Credo
"Sign on, young man, and sail with me. The stature of our homeland is no more than the measure of ourselves. Our job is to keep her free. Our will is to keep the torch of freedom burning for all. To this solemn purpose we call on the young, the brave, the strong, and the free. Heed my call, Come to the sea. Come Sail with me." -- John Paul Jones
"Pardon him, Theodotus; he is a barbarian, and thinks that the customs of his tribe and island are the laws of nature" --George Bernard Shaw, "Caesar and Cleopatra"
"And those who were seen dancing were thought to be insane by those who could not hear the music."--Friedrich Nietzsche
"A kind Providence has placed in our breasts a hatred of the unjust and cruel, in order that we may preserve ourselves from cruelty and injustice. They who bear cruelty, are accomplices in it. The pretended gentleness which excludes that charitable rancour, produces an indifference which is half an approbation. They never will love where they ought to love, who do not hate where they ought to hate."--Edmund Burke
“You say that it is your custom to burn widows. Very well. We also have a custom: when men burn a woman alive, we tie a rope around their necks and we hang them. Build your funeral pyre; beside it, my carpenters will build a gallows. You may follow your custom. And then we will follow ours.”--General Sir Charles Napier
"Μολὼν λαβέ" -- Leonidas
"Blogito Ergo Sum" -- Neptunus Lex
My guess (having seen way too many condition reports round filed and told this work would be “deferred”) is that there’s a LOT of maintainence not being done.
I fear we are headed toward the “one-horse shay” outcome, Byron. And then what? Looks like the Aussies have provided us a cautionary tale. Rome fell in part because it’s citizens grew weary of wearing heavy armour into battle as being too strenuous a burden for an “advanced” people. Sir John Glubb Pasha, in his one volume work; “A Short History of the Arab-Speaking Peoples” made the counter-intuitive (for many) point that civilizations begin to decay “when they begin to spend more on libraries than on armaments.” His point being that once a people fail to maintain a level of armaments necessary for their survival–usually at the peak of their power–a vicious death spiral begins in which, with each passing day the costs/efforts needed to restore the status quo grow greater, finally reaching such a point that all efforts seem futile; and so people rationalize away the necessity for defense at all, trusting instead on diplomacy and the good intentions of their enemies. Thussly, claims Sir John, do civilizations decline and disappear–either overrun or cowed by their enemies.
Virg
I think you’re right on it here. There’s another corollary here, that when within a civilization or group of civilizations “civilized” behavoir becomes more and more the automatic and intrinsic behavoiral norm (as opposed to an externally enforced norm) paradoxically the more the benefits of brutish behavoir become to anyone willing to use it. The classic example from Lee Harris is Germany in WWII. Europe, from the concert of Vienna in 1815 till the start of WWII in 1914, existed largely in peace with diplomacy and free trade being the norms, especially relative to the previous centuries of rivalry and war. (The Crimean War and Franco-Prussian war both being relatively minor interludes, and at the periphery in the case of the Crimean.) After 100 years of such relative peace all out war was such an abnormal thought in European minds that the Germans felt the mere threat of it would be the surest and lowest risk method to get there way. They were of course wrong, but after the wholesale slaughter of WWI and the reaction with attempts to set up the League of Nations, Kellog-Brian pact etc. Hitler sensed the resultant and understandable complete aversion to war as a similar opportunity to get what he wanted. For him it worked a little bit better at first than for the Kaiser in WWI, the re-militarization of the Rhine valley, the Anschluss, and the seizure of the Sudetenland all being met with diplomatic wimpers and no real will to oppose the opening chess moves of a blood thirsty and crazy megalomaniac. Of course, it eventually caught up with him.
Do we have a similar situation here? Is the nation so exhausted from Iraq and Afghanistan despite (and my sincerest apologies to anyone who has lost a loved one or friend in these current wars) their low casualty rates in historic perspective, and even with supplemental funding their not much higher than the cold war drain on our economy? Has the endless dance of to be or not to be an ineffectual enforcer of meaningless sanctions become an end in and of itself, more than a means, in our civilized minds that realize it is better to jaw, jaw than to war, war? Does Ahmadinejad in Iran sense an opportunity, to in effect call our bluff when we TALK about his nuclear program? The Minoans, the Sumerians, the Hellenistic Greeks, the Romans, it would seem that the majority of the most civilized and advanced societies man produces from time to time simply gave up the ghost of the burden of doing the dirty work at the foundation of maintaining a civilization, clouded by the conceit of the heights of their success that human nature had somehow changed and such dirty work was not only no longer necessary but was merely a drain on their daily dose of lotus for eating and more refined pleasures. This cycle of decay, reversion to the brutal realities of human nature without a civilizing *force* being constantly applied as a wellspring of civilized behavoir, and eventual ascent to power and new civilization of the group that was best able to master the brutality of such chaos was well recognized by the Greeks at least who called it Anakuklosis. I recall an Admiral once on a show in the nineties adamantly and profoundly howling against the wind that the Peace Dividend of the Cold War was not the money that could be saved from gutting defense procurement as we did then, but was the Peace and not War bought from our readiness and willingness to stand up to the USSR during it’s entire tragic existence.
Si Vis Pacem Para Bellum
Well, you bring up another point, PAMDO: the willingness to take casualties. Even as late as WWII we were largely a rural nation with correspondingly large families (no TV
) and a society in which a great mant–perhaps a majority–were used to losing one or more children during childbirth or to early childhood diseases. Add to this the realities farming life bring concerning the life-cycle and matters of life and death and one has a picture of a society far more able to endure casualties than the modern “1.2″ child family of today. I can’t imagine us today as a society being willing to accept casualties on the order of the WWI or Civil War experience. Hell, the public in letters-to-the-editor was calling for gas to be used in the Pacific at the end of WWII to keep casualties down. And that was the “good” war…
What’s especially interesting about the Northrop-Grumman situation is how the Newport Daily News is trying to divert attention from them by running an article about faulty welds at Electric Boat, even though that situation is a couple months old and didn’t involve any “Subsafe” items.
Northrop-Grumman used the wrong material in welds, installed the wrong bolts and fittings onto torpedo-loading equipment despite clear instructions, and the result was the 4 Virginia-Class subs had to have their loading gear rebuilt, delaying the launch, in at least one case, of USS New Mexico.
http://aquilinefocus.blogspot.com/
scroll down that link aways for the article.
Everyone who hasn’t visited Cdr. Salamander yet today should do so, he has a similar topic today.
Addendum: I realize that critics of the pov expressed by me above will point to the old SU as a prime example of a society which spent TOO MUCH on arms and failed under the crushing burden of it’s defense budgets as a result. I would answer that this example only proves that there is an Aristotlean “golden mean” that needs be obtained by any nation, i.e., the Goldilocks approach. But it seems to me to apply as only averaged out over the long-term. Surges in war-making capacity to the exclusion of all else being certainly necessary to meet existential threats as was the case in WWII–as long as of relatively short duration–followed by a return to ex-post ante “normalcy.”
Virg
Ah, the ability to surge. The draft used to provide that for us. Multiple defense contractors with excess capacity (often subsidized by the Government expressly for surge ability) provided that for us much better than it does now. We’ve badly mis-managed our defense industrial base, largely from the post cold war procurement drawdown and technologist/accountant wet dream RMA projects like JSF. Another trend, efficiency/lean/six sigma, is good, but it’s also brittle and inflexible. And war is anything but brittle and inflexible.
No, we don’t want to go down the USSR road of crushing ourselves with military spending. The draft? Personally I don’t see a need for it short of something hugely disastrous and unforeseen, some sort of new set of wars in the Middle East, Korea, Taiwan, and maybe Pakistan/Afghanistan all at the same time bizarro-world occurrence. I would however cancel JSF, make enough to meet our (poisoned) commitment to our allies and try to reinvigorate our industrial base by replacing it with at least two separate airframes designed with less all aspect stealth to actually be cheaper and more mass produced. Army’s already seen the light on FCS, the Navy is in for massive pain on shipbuilding before they do something similar as New Wars does better than any other blog (although sometimes broken record wise.)
But that Aristotlean mean moves from decade to decade if you ask me, and good men honestly disagree on where it is. For me, it is certainly higher now than in the nineties, I can stomach it being as high as in the “average” years of the cold war, but perhaps not much more. But historically speaking, looking at DOD spending as a percentage of GDP relative to what the USSR was spending, we currently sit with far more margin for error on the upside than on the downside, i.e. a percent or two more spending will likely not put us under whereas scrimping now could seriously threaten our security.
The “good news” is that we’re not the only ones afflicted between the Aussies, the Brits, the Indians, the Canadians all have had major maintenance problems in the last recent past. And don’t even count the Russians. Small solace tho.
time to go back to public shipbuilding yards – give the taxpayer what they pay for and to heck with the idea that defense can be run like a commercial industry – give that idea the six shigma salute.
EXACTLY, G-man. Running an operation on “just in time’ principles pretty much breaks down in war-time when major disruptions take place. What is needed then are vast warehouses, etc., with goods stored “just in case.” You say such a thing is economically ruinous during peace-time when competitors are running their ops on the basis of JIT? I say look at the excess capacity the way one looks at non-recoverable insurance premiums–the cost of doing business to ensure that you will ALWAYS be able to be doing business even if disaster strikes. Whatever $ the City of New Orleans, the State of La. and the feds saved scrimping on levy construction and maint PALES in comparison to the losses incurred due to Katrina. An old insurance saying goes: “There is a cost to doing something and a cost of doing nothing–and more often than not the cost of the latter is far, far greater than the cost of the former.”
Public shipyards, private shipyards . . . personally I’d stay with private BUT with one big caveat: Government would subsidize (as cheaply as possible, competition being key, if not enough competition can be fostered with the current shipbuilding plan a public shipyard might be the lesser of two evils) excess capacity as part of the terms of a contract for the ability to surge production. Like Virg mentions, it’s an insurance premium, an extra fee for which you get “waste” and “inefficiency” in peacetime but which is more than worth its weight in gold if the red balloon ever goes up.
PAMDO, pushed the wrong “like” button. Really liked your comment – on the money,
You can’t fool us, MtM, you really DID mean to give “thumbs down”–that’s why you’re named “Ming the Merciless,” right?
That’s alright Ming, it’s more fitting with your merciless character!
Just to get back on topic (OZ) here is some esoterica for MtM: The Scottish name Menzies is traditionally pronounced /ˈmɪŋɪs/ and a shortened form is “Ming” Robert Menzies (nicknamed “Ming”), an Australian Prime Minister aka ‘Pig Iron Bob’.
I wish I had more contact with the waterfront. My sense is that we are REALLY far behind on maintenance, although not quite as bad as we were in 1978. We are probably a year or two away from finding some ships unable to sortie due to serious maintenance problems. Look at the Armorer’s article on Haiti and USNS Comfort over at Jonah’s Guys and read about how they had both ship’s electrical service diesels OOC and still got underway using a commercial diesle they landed on the deck for power. They had NO COMMS underway and still had to warm up and fix the plant to make power and meet SOA. When they finally did get comms, something in radio popped a breaker and they had a small fire.
While COMFORT’s condition can hardly be expected to be up to Man O War condition, I’ll bet we are sending good ships in hamrs way with lots of gear OOC. That hasn’t happened in the Submarine Force in a good while either. We almost lost three good ships due to maintenance failures in 1982 when I first got to the fleet after Jimmy Carter’s Hollow Navy. We fixed ourselves only by having money to buy spare parts and new bodies to throw at fixing the problems. Today, I’d be willing to bet that materiel condition will cripple us in the not too distant future.
Ground wars need the funding now. But we should have been paying and recruiting far more bodies over the last 13 years than we did. And without some cash to keep the fleet afloat, we will be a regional Navy in the near future. Not a global one.
And then No One will rule the waves.
Subsunk
Ok confession time.
“Ming the Merciless” is a behind-my-back name from the troops I got in the NZ Army as I filled up the cells one night in NZ when I was the Ordely Officer, one WO1 for harrassing female, one Sgt for hitting me because I wouldnt take my hat off when closing the SNCO mess (the orderly Sgt didn’t – so I didn’t), two WO1s for fighting on the parade ground, a Cpl and LCpl copulating in a non reproductive manner in the Baggy’s bar (male/female human to ward of any sheep jokes from Aussies). It was end of year Christmas close-down bash, not your typical friday night. Funny, never got asked to do duty again. It got shortened to “Minga” by my lads. As Lex is ex US Naval Officer and therefor I assume a Gentleman, I am using the formal term “Ming the Merciless”. (and who would understand what “Minga” means?.
Note how small our camp cells are!
Having explained all this, will now take the liberty of using Minga. Am I truely merciless?
Mercilessly So. Although I did resist giving the Sgt who hit me a hay breaker – he was so drunk I would have been there all night whacking him.
Sounds like we could use more guys like you. Draconian doesn’t even come close.
Don’t think so PAMDO, I have tranferred to the reserve, which means I shall mercilessly stay home and look after the women and not fit for fighting – although at the ripe old age of 40, I still qualify on Pack-March, Fitness and Shooting. Did a merciless 10 km Run in very steep hills/forest last wednesday – brought up my breakfast, but kept up with the kids and beat them down hill mountain goat syle. Feeling my age though took me a day or two to recover. (Wife chastised me again).
I think your comments on the empire stuff are very close to the mark – whats changed over the last 3000 yrs? not much, Empires rise and fall – fact of life.
Personally I think the US needs more Douglas A-1 Skyraiders – A Merciless Man’s Aircraft, – puts fear of god into enemies just at the sound, 20/20 mike mike, all day ops, cool at airshows, tail dragger to keep Lex Happy, designed by a genius, built like the proverbial brick ……… , chicks dig Skyraider Pilots due to well developed physique – especially legs, what else is required?
I wonder how much of the Aussie’s problems are due to lack of funding and how much is the result of their chronic shortage of personnel in the engineering and electronics ratings.
The diesels have been shit for years, there’s a program called Submariners that followed one of the subs on a cruise.
The diesel mechanics worked like dogs, no wonder they jump ship for a six figure salary in the mining industry.
“The latest problem with the subs was the failure of a generator on HMAS Farncomb due to a manufacturing defect, Senator Faulkner [OzDefMin] said.” 27 Jan 2010
http://www.news.com.au/adelaidenow/story/0,,26641440-2682,00.html
Sim, Oz Sailors work hard for sure.