I woke up this morning with the answer to many questions in my head, foremost among them this: What on earth is Navy doing? I mean, after all, these are smart men atop the leadership ladder at Navy and in the Navy. Excellent competitors and achievers with brilliant political instincts.
How could they be so dumb?
What is it with that whole “diversity is the number one mission” at the Naval Academy thing? How did that fit with our professed mission of preparing midshipmen mentally, morally and physically to be naval officers?
What is it with the retention of Midshipman 3/C Curry, an apparently outstanding athlete but demonstrably inadequate midshipman?
Why did naval leadership go on a country-wide “listening tour” seeking guidance on roles and missions? Why did we settle on “Navy – A global force for good“?
What does that even mean?
With the lucidity that comes from a good night’s rest, and the ability to focus fully on a problem the answer came to me. As always, it is useful to rely upon first principles – what is the thing in itself, what does it do?
It’s ought to be helpful to go to the mission of the Navy in search of first principles: “The mission of the Navy is to maintain, train and equip combat-ready Naval forces capable of winning wars, deterring aggression and maintaining freedom of the seas,” but while that points us in the right direction it misses center mass. First and foremost the Navy is a bureaucracy, and the first instinct of any bureaucracy is always survival.
Seen in this light, all of the foregoing makes perfect sense.
Consider these facts:
- The US spends more on national defense than the rest of the world combined.
- The Navy faces no peer competitor in any Mahanian clash of “fleets in being.”
- The country’s demographics are changing rapidly.
The pressures of federal mandatory spending continue to squeeze the fisc, and those pressures will not abate but rather multiply over the out-years. We simply lack the national, political will to do anything about it, and the result will be ever diminishing discretionary spending (certainly as a proportion of GDP, and potentially in real terms) and brutal competition within DoD for a slice of the shrinking resource pie.
The closest thing to a non-allied “fleet in being” is the People’s Liberation Army Navy. But while they are taking their first, tentative laps around the blue water pond they are primarily organized around coastal defense, with a growing emphasis on in-close area denial. A fight with China – especially for what amounts to symbolic reasons – would be ugly, costly and stupid for everyone involved. In the near term, it ought to self-deter.
The long term threat will be the “resource wars” that become increasingly more likely as emerging countries with enormous populations and ravenous appetites for growth grapple for hydrocarbons, steel, cement – everything required to build and sustain economies to support unstable billions of people with rapidly growing expectations. And all of that commerce – and all of that fighting – will occur in the maritime domain, because everything worth anything in bulk will always move by sea.
The resource wars are probably at least 30-40 years away, but the fiscal pressures are here now. How does a capital intensive Navy built by a finite base of trained industrial labor that lacks a peer competitor survive to maintain relevance in the really bloody wars for national survival fought three or four decades hence?
The strategic answer seems to be that you build good will. You show that you “get it.”
In a country growing more rapidly brown and feminized, you get that you’re perceived as a white boy’s club, especially at the top. You buy good will in Congress and with the people by worshiping at the unexamined altar of diversity and do whatever it takes to put the right kind of faces in place to one day stand as flag officers before Congress and beg for resources.
And as you’ve done in the past, you beat the other services to it.
In a world increasingly grown tired of the cost and stupidity of war, you downplay the notion of combat capability and deterrence in favor of worldwide “goodness,” and when a natural disaster strikes, you divert combat forces from routine deterrence deployments to humanitarian rescue operations, ensuring that the press embarks with you.
You do whatever it takes to survive because that’s what bureaucracies do. You hope that all the petty deceptions, broken promises and compromised standards are worth the fact that thirty or forty years from now when the country really needs you again, you’ll be there for her.
It’s all so clear to me now.
Whether it is correct or not, I suppose we shall see in time.
When one chooses to depart the envelope of controlled flight in an aircraft for a HALO or HAHO, one may track in any cardinal direction. The unalterable direction is always down.
Choosing idol worship at the altar of diversity or pretending that one really can see the emperor’s clothing is just more tracking. Entropy and rust never sleep.
Entropy is rest. Our Naval Leadership may already be at inert uniformity.
I have my doubts that the senior leadership in the Navy is capable of this kind of analysis and foresight. I think they are just taking the easy way and getting along and hoping things don’t blow up until they’re retired.
Cap’n, Skipper,
Perhaps you might consider sleeping in a little longer next time?
It’s an elegant theory, but I’d suggest not subscribing to that sort of forward-thinking on leadership’s part when simple incompetence and selfish post-retirement maneuvering is far more likely.
Here….. lemme get you a fresh cup o’joe.
I’m gonna rise in Lex’s defense. The Naval leadership ARE very smart (and crafty) men, or else they wouldn’t have risen to where they are. And they see what side of the bread is buttered. I think what Lex is onto is a case application of Pournelle’s Iron Law of Bureaucracy : In any bureaucratic organization there will be two kinds of people: those who work to further the actual goals of the organization, and those who work for the organization itself. Examples in education would be teachers who work and sacrifice to teach children, vs. union representative who work to protect any teacher including the most incompetent. The Iron Law states that in all cases, the second type of person will always gain control of the organization, and will always write the rules under which the organization functions. They know that certain surfaces have to be kissed to continue the mission.
Concur…. especially the illustration regarding the Union rep. It’s why I home school.
And, of course, my comment was somewhat sarcastic/cynical, etc. However, it seems to me that the leadership under discussion has lost it’s way, and perhaps ought to pull back and reexamine the mission before getting up a head of steam and charging back into the fray.
Respects,
The Iron Law states that in all cases, the second type of person will always gain control of the organization, and will always write the rules under which the organization functions.
So then, is it possible to wrest the control of the organization away from the second type of person and hand it over to the person(s) that will work to further the actual goals of the organization as a way of saving said bureaucracy from itself? Or is that too much to ask?
As much as it pains this deck ape to admit it, the brown shoe four striper makes sense. Otherwise Chaps has it.
Lex, your subtlety scares me sometimes. This is one of those times.
“In a world increasingly grown tired of the cost and stupidity of war . . .”
Exactly what scares me. Paradoxically, the less willing the civilized are to use ruthlessness in defense of their cause, the more more incentivized the irrational are to threaten or go to war in the advance of theirs.
And to extend your argument, Prowler, what better way to arrive at the final war of biblical proportions, than to swing the pendulum the other way, where the civilized take it on the chin until they snap?
Some people make the argument that WWII might have been averted had the French military high command forcefully resisted Hitler’s re-militarization of the Rhineland. In the end, the world was too tired and aghast, with good reason, from WWI and he was doing little more than putting troops back into a place in his OWN country, so . . .
That may be the path USNA decides to embrace and it implies the ends justify the means. However, if you don’t draw a line in the sand you will find yourself sliding down slippery slopes. Some principles, some truths, are immutable. If, as a nation, we regard the constitution as a quaint historical document instead of a guiding set of beliefs we do so at our peril. If we cut large swaths of text out of the scripture to remain trendy and “relevant” there will be no guiding rudder for tough moral choices.
“Service before Self” and “Duty, Honor Country” are plumb lines that keep the house straight when it’s under construction. If they become only platitudes then why have service academies? Yes, USNA needs to understand the population from which it draws it’s students along with the ever changing environmnet in which it’s future leaders will operate. Hopefully it will not lower standards to be expedient. Character matters. Excellence matters.
(Relinquishing soap box to the next speaker….)
Have to agree with Wilko. The question for me is, *what* will be there for the country in the form of the USNA when called upon three or four decades hence? A multi-culti, standards-less, typical American college that forsakes Academics (to say nothing of instilling service specific principles) and “makes money” by being a sports team with a degree mill on the side? Sure, I guess the students will be forced to spend at least the next four years in the fleet though . . .
Lex, your rationale for what on earth the Navy is doing has all the appeal of clean, fresh air to a runner after a 100-yard sprint. You can bet I relish a hope for defense readiness with every juicy bit of accompanying information you furnished.
Adding to that hope I would quickly add that diversity emphasis is also consistent with our multi-generational plan to discredit and quash organized Islamist terror.
Detracting from such hope, however, may be an inevitable consequence of back-and-forth shifts in the 2 political parties in power at various times.
One party encompasses the goals of civilian trial lawyers to whom diversity is certainly a lucrative bread-and-butter issue. The envelope for greater diversity is inevitably expanded whenever said party attains levers of control.
How the military may be weakened in the process of such expansions should be of major consequence to both parties (neither of which, am I a member). Is it?
Well, Lex, I’ve CONSISTANTLY argued this very same point many times previously–a bureaucratic response to a feminized, multi-culti enamoured Congress in fear of budget cuts out of cultural pique–each and every time the subject has come up–both here and over at CDR Sal’s place.Glad to see you’ve finally come on board, so-to-speak. And the thinking is certainly rational on one intellectual level at least; the loss of funding for vital wpns platforms will far out-weigh the damage done to morale and slightly sub-par performance on the part of the affirmative action diversity crowd. The latter condition causing only a mild degredation in combat effectiveness, while the former scenario which sees vital wpns unfunded could prove catastrophic on it’s face.
I would point out, however, that IMHO the oxygen that fans the flames of this “path-of-least-resistance” approach is the belief in two propositions that are both problematic: The first is the view you have advanced that potential conflict with China is many years down the Pike. Looked at from the sheer capabilities aspect there is a certain logic to that view. But internal politics and “incidents” can always move the time-table up.Remember, Hitler’s CNO of the Kriegsmarine, Adm Raeder, told Hitler in 1936,IIRC, that the Kriegsmarine wouldn’t be ready to confront England until 1945 at the earliest under their then current building program. But that little fact didn’t stop Hitler, did it? He had other priorities. Likewise, even a premature conflict with the PLAN which, while America might emerge on top in a localized conflict, could also prove catastrophic to our morale at home and prestige abroad should a carrier be lost with 5000 souls on board. So I, for one, would caution that those who think that they can buy time and that, by the time the balloon goes up, it will be on somebody else’s watch and they will be on the links in Sarasota, should not be so sanguine about the prospects.
Secondly, such attitudes betray a belief that present trends are unalterable; that the lack of political will to control our borders, when combined with “other” “progressive” cultural trends (think DADT) make their course of action the only one avail., i.e., to quote the Borg: “All resistance is futile.” Now they may very well be correct in reading the tea-leaves (or for you Navy types perhaps Goats entrails is the better term
) and if so I weep for the future indeed. But as Brown’s victory in Mass proves, the political winds can shift overnight, and the tactics of the big kids may prove to be short-sighted indeed. Prior to the coming of Margret Thatcher people thought “the British Disease” characterized by an almost non-existant work ethic and class hatred of the profit motive that was a seemingly permanent fixture of a union-dominated Labour-Govt led society was beyond changing. Lady Thatcher proved all the pundits and academics wrong. The political and cultural winds may yet shift again. At any rate, hopefully I’ll be long gone when the worst comes to fruition, but unfortunately, as Grampa Bluewater has said, our grand-children won’t.
I concur 100%. China has internal issues that it might well divert attention from with a war. And in any case, the PRC government has a regional, not a worldwide, perspective. I could well see them involved in a war because they did something that was of no import in East Asia, but of great impact somewhere else.
Mike,
The problem is however, if China (like Nazi Germany) takes a less rational course of action and decides to divert attention from internal problems by foreign adventures abroad (for Hitler one of the key fears was his own personal mortality – he was completely convinced he was THE ONLY MAN OF DESTINY who could secure Lebensraum for Germany) then we win. They simply are not ready to sustain a real bid for global hegemony. The concern really is the horse race between China’s expanding economic and technological capability (as well as our own slide into a quasi-European nanny-state unwilling to pay for its own defense) and the socio-political pathologies of one-party rule/one-child policy/regional tensions and all the hidden problems that a dictatorship like China has that we won’t know about till it collapses. Will the Chinese leadership be able to play chess internally and externally and wait the 50 years necessary to grow their own organic capabilities so that they can make a truly dangerous bid for global hegemony? If so, we will be lucky if the PC gambit works and the USN can maintain enough institutional cohesion and technical edge to be ready for that fight (and we needs remember that we have as a country never have had to fight someone our own size or bigger – we’ve had the luxury of a continental size space and always outnumbering/overbearing our enemies without ever having to fight too smart – with a mature China we would have a very different kind of fight). If China made a premature bid for hegemony however, it could not only give us the chance to take them down before they become really dangerous AND perhaps even change the political dynamics in this country as well.
Cap’n,
Looking for the silver lining this morning? Who was it said (and I paraphrase, memory being what it is) “Never attribute to malice that which can be blamed on mere incompetence”? I have to agree with Tim on this one.
…Hanlon’s Razor
The US Navy having farsighted Admirals, tricky and skilled in bureaucratic infighting, is possibly true.
How about this take? The third class midshipman will be milked for all of his football prowess, then sh!t-canned before commissioning. My guess is that he will be kept well away from leadership roles. This is very similar to the treatment of Captain Holly Graf, fired near the end of her second command tour. It extracts as much as possible from an individual before letting them go. Short-sighted, yes. Maybe the wish was for the damage to be smaller than it is now.
The Navy is a long lead time service, and we need good and versatile people to get the most out of our technology. I see how we have to be open to all talent. True diversity works if there is no protected classes, and we have strong performance and conduct standards. Enforcing those standards is the key. We should pay attention to performance, not DNA, chromosomes, or single-faceted skills. This is where the USNA senior leadership is tone-deaf.
China seems to be less of a threat these days. Dictators and other overly empowered narcissists tend to want a goal in their own lifetime. Setting a country on a course for future greatness is for mature leaders like our founding fathers. The primary factors that underpin long years of peace are A) Decisive Victories, and B) Maritime Supremacy.
America is exceptional because of our unshackled individuals, and our Constitution. Here’s to American Exceptionalism; harnessing bad social drives for the good of all.
It comes back to each individual striving to do there best. I think that the next big struggle will be to bend the current culture to one that rewards success, not reinforce failure or learned helplessness.
“This is very similar to the treatment of Captain Holly Graf, fired near the end of her second command tour. It extracts as much as possible from an individual before letting them go.”
There’s one thing wrong with your analysis, NaCly dog. She wasn’t let go. She’s going on to her follow-on assignment at the Pentagon, as if nothing happened.
Sort of like the treatment Marcus Curry is getting.
Personally, I don’t see how a CO who was relieved following an Admiral’s mast, for cruelty and conduct unbecoming could be allowed to continue her career. CDR Mooney of the USS San Francisco was relieved, but at Admiral’s mast he was praised as fine officer, not cruel or guilty of conduct unbecoming.
But he was still assigned to a career-ending desk job so he could finish out his remaining year until he hit 20. He didn’t get the treatment CAPT Graf is getting, and apparently she’s nowhere near the officer he was.
Why? Well, if I can speculate based upon the CNO’s statement that building a force that represents the country’s diversity is a strategic necessity. CDR Mooney comes from a demographic that is over represented, while Holly Graf and Marcus Curry do not.
Oh, and don’t take that the wrong way. I don’t mean it’s because Mooney is a white man, and Holly Graf is a woman and Marcus Curry is a black man.
Apparently the over-represented demographic involves good officers. We have too few really bad officers. Apparently drug-using athletes and the cruel and unprofessional are two groups that are seriously under-represented. But they do exist in larger numbers than you might imagine, and how can the force truly reflect the nation’s diversity if they’re forced out?
And I thought I was cynical…
Lilly “I try to be cynical but I can’t keep up” Tomlin had better never visit this blog– too many people here have been around the racetrack more than once…
Well VX, I can see I’m a dinghy amongst dreadnoughts; definitely outclassed. I just hope I’m never worth anybody’s ammo here
Maybe we should start shooting spies. That would some of the cynicism and get us back to people like VX and a bit more optimism.
QM, easy on the spy shooting…a few of us around here…and remember, we now HAS GPS. No need for Celestial, paper charts or anyone trained to use them. We’s all technical now.
I stand corrected. I thought we had a lot of good officers, but instead we have a lot of good careerists. Maybe I need more cynicism.
The US Navy has a long tradition of keeping poorly performing CO’s by sidelining them. Three of the four surviving CA CO’s from the Savo debacle manned desks in WWII. The fourth, Capt. Bode of USS Chicago, committed suicide. Although we did bring in the Japanese submarine skipper to testify at Capt. McVay’s court-martial for the loss of the USS Indianapolis. Capt. McVay was allowed to retire in 1949.
So we need more abrupt career termination? More courts-martial? Not sure that is the answer. No matter how elite the outfit, there is a finite amount of stupidity. This applies to the military, science, business, and certainly in politics. Selection boards have very public mistakes. Are boards getting the right info and making good decisions? Ducks selecting ducks? I certainly want the future Navy to be filled with effective leaders and warriors, not time-servers. More ships to increase our strategic depth is an old-school solution.
Sounding like a job for CDR Salamander’s blog.
See the bio on the first female CSG? http://www.navytimes.com/news/2010/01/navy_flags_012810w/
Sleep well Lex.
Hey, she survived a tour on ENTERPRISE and decided to stick with the Navy. That’s enough for me.
Maybe Midshipman 3/C Curry is trying to do what Mike Wahle (USNA 99 almost) did, and get into the NFL. It worked out pretty good for Wahle.
Selection/promotion boards have ALWAYS been problematic and highly politicized in all the service branches–and a numbers,luck-of-the-draw crap-shoot to boot. Woe is the O-6 who’s board doesn’t include a single Gen /Admiral he has worked for. And woe to the O-6 whose wpns system he spent his career in if that system is canx far enough ahead of his selection elgibility to have all the Flag officers who were his mentors retire. A classic example of this would be the Army missile guys who entered the Nike Ajax/Hercules program in the early 50s as 0-3/4s and by the time their turn came as O-6s for Flag selection in the early 70s the program had been long-canceled and what were once fast-burner fair-haired boys (who by their very selection into a select program were signaled to be obviously superior to their tube arty brethren) were now just faces in the crowd with no guardian angels left on active duty when selection boards came around.
I had forgotten about that bunch (understandable since I was but a child when the program started), but the example is certainly a very good one. As I recall the selection board for those guys also ended up being a type of payback for their having the temerity of accepting their selection for the program.
An important discussion that needs to be taken up in other fora as well…a couple of years back my day job involved developing a doctrinal framework for the complex COE i.e. the mess we are in now…the application of doctrine in individual and collective training was pretty simple, essentially, you teach what we tell you to teach. Defining the application of doctrine ‘with judgement’ on operations, and then we broadened the question to any real-time decision-making was more problematic until one day we were having a Q&A session with a warrant officers course. One of the WOs stood and said “Sirs, you can wave that code of military justice and lock me up for the rest of my life if you want but when the heat is on, what defines how we make decisons is what’s in the heart, not the head.” If we don’t embed and maintain a culture of the highest ethos and values from Day One when a recruit or a cadet steps off the bus, we can hardly be surprised when they don’t uphold our traditions when the pressure comes on…
I’m glad to see that the fifth comment quoted Pournelle’s Iron Law. And, yup, there’s nothing we can do about it. Let’s amuse ourselves instead with sailor-homo jokes. Or bandsman-homo jokes. Hey, I was a clarinetist! Have at it!
Was listening to some Artie Shaw on my way to work. Lord he was good.
The thing that NaCly Dog may not understand about the PRC is that 1) the Chinese tend to think/plan long-term, and 2) the PRC leadership tends to collective, not individual. Mao aside, they are not Hitlers or Stalins. It is entirely possible that they are planning for a confrontation with us 40 or 50 years from now.