Navy’s top 5th Fleet commander found dead in his homeUpdate Dec 3
The commander of the Navy’s 5th Fleet was found dead in his home Saturday in Bahrain, Chief of Naval Operations Adm. John Richardson said on Twitter.
Vice Adm. Scott A. Stearney had assumed command of 5th Fleet and Naval Forces Central Command in May, a job that oversees U.S. naval operations in the Middle East.
Richardson said Bahraini authorities and the Naval Criminal Investigative Service are coordinating but that “at this time, no foul play is expected" in the death of the 58-year-old man.
“This is devastating news for the Stearney family, for the team at 5th Fleet and the entire Navy,” Richardson said. “He was a good friend to all of us.”
So a tremendous amount of submarine resources are sidelined based on inadequate budgets and the Russians are dangling submarines in the Atlantic?
I remember being up there in the North Atlantic near the artic circle in a experimental submarine. We were at about 400 feet and we were riding smooth a silk. Then we had a circuit card go bad in the nuclear protections system. The nuclear plant tripped. It basically was a insignificant failure but we find it. On the surface we had a ragging north Atlantic storm. It was towards the end of my enlistment, I thought I'd seen everything a ocean could throw at us. We went to periscope level and started up diesel generator with the snorkel. The wave height was absolutely astonishing. Our sub design wasn't adequate for this one off submarine. We were a lot long submarine than normal. The waves we so bad, our front kept coming out of the water, This tripped the DG over and over again. We couldn't find the short, it was take a lot more time than expected. Our battery was running out of juice. We surfaced and put men on the sail. We were hoping this would prevent the DG from tripping. Our length and electric motor propulsion made it difficult to put the sub heading into the waves. One of the waves was so high, the bow and sail went underwater with the men in the sail. For some reason both sail hatches were open. We had thousands of gallons of seawater flood into the sub and we almost lost the men on the sail. We were almost out of battery power. The captain said get the men off the sail, close the hatches and go done to 400 feet. That is when we used the "battleshort switch". This switch saved our lives. This switch overrides all nuclear protection functions. We emediately started up the reactor, after about 10 minutes, we discover were the bad card was and replaced it. And then bam, we were back to smooth as silk operation.
Update Nov 28
***I wish I could blame this wholly on the Navy. But the public is really not interested in our military. The news media is worst.
So how we are beginning to see how weak our Navy is coming out of our recent set of ship collusions and aircraft crashes in the last few weeks. In the same period, we see how secretly degraded our submarine fleet is. The idea they are yanking and cementing ships to a pier, has me wondering how bad the degradation was seen out to see. They must of have some really scary events out to sea and somebody realized how publicized a big event out to sea would be. As shown in the past, we have no idea what is going on Navy right now. So they played it safe by cementing ships to the piers. You will never see how ill prepared we are for the next war, until we can't operated our ship out to sea and a lot of our ships get sunk by the Russians.
The true warfighting condition of our military are being kept from the public's eye. It facilitates all the corruptions from defense contractors and the politicians. They are selling the public a defense readiness and durability way higher than actual. Remember our enemies got sophisticated satellites, amazing technical means and Russian spies and civilians. They can watch our floating submarines all over the world including where docked and it shipyards. They have been watching us for years. They clearly can put two and two together...they broadly can analyze the degraded condition of our fleet of submarines. And they can clearly tell when the politicians and defense establishment are putting one over on the public. I find this humiliating as hell. As always, all wars are called to a nation. Our enemies can figure out how weak we are...know they can probably kick our ass or hobbles our world wide interest for the next 50 years.
Here comes our budget war between the democrats and republican. The republicans are going to blackmail us with massive budget gets to our social programs to get their interest and the democrats are going to threaten massive budget cuts to the military to gain their politicals.
I swear, the Russian must have a lot of fun watching the great US show. We must entertain the hell out of the Russians or whatever.
Watchdog report sounds alarm over military aviation readiness
Navy Says Deadly Ship Collisions Were 'Avoidable,' Faults Lack Of Preparation
By: Megan EcksteinNovember 26, 2018 10:49 AMThe Los Angeles-class submarine USS Bremerton (SSN 698) transits Puget Sound while returning to Bremerton, Wash., for decommissioning. The 37-year-old Bremerton, commissioned March 28, 1981, is scheduled to begin the inactivation and decommissioning process at the Puget Sound Naval Shipyard in July. U.S. Navy photo.Chief of Naval Operations Adm. John Richardson said there are “no surprises” in a recent Government Accountability Office report that found the Navy has lost more than $1.5 billion and thousands of operational days over the past decade due to attack submarines caught in maintenance delays or sitting idle while awaiting an availability.According to the Nov. 19 report, “The Navy has started to address challenges related to workforce shortages and facilities needs at the public shipyards. However, it has not effectively allocated maintenance periods among public shipyards and private shipyards that may also be available to help minimize attack submarine idle time.”Richardson, in a media call on Thursday during his Thanksgiving visit to USS Harry S. Truman (CVN-75), told USNI News that he found “no surprises in that report. Every bit of information in that is information we’re very, very aware of. We’ve been talking about the maintenance challenges at the public shipyards for some time, so no surprises there.”The Navy this year released a 20-year, $21-billion plan to optimize and modernize its four public shipyards that work on attack submarines. But in the short term, Richardson said the yard readiness situation is “a very complex and stressed environment.”The four yards are digging out of maintenance backlogs that built up due to insufficient manpower, unexpected work popping up once a ship got into the yard and other factors. The attack submarine force faced the brunt of the delays, though, because the yards prioritize ballistic-missile submarines (SSBNs) and aircraft carriers above the attack subs (SSNs).Several instances have occurred where an attack sub idled at the public yard because the workforce was focused on a higher-priority ship, or where an SSN couldn’t even get into the yard because there was no capacity to work on it. Private shipbuilders Newport News Shipbuilding and General Dynamics Electric Boat have asked to help take on some of the SSN repair work the Navy can’t handle, and there has been discussion on how early to award that work to the private sector versus wait and see if the Navy can handle it itself.These readiness challenges, though, come as operational commanders are asking for more and more attack subs to support their areas of responsibility, and subs are increasingly being requested to support high-end training with carrier strike groups, with P-8A aircraft and with each other for sub-on-sub training. As demand increases and readiness remains a challenge, the inventory may drop into the mid-40s, compared to a requirement for 66, due to planned decommissionings.“In terms of the impact the attack submarine force has on the strategic environment, that’s also exacerbated by the fact that we’re [facing] a declining force level right now. Even as we build two Virginias a year, we’re taking submarines out of the inventory as they decommission. And so Navy leadership, including the Submarine Force leadership, Adm. [Charles] Richard, Adm. [Tom] Moore at [Naval Sea Systems Command – very, very focused on this, and so we’ll continue to adapt. All of those things you mentioned in terms of schedule adjustments, the back-and-forth in terms of taking advantage of all of the capacity in both the public and the private sector – that’s something that we talk about very very frequently as we try to optimize our way through these challenges,” Richardson told USNI News
Update Nov 28
***I originally published this on Nov 18, 2007?
...A submarine and aircraft carrier metaphor…USS Hampton, Enterprise and Midway….
As we have seen in recent congressional and executive level problems with funding our military…I think funding problems has undermined the ethics of the military in general since 9/11. Everyone is resourced strained…everyone is lying or distorting in order to meet a legitimate national security commitment….everyone wants to make it look good to their superiors. Nobody want’s to tell the president and congress that the “Emperor has no clothes”…that a con man has entered our minds declaring that it’s not as bad as it looks. I believe the military’s ethics is at a historic breaking point…worst than Vietnam.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Emperor's_New_Clothes
Our submarine fleet is the weak link in the chain…it’s the loudest and leading indicator with the ethics and integrity of the whole military system. We have mismanaged this war so badly….it has undermined the ethics of the whole organization and our political system.
I believe our military is near a historic breakdown. Half of it is conscious…and the other half is cultural attributes of human behavior, in stress, and a lack of resources. At the end of the day, we have blinded ourselves from observing the behavior of each other in the name of survival and evolution…it’s a survival tactic.
I believe my Navy aircraft carrier fighter pilot buddy wasn’t talking about an event in the 1960’s and 1970’s… he was talking about the slide into devaluing and dehumanizing life…the sliding into self blindness and distortion….in the name of altruism and national security…that unstoppable decline into taking shortcuts and falsifying documents and events in the name of protection and doing your job with limited resources.
It is an extremely important metaphor for the military today and tomorrow.
"What gem? Several of Mike's emails caused me to rethink a notion I held since my first day observing this august body. That notion was that "can do," "make do," "go the extra mile," "not on my watch" were the necessary and appropriate watchwords of military service during the 60s and 70s, a time when an increasingly unpopular war was being financed very often out of operational, training and maintenance budgets, a time when the insanity of "Mutually Assured Destruction" became understandable, ergo, possible. These ill conceived notions caused us to devalue human life by wagering death and injury against "national security," and "getting the job done." It led us to several deaths, and near loss of Enterprise, to a very preventable fire, essentially caused by the lack of a jet starter hose of sufficient length to keep the starter engine exhaust a safe distance from missile warheads held on an F4's wing. Starter hoses were in short supply, so when the hose developed holes or breaks, it was common practice to simply shorten the hose. It led to my crash one night on the flight deck of USS Midway, killing 5, injuring dozens, destroying 8 aircraft, all for the shortage of operable Multiple Ejector Racks (MERs). The MER's failure caused two 500-lb bombs to be hung up on my starboard wing; normal procedure would have had me jettison both the bombs and the MER, but since MERs($4,000) were in short supply, the decision was made to bring the bombs and attendant MER aboard, a common decision primarily determined by the skill and experience of the pilot. Unfortunately, my starboard axle failed upon touchdown, and I rode the aircraft into the pack of parked aircraft, having lost the arresting cable. We must be constantly reminded of the atmosphere under which Scorpion was operating. I had minimized and discounted this "constantly scrambling and always behind" atmosphere as "Standard Operating Procedure." Mr Mulligan reminded me to not overlook the operating tempo of the time. I accuse no others of requiring this same reminder, but I owe Mike an apology for my discounting of him."
CNO: Stressed fleet can’t sustain op tempo
By Sam Fellman - Staff Writer
Posted : Thursday May 3, 2012 9:54:14 EDT
The past year has seen the fleet straining to respond to successive crises around the world, from air and missile strikes against Libya and aid missions in the wake of Japan’s devastating earthquake last spring to escalating tensions with Iran over the past five months.
The Crews are seeing quicker turnarounds between deployments and longer cruises. In some cases, these have stretched past the normal six to seven months, out to eight months and beyond.
Recent examples abound. In March, the Enterprise Carrier Strike Group headed out on what’s expected to be a 7 1/2-month deployment only eight months after returning from their last cruise. Similarly, the Carl Vinson strike group deployed in late 2011 after 5 ½ months stateside. And then there’s the Bataan Amphibious Ready Group, which returned from an epic 10 1/2-month deployment in February.
Officials are warning this can’t keep up indefinitely.
Asked at an April 16 speech whether these mounting demands were allowing crews enough time at home and giving ships the opportunities for needed maintenance, Chief of Naval Operations Adm. Jon Greenert replied: “If we continue through, if you will, the [future years defense program], the next five years, at the pace we are at today, the answer to your question is no, we can’t run at that rate.
In testimony this spring on the budget, a chorus of Navy officials reiterated the continuing strain on the fleet.
The Navy can surge ships when war beckons and can also support a handful of very extended deployments, like the Bataan ARG’s 10 1/2-mother, one of the longest in decades, said retired Vice Adm. Peter Daly, former deputy commander of Fleet Forces Command, who said carrier deployments may stretch to meet the two-carrier requirement. “But when you wake up one day and find that your deployments, instead of being six to seven months, are 11 months and you’re not able to do the maintenance and the sustainability over the long-term, then you’re going to break things,” he said. “You’re not going to have a whole force.”
“The risk that I see is we maintain this op tempo going forward,” said Vice Adm. David Architzel, head of Naval Air Systems Command, at a March 22 hearing. “We have to ensure we can sustain the funding to allow us to have this in place.”
At that same hearing, Vice Adm. Bill Burke, deputy CNO for warfare systems, testified that “Navy readiness remains under stress as a result of our efforts to push the maximum available force forward.”
Money is the central issue. The current demand for ships, submarines and air wings outstrips the funding for them, Greenert said in testimony a week earlier, on March 15.
Daly, the retired three-star, agrees that there is a “mismatch” between the Navy’s operations and its funding. Each Navy budget is put together with assumptions about the operations pace and how much this will cost. And each year, it seems, this funding is quickly surpassed by the Navy’s real-world operations without adding funds back in later, Daly said.
Referring to Greenert’s remarks at the Navy League conference, Daly said, “I think he’s giving a cautionary note that if you continue to do that, you will get to a hollow force, you will break the force.”
“Ultimately, you’re balancing this on people, and your people pay the price. They work longer hours. They get over-stretched on deployments and family stress,” continued Daly, who is now the chief executive of the U.S. Naval Institute in Annapolis, Md. “And so if you just do more with less over too long a time — and I can’t tell you exactly where that marker is — then you got a problem.”
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