Military

What did you watch on Saturday?

It’s what the Spec War troops are up to. How will this be used, and how is it being used, in this nation?

The new CNO for the Navy is a diversity hire pencil pusher whose only real qualification is the possession of a vagina. Let me illustrate: She was assigned to no fewer than 9 seagoing ships and command groups during her 38 years in the Navy, but has only received 2 Sea Service Deployment ribbons. The rest of her decorations are bullshit awards for being good at ass kissing her superiors.

the Defense Distinguished Service Medal, Distinguished Service Medal, Defense Superior Service Medal (two awards), Legion of Merit (five awards), Meritorious Service Medal (five awards), Navy and Marine Corps Commendation Medal (four awards), and the Navy and Marine Corps Achievement Medal (two awards).

I was only in the Navy for six years and received three sea service deployment ribbons. My opinions on:

• How women in the Navy get credit for sea duty without going to sea
• Women being whores in the military, then screaming about harassment

Most people think that you join the military for a term of 2, 3, or 4 years. What people who haven’t served in the US military usually don’t know is that everyone really signs up for 8 years. What people think of as their 2, 3, or 4 year ‘hitch’ is merely the active duty part of their contract. You can begin serving that active duty part of it immediately, or you can wait up to 12 months to report. That’s in your contract as well. When you are done with that active duty commitment, what happens to the time that is left?

The military owns your ass for it, that’s what. If they want you to come back, you come back. That is exactly what is happening to 450 unlucky people this month as Biden issues orders to call up 3,000 reservists, up to 450 of whom can be people who recently thought they were done. Where are they headed, you ask?

Europe, to join the other 100,000 troops already there. Gotta be ready for Biden’s big war in Ukraine. They are going to use the catchy name from 2014- Operation Atlantic Resolve. Can’t kill thousands of people in a military adventure without a catchy name.

Biden’s boys are careful to mention that the troops aren’t going to the Ukraine. Nope, they are joining the 2nd Armored Brigade Combat Team. The base that the brigade is operating from is called Camp Herkus:

I’m sure that you won’t be surprised to find out that this camp is in Pabrade, Lithuania. Now Pabrade is just 3.5 miles from Lithuania’s border with Belarus. That also places them less than 400 miles west of the suburbs of Moscow, and 110 miles from the eastern end of Kaliningrad Oblast, Russia. The red pin is where the Brigade is based:

When you find out that the US opened the base in August of 2021, then remember that the US started moving troops into Europe at about the same time, and you can begin to understand why the Russians finally decided to get pissed off and invade Ukraine six months later. How would Americans react if the Russians decided to place an armored brigade 100 miles from the Canadian border? Perhaps Putin isn’t the dictatorial asshole he is being painted as?

Consider that an Armored Brigade Combat Team is what used to be called a heavy armored brigade. The armored brigade combat team (ABCT) is the army’s primary armored force, and is the largest brigade combat team formation with 4,743 soldiers. An ABCT includes 87 Abrams, 152 Bradley IFVs, 18 M109s and 45 armed M113 vehicles. It is a formidable unit, and carries a lot of firepower, all of it on the northern border with Belarus.

On the western border with Belarus is Poland. What’s there, you ask? The US First Army, with the potent V Corps has its headquarters there.

As a part of the enhanced Forward Presence (eFP), four NATO multinational battalion battlegroups are stationed in Poland, Estonia, Lithuania and Latvia. On the eve of the summit, NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg, in addition to expanding the high readiness force with 40,000. up to 300 thousand soldiers announced to increase the potential of the battle groups to the level of brigades.

Last month, Poland began moving elements of its 12th and 17th Mechanized Brigades to its eastern border with Belarus. These are the same brigades that were just upgraded to the Abrams.

With tens of thousands of NATO troops massing on the border, it makes sense that the Russians are putting tactical nukes in Belarus.

Biden is pushing for a war with Russia, and Russia will have little choice but to use nuclear weapons in the face of division sized armored forces pushing towards his capitol city. If the US does the stupid thing, there is little chance of avoiding the use of at least a few tactical nukes.

I am old enough to remember when the Democrats were opposed to nuclear war.

The military supply system is stupid and messed up. Everything has a stock number and a description. They frequently don’t make sense. For example, a flyswatter is referred to as “Exterminator, Insect, Manual.” When I was a new E-4, I was forced into the role of Supply Petty Officer for the workcenter by the E-4 who was previously the most junior. He was glad to be rid of the job. I was soon to understand why.

On July 1, 1941, a requisition was submitted for 150 rolls of toilet paper by an officer aboard the submarine USS Skipjack (SS-184). As the boat patrolled the Pacific, the requested item never arrived. In March 1942, Lieutenant Commander James Coe took command of the Skipjack. As Coe settled into his new role, he learned of the missing toilet paper. On June 19, Coe received a canceled invoice for 150 rolls of toilet paper. The request was the original from July 1941 and was stamped “canceled-cannot identify.” Coe wrote a response that is famous within the Navy today.

1. This vessel submitted a requisition for 150 rolls of toilet paper on July 30, 1941, to USS HOLLAND. The material was ordered by HOLLAND from the Supply Officer, Navy Yard, Mare Island, for delivery to USS Skipjack.

2. The Supply Officer, Navy Yard, Mare Island, on November 26, 1941, cancelled Mare Island Invoice No. 272836 with the stamped notation “Cancelled—cannot identify.” This cancelled invoice was received by Skipjack on June 10, 1942.

3. During the 11 1/2 months elapsing from the time of ordering the toilet paper and the present date, the Skipjack personnel, despite their best efforts to await delivery of subject material, have been unable to wait on numerous occasions, and the situation is now quite acute, especially during depth charge attack by the “back-stabbers.”

4. Enclosure (2) is a sample of the desired material provided for the information of the Supply Officer, Navy Yard, Mare Island. The Commanding Officer, USS Skipjack cannot help but wonder what is being used in Mare Island in place of this unidentifiable material, once well known to this command.

5. Skipjack personnel during this period have become accustomed to use of “ersatz,” i.e., the vast amount of incoming non-essential paper work, and in so doing feel that the wish of the Bureau of Ships for the reduction of paper work is being complied with, thus effectively killing two birds with one stone.

6. It is believed by this command that the stamped notation “cannot identify” was possible error, and that this is simply a case of shortage of strategic war material, the Skipjack probably being low on the priority list.

7. In order to cooperate in our war effort at a small local sacrifice, the Skipjack desires no further action be taken until the end of the current war, which has created a situation aptly described as “war is hell.”

J.W. Coe

Coe’s letter caused quite a stir and was circulated throughout the fleet. When the Skipjack returned to Australia after her patrol, she was greeted by quite a sight. The pier was stacked seven feet high with boxes of toilet paper instead of the usual crates of fresh fruit and ice cream. Toilet paper streamers decorated the dock, and a band greeted the boat wearing toilet paper neckties and toilet paper flying out of trumpets and horns. The men of the Skipjack would not have to do without toilet paper again, as they were greeted upon every return with cartons of the precious paper.

Back to my story: we had an upcoming deployment, and I had to order supplies to get us through the first six months. I was told to order some superglue and some wooden handled cotton swabs. I looked them up, and the superglue was listed as “adhesive, cyanoacrylate” with a unit of issue of CS (meaning case) and a unit cost of $1.44. The cotton swabs were listed as “applicator, cotton tip, wood handle” with a unit of issue of BG (bag) and a cost of $0.29. No mention in either case of how many were in a case or a bag. At the time, the military was known to be paying $400 for a hammer, so I had to guess.

I guessed that there were at most 2 tubes of superglue per case, and ordered 12 units of superglue, and that there were at most 10 swabs per bag, so I ordered 100 bags of them. What it turned out was that there were 144 tubes of glue per case, and 100 swabs per bag. I wound up with 1,700 tubes of superglue and 10,000 cotton swabs. This mistake was legendary. I caught shit about it for the entire deployment.

When I passed the job on to the newly promoted guy a few months later, I was evil about it. We sent him down to supply to get a can of eh-eye-arr. He came back to supply with a bottle marked “Air, room temperature.” He got the best of me.

These are US Marines.

The world is laughing at us… 👇🏼pic.twitter.com/N4EdBGVts8

— Gunther Eagleman™ (@GuntherEagleman) June 13, 2023

I joined the military shortly after Reagan took office. I heard stories about the Carter years: how officers couldn’t go into enlisted quarters without escorts, for fear of violence. Enlisted openly using cocaine in berthing areas. Our military was effectively useless.

This looks every bit as bad as those Carter years.

The Biden administration is worried that the military might not be loyal in a potential Civil War. Here is how that will be handled.

My Memorial day post on the loss of an airman reminded me of the procedures when a man went overboard. Navy ships drill for man overboard at least once a week while they are at sea. The drill goes like this:

An officer throws a mannequin dressed as a sailor into the sea. That mannequin is named “Oscar,” after the flag that is flown from a ship’s mast when they have a man overboard.

There is a watch on the rear end of the ship, called the fantail watch. On aircraft carriers, there are two sailors assigned to this watch 24/7, one one each side of the ship’s rearmost point. They are wearing headsets attached to the lookout circuit. The fantail watch sees what appears to be a sailor in the water, and tosses a smoke float into the water to mark the position of the man in the water. He also calls “man in the water, (starboard/port) fantail” over the lookout circuit. The phone watch on the bridge hears this and notifies the Officer of the Deck (OOD). The OOD immediately orders three long blasts from the ship’s horn, orders the bosun of the watch to sound “man overboard” over the ship’s announcing system (1MC) and stops the ship by reversing the engines. Once it is below a certain speed, the ship will turn around and return to the location of the smoke float (if operations and conditions permit). The navigation crew uses as position tracker called a DRT (dead reckoning tracker) to coordinate the search. (This system uses inputs from the ship’s gyro to track its location. The advantage of the DRT over GPS is that the DRT can’t be jammed.)

The announcing of “man overboard” on the 1MC causes a few automatic actions. The signal bridge will hoist the above-mentioned oscar flag. The rest of the crew begins a face to face muster. There is a phone tree setup, where each crew member reports his location to a superior, who then calls their respective Division office. The division office calls the department office, who calls the bridge with a list of missing sailors. All 6,000 members of the crew must be accounted for in less than 20 minutes. Ten minutes after the initial “man overboard” call, the names of any sailors who remain unaccounted for are called over the announcing system until everyone is accounted for, or until the names of missing sailors are known. In a drill, the training team will randomly grab a couple of sailors just before the drill starts and hold them incommunicado, to make sure that they are reported as missing as a check to make sure divisions aren’t fudging the muster.

Another thing that happens is the ship launches a helicopter if possible, or a small boat if flight operations aren’t possible. The boat or helo has a rescue swimmer in it whose job is to grab the sailor.

Once the rescuers arrive near the man in the water, another smoke float is tossed in the water near him. This is in case they lose sight of him for some reason (waves, weather, darkness). They then deploy the swimmer to pull him from the water.

We used to lose 3 to 5 guys over the side in any given year. Most of the time we would find them, sometimes we wouldn’t. During the six years I was in, I remember two or three that we never found. The one referred to on Memorial day was one of them. I remember one time, we had a helicopter crash where an entire CH-46 Sea Knight went into the water, complete with aircrew. I saw that one happen. Luckily, we rescued the entire crew. That’s a story for another time.

When I joined the Navy, I was an idealistic young man who joined for patriotism, and not college money. It was a time when so many were joining because they wanted the GI bill. Not me, I declined it. I wanted to serve.

The military and the way that it works taught me more about life, government, and country than I ever bargained for. You get used to hearing things like: “We don’t care about your family. If the Navy wanted you to have a family, they would have issued you one.”

One of the worst things that happened to me while I was in was an indirect result of the Navy’s beneficial suggestion program. This was a program where a sailor who saw waste, fraud, abuse, or a way that the Navy could save money, could make a report to the chain of command. If the Navy adopted your suggestion and saved money, the sailor making the suggestion would get a percentage of the savings.

In 1989, there was an explosion on the USS Iowa. In the case of the Iowa battleships, there was a flaw in the firing system. The silk making up the 50 pound bags that the gunpowder comes in were famous for leaving embers behind in the chamber of the 16 inch guns. Ramming them into the breech too quickly while those embers were still there was a recipe for explosions. They had been known to cause mishaps in those guns for decades.

However, those cannons were a huge PR point for the Navy, providing tons of photo ops and bragging rights for recruiting commercials. So when the Iowa had an explosion, instead of blaming a faulty process in a 50 year old weapons system and hurting their recruiting tool, they blamed a sailor who they alleged was a jilted gay lover.

The Tailhook scandal broke in 1991. It was such a huge deal that they made everyone in the Navy take sexual sensitivity training. Officers were exempt, which was ironic, since every person involved in the Tailhook scandal was an officer.

Back to the beneficial suggestion program. So the Navy had light fixtures that lit up the runways. These light fixtures were low voltage, with a transformer that stepped the power for that fixture from 120 volts down to 12 volts. The light fixtures would often fill with water, and this would short out the transformer, overheating it. The overheated transformer would then catch fire. I submitted a suggestion with a redesign of the circuit.

I was told that the command could authorize an award of up to $500, and my idea would get me more than that. It was so valuable that they were sending it to Atlantic Fleet command. A month later, I asked the Lieutenant what had happened to my idea, and he told me that LantFleet could only authorize an award of $5,000, and this was worth more than that. They were sending it to Navy Sea Systems, where my award could be as much as a million bucks. Wow!

A year later, we went into the shipyards for a 6 month long repair cycle. While we were in there, I helped the yard workers incorporate my changes into the ship’s runway lighting circuits. I asked why we were performing this change, and where my reward was. They said, “what reward? This was the lieutenant’s idea.” The lieutenant that I had brought my idea to wound up getting a sizeable reward from the beneficial suggestion program.

By the time I got out, I was often heard to say, “Oh, you don’t like my attitude? It’s the one I was issued.” I left the Navy wiser, more cynical, and less trusting of government than I was when I entered as the idealistic, patriotic believer that I was when I entered. I was still patriotic, but I had discovered that my government and the people who worked in it were not.