Two years of USNI Blogging, for your reading pleasure. Personally, I got the most enjoyment out of my discussions of naval memorials and offering historical perspective on different programs/platforms. Asterisks are those posts that I found interesting/important/engaging. Enjoy:
Dec 9, 2008: The Coming Resource Wars…At the Pentagon!!
Dec 10, 2008: Probably wise to recall: Our first woman Skipper *
Dec 13, 2008: Accounting and the shrinking Navy
Dec 16, 2008: If LCS-1 is a Mothership, LCS-2 is…a bigger one?
Dec 20, 2008: History points the way: Ship size *
Dec 23, 2008: When MSC Masters and naval leaders collide *
Dec 24, 2008: Christmas in wartime
Dec 29, 2008: Commission before delivery omission
Jan 9, 2009: Coast Guard ASW: Will the hemline move? *
Jan 14, 2009: The Caribbean: Where innovative ships go…die? *
Jan 20, 2009: Any good Bush-era naval legacy worth keeping? *
Jan 26, 2009: In the ‘Stan IEDs come from above
Jan 26, 2009: Stopping Iranian go-fast buy a non-proliferation gambit? *
Jan 29, 2009: DOD Energy Czar: Energy efficiency vs. wear and tear
Feb 5, 2009: Gene Taylor (D-MS) Fires a broadside
Feb 7, 2009: USS Port Royal (CG 73) grounding thread *
Feb 12, 2009: See Robert Work at WEST, but RSVP for this
Feb 13, 2009: WEST 2009: Naval shipbuilding Pop-Quiz
Feb 17, 2009: A Byline Breaker: Inside the Navy’s Zachary Peterson
Feb 20, 2009: USS Port Royal (CG-73) grounding: Before and after
Feb 20, 2009: VADM Kilcline discusses EMALS *
Feb 27, 2009: INSURVs classified, so smile bigger and clap louder
March 13, 2008: A wise Admiral’s advice to China *
March 18, 2009: Stavridis to EUCOM; Willard to PACOM
March 26, 2009: Northrop Grumman: Hows that Carrier doing?
March 30, 2009: The knives come out for Governor Mabus
April 6, 2009: Save the date: Inaugural Marine Week May 11-17
April 20, 2009: China buying the Navy’s only nuclear fuel provider?
April 27, 2009: Tom Ricks and the Navy War Colleges
May 5, 2009: The USS Dubuque (LPD-8) Flies the Quarantine Flag? *
May 21, 2009: MV-22 flies into hostile fire…From Congress!
May 26, 2009: Off San Diego: Small craft swarm a supercarrier!
Oct 16, 2009: Meet Congressman Walter B. Jones (R, NC-3)
Nov 24, 2009: Mistral Madness: why is France selling to Russia: *
Dec 3, 2009: Second LCS-2 class–the price revealed!
Dec 7, 2009: Shipbuilding: Is ASW eating missile defense’s lunch? *
Dec 13, 2009: Does the U.S. sub (plan) sale to Taiwan mean anything?
Dec 25, 2009: Is the Marine Corps manipulating MV-22 safety records?
Jan 4, 2010: Blackwater’s pirate-fighting navy has sunk! *
Jan 13, 2010: Haiti earthquake: Awaiting the aid tsunami
Jan 20, 2010: Haiti: How to fuel disaster recovery? *
Jan 21, 2010: Navy shipbuilding in crisis: 2 LPD-17s sidelined, more bad welds reported
Jan 25, 2010: FFG-7: The LCS of the seventies *
Jan 27, 2010: More LPD-17 Wonderment
Feb 8, 2010: Telling an old Sub tale: History only helps if we let it! *
Feb 12, 2010: Mulling the LCS down-select:
Feb 18, 2010: Israel quietly floats cheap Littoral Combat Boats (LCBs): *
Feb 27, 2010: Navy prepares for the Hawaii Tsunami
March 8, 2010: What’s going on between Northrop and the Navy?
March 10, 2010: USS Bataan: When unexpected contingencies strike! *
March 13, 2010: Despite happy rhetoric, EMALS commits sepaku
March 16, 2010: China’s Navy: Hey, let’s not panic… *
March 27, 2010: The return of EMP threat analysis
March 28, 2010: The Cheonan split in two; USNS Salvor to assist?
March 30, 2010: Arctic diplomatic meet gets frosty
March 31, 2010: Another Trident test….In Saudi Arabia?! (Update: Or not?)
April 2, 2010: Which floating naval monument will you save? *
April 5, 2010: Iran’s new speedboat: A threat? Or not?
April 10, 2010: Maritime strategy: Confronting comforting bias *
April 13, 2010: Ex-USS Iowa (BB-61): Is the “Iowa-Saving” nonprofit honest? *
April 21, 2010: Must-see Coastie video
May 14, 2010: Navy moves to save the Ex-USS Iowa (BB-61) *
May 18, 2010: USNI on the Military Times’ Scoop Deck
June 8, 2010: Save the Olympia (C-6): Why the Marines should care *
June 14, 2010: Provocative question for a cash-constrained Navy *
July 8, 2010: Changing the game: Putting PGS in the VLS *
July 23, 2010: The LSV: Cheers for the Army’s no-frills Navy! (Now let’s use it…) *
July 27, 2010: Is the Intrepid Memorial sailing into trouble?
July 29, 2010: The PAO’s nightmare: Or what keeps CDR Charlie Brown awake at night
August 9, 2010: Environmental anti-access threats:
Sept. 28, 2010: Is the IDF Submarine force going coed?
Oct 11, 2010: San Francisco Fleet Week– A working celebration…
Oct 12, 2010: Why Navy is beating Air Force in Green-Tech
Oct 29, 2010: J. Michael Gilmore: A new voice for Procurement sanity
Nov 12, 2010: Why you must attend WEST 2011
In the end, this was a fine two years contribution to USNI.
Overall, I think the blog could use, well, a more diverse set of contributors (diverse as in the various communities), more active duty folks, and, yeah, a lot less tolerance for embarrassing crap like this.
To that end, I urge USNI to try and open the blog up each month to the fifteen-twenty contributors to the latest issues of USNI Proceedings. Give each new set of writers a key to the blog and put ’em to work for a couple of months–surely they would contribute more than, oh, some of the USNI blog’s long-absent contributors.
Enlist the military guys who are currently doing a year in the think-tank world. Enlist the people who are doing time at MIT, the Hoover and other places. Let them be heard–after all, they are spending a year out to, well, think about the Navy. What better outlet for them than, say, USNI?
As a Proceedings reader, I would love to hear more from some of the authors. As a Proceedings contributor, I suspect some of the authors would relish an opportunity to expand upon their work–work that is, more often than not, cut in the editing process. It would enliven the blog and help it be something more than just another tired representative of the tired old right wing-leaning milblog world.
{ 1 comment… read it below or add one }
Doc,
While I am an avid reader of the USNI blog, as well as a Proceedings and Naval History contributor, I can’t help but think that “opening up” the blog to more active duty writers is a lot harder than is sounds. Knowing the editorial team at Beach Hall a little bit, I would say that they are about as open as you can get to contributions from those of us in uniform. The problem is not the good people at the Institute, the problem is a culture that isn’t exactly encouraging of open participation in public debate. I have been lucky to have very supportive chains-of-command, but I’ve also had many officers tell me that I’m putting my career at risk (no matter what my article is saying) simply by being a part of that open discussion.
The Institute is great, the editorial and blog admin teams genuinely want their active duty authors to succeed. Its not them, its us.