In Forbes: Build A USN Training Fleet

April 5, 2019

I have been remiss, but I have a few posts up at Forbes that may be worth your time. One of them deals with training ships. Go read it! Now, I am convinced that training ships–if they are taken seriously–do work, and I am particularly impressed at how Japan has converted their BIG training fleet […]

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In Press: The New Naval Race To Look Good

March 15, 2019

I have a post up at Forbes.com, discussing how emerging/re-emerging navies are exploiting the U.S. Navy’s increasingly shabby visage. I urge you all to take a look, here. There are a few other ancillary items that didn’t make the piece, but they were interesting enough to merit additional discussion. Item 1: Image Does Matter: Many […]

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In Press: No Reserve Ships On The Road To 355

March 7, 2019

Glad to see the Navy finally, irrevocably, kill off the pipe-dream of resurrecting the FFG-7s. As I said about two years ago, when I first panned the fever-dreams of the “Reactivate the FFG-7” crowd, “America need FFGs less than a policy and strategy to guide the graceful transition of combatants from front line duties, through […]

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Winners and Losers from the 2019 USNA Ship Selection

February 24, 2019

The U.S. Naval Academy’s annual Ship Selection “rite-of-passage” is enormous fun. Of course, it happened more than a month ago, so I’m a little late to the party. But, that aside, two things really struck me: the participation of the Japanese Maritime Self Defense Force (JMSDF) and the non-participation of the Avenger Class MCM and […]

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Let’s Build a New National Shipyard, Part II

February 9, 2019

In continuing the discussion sparked by my recent DefenseOne.com proposal to build a new National Shipyard, let’s take a few minutes to examine maintenance work-load estimates. Even though low-balling the cost of operations and maintenance is an old, long-standing habit in certain parts of the Pentagon, the game is no longer fun, and it needs […]

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Admiral John Aquilino Gets It

February 1, 2019

It was great to see the Pacific Fleet Commander, Admiral John Aquilino, head over to one of the more important National Shipyards–the Puget Sound Naval Shipyard & Intermediate Maintenance Facility–and rally the workforce. This is exactly the sort of high-level attention the National Shipyards need if they’re going to be sufficiently resourced. There’s no transcript […]

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Let’s Build A New National Shipyard, Part I

January 22, 2019

I published a commentary over at DefenseOne.com last week, suggesting that the Navy commission a new public shipyard. You can read it here, but the general gist is this: The U.S. Navy’s four public shipyards are overwhelmed. Budget documents show that their workload exceeds their capacity by 117 to 153 percent — that is, there’s too much to get done […]

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The Pacific Pivot as An Old LCU

November 18, 2018

To me, the picture accompanying this post speaks volumes about the “Pacific Pivot”. The photo shows LCU 1634 helping the Commonwealth of Northern Mariana Islands (CNMI) recover after being leveled by Super Typhoon Yutu. Looks great, right? Well, it looks great until the observer realizes that LCU 1634 is ancient. That venerable LCU in the […]

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Inside the CBO’s Attack on Public Naval Shipyards

September 24, 2018

The misguided drumbeat to privatize America’s four remaining public shipyards is proceeding apace. The latest volley, fired by the Congressional Budget Office (CBO), is a September 2018 report, “Comparing the Costs of Submarine Maintenance at Public and Private Shipyards.” CBO researchers looked at the DSRA costs (Docking Selected Restricted Availability) for SSN-688s over the PAST […]

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Arleigh Burke Wisdom in the Age of AI

August 31, 2018

Back in January 1984, the U.S. Naval Institute’s Proceedings Magazine published some commentary by World War II destroyer skipper and former CNO, Admiral Arleigh Burke. The free-wheeling comments from this old Analog Admiral are appropriate in today’s whiz-bang AI era. Now, to understand the context of his comments, Admiral Burke–who had built his wartime reputation […]

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