Posts Tagged ‘Navy Grade 36’

Will COVID-19 change your care level in local elections?

Posted: May 2, 2020 by ng36b in Uncategorized
Tags: , , , , ,
From https://penobscotbaypress.com/news/2018/oct/31/voting-information-for-election-day-november-6/

Everyone wants to talk about President Trump. Even when the President isn’t focusing the media attention on himself (which is pretty rare), people want to discuss what he’s doing or not doing. If you wander onto social media, the overwhelming number of political posts are about President Trump, followed by Nancy Pelosi and Joe Biden.

Given all that focus, you would think that the President has an outsized influence in our daily lives. But unless you work in the federal government, that’s not really true. In fact, your local judges and politicians have a far greater impact on your daily life, and yet most people can’t name but a handful of them.

Let’s look at your average day. After you get up, you drive into work. The roads are managed at the state level, with some states spending significantly more in administrative costs than others. Your gas tax varies widely from state to state. Whether your hair stylist or braider needs a license is mainly state controlled. Whether you can buy alcohol on Sunday, or at night, or from a private store, is controlled by your state.

The COVID-19 responses in your state are mostly controlled by the governor. While Michigan and New York have capitalized on media coverage, the reality is that most governors seem to have done OK. I’m not a fan of our governor, but his response to COVID-19 and the restrictions he put in place made sense. I can still shop and get take-out from restaurants, without getting pulled over by the police and having my trunk checked for essential items.

The rules in place get funded and reinforced by the state legislature, and yet I struggle to find people who know anything, even the name, of their state representative. These people have a huge influence on your daily life, and people actually get to choose them every few years, and yet most have no idea who they are.

Schools are even worse. School board elections are so mundane, and yet most people figured out that despite the administrative costs paid by your property taxes, most schools couldn’t build a distance education plan to save their lives. I’m having to teach my kids math and science because the math and science teachers aren’t allowed to lecture more than an hour a week because of the school administration. After having that stupid rule explained to me, I’ve taken a larger interest in school board elections.

The COVID-19 pandemic was a chance for many people to reevaluate portions of their life. Could you spend long periods of time at home? Could you stay connected with others when you couldn’t travel? But perhaps most importantly, it exposed most of us to how well or not well our local elected officials run our government. That experience should drive your vote this year.

This post represents the views of the author and not those of the Department of Defense, Department of the Navy, or any other government agency.

The Navy is losing the information war, one Captain at a time

Posted: April 25, 2020 by ng36b in Uncategorized
Tags: , , ,
The USS THEODORE ROOSEVELT, from Task and Purpose

As more details emerge concerning CAPT Crozier of the USS THEODORE ROOSEVELT, its becoming clear he has a distinct possibility of being reinstated as commanding officer. Given his circumstances, people have asked me if the Navy learned any lessons from this.

My answer is, no.

The Navy is in the middle of grappling with information warfare, and its not doing a great job, mostly because there is a significant age (and thus cultural) problem in its senior officers. The average age of an admiral hovers around the 50’s, meaning most were born in the late 1960s (or earlier!) and spent their childhood without internet. They entered the Navy in an era when information could legitimately be controlled while underway. Censoring mail and family grams was normal. When bad things happened, the first response is to close off the news, solve the problem, and then tell everyone what happened, and during that process, it was (in the past) totally OK to hide details and be opaque. In general, these officers grew up in a time when information could be totally controlled.

The environment is very different now, and these old responses don’t work. CAPT Crozier would have grown up with some internet access, and he is probably more savvy online than most of his senior officers. When his boss tried to clamp down on information flow, CAPT Crozier easily worked around it. It was an ugly black eye to have a video showing him leaving to cheering Sailors, and it likely wasn’t an accident that this happened. In warfare terms, CAPT Crozier was flying an F-18 against an opponent using a biplane. It wasn’t a fair fight.

Despite this really ugly fight, the Navy is unlikely to learn anything. Contrary to popular myth, the Navy isn’t inherently a learning organization. It learns through death and injury. When Sailors die, or when ships get sunk, the Navy learns really fast, mainly through firing people and changing operating procedures. But its unlikely anyone will lose their job over this incident, and the Navy won’t put out any additional guidance on how to handle these circumstances. We’ll only learn as flag officers start coming from people that grew up in an age when information had to be managed, not controlled.

This also explains why Navy isn’t good at information warfare. Do you see Navy countering misinformation well? Not really. At best, Navy commanders engage on social media via their public affairs officers. But posting on the command’s Facebook page isn’t enough to go viral and get your message out. And yet you see commanders claim, time and time again, that because they posted articles and gave the occasional interview, they “maneuvered” in the information environment. Meanwhile, Russia and China run rings around the Navy, easily maneuvering against their stories and constantly pushing their own agenda.

While we don’t want to admit it, in the information realm, we are flying the biplane, and our adversaries are flying jet aircraft. It’s not a fair fight, and won’t be for sometime to come.

This post (clearly) represents the views of the author and not those of the Department of Defense, Department of the Navy, or any other government agency.

This post was edited on 4/27/20 because I mistakenly listed the HARRY TRUMAN instead of the ROOSEVELT. That was an honest mistake, I had been working on something else and swapped the two carriers.

On Conspiracy Theories

Posted: April 18, 2020 by ng36b in catholic
Tags: , , , ,

People never cease to amaze me. I am used to reading Chinese, North Korean and Russian propaganda. It’s comical to read, but sad when you think that 20% of the world’s population has to read this garbage due to censorship.

So imagine my frustration when a friend sent me this:

And I’m pouring myself a glass of plentiful water being like

How are you supposed to respond to these things? It’s not the first time, and over the years, I’ve tried various strategies. The three I’ve settled on I like to call Truth, Ridicule and Instigation.

Truth

You can always fight lies with truth. A while back I was trying to sort through the hype about the HPV Vaccine. My doctor at work said it was fine, but I had heard stories about it acting as a contraceptive. So I dove in, reading an awful lot of technical papers. Turns out, the one study that said the vaccine was a contraceptive was poorly done, and every Catholic source I found said the vaccine is fine, although also recommending it not be mandated.

Ridicule

Watch Baghdad Bob in action at about the 7 minute mark!

The invasion of Iraq exposed many Americans to the Iraqi Information Minister, Mohammed Saeed al-Sahhaf, or more commonly known as Baghdad Bob. During the invasion, we were inundated with interviews where Baghdad Bob would deny claims that any American forces had entered Iraq or Baghdad, with such memorable quotes as “They’re coming to surrender or be burned in their tanks.” and “There are no American infidels in Baghdad. Never!” Americans, in typical American fashion, were not impressed, and soon al-Sahaaf was featured on countless memes, YouTube videos and even had a website devoted to him.

From http://www.holtorf.com

Instigation

Instead of fighting the allegation, you force it one level deeper. When someone asked me whether 5G caused COVID-19, I told them “Only the Huawei 5G. That’s why we have to build 5G from Verizon.” Or when someone claims that climate change is a government conspiracy, I tell them “It’s worse than that. Ever since the U.S. captured the Nazi weather machine in Svalbard, our scientists have been making all sorts of dangerous changes!”

A good instigation has a kernel of truth that is easy to find on the Internet. In the 5G case, its the push by the U.S. to build their own 5G infrastructure. In the climate case, its the (true) fact that the Nazi’s had a weather outpost on Svalbard that was one of the last places to surrender during the war. Heck, the Nazis even had a weather station in Canada! Maybe the Inuits were working with the Nazis to overthrow the Canadian government…nah, couldn’t be true, could it?

You can easily do your own instigation, and you should! The best format is:

  • Hyperbole – Actor – Kernel of Truth – Outright Lie –

My favorites are:

Hypberole:
It’s worse than you know…
I have insider information…
A study that was covered up said…
I found this site on the Dark Web that said…

Actors:
The radical left
The vast right-wing conspiracy
The underground Communist movement
Russian spies
Vatican II
The Nazis
The Illuminati

Truth and Lies are easy, a bit of Googling and you’ll learn some interesting history. Occasionally, places like the Onion help you out, like when they reveal that government vaccine trackers malfunctioned.

Instigation seems cruel, but the more I used it, it made me realize two things. First, when you learn about history, you realize that governments are made of people that are flawed. Conspiracy theorists will connect a few dots of information to come up with some wild accusation, while the reality is a lot more mundane. I tell people that the golden rule for government conspiracy is “Never attribute to government conspiracy what is better left to incompetence, greed or lust for power.“

Applying that to the current status of Michigan’s COVID-19 shutdown is perfect. The current Governor is a jerk. She’s using the crisis to push her own agenda, beat down on people she doesn’t like, and it wouldn’t surprise me if she profits from it in some way. But is she part of a bigger conspiracy? Doubtful. You’d be giving her too much credit by saying that.

The other thing I realized is that we’re all sucked into conspiracy. Plenty of people reading this will think they are somehow too smart to be fooled by conspiracy. To that I say, you’re not. Lots of people believed Bernie Sanders and/or Donald Trump was being funded by the Russians. People doubted whether Barack Obama was a U.S. citizen, despite the FBI having investigated the matter. People still believe there are UFOs at Area 51.

On a small scale though, we all fall victim to this. How many people think drinking 8 glasses of water a day is recommended? Or that flossing your teeth is a good thing? Despite living in the information age, we’re terrible at actually challenging our beliefs. We could read about vaccines and flossing, sift through campaign finance records, and learn about unique history…or we could share social media posts that appeal to our emotions instead of reason.

Humans are unique for many reasons, but perhaps the biggest is our ability to reason and logically question the world around us. Social media makes it too easy to be lazy, put people in stereotyped boxes, and accept old-wives tales as truth. We could all do better.

This post represents the views of the author and not those of the Department of Defense, Department of the Navy, or any other government agency.

For lack of all things, the Navy

Posted: April 11, 2020 by ng36b in war
Tags: , , , ,
From military.com

I wrote about the CAPT Crozier/SECNAV Modly affair last week, and couldn’t have been more wrong. I was disgusted to get information from others that pointed to a lack of a plan and a lack of care by many in the chain of command for the well being of the Sailors aboard THEODORE ROOSEVELT. What should have been a good news story of the Navy tackling the COVID-19 virus turned into a complete shit show, resulting in Acting SECNAV Modly resigning, a lot of hurt feelings on all sides, and a huge loss in confidence in senior Navy leadership. The only good thing we got out of it was no more “Vector” emails. Despite tons of good news stories for the Navy right now, especially the USNS COMFORT and USNS MERCY, the Navy headlines will be more bad than good.

So yes, I got it wrong. I was fooled by a good media performance early on, then watched everything descend into chaos. I do hope, if CAPT Crozier is found innocent, they put him back in charge.

Going forward, our Navy is in trouble in terms of leadership. To start with the situation, we have a Navy too small for what we ask of it. We’ve killed the Navy’s one saving point, mobility, by demanding presence per a Global Force Management schedule that doesn’t take ship maintenance into account. Yet we pay an astronomical amount of money for the Navy we have, mainly because our shipyards can’t produce a ship on budget or on time. Worse still, while the Army and Air Force had free reign of Overseas Contingency money, and a chance to recapitalize hardware, Navy still has old ships that are increasing in maintenance cost.

We need a strong SECNAV to get the Navy bureaucracy back on track, and yet to Congress, the Navy is somewhere on the bottom tier right now. Nobody cares enough to approve the President’s SECNAV choice, or to suggest someone else. Nobody cares enough to either build more ships or demand we scale back our overseas commitments. So this puts us lacking equipment and leadership.

But soon it’ll be worse, because we’ll be lacking people. When we put the Blended Retirement System in place, it was to make the system more “fair,” which for Congress means “cost less money.” The negative effect is that we’ll need more recruiting more often, because more people will leave earlier. Since it started in 2018, you’ll start seeing drastic changes in 2023 as Sailors that entered in 2018 leave in greater-than-anticipated numbers. For officers, who already have large incentives to leave after their 5 year initial contract, we’ll either have to throw huge bonuses at them to stay or live with gaps, keeping in mind in many cases, we’re already maxing out bonuses in many cases. If you’re an O-3 in 2023, would you stay in a Navy full of old ships, a declining retirement system and leaders that set poor standards, or would you jump ship for a civilian job?

The Navy’s approaching a crisis point. We’ll soon be lacking in equipment, leadership and people. Without some drastic rudder, the Navy will struggle to weather the upcoming storms.

This post represents the views of the author and not those of the Department of Defense, Department of the Navy, or any other government agency.

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