Tuesday, November 29, 2016

Final Justice for Major Anderson

























Tuesday, November 15, 2016

Prepare to Board!




From the UK Telegraph:


















1.  Form battle line.

2.  Engage with main guns

3.  Lure enemy into CIWS range

4.  Distribute cutlasses, small arms and prepare to board!  


Thursday, November 10, 2016

Winners and Losers (Election Edition)














And for once, their voice was heard.  




























Monday, October 10, 2016

The Gathering Storm (Russia Edition)


















Sunday, October 09, 2016


Before he heads out the door, President Obama is pushing a few of his pet initiatives, with little regard for their long-term impact on the nation.

Let's begin with global warming, climate change or whatever catch-phrase is now being used to perpetuate that hoax.  As the Washington Times recently reported, Mr. Obama is claiming that rising temperatures (and sea levels) will trigger new waves of massive migration, creating problems far beyond those now being experienced in the Middle East and Europe.

Never mind that the "science" behind climate change has been notoriously politicized--and global temperatures haven't risen a single degree over the past 18 years; President Obama has never been one to let the facts stand in the way of a convenient narrative.  Just the other day, he suggested that droughts (brought on, of course, by global warming) were one of the factors that caused the Syrian civil war.  So. stop blaming Bashir Assad; those barrel bombs being dropped on civilians in Aleppo are a by-product of climate change, and not the repressive tactics of a brutal dictator.

Mr. Obama has also jumped back on the diversity bandwagon.  On Wednesday, the President directed national security agencies to "strengthen the talent and diversity of their organizations."  More from the Washington Post:



In other words, agencies like the CIA, NSA, DIA, the State Department--and others--need to hire more minorities.  Decades of affirmative action programs, specialized recruiting efforts and other initiatives have failed to place enough individuals of color in the senior ranks of the military, the diplomatic corps and the intelligence community.  

National Security Adviser Susan Rice (of Benghazi infamy) is the administration's point-person for the diversity push.  In recent remarks, she described the need to recruit and promote more blacks, Latinos and Asians as a "national security imperative."  Dr. Rice expressed disappointment that people of color represent about 40% of the nation's population, but only 15-20% of the nation's senior diplomats, military officers and intelligence officials.  So, it's a safe bet that a candidate's race will play an even more important role in future hiring and promotion decisions. 

And not surprisingly, the military is rushing to re-embrace diversity as well.  Last Friday, the Air Force released a memo--signed by service secretary Deborah James; chief of staff General David Goldfein and Chief Master Sergeant of the Air Force James Cody--outlining 13 new "inclusion" initiatives.  According to Air Force magazine, the new mandates include diversity requirements for certain promotion candidate pools; membership on command selection boards and panels considering airmen for recruiting duty. Additionally, the Air Force will create a new "human capital analytics office," which will use microtargeting capabilities to better attract and retain talent.

But the diversity push doesn't end there.  Air Force ROTC will receive an extra $20 million over the next five years to fund 200 new scholarships for students from "under-served and under-represented population centers.  One of the primary goals is to increase minority representation in career fields that have historically "lacked diversity," including pilot, air battle manager, missile and space operations and intelligence.  Leaders in those fields have been tasked to submit plans to reverse those trends.

Obviously, there's nothing wrong with getting more minorities into the cockpit, behind a radar console, or as part of a missile or space operations crew.  But certain words are often missing from such discussions, including "standards" and "qualifications."  When the military needs more bodies, there is often a temptation to lower standards; it happened at the height of the Iraq War, when the Army was struggling to meet recruiting quotas.  Minimum scores were lowered on the Armed Services Vocational Aptitude Battery (ASVAB), and standards were relaxed in other areas as well, to get enough recruits into uniform.

Recruiting someone to be a pilot or intelligence officer is a different matter, but many of the same issues persist.  In the rush to get more people with the "right" background into selected AFSCs, there is tendency to relax requirements.  Minority applicants with lower scores on the Armed Forces Officer Qualification Test (AFOQT) may be admitted, in hopes of achieving diversity goals.

To be fair, there have been no reports (yet) about a serious erosion of standards among candidates who will be recruiting for those new ROTC scholarships.   But such slippage has occurred during the past.  During the mid-1990s, your humble correspondent was an Air Force ROTC instructor at an SEC school.  One of our "sister" detachments was at a historically black college and university, about 75 miles away. We met with the instructor cadre from the other school on a periodic basis, to share best practices and lessons learned.

At the same time, the USAF was in the middle of another diversity push, trying to send a minimum number of minority candidates to pilot and navigator training each year.  I remember asked the commander of our sister detachment about his thoughts on the efforts.  His answer was shorting and stunning: "it's a dumb idea," he told me, and "doomed to fail."

As the Lieutenant Colonel recounted, his detachment had sent an average of two cadets a year to pilot and navigator training during the previous four years, a period that predated his arrival at the school. Most of the cadets were African-American, though some were white, students at a third school who completed ROTC at the HBCU.

From the Colonel's perspective, most of those young people heading to UPT and UNT were doomed to fail, and it had nothing to do with their skin color.  But it had everything to do with their educational background and preparation for pilot and nav training.  Virtually all of the young officers had graduated from high school in the state--a state with notoriously poor public schools.  Many had struggled to complete their undergraduate studies, but they met the requirements for ROTC and earned their commissions.  And with the diversity push of that era, one or two headed off each year to pilot or navigator training, among the most demanding training courses in the Air Force.

According to the commander, not a single lieutenant from his detachment had completed UPT or UNT during the previously-cited four-year period.  Most of the pilot candidates washed out during the first half of UPT (a year-old program); roughly half were retained by the Air Force and trained in a different career field.  The rest were discharged, after hundreds of thousands of dollars had been spent on their training.  According to the detachment commander, most of the selectees from his school were marginal candidates, with AFOQT scores that were borderline for pilot and navigator.  Obviously, the test results weren't the only predictor of potential success, but they were a useful barometer.

The Air Force persisted in its effort for a few more years, but the number of minority pilots, navigators, missileers and intel officers remained relatively low.  The detachment commander who warned about marginally-qualified candidates being thrown into the fire at UPT and UNT suggested better screening of candidates, with additional funds to help them complete ground school and earn some "stick time" towards a private pilot's license, since Air Force data shows that applicants with flight experience tend to do better in undergraduate pilot or navigator training.  His idea was rejected due to the projected cost and the perceptions that the service would be giving minority applicants an unfair advantage.

Fast forward 20 years, and the USAF appears to be back as square one.  So far, the Air Force hasn't offered any details on how it plans to meet its diversity goals, but the effort is getting off on the wrong foot.  Consider those 200 additional ROTC scholarships.  What service leaders fail to mention is that minority applicants who meet requirements for those awards are typically bombarded with scholarship offers from top schools--with no requirement for military service.  And, for a student accepting a four-year ROTC scholarship out of high school, there is no military commitment until the end of their sophomore year.  Not surprisingly, many quit the program before their service obligation begins, getting two free years of college on the taxpayers' dime.  For those who remain, the overall washout rate for the four-year scholarship program is 70%, since many can't handle the rigors of an engineering curriculum (ROTC schollys are heavily weighted towards engineering and the hard sciences).  

So, the Air Force faces a tough choice: lower academic standards (and hope some of those students make it to the cockpit, an intel billet or cyber unit, regardless of race, sexual preference or gender), or try to convince more highly-qualified minority applicants to become USAF officers.  But the odds of success for either option are decidedly slim.  It's quite likely that the Air Force secretary and chief of staff will face the same "diversity" issue in 2025 that they're facing in 2016 (and previously confronted in the 1990s).  And did we mention that the percentage of young Americans who qualify for military service is decreasing, even among those who might be competitive for a commissioning program? 

Ironically, there are more viable options for increasing diversity in the Air Force officer corps, but (so far the service hasn't shown much interest in them.  We refer to those "13-week wonders" who earn their commission through Officer Training School, the USAF version of OCS in the Army, Navy and Marine Corps.  There are thousands of minority NCOs who have earned their college degree on active duty and are candidates for OTS, but most will never earn a slot in the program for various reasons.

First, there's the academic factor.  As noted previously, the Air Force has always had a preference for officers with degrees in engineering, mathematics, computer sciences, physics and similar disciplines.  Many of the NCOs who complete their bachelor's while on active duty major in business, liberal arts or other subjects that are available on-line, or through classes at the base education center.  Of course, there is a certain irony in the service's preference for technical degrees.  While no one doubts the rigor associated with an engineering, math or IT curriculum, completion of those degrees is no guarantee of success in pilot training, as a missileer, or as an intel officer.

Age can also pose a barrier.  Candidates for OTS must be commissioned by their 35th birthday, allowing them to complete 20 years of service by their 55th birthday.  And, individuals who want to be pilots must enter flight training by the age of 30.  Unfortunately, by the time most NCOs finish their degrees, they are at (or past) that age limit.  And here's the ultimate irony: Air Force OTS only commissions about 500 officers a year (roughly one-sixth of the production rate during the Reagan era) and half of the current slots are reserved for civilian applicants.  So, it's very difficult for active-duty NCOs--from the groups the USAF is targeting--to trade their stripes for a second lieutenant's bars.  Never mind that these individuals already have outstanding service records, and are more likely to make the military a career.  The existence of these obstacles make little sense if the service is truly committed to "diversity."

Expanding the OTS pool would also address issues about experience and competence among junior officers, particularly if the service selects airmen and NCOs from high-demand career fields to serve in officer positions in those same vocations.  Obviously, that won't work for pilot (the USAF only recently approved the training of enlisted drone pilots), but the enlisted-to-officer pipeline works very well in the intel career field and air battle manager, where enlisted surveillance technicians can easily make the transition to surveillance officers and weapons directors.  The Air Force would also do well to consider other possible solutions, such as a reintroduction of the warrant officer ranks, and following the lead of other services in creating limited duty officers, who provide exceptional technical expertise in various career fields.

Unfortunately, those concerns often become secondary when service secretaries, agency heads and general officers sign on for the latest diversity gambit.  The fanfare associated with the launch of such initiatives is rarely followed by the same level of enthusiasm in measuring the success (or failure) of the current scheme to increase minority representation in critical career fields.  However, there is a silver lining for members of those groups who enter the service and make it a career.  Under the new promotion systems being developed, a select number will be virtually guaranteed command slots.  That will make this latest initiative less of a outreach effort and more of a quota system.  Not that anyone at the White House or the Pentagon really cares.        


Thursday, September 15, 2016

"Sea of Fire"


















Thursday, September 08, 2016

Hillary's Unnoticed Revelation




















Friday, August 26, 2016

What Might Have Been (Iran Edition)

For the second time in three days, there has been a confrontation between U.S. and Iranian naval vessels in the Persian Gulf.  During today's incident, an American patrol craft fired three warning shots into the water after four Iranian boats harassed U.S. and Kuwaiti Navy vessels in the northern Persian Gulf. As CNN reports: 

"At one point, the Iranian boat came within 200 yards of one of the US Navy boats. When it failed to leave the area after the Navy had fired flares and had a radio conversation with the Iranian crew, the US officials said, tthree he USS Squall fired three warning shots. Following standard maritime procedures, the Navy fired the shots into the water to ensure the Iranians understood they needed to leave the immediate area."  

The episode came just two days after four Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps vessels staged a "high-speed intercept" of the guided missile destroyer USS Nitze in the Strait of Hormuz.  

American officials said two of the vessels slowed and turned away only after coming within 300 yards of the US guided-missile destroyer as it transited international waters near the Strait of Hormuz, and only after the destroyer had sent multiple visual and audio warnings.  In response, a senior IRGC naval officer said Iran will continue its close-quarters intercepts of American vessels, maneuvers deemed "unsafe" and "unprofessional" by the U.S. Navy.  

The most recent showdowns in the Gulf are merely the latest in a string of dangerous incidents involving Iranian military forces.  Last December, one of its vessels fired a rocket near the aircraft carrier USS Harry S. Truman; that was followed by the capture and brief detainment of 10 American sailors whose Riverine broke down during a transit from Kuwait to Bahrain and drifted into Iranian waters.  And just last month, one of Iran's naval craft sailed close to the USS New Orleans while the Commander of US Central Command, General Joseph Votel, was on board.   
And, did we mention recent revelations that the Obama Administration paid a $400 million ransom to secure the release of four American hostages from Iran last year?  Or that more money is on the way, helping Tehran finance its own military modernization program, and fund terrorist proxies around the world. 

Then, there's the nuclear deal, which places Iran squarely on the path to developing those weapons.  Iran's partnership with North Korea will provide the expertise needed to extend the range of Tehran's ballistic missiles, so an Iranian ICBM--capable of a nuclear warhead to the CONUS--is a virtual certainty, and perhaps by the end of this decade.

Against that grim backdrop, it's a fair question to ask what might have been, particularly if the U.S. had pursued regime change as a priority in Iran.  And there were opportunities, most recently during the so-called "Green Revolution" in 2009.  After Mahmoud Ahmadinejad and his faction won the presidential election ("stole" is probably a better term), thousands of Iranians took to the streets, demanding change. 

The widespread unrest threatened to topple the Tehran regime, which responded brutally.  Between 800 and 3,000 protesters were killed in the street; hundreds more disappeared and were executed in Iranian prisons.  President Obama refused to lift a finger in support, claiming the demonstrators--which represented a broad cross-section of Iranian society--didn't represent "real change."  He never admitted publicly that the Iranian election was riddled with fraud, aimed at keeping Ahmadinejad and the mullahs in power.

Why was Obama so insistent on letting the Iranian revolution die on the vine?  We finally have some answers, thanks to Wall Street Journal reporter Jay Solomon and his new book, The Iran Wars.  Eli Lake of Bloomberg devoted a recent column to Solomon's work and its revelations.  He affirms what many long suspected; Obama's obsession over reaching some sort of deal with Iran overruled any other considerations; he was quite willing to let the Green Revolution die on the vine, to preserve his then-secret overtures to Tehran.  As Mr. Lake writes:

It's worth contrasting Obama's response with how the U.S. has reacted to other democratic uprisings. The State Department, for example, ran a program in 2000 through the U.S. embassy in Hungary to train Serbian activists in nonviolent resistance against their dictator, Slobodan Milosevic. Milosevic, too, accused his opposition of being pawns of the U.S. government. But in the end his people forced the dictator from power.



And, as Mr. Solomon reveals, the president's over-arching desire to strike a deal with Iran influenced critical decisions in other areas.  It's the main reason he walked away from the infamous "red line" in Syria three years ago.  Iranian negotiators told their American counterparts the nuclear talks would end if the U.S. intervened against Syrian dictator--and Iran ally--Bashir Assad.  Obama blinked.  The President also took the unusual steps of ending U.S. programs that documented human rights abuses in the Islamic Republic and wrote letters to Iran's Supreme Leader, assuring him that the we had no plans to overthrow him.  

In the end, Obama got his badly-flawed nuclear deal--and a lot more.  Iran is more belligerent and aggressive than ever before, as evidenced by the recent naval encounters in the Gulf.  And the situation isn't likely to improve anytime soon.  Tehran got everything it wanted in the nuclear accord, and the return of long-frozen Iranian assets in the U.S. will provide a funding stream for new military hardware, the nuclear program and various terrorist allies.  

To be fair, there is no guarantee that American support would have guaranteed the success of the Green Revolution.  But as Mr. Lake writes, it was definitely worth a gamble.  Installing a new Iranian regime would have been a game-changer across the Middle East, likely resulting in a nuclear deal that effectively dismantled the Iranian program and eradicated the emerging threat.  The situation in places like Syria might have become more manageable and there's even the possibility that Tehran's support for groups like Hezbollah would fade.  Without that assistance, the group would become less of a threat to Israel and its stranglehold over Lebanon might decrease as well.  

Unfortunately, all of those scenarios are permanently banished to the realm of what "might have been," thanks to the obsessive and feckless behavior of Barack Obama.  Mr. Solomon's book is on our reading list, since he clearly breaks new ground in reporting one of the story's most important diplomatic stories.  One thing we're wondering about: what role did Presidential adviser Valerie Jarrett play in all of this?  Ms. Jarrett, the president's closest confidante was born in Iran to American parents and, by some accounts, retains a certain affinity for the land where she grew up.  

Nothing wrong with that, but Jarrett seems to be an invisible hand in the diplomatic activity that pursued the nuclear deal to the exclusion of everything else.  One report indicates that Ms. Jarrett played an active role in secret talks with Iran before the public negotiations began.  Never mind that the presidential adviser has no real experience in diplomacy or national security matters.  But she does have Mr. Obama's ear, and some observers believe that Jarrett played a role in the departure of Ambassador Dennis Ross from the president's national security team early in his tenure.  Ross, a veteran Middle East hand, favored a much tougher approach in negotiations with Iran.  Needless to say, that didn't sit well with Mr. Obama or Ms. Jarrett. 

In the end, the president's singular focus on "winning over" Iran--encouraged by members of his inner circle--spelled doom for brave Iranians who rose up during the Green Revolution.  Some of them still languish in prison to this day.  Not surprisingly, the Obama administration isn't doing anything to help them, since we no longer track human rights abuses in Iran.