Position of Influence
(See W. H. Bishop, pp. 81–82, March 2013, and M. T. Majors, p. 85, June 2013 Proceedings)
Chief Warrant Officer Chuck Berlemann, U.S. Navy, Retired—I have to disagree with Chief Operations Specialist Majors’ assessment of chief petty officer experience and seasoning. In the late 1970s the Department of Defense made the Navy add Time in Service (TIS) requirements to the enlisted advancement requirements. Other services (the Army and Air Force) had lower turnover rates because of, I think, fewer unaccompanied tours at that time. This constricted advancement and created jealousy when the members of those services saw that Navy enlisted “go-getters” were advancing faster than their counterparts in the other branches. There were plenty of sailors who stagnated at certain levels either through over-manned ratings or through their failure to perform the one magic trick that was almost a guarantee of success. That magic trick? Perform on sea duty! The next few advancement cycles saw the Peter Principle, which says people tend to advance to their level of incompetence, turned on its head. Many candidates who had stagnated for a reason were suddenly on the E-7, E-8, and E-9 lists because their TIS trumped performance. When advanced, they didn’t perform any better than they had in their previous pay grades.
I was a two-hashmark CPO. When I made chief, I was on my second consecutive sea duty extension in an A-6 squadron. I was putting maximum effort into doing the best job I could. I found this to be easy, because I enjoyed what I was doing. To tell the truth, I was having fun. At the same time, several members of the first-class mess in my squadron spent about two hours every morning sitting in one of the work centers discussing what special kudos they could get placed in their advancement package to insure that they would be successful the next time the CPO board met. While they connived for success, their shops were being run by their subordinates.
Experience and seasoning are not gained by simply wearing the uniform for a certain number of years. It helps, a lot, to eagerly accept the responsibilities of the billet in which you are presently serving. We are frequently offered the opportunity to do something extra for our units. Stepping up to accomplish unit goals isn’t self-promotion, it’s fulfilling one’s duty. The Navy has good business reasons to reward performers. Being fair doesn’t mean we have to promote folks who are simply doing time. That isn’t fair to the people who strive to do their jobs to the best of their abilities. The watchwords for all selection boards should be: excellence on sea duty! All other criteria belong in the tie-breaker column.
The Russian Submarine Fleet Reborn
(See T. Spahn, pp. 36–41, June 2013 Proceedings)
Norman Polmar—Lieutenant Commander Spahn’s article contains a large amount of outdated and inaccurate information. Considering the author’s contacts in the submarine community, he should have been able to provide Proceedings readers with a more useful discussion.
For example, for the past several years Russian sources have confirmed that the five later ballistic-missile submarines of the Borei class (Project 955) will have 20 missile tubes. And it is highly unlikely that their RSM-56 Bulava submarine missile carries “a variety of countermeasures and decoys.” As in the United States, Russian military leaders have found that payload space and weight on strategic missiles are better spent on actual warheads.
Cost estimates for the U.S. Ohio-class replacement vary from $5 to $7 billion per submarine—not $2 billion!
I do not believe that any Soviet-Russian submarine was assigned the designation “Akula III.”
Perhaps more serious is the statement, “In a first for nuclear warships . . . India entered a ten-year lease for an Akula II–class nuclear fast-attack submarine.” That “first” occurred more than 25 years ago when a Charlie-class (Project 670) cruise-missile submarine was leased to India by the Soviet Union.
The VA-111 Skval torpedo is a 21-inch weapon, thus is launched from torpedo tubes of that diameter. Modern Russian submarines appear to have both 21-inch as well as 25.6-inch torpedo tubes.
The U.S. intelligence community has denied that “in late 2012 an Akula . . . remained undetected for several weeks whle conducting operations in the Gulf of Mexico.” Except in sensational press reports, it never happened.
Finally, the author tells us that the U.S. Navy has “answered” the challenges of the proliferation of Russian-built diesel submarines and has “developed critical doctrine and tactics and [is] providing numbered fleet commanders with the new technologies and strategy they need to understand and respond to these stealthy new diesel adversaries.”
As one who until recently had access to such information, I can only wonder what are these new doctrine and tactics, and technologies and strategy. They certainly were not demonstrated when the U.S. Navy recently “borrowed” a Swedish air-independent-propulsion submarine—HMS Gotland—to operate against U.S. naval forces. (see Proceedings, March 2006, p. 61).
Later in the article the author states that the threat from these submarines “continues to grow at an alarming rate.” Have or have not these challenges been answered?
The Good and Bad of 360-Degree Feedback
(See J. Murphy, p. 14, June 2013 Proceedings)
Captain Tom Davis, U.S. Navy (Retired)—I had difficulty discovering the point and purpose of Senior Chief Murphy’s column. As I see it, the 360-Degree Feedback evaluation program is a distraction, for no defined purpose, from the ability of Navy management to do its job, and is a further burden for middle managers who already carry the load imposed by trying to everything with nothing and no time to do it.
Chairmain of the Joint Chiefs of Staff General Martin Dempsey is quoted in the 1 May Military Times article (on which Senior Chief Murphy bases his column) as saying that, regarding the 360-Degree Feedback program he is instituting for the military services, he “does not envision 360-Degree reviews being used in the traditional promotion process.” If that’s the case, why bother forcing yet another program—one that Forbes magazine and many researchers have called a failure in the business world—down the throats of the armed forces? This program requires special and voluminous instructions, special training for all participants, and yet produces no measurable, profitable, or reliable results. It does, however, appear to be another child of the human-resources advocates who find employment in promoting fuzzy-warm programs like 360-Degree Feedback.
After a tour in both OP-01 and BUPERS, I dreaded seeing a group of contractor’s representatives troop in to see the boss with another manpower or personnel whiz-bang, guaranteed to solve the people problems, another program offered without someone there to take the gleam and glitter off the promises. Although many private businesses have instituted some form of 360-Degree Feedback—also called Multi-Rater Feedback or Multi-Source feedback—the results are, at best, marginal and ill-suited to the military. It is ridiculous to think there is some benefit in having a Marine platoon sit down with the leader after an assault on an enemy bunker and letting everyone “evaluate” the leader’s performance and then send the evaluation on to the company commander along with a self-evaluation by the platoon leader.
While the Air Force, always quick to sense the wind direction from Washington, has already instituted a 360-Degree Feedback–like program, it would make more sense, in these arduous time of sequestered budgets, to forget the unproductive time-waster projects and concentrate on personnel-evaluation systems that are appropriate to military service.
Bomb Iran?
(See D. Dolan and R. Oard, pp. 36–41, May 2013 Proceedings)
Commander Carl Burch, U.S. Navy Reserve (Retired)—I was glad to see in Commander Dolan’s and Professor Oard’s article a detailed analysis of the likely difficulties in mounting a conventional air campaign against the Iranian nuclear program. Perhaps such issues will motivate a broader approach targeting Iran’s unique level of vulnerability to economic warfare.
Iran’s economy is overwhelmingly subsidized by oil exports through a small number of seaports and fixed pipelines. Obviously, the Iranians’ seaports are vulnerable to one of the Navy’s brands of asymmetric warfare—offensive mining. In fact, their oil terminals would be easier to mine effectively than the Strait of Hormuz, which the “U.S. Navy in Review” article in the same issue quoted Iran’s Admiral Habibolla Sayyari as saying it would be “easier than drinking a glass of water” (p. 62). The mine-countermeasures difficulties revealed by Exercise IMCMEX 12 would apply even more strongly to Iran than to the exercise participants.
Commander Dolan and Professor Oard assert that an air campaign’s “protraction is unpreventable.” By accepting the global economic disruption that any military action against Iran would imply, we then can use Iran’s own strategy against it. Instead of a “steady-state application of force,” one attack to remove Iranian oil-export capability would let us wait to see how important further nuclear-weapons development is to a nation with a collapsing economy.
On the tactical level, I’ve read that Iran is so short of refinery capacity that it imports refined fuels. Those imports would naturally also be blockaded, but fuel dumps should be high on the target list to reduce the mobility of Iran’s likely military responses—which Commander Dolan and Professor Oard so ably anticipate.
All this must be equally obvious to the Iranian government. Perhaps the example of North Korea encourages Iran to play out its hand against our diplomats instead of anticipating the need to defend against our full range of capabilities.
The Danes Have the Answer
(See T. X. Hammes, p. 12, April 2013, and A. Cowden, p. 84, June 2013 Proceedings)
George R. Gabaretta—Colonel Hammes’ column on the littoral combat ship calls into question the wisdom of a global navy focusing on the littorals, limiting the operational domain of nearly half of its dwindling inventory of surface combatants, and failing to provide the resulting design with the means to survive and succeed in a dangerous environment. World War II destroyers of about the same size and draft, optimized for blue-water surface warfare, were quite comfortable performing naval gunfire-support missions a few thousand yards offshore, had considerable antiair-warfare (AAW) and basic antisubmarine-warfare (ASW) capabilities, and could be easily modified to serve as minelayers (DM), minesweepers (DMS), or with additional effort, transports (APD). Nobody called them “littoral” or specified where those versatile combatants should operate. The littoral mindset is an unaffordable straitjacket on a globally committed but shrinking Navy facing diverse sophisticated threats.
True littoral combatants—large missile boats such as the heavily armed German Type 143, mission-reconfigurable Scandinavian Stanflex combatants—and coastal mine-countermeasures vessels draw less draft and are much cheaper than the LCS, for good reason. Whereas these coastal-defense craft operate in home waters, close to bases and support from friendly forces, the LCS is part of an expeditionary force that has to make transoceanic transits to reach the theater of operations, often in contested waters or close to territory under hostile control, where intense resistance is likely. LCS supply and support bases are likely to be distant or vulnerable, and the U.S. Navy hasn’t operated a base-alternative destroyer tender in years. Oceangoing expeditionary warships in that environment must be appropriately equipped.
Since the LCS’s cost has grown to equal or exceed that of a better-equipped and more survivable vessel such as the Danish frigate Iver Huitfeldt, should the current program be terminated in favor of Colonel Hammes’ recommendation? Perhaps not. The Navy could have designed a capable Knox- or Perry-class successor equal to the Huitfeldt but chose differently, presumably for budgetary reasons, with hitherto unfortunate results in cost and capability. Redesigning the LCS and achieving a unit cost under $500 million seems a goal worth pursuing.
Since a considerable portion of the LCS’s capabilities derive from embarked aviation, facilities for this critical capability should remain intact. All else should be reconsidered.
Reduce propulsion-plant output from 114,000- to 40,000-horsepower and speed from 45 to 28 knots. Double fuel load and endurance.
Make surface warfare the basic configuration. Replace the six-pounder with a five-inch Mk-45 gun. Add a pair of twin Harpoon cannisters.
Replace the 30-mm mounts with Phalanx, securing counter-speedboat firepower while substantially augmenting RAM’s AAW (counter cruise missile) capability.
Make the variable-depth-sonar/tactical-towed-array system a permanent feature. Limit modular exchange to a choice of ASW or mine-countermeasures unmanned underwater vehicles and control systems.
Add a 16-cell Mk-41 vertical-launch system dedicated to Tomahawk land-attack cruise missiles (desirable SM-2, 6, and Evolved Sea Sparrow missile use would involve excessive cost in sensors and direction systems).
CORRECTION
A Japanese carrier of the Taiyo class was misidentified in the caption on page 63 of the June issue as the Japanese carrier Taiho.