A Concept for Stand-In Forces
General Berger makes timely, thoughtful observations about the challenges that stand-in forces (SIF) would have to face, but with all due respect to the general and the Corps, it is doubtful whether a group of U.S. Marines could operate as SIF within the United States and not attract a great deal of attention. To attempt it in a foreign land would be far more difficult.
Counter-reconnaissance would be a problem. Americans tend to stand out in other countries, and service members even more. China could simply offer a bounty for information about U.S. forces, information that could be provided using just a smartphone.
If General Berger is serious about establishing an SIF capability within the Marine Corps, he should double the number of officers who serve as assistant naval attachés in countries bordering the South China Sea. And the Marines should make a specific effort to recruit native speakers of Bahasa Malaysia, Tieng Viet, Bahasa Indonesia, Tagalog, and of course Mandarin. Marine exchange tours with friendly countries in the region need to be doubled or tripled. Serious consideration should be given to creating a career path for country experts who would speak the local language and spend substantial time in the country to develop a knowledge of the geography, culture, and people. Skills in sailing and small craft navigation would be vital.
None of this will make any difference if the United States chooses its battles poorly. If we decide to fight China over issues that are tangential to the interests of the countries bordering the South China Sea—Taiwan for instance—Marine SIF’s fluency in other languages will not matter, nor will their knowledge of a country’s culture. Small countries near China will think long and hard about the consequences of provoking the dragon by cooperating with SIF—especially if they believe there is a chance the United States could lose.
—Guy Wroble
Bring Back the USS Constitution’s Marines
During the national bicentennial, a Marine Guard was proposed for the ship. Even though many modern Marine noncommissioned officers were enthusiastic, headquarters disapproved of the idea, allegedly because manning would be adversely affected by the allocation of a dozen or so senior enlisted personnel to a non-tactical duty. But local civilian Old Ironsides enthusiast Bill Moss was inspired to organize a group of reenactors to become the ship’s Marine Guard. At their own expense, they outfitted themselves with uniforms and equipment. Then they appeared at most public events, both in the ship and at the USS Constitution Museum. “Major” Moss passed away in August 2019, but his guard continues to serve.
—Commander Tyrone G. Martin, USN (Ret.), CO, USS Constitution (1974–78)
Cheers to Chief Fabrizio for advocating the return of Marines to the USS Constitution. A Marine detachment would greatly enhance the public relations mission of the ship and provide additional public visibility to the Marine Corps. As the chief may be aware, the last time Old Ironsides had a Marine detachment was during the national tour of 1931–34. The commanding officer, Commander Louis J. Gulliver, requested and received a detachment of one sergeant, two corporals, and 12 privates. They performed a number of duties on board, including providing an honor guard for distinguished visitors. More about the Marines during the national tour can be found in my book, The National Tour of the USS Constitution, 1931–1934.
—LCDR Phillip K. Parker, USNR (Ret).
Navigate by the Stars—From Beneath the Waves
Lieutenant Homeier’s excellent article on reviving celestial navigation highlighted the importance of this long-lost art for not only submarines but also surface ships and long-range naval aviation. The article brought back memories of my first tour as a naval flight officer (NFO) in “Take Charge and Move Out” (TACAMO) squadron VQ-4 nearly a half-century ago. Every NFO was required to first qualify as navigator in the EC-130, with a minimum accuracy of ten miles for celestial fixes of all types, taken in often turbulent flight conditions. Good navigators were quite capable of five-mile accuracy, based on triangle size. It was a point of pride for a navigator to call landfall bearing and range and have the tactical air navigation (TACAN) roll up to within a mile or two of the estimate.
We had two tools to make this work. The first was the aircraft bubble sextant with mechanical averager. Like Lieutenant Homeier’s periscope, this did not require a visible horizon. The navigator kept the celestial body inside a bubble in the field of view for two minutes with the elevation knob, while the mechanical averager smoothed out the variations. At the end, the averager closed the shutter, and the navigator read off the smoothed elevation. The only problem with the bubble sextant was that we could not see the sky to select the stars. We had to pick them beforehand, to aim the bubble sextant to the precomputed bearing and elevation.
The other tool was one I developed. In 1974, Hewlett-Packard came out with the HP-65 calculator with programmable magnetic card strips. I developed a program for this device that calculated elevation and bearing of a star from the dead-reckoned latitude and longitude at time of fix. This was significantly faster—about five seconds—than the paper calculations requiring the use of two star pubs and multiple error-prone calculations, which took several minutes for a three-star fix. I was able to navigate for eight hours, easily taking a three-star fix every 30 minutes, simply to prove it could be done with the HP.
With modern computers you can get a view of the sky, with your course and speed overlaid, and easily select three optimum stars, as easily as seeing the night sky. And the precomputation is very simple: The elevation is the great circle range from DR to the star’s geographical position in nautical miles, divided by 60, and subtracted from 90 degrees. The bearing is the great circle bearing.
It is time for us to revive this vital centuries-old skill using 21st-century technology. If you want to know what the GPS-denied environment looks like in wartime, I highly recommend reading Onslaught by David Poyer. It’s not pretty.
—CDR Lewis F. McIntyre, USN (Ret.)
I learned the art of navigation on diesel boats in the early ’70s. When I reported on board my first nuclear-powered attack submarine as assistant navigator, I found a lack of training in celestial navigation. We had all the required publications to work out the problems. I had trouble getting the wardroom to support my training, so I resorted to training my quartermasters to get an azimuth each time we came to periscope depth. My procedure was to have them find a star on the beam, get the time of observation and a rough altitude. The reason to take the observation off the beam is to eliminate the effects of roll that affect the correct bearing.
They worked the problem using the Rude Star Finder (HO.2102). The captain and navigator were excited to find on the 8:00 reports “Gyro Error .5w by Vega or Saturn.”
When the quartermasters were merged with electronics technicians, I knew the art of navigation would suffer. I was glad to read in Proceedings that celestial navigation is being taught once again at the Academy. Reliance on the Global Positioning System (GPS) will not do any good in an all-out shooting war. Bring back the quartermasters and the art of navigation.
—QMCM(SS) David B. Dalby, USNR (Ret.)
I was (pleasantly) shocked to see Lieutenant Homeier’s article espousing the use of celestial navigation in today’s submarines. Bravo! I used celestial navigation extensively as a P-3 NFO in the mid-1970s. We didn’t need it when flying over land, but when crossing the Atlantic or Pacific Ocean, we eventually flew out of range of land-based navigational aids (TACAN, LORAN, etc.) and had no alternative but to use celestial navigation to stay reasonably close to course. Taking celestial fixes every half-hour and doing the math, while using the current Air Almanac as a critical reference tool, was hard work but very, very satisfying.
Today’s GPS has made celestial navigation obsolete—or so I thought before reading Lieutenant Homeier’s article. As he notes, satellites are vulnerable to attack. If that were to occur, and if the United States were not prepared, it is awful to imagine ships and planes feeling lost and having no way to know where they are.
Lieutenant Homeier makes an excellent case that periscopes can be modified and, combined with computer apps and a little training, become excellent tools for celestial navigation. Not as good as GPS, but a whole lot better than nothing. Navy planes and surface ships may not have periscopes, but I hope consideration will be given to providing them with similar modifications to allow them to be effective fighting forces in a worst-case scenario.
—LT Dan Edelstein, USN (Ret.)
Correctly Calculating Ship Squatting
BZ to Lieutenants Balistreri and Alkonis for their excellent article on ship squatting. One has to be concerned for squat in confined fresh water canals that I transited as a Gearing-class destroyer ship driver. Although there is some mixing of salt water with fresh water when the ship enters and exits confined waters, one must allow for some sinkage in the fresh water due to the decreased buoyancy. This is easily discerned from the damage control assistant’s curves of form for tons per inch immersion to perform a quick calculation:
d(in. of sinkage) = Displacement of ship in salt water in tons / 35 x Tons per inch Immersion
In a more confined waterway, the sideways water flow is restricted as well as that due to the shallow water. This intensifies the low pressure, which causes more squat than in open water. It is taken into account by a “blockage factor.” Basically, this is the breadth of the ship times the draft of the ship divided by the depth of the channel times the channel width for a rectangular channel (use trapezoidal formula for some shaped channels). In other words, the blockage factor is the ratio of the ship underwater volume to the volume of the box that it would fit into. A blockage factor of .265 defines a confined waterway, whereas a blockage factor of .1 is open sea or no blockage factor.
For confined waters, the simplified Barriss formula for squat is now:
Squatmax(meters) =Block Coef x Speed through water in knots2 / 50
Convert to feet by multiplying by 3.28 feet/meter
In other words, the squat is doubled in a confined waterway in addition to the small fresh water sinkage effect.
Current and tide must be taken into account, since only the speed through the water caused by the pushing water aside causes the low pressure effect that leads to squat. A ship moving at ten knots relative to the ground, due only to an astern current, has water flowing with the ship. There is no squat in this situation, since the ship is not pushing any water forward and no water is required to pass under the ship to create a low pressure area and squat.
Also, the block coefficient value determines whether the squat occurs at the bow or stern. For a stationary ship on an even keel with a block coefficient less than 0.700, the squat is at the stern. Similarly, for ships with a block coefficient greater than 0.700, such as container ships and roll-on/roll-off ships, the squat occurs at the bow. Ships near 0.700 have sinkage equal to the maximum squat.
There are many more mathematically complex depictions of squat (including potential flow numerical methods), but the Barriss-simplified equations and fresh water sinkage calculations are very useful to the ship driver in making quick estimates in open and confined water situations.
—CAPT Randolph M. Brooks, USN (Ret.)
Lessons from the Balkans for Today’s Conflicts
Proceedings has been using the term “Serbo-Croatian language analyst,” which suggests that differences between Serbian and Croatian are not understandable. Serbs and Croats may speak similar languages, as do Czechs and Slovaks, Norwegians and Swedes, Russians and Ukrainians, British and Americans, but there is no Serbo-Croatian, Czecho-Slovakian, Russian-Ukrainian, or British-American language. Both Serbian and Croatian are very old languages, and one of the numerous disputes between Croats and Serbs concerns language.
Some Croats believe Serbs speak a version of Croatian, but they recognize Serbian out of respect for one’s neighbor. On the other side, some Serbs believe Croats speak a version of Serbian, and do not recognize Croatian. The source of disputes and wars between Serbs and Croats was Great Serbian ideology, thanks to which Serbia does not recognize Croatia, yet would like to become an EU member with Croatian approval. The term “Serbo-Croatian” to designate language officially existed only in former Yugoslavia, under a Communist dictatorship that enforced language use.
Croatian, Serbian, Montenegrin, and Bosnian are all official languages, and to solve the problems in the conflicted Balkans, it is important to understand the differences between nations. The United States, a Croatian ally, does not understand the source of these problems. And today, we see again the rise of Serbian nationalist ideology all over the Balkans—with Russian support, of course. The recent Serbian invasion of Montenegro was shameful for NATO. The question is not whether there will be another war in the Balkans, but when there will be one.
—Dr. Ivica Tijardovic
It felt particularly cruel to read this issue about emerging technologies and proposed tactics while under way, standing by for hours awaiting Condition II AS to be called away, delayed by sonar casualties. The other antisubmarine warfare (ASW) evaluator and I talked about how much we’d enjoyed the training pipeline and the practice of target motion analysis, only to be sent to a ship that was tied for the oldest sonar system in the Navy—a sonar system without the ability to conduct onboard training, constant outages.
If the Navy truly cares about ASW, it should not waste motivated sailors, schoolhouse seats, and obsolete material on incompatible warfare areas, upgrading systems when they should be phased out. It should properly invest in its platforms to make them fully mission-capable.
—LT Michael Smallberg, USN,
USS Leyte Gulf (CG-55)
Under the Waves: Presidents’ Submarine Voyages
I enjoyed retired Lieutenant Commander John Lehmann’s tribute to the fabled USS Cincinnati (SSN-693) event in the October issue, but I wish he had spiced the story with mention of the instigator of that visit. I was a member of the Cincinnati wardroom in November 1980. One afternoon we were scrambled from Norfolk and ordered to tie up at State Pier, New London, upon arrival; reason not provided. By the time we arrived—and increasingly during the several hours we waited—we were sure the father of our nuclear Navy had something to do with this mission. The surprise came when the first visitor dropped down the hatch and introduced himself as former president Richard Nixon’s Secret Service detachment. Admiral Hyman Rickover and the President arrived some time later. I will forever remember dining in the wardroom with President Nixon seated to the right of our CO, Commander Gilbert V. Wilkes III; and Admiral Rickover to his left. Both were engaged in conversation about trusting the Chinese over the French with nuclear secrets, concerns over women serving on board submarines, and other heady topics for 1980. Addressing the rigors of our nuclear training program on board ship, Admiral Rickover asked “Gil” to fetch his training records. It was amusing to see “God” (our CO) jump from his chair so fast. Admiral Rickover had executed his promise to the President.
—CDR Marc S. Stewart, USN (Ret.)
What’s At Stake in the Indo-Pacific
As Friedberg points out, having friends in the area is a nice idea, but with China so close, not really sustainable when things start heating up. The Chinese Communist Party (CCP) now has Hong Kong under its thumb; Taiwan is next (the logistics for the United States are impossible, as China knows); and the stomping will go on. Everyone in Silicon Valley knows Apple was fully aware of the fact that its first iPhones were the products of Chinese quasi–forced labor.
The United States should be insisting that no Chinese containers be unloaded in U.S. ports until we come to terms over Taiwan and China stops using concentration camps and organ harvesting. But we are not insisting, so this just continues regardless of Pentagon strategies to counter the CCP military expansion. Friedberg’s big-picture analysis does not address these issues, which are part of CCP world-stomping.
Meanwhile, the U.S. Navy is facing the CCP’s hypersonic missiles, which are to U.S. nuclear carriers what gunpowder was to medieval knights. Do they cost more to maintain and operate than they bring to the fight? It could be time to free up the strike group’s resources to build a more agile, deadly force—for example a destroyer, an attack sub swarm of nukes. As Marshall McLuhan noted, driving into the future using the rearview mirror is a serious safety concern.
—Paul Cavallo
Want Better Mental Health in the Fleet? An App Might be the Answer
Suicide is a very delicate subject; no death is good. Ensign Rivera begins by citing a 2019 New York Times piece that reports on suicide rates and compares the Navy (20.1 per 100,000 service members) to the civilian rate of approximately 14 per 100,000. My initial reaction was that the Navy really had a problem. But the more I thought about it, the more curious I became. I discovered that in fact, the Navy’s suicide rate is not worse than that of the general population.
Among civilians, women have accounted for a suicide rate of about 6 per 100,000, and men about 23, yielding the combined overall rate of 14 that is given. However, the Navy is 80 percent male, and so its rate is actually much lower than that of the civilian male population. It is very close to the blended rate, which matches the Navy’s male/female population. So the number of people who commit suicide in the Navy is about the same as among the general population.
—Captain Jack Laufer, USCGR (Ret.)
Challenging the Conventional: Diversity Deserves Better
Diversity to me means goals based on personal characteristics, and it arises naturally from recruiting. If we concentrated on training this base in warfighting skills while treating each individual fairly and without discrimination, we would end up with a cohesive, competent, deadly force, not one divided into “diversity” groups.
Reading lists should emphasize history and biographies of great leaders. Instead, we seem to be promoting the notion that the United States is systematically racist, so we must “reverse discriminate.” Who would want to put their life on the line for such a country? What would Martin Luther King have to say?
The time and effort focused on nonessential and in many cases nonsensical issues detract from what the military needs to train for, and if this continues it will only lead to more and worse defeats in the future.
—Frank Morgan, Life Member