-box;outline:none;margin:0px;padding:0px"):}:, is the five-college professor emeritus of peace and world security studies at Hampshire College and a senior visiting fellow at the Arms Control Association. He is the author of 15 books, the latest of which is All Hell Breaking Loose: The Pentagon’s Perspective on Climate Change.

Naval leaders recommend reinstating fired commander who sounded the alarm about coronavirus outbreak: report

Alex Henderson April 29, 2020

Although former U.S. Navy Secretary Thomas Modly lambasted Capt. Brett Crozier for sounding the alarm about a coronavirus outbreak on board a Navy warship, Crozier has been widely hailed as…

so much for respect for military crozier got her's farewell from sailors

https://www.alternet.org/2020/04/its-not-shocking-the-navy-fired-a-commander-for-warning-of-coronavirus-threat-its-part-of-a-disturbing-pattern/

no lnx

It’s not shocking the Navy fired a commander for warning of coronavirus threat — it’s part of a disturbing pattern

Written by T. Christian Miller, Megan Rose / Pro Publica April 5, 2020

ProPublica is a Pulitzer Prize)

Capt. Brett Crozier, fired this week from command of the aircraft carrier USS Theodore Roosevelt, joins a growing list of Navy officers who attempted to raise concerns about the safety of their ships and crew, only to pay with their jobs.

Crozier wrote a letter dated March 30 warning that an outbreak of the coronavirus on his ship was a threat to his crew of some 4,000 sailors unless they disembarked and quarantined.

“We are not at war, and therefore cannot allow a single sailor to perish as a result of this pandemic unnecessarily,” Crozier wrote. “Decisive action is required now.”

We do not know all the facts that prompted the letter. But we know that once it was published in the San Francisco Chronicle, the acting secretary of the Navy, Thomas Modly, relieved Crozier of command. Crozier, 50, had been a rising star in the officer corps. He will remain in the Navy at his current rank, though his career future is uncertain. In viral videos, Crozier’s sailors can be seen cheering him loudly as he disembarks the Roosevelt, alone, before driving away.

Navy experts believe that the cumulative effects of the service’s decisions over the past several years to punish those who speak out will result in silencing sailors with legitimate concerns about their health and safety.

“This may have the effect of chilling the responses of other commanding officers because it will be perceived, fairly or not, as a shoot the messenger scenario,” said James Stavridis, a retired admiral and former head of the United States Naval Institute, who called for an investigation into the circumstances surrounding the dismissal.

The Navy’s top officer, Adm. Mike Gilday, initially praised Crozier’s attempt to warn his superiors. But the next day, Thursday, Modly, the Navy’s civilian boss, reversed course, telling reporters that he fired Crozier because he lost confidence in the officer for not using a secure email network to properly route his complaint.

Crozier’s unclassified email wound up with 20 or 30 other individuals and at some point was provided to the Chronicle reporters. Modly said the public airing of the complaint had unnecessarily alarmed sailors and provided enemies with information that exposed weaknesses on one of the country’s most important warships.

As part of our 2019 investigation into the incidents in the Navy’s 7th Fleet, its largest overseas presence, ProPublica found repeated instances of frontline commanders warning superiors of risks the fleet was facing — a lack of training, exhausted crews, deteriorating ships and equipment. Those warnings, all sent through the normal chain of command, were met with indifference.

Disaster in the fleet struck in June 2017, after the USS Fitzgerald, a destroyer, collided with a cargo ship in the Sea of Japan. Two months later, a second destroyer, the USS John S. McCain, collided with an oil tanker in the Singapore Strait. The two accidents cost the Navy 17 sailors — the biggest loss of life in maritime collisions in more than 40 years.

Navy investigations laid blame on nearly the entire chain of command in the 7th Fleet, punishing commanders and sailors for failing to properly train and equip its crews and ships.

Adm. Joseph Aucoin, the head of the 7th Fleet, was fired. Vice Adm. Thomas Rowden, who oversaw training, was forced from his job. Cmdr. Bryce Benson, captain of the Fitzgerald, was recommended for court-martial.

But ProPublica reported that all three men had repeatedly tried to warn higher-ups of dangerous safety issues in the vaunted fleet, based at Yokosuka, Japan. They argued to their superiors that the Navy was running ships in the 7th Fleet too hard, too fast. Their warnings were dismissed.

Some of the Navy’s criminal cases against the officers collapsed after court rulings found possible bias in the Navy’s prosecution.

Benson, the Fitzgerald commander whose court-martial case was dismissed, said that Crozier “was right to strongly advocate for the safety of his crew and it was wrong for the SecNav [secretary of the Navy] to fire him for doing so.”

Senior leaders “continue to under-resource ships at sea and are slow to respond to commanders’ pleas for assistance,” said Benson, who is now retired. “From one tragedy to the next, senior Navy leaders continue to break faith with the fleet.”

Dismissing Crozier, Benson said, “sends a clear message to commanders: The authority and responsibility that you enjoy is yours alone and an absolute liability even when under resourced and thinly supported.”

Modly emphasized that he did not intend his actions to discourage officers from coming forward to report their concerns through the chain of command.

“I have no doubt in my mind that Capt. Crozier did what he thought was in the best interests of the safety and well-being of his crew. Unfortunately, it did the opposite,” Modly said at a press conference.

But Crozier’s firing has raised alarm anew that the Navy is more interested in its public image than in fixing problems raised by its sailors. It did not go unnoticed by fellow officers that Crozier was dismissed within two days of his letter becoming public. Such haste is unusual, and raised questions about the due process afforded to Crozier.

Some now believe that the cumulative effects of the Navy’s decisions over the past several years to punish those who speak out will silence sailors who have legitimate concerns about their health and safety.

“His removal sends a really strong message that coming forward will end people’s careers,” said Mandy Smithberger, a military expert at the Project on Government Oversight. “Before this I’d say that risk was more so implied through both social and professional retaliation. This is much more explicit.”

Crozier’s firing comes amid increased concern that the Pentagon is not acting quickly enough to protect whistleblowers. Glenn Fine, the principal deputy inspector general for the Defense Department, testified that the agency has shown a reluctance to punish officials who take punitive action against whistleblowers.

“We have seen a disturbing trend in the DoD disagreeing with the results of our investigations or not taking disciplinary action in substantiated reprisal cases without adequate or persuasive explanations,” Fine testified in January to the House Committee on Oversight and Reform. “Failure to take action sends a message to agency managers that reprisal will be tolerated and also to potential whistleblowers that the system will not protect them.”

Navy commanders may be fired at any time by their superiors. And the captains of Navy ships are uniquely responsible for any mishaps on their ships.

A study published earlier this year of more than 2,000 disciplinary cases found that Navy commanders were historically dismissed for “crimes of command” — such as a ship colliding with another vessel or running aground.

More lately, however, the study documented that it has become harder to tell if those punished are being disciplined less because of their performance and more because they had either internally or publicly called the Navy out for neglect.

“In the modern Navy,” wrote Capt. Michael Junge in the Naval War College Review, “a commander is most likely to be removed for personal misconduct or when the crime of command includes one or all of the following elements: death, press coverage, or significant damage to the Navy, whether materially or to its reputation.”

Do you have access to information about how the Navy, the Air Force, the Marine Corps, or the Army is responding to the coronavirus that should be public? Email t.christian.miller@propublica.org or megan.rose@propublica.org or robert.raturechi@propublica.org. Here’s how tosend tips and documents to ProPublica securely.

For more coverage, read ProPublica’s previous reporting on the Disaster in the Pacific.

Filed under:

Health Care

https://www.alternet.org/2019/12/potential-for-sudden-and-extreme-change-new-climate-report-warns-a-feedback-loop-may-already-be-underway/

no lnx

‘Potential for sudden and extreme change’: New climate report warns a feedback loop ‘may already be underway’

Written by Jessica Corbett / Common DreamsDecember 11, 2019

In addition to warning that “the feedback to accelerating climate change may already be underway,” the U.S. government’s latest report on conditions in the Arctic reveals that temperatures in the region are persistently warming, leading to land and sea ice melting, permafrost thawing, species being threatened with extinction, and putting Native communities at risk.

The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration on Tuesday published its 14th annual Arctic Report Card (pdf), which warns that “the Arctic marine ecosystem and the communities that depend upon it continue to experience unprecedented changes as a result of warming air temperatures, declining sea ice, and warming waters.”

The new NOAA report “draws particular attention to the Bering Sea region, where declining winter sea ice exemplifies the potential for sudden and extreme change,” and features commentary from Indigenous elders.

“The Bering Sea, in particular, has experienced unprecedented declines in sea ice over the last two years, with resulting changes in algae growth to include observations of thepresence of harmful algal blooms,” Clark University polar scientist Karen Frey, lead author of one of the report’s chapters, said in a statement.

Zack Labe

@ZLabe

The annual @NOAA Arctic Report Card is available today for 2019. It discusses recent changes in the Arctic, extreme events, and broad implications for the Earth system.

Report: https://arctic.noaa.gov/Report-Card/Report-Card-2019 …

Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UlhU4vrE3e4&feature=emb_title …

Summary/News: https://www.washingtonpost.com/weather/2019/12/10/arctic-may-have-crossed-key-threshold-emitting-billions-tons-carbon-into-air-long-dreaded-climate-feedback/ …

Infographic highlighting 2019's extreme events within the Arctic

Erich Osterberg, a Dartmouth College professor who has studied glaciers, told PBS NewsHour that “I think the headline from this report is that the Arctic is in real trouble. If this were an annual health check-up, I think we’d have to say that the Arctic is chronically sick and getting worse. 2019 was a particularly bad year for the Arctic.”

Osterberg, who did not contribute to the report, highlighted that this year saw the second-warmest average annual land surface air temperature on record, which led to significant sea ice loss in the Arctic Ocean and melting of glaciers on Greenland—both of which cause sea level rise.

Major findings include observations about rising temperatures, the Greenland Ice Sheet, North American Arctic snow cover, Tundra greening,thawing permafrost, sea ice extent, thickness of sea ice, ocean primary productivity, wildlife population declines, winter sea ice, and northerly shifts in the distribution of fish species.

Andrew Freedman

@afreedma

This is a BIG deal, and a finding that's a bit buried in the @noaa Arctic Report Card out today. https://www.washingtonpost.com/weather/2019/12/10/arctic-may-have-crossed-key-threshold-emitting-billions-tons-carbon-into-air-long-dreaded-climate-feedback/ …

The Arctic may have crossed key threshold, emitting billions of tons of carbon into the air, in a...

A new federal report on the Arctic finds the region is in the midst of drastic and sudden changes as a result of human-caused warming.

washingtonpost.com

NOAA’s new report is made up of 12 essays written by an international team of 81 researchers from 12 countries. An independent peer review was organized by the Arctic Monitoring and Assessment Program of the Arctic Council.

“It’s a really sobering report, but I have to say it’s not a very surprising report,” said Osterberg, “because this is a continuation of the trends that we’ve been seeing happening in the Arctic for quite a few decades now as climate change has gotten worse.”

Alongside the report, NOAA published a short video which explains that “unprecedented warming and exceptionally low levels of sea ice are imposing dramatic, rapid, and disruptive change on marine ecosystems in the far north,” including a “cascade of impacts on the marine food web.”

Watch:

“Changing growing conditions, including warmer summers, decreasing snow cover, and permafrost instability lead to alterations in the vegetation of the Arctive landscape. This can strongly affect habitat for caribou, birds, and other wildlife,putting further pressure on northern ecosystems and communities,” the video details. “Indigenous communities along the Bering Sea are on the front lines of climate change. As sea ice disappears, so does hunting access to seals, whales, whales, and other marine life.”

Bering Sea Elders Group executive director Mellisa Johnson, who edited a chapter of NOAA’s report, spoke with InsideClimate News about dead or dying salmon increasingly washing up on the shores over the past few years. She explained that “the seals, they don’t want to eat those types of fish. They know they’re unhealthy for consumption. So then they don’t have enough fat reserves to last them.”

The chapter that Johnson edited, which offers perspective from Indigenous voices, reads in part:

Our resilience as Indigenous Peoples comes from our close proximity to the food resources that we depend on. In a warming Arctic, access to our subsistence foods is shrinking and becoming more hazardous to hunt and fish. At the same time, thawing permafrost and more frequent and higher storm surges increasingly threaten our homes, schools, airports, and utilities. Our environment has changed, but we remain vigilant. By adapting as we always have, we continue to hunt, fish, and harvest from the ocean and land. But, we fear for our young people; we worry that they will grow without the same foods and places that we have known throughout our lives. Maintaining what we inherited from our elders and thinking about our future generations, we offer this report as a glimpse into what we are observing and experiencing at the locations of our eight communities in the Bering Sea region of Alaska.

Johnson, whose group represents 38 regional communities, emphasized in her comments to InsideClimate News the need for action to address the climate impacts in the region. “The Bering Sea provides for our people,” she said. “It’s our responsibility to take care of the one who provides for our people.”

Retired Navy Rear Adm. Timothy Gallaudet, deputy undersecretary of commerce for oceans and atmosphere at NOAA, led the news conference where the report was released Tuesday. In a statement, he underscored the importance of scientists continuing to track the conditions in the Arctic.

“The speed and trajectory of the changes sweeping the Arctic, many occurring faster than anticipated,makes NOAA’s continued investment in Arctic research and activities all the more important,” Gallaudet said. “We need the best scientific information to support NOAA’s efforts to better understand how environmental change is affecting the Arctic and weather around the globe, to support adaptation and economic opportunities in the region, and to sustain our ocean-based Blue Economy.”

Deadly serious’: Read fired Navy Secretary’s scathing letter in wake of Trump’s attacks on ‘the rule of law’

"I cannot in good conscience obey an order that I…

https://www.alternet.org/2019/11/new-york-times-reporters-stand-by-story-revealing-navy-secretary-spencer-threatened-to-resign-over-trump-plan-to-reverse-seals-punishment/

https://www.alternet.org/2019/07/as-charles-koch-cultivates-anti-war-image-koch-industries-profits-from-defense-contracts/

no lnx

As Charles Koch cultivates anti-war image, Koch industries profits from defense contracts

Written by Alex Kotch / The American Prospect July 26, 2019

Libertarian billionaire industrialist Charles Koch has gone to great lengths to paint himself as an anti-interventionist. He has funded foreign policy-focused think tanks and university centers such as the conflict-averse Center for the Study of Statesmanship at Catholic University and the Notre Dame International Security Center, which is directed by anti-NATO professor Michael Desch.

Most recently, he teamed up with an extremely unlikely ally, liberal billionaire philanthropist George Soros, to found the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft. The Charles Koch Foundation and Soros’ Open Society Foundations each contributed $500,000 to help found the Quincy Institute, which will open in September, along with $800,000 from other donors.

“Political leaders have increasingly deployed the military in a costly, counterproductive, and indiscriminate manner, normalizing war and treating armed dominance as an end in itself,” reads the institute’s website. “The Quincy Institute is an action-oriented think tank that will lay the foundation for a new foreign policy centered on diplomatic engagement and military restraint.”

But Koch Industries, the giant oil, chemical, paper, and electronics conglomerate owned and led by Koch, has been cashing in on Department of Defense contracts. Since 2016, two Koch Industries subsidiaries have gotten federal contracts worth a total of close to $2.3 million to provide the Navy with circuit boardsfor its ships, according to Sludge’s review of federal contract data from the Federal Procurement Data System.

A Navy spokesperson told Sludge that “circuit boards are used in a variety of ships, submarines and aircraft” but declined to provide additional details regarding the use of the Koch subsidiaries’ electronics.

The two most recent contracts, which total nearly $500,000, went to Camarillo, California-based Interconnect Systems, which Koch Industries subsidiary Molex acquired in 2016. Naval Surface Warfare Systems Crane, a Navy office with a mission “to provide acquisition engineering, in-service engineering and technical support for sensors, electronics, electronic warfare and special warfare weapons,” initiated a $247,350 contract with Interconnect Systems in March 2019 for “digital signal processing computer card[s].” The company had signed a similar contract in September 2018 with NSWS Crane for $243,950.

Interconnect Systems scored a $1 million contract for circuit cards in July 2018 from the Defense Logistics Agency’s (DLA) maritime facility in Mechanicsburg, Pennsylvania. DLA Land and Maritime “manages the supply chain for ground-based and maritime weapons systems repair parts, small arms parts, and fluid-handling systems.”

Nallatech, a subsidiary of Interconnect Systems, has gotten close to $247,000 worth of Navy contracts since 2016. The majority of that money came from NSWC Crane, but some came from the NAVSUP Weapons Support Systems agency, which supports naval weapons systems. NSWC Crane gave Nallatech its largest contract, for $147,000 worth of hybrid processors, in September 2017.

Since 2016, Interconnect Systems and its subsidiary, Nallatech, have gotten $2,260,000 worth of Defense contracts.

Nallatech, which last year integrated with Molex subsidiary BittWare, has received over $617,000 worth of Defense contracts since 2008, the year it was acquired by Interconnect Systems, according to usaspending.gov. The company advertises military and aerospace products such as radar systems for manned and unmanned vehicles that “provide unprecedented situational awareness and target coordination,” as well as a “ballistic digitizer.”

Molex, an Illinois-based manufacturer of electrical connectors, provides parts for a number of industries. In its defense section, the Molex website lists products for use in unmanned vehicles, missiles, and ground vehicles.

Koch Industries, the Quincy Institute, the Charles Koch Foundation, and Open Society Foundations did not respond to requests for comment.

More Navy Connections

A partially Koch-funded foreign policy center at a California state university is also involved with the Navy.

The University of California at San Diego’s Center for Peace and Security Studies got a $3.3 million multi-year grant from the Charles Koch Foundation in 2017, its second year of existence.

“We’re excited about U.C. San Diego and its scholars’ work to better understand emerging issues in security studies and their implications for U.S. foreign policy,” said Charles Koch Foundation Vice President for Research William Ruger in a university news story. Ruger, an Afghanistan war veteran, is in the Navy Reserve.

The Center for Peace and Security Studies also gets funding from the Office of Naval Research’s Minerva Research Initiative. Its current grant, covering 2014-19, is called “Deterrence with Proxies.”

The center’s website describes its work on military automation. “Technologies that supplant human labor in battle—such as UAVs (drones) and ground combat robots—lower military labor costs and limit political risks associated with friendly casualties. The tendency should thus be for military automation to increase the scope of threats or uses of force by the most advanced economies, geographically and in terms of the issues in dispute.”

UCSD has a long and lucrative relationship with the Navy; the Navy’s Naval Information Warfare Systems Command, which works with the defense industry to create new weapons systems, has been headquartered at the university since 1997. Since 1981, UCSD has raked in nearly $250 million from Navy contracts, according to data from the Federal Procurement Data Service.

Political science professor Erik Gartzke, a former Army and Navy officer who runs the Center for Peace and Security Studies, has written papers about “costless combat” drones.

Meanwhile, American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC), the Koch-backed corporate bill mill, supported domestic drone use through its proposed Unmanned Aerial Vehicle program.

‘The Case for Private Defense’

“Charles Koch’s anti-interventionist posturing is more clearly understood through his decades-long support of anarcho-capitalist scholars who have developed and championed the call to privatize police and military defense,” said Ralph Wilson, co-founder of the Corporate Genome Project and former research director of activist group UnKoch My Campus.

Koch’s political views are shaped by the Austrian School of economics, which advocates unfettered free markets and small governments. One prominent right-wing think tank that has promoted these concepts is the Mises Institute,which was established in 1982 and is named after one of the 20th century’s leading Austrian economists, Ludwig von Mises.

The late Murray Rothbard, Mises’ close associate and vice president of academic affairs at the Mises Institute for 13 years, argued against the state entirely and advocated a privatized military and police force. Like Rothbard, Mises Institute senior fellow Hans-Hermann Hoppe supports fully privatized security. In a paper first published by the Mises Institute in 1998, Hoppe argues that “collective security is a myth that provides no justification for the modern state, [and] all security is and must be private.”

In a 2002 essay, republished by the Mises Institute in 2010, Mises Institute fellow Robert Murphy made the case for privatized defense. Since then, he has continued to speak on the issue; Murphy held a session called “The Market for Military Defense” at this month’s “Mises University,” an annual free-market-economics boot camp.

Murphy owes much of his career to the generosity of Koch; he’s a research assistant professor at Texas Tech’s Free Market Institute, which is heavily funded by the Charles Koch Foundation (but also, ironically, gets substantial funding from the state government); a senior economist at the Institute for Energy Research, which Koch helped found and which has received funding from the three Koch family nonprofits; and a research fellow at the Independent Institute, which has scored grants from two Koch foundations.

Rothbard and Koch co-founded the libertarian Cato Institute in 1977 but had a falling out in the early 1980s. Still, their spheres continue to intersect, as several other current Mises Institute associates teach in university programs also funded by the Charles Koch Foundation.

Just Another Rebrand?

The Koch family has struggled with image problems for some time. Koch, along with his younger brother, David, has helmed a libertarian-minded political operation for decades, which has helped propel conservative Republicans to state and national office, and helped to found the Tea Party. Koch Industries is one of the country’s biggest polluters and has had to pay over $800 million in fines for environmental, labor, workplace, and other violations.

Because of their poor reputations, Koch Industries and Koch’s political network have undergone a series of rebrands, including Koch’s newest incarnation as a philanthropist who works with both parties to reform the criminal justice system and restrain America’s forever wars. For several years now, Koch has compared himself and his network of wealthy conservative donors to civil rights heroes such as Frederick Douglass and Martin Luther King.

But critics say these recent initiatives are largely distractions from Koch’s core mission, which he has always followed: to cut taxes and slash regulations in order to maximize Koch Industries’ profits.

“Koch Industries has consistently chosen corporatism and profit over their own ‘principled’ libertarianism, whether contracting with the U.S. military or accepting over half a billion dollars in local, state, and federal subsidies,” Wilson told Sludge.

Koch will likely continue to fund think tanks focused on preventing wars, but his company’s simultaneous role in the military-industrial complex should not be overlooked.

iowa class battleship

The powerplant of the Iowas consists of eight Babcock & Wilcox boilers and four sets of double reduction cross-compound geared turbines, with each turbine set driving a single shaft. Specifically, the geared turbines on Iowa and Missouri were provided by General Electric, while the equivalent machinery on New Jersey and Wisconsin was provided by Westinghouse.^[59][60] The plant produced 212,000 shp (158,000 kW) and propelled the ship up to a maximum speed of 32.5 kn (60.2 km/h; 37.4 mph) at full load displacement and 33 kn (61 km/h; 38 mph) at normal displacement.[N ^10] The ships carried8,841 long tons (8,983 t) of fuel oil which gave a range of 15,900 nmi (29,400 km; 18,300 mi) at 17 kn (31 km/h; 20 mph). Two semi-balanced rudders gave the ships a tactical diameter of 814 yards (744 m) at 30 kn (56 km/h; 35 mph) and 760 yards (695 m) at 20 kn (37 km/h; 23 mph).^[26]

https://www.popsci.com/technology/article/2012-09/fyi-what-kind-gas-mileage-can-you-get-naval-warship/

A hulking Arleigh Burke–class destroyer might typically burn a minimum of about24 barrels (1,000 gallons) of fuel per hour, but this figure conceals so many factors and variables that the Navy doesn't really use it the way we use "miles per gallon." Wind and current can have a major effect on a ship's efficiency. Speed affects a ship's mileage in unique ways, too, says Gabor Karafiath, with the Naval Surface Warfare Center in Bethesda, Maryland. When a ship moves quickly, he says, "it takes an inordinately greater effort to push it through the water because it makes bigger and bigger waves."

Other subtleties arise from a ship's engine setup. Arleigh Burke–class destroyers are fitted with four gas turbine propulsion engines (which are most efficient at high RPMs), so depending on the speed required, one engine going full tilt is more efficient than splitting the work across two engines. The USS Chafee burned similar amounts of propulsion fuel overall in May and July 2010, but in July its efficiency turned out to be 72 percent higher; that month the ship operated mostly with one engine cranking at maximum capacity versus using multiple engines running at lower ones.

https://www.sandiegouniontribune.com/sdut-navy-fossil-fuels-2016jul07-story.html

DAVID IGNATIUS, THE WASHINGTON POST

JULY 7, 2016

5:50 PM

The week of July 4th is a good moment to salute an unlikely champion of saving energy and switching to alternative fuels — the U.S. Navy.

Once a supreme fuel-guzzler whose energy needs sometimes dictated foreign policy, the Navy has become a model for how the country can curb its appetite for fossil fuels.

The Navy’s energy diet began seven years ago with an edict from newly appointed Secretary Ray Mabus, who issued five goals for radically changing how the Navy bought and consumed fuel. A former Mississippi governor who had served two years as U.S. ambassador to Riyadh in the mid-1990s, Mabus worried about how vulnerable the U.S. military was to foreign energy sources.

The Navy, like most military services, likes its traditions.

So the idea of a “Great Green Fleet” met considerable resistance from admirals and their allies in Congress. The Navy brass resisted, in particular, Mabus’ commitment in 2009 to switch the Navy’s consumption so that by 2020, at least 50 percent of its fuel would come from alternative sources.

At that time, many Navy commanders thought that 30 percent was a realistic target.

The Navy has already exceeded that 50 percent target in its contracts for fuel ashore, Mabus told me in a recent interview. And it expects to meet the overall goal well before 2020.

Under the rules Mabus set for transition, the alternative fuels must be ready to “drop in” for any requirement, including jet fuel for an F/A-18 Hornet; the fuels must be competitively priced; and any biofuels can’t take land away from food production.

Mabus, who served aboard a cruiser in the early 1970s, argues that this energy shift is as much about national security as about environmental goals. Saving fuel reduces combat vulnerability: He notes that in Afghanistan, the Marine Corps suffered one Marine killed or wounded for every 50 convoys of fuel. Less fuel consumption means fewer casualties.

The Navy’s main push has involved alternative fuels for ships, planes and shore facilities.

The cost curve has come down sharply: Mabus says that four years ago when the Navy began buying jet fuel that used a heavy mix of biofuel, it cost $25 a gallon. Today, it costs less than $2 a gallon.

The Navy is also making some new “hybrids,” such as the amphibious assault ships USS Makin Island and USS America.

These ships use electric propulsion for lower speeds and save the gas turbines for higher speeds. Mabus says the “Prius of the sea,” as he jokingly calls the Makin Island, was able to remain at sea 44 days longer than expected without refueling. Over a ship’s lifetime, the savings could add up to $250 million, the Navy says.

Mabus also pushed the Navy and Marines to begin using alternative technologies for electricity. The Navy is refitting ships to use long-lasting LED lights; so far, 7 percent of the fleet has made this transition, saving the equivalent of 1 million gallons of marine diesel fuel annually. Marines deployed in combat are now using solar panels, where possible, to produce power that would otherwise come from generators and batteries. For a Marine company, this could spare troops from lugging 700 pounds of batteries into combat.

Another nice thing about using green technology in combat, says Mabus, is that it’s quiet.

He notes a comment by a SEAL Team officer after a recent deployment: “When you turn off the generator, you can hear the bad guys.” In remote, rural areas of Afghanistan, “a generator is likely putting a target on your back,” says Mabus.

The Navy has always been at the cutting edge with energy: Sailing vessels that depended on the wind gave way to steamships, which were replaced by diesel-powered vessels, which made way for nuclear carriers and submarines. Mabus says the Defense Department is still the largest single user of fossil fuels on earth, with the Navy accounting for about one-third of that total.

Climate change is a very practical problem for a seagoing Navy.

Melting polar ice changes the strategic map of the world; rising sea levels are expected to displace up to 150 million people living in coastal areas by 2050, adding to global instability; the Navy’s prize Atlantic port of Norfolk may be at risk, as sea levels rise through this century.

Occasionally, environmental and defense policy converge.

Mabus’ energy initiative, which drew jeers at first, now looks like a demonstration of how to make the country stronger and greener at the same time.

Ignatius can be reached at davidignatius@washpost.com.