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Fort Bragg soldiers receive the Distinguished Service Cross, Silver Star, other medals for actions in Afghanistan – Fayetteville Observer: Military & Fort Bragg News
The highest award was presented to Capt. William N. Eberle, whom officials said distinguished himself during an attack on Jalalabad Airfield on Dec. 2, 2012.
At the time, Eberle’s Operational Detachment Alpha 3132 was called on to serve as a quick reaction force after enemy fighters breached the walls of the coalition military compound, according to the citation for his Distinguished Service Cross.
Eberle led his men in two vehicles toward the sites of the attack, where two vehicle-borne improvised explosive devices had torn through base security.
Eberle directed his vehicle to the breach, to shield a wounded American and Afghan forces, then maneuvered through enemy fire to the gate to get a better view of the attackers.
Using his M-4 carbine and grenades, he battled insurgents who came as close as a few feet.
Throughout the battle, Eberle was exposed to enemy fire, even when he climbed a tower to better direct the defense of the base.
In addition to generally being a bunch of badasses, the SF c0mmunity also recognizes the importance of keeping the S-1 shop’s feet to the fire, and submitting awards packages in a timely manner, and with proper supporting documentation.
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Government Regulation of the Internet
This Friday is a very big day for free speech. It is the day in which the Federal Elections Commission once again addresses regulation of political content on the internet. The Washington Examiner tells us:
Claiming that thousands of public comments condemning “dark money” in politics can’t be ignored, the Democrat-chaired Federal Election Commission on Wednesday appeared ready to open the door to new regulations on donors, bloggers and others who use the Internet to influence policy and campaigns.
During a broad FEC hearing to discuss a recent Supreme Court decision that eliminated some donor limits, proponents encouraged the agency to draw up new funding disclosure rules and require even third-party internet-based groups to reveal donors, a move that would extinguish a 2006 decision to keep the agency’s hands off the Internet
It was a close vote, 3-3, back in October. The Washington Times reminds us of Democrat Ann Ravel’s plans to govern political content on the internet, including blogging and other forms of expression:
While all three GOP-backed members voted against restrictions, they were opposed by the three Democratic-backed members, including FEC Vice Chair Ann M. Ravel, who said she will lead a push next year to try to come up with new rules governing political speech on the Internet.
It would mark a major reversal for the commission, which for nearly a decade has protected the ability of individuals and interest groups to take to engage in a robust political conversation on the Internet without having to worry about registering with the government or keeping and reporting records of their expenses.
One should be most alarmed at handing ANY administration or entity of government the kind of power being considered here. To consider giving such power to THIS administration is akin to willfully loading the Bill of Rights into a shredder. Republican Chairman Lee Goodman summed up perfectly the impact of such an intrusion by the Federal Government back in October:
FEC Chairman Lee E. Goodman said what Ms. Ravel is proposing would require a massive bureaucracy digging into the corners of the web to police what’s posted about politics.
“I cannot imagine a regulatory regime that would put government censors on the Internet daily, culling YouTube video posts for violations of law — nothing short of a Chinese censorship board,” Mr. Goodman said.
One can wager that the objectivity of such government censorship will be on par with that of the IRS in deciding tax status of PACs, the EPA in approving or denying construction of nuclear plants, and the Justice Department in dealing with cases involving black perpetrators.
If you really believe that the push to designate broadband wireless networks as a Public Utility under Title II is really about “net neutrality” and is unrelated to the clearly-stated desire by Democrats for regulation (read: censorship) of Constitutionally-protected free speech by political opponents, you can drive to Brooklyn and walk around on the bridge you just bought. Or you can recite a thousand times:
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Armor Upgrades
We noted an article in The Diplomat remarking on the recapitalization of the Army’s armored fleet.
And you’ve probably seen in the news in the last year or two complaints about how Congress was wasting money on new tanks the Army didn’t even want. Well, that’s not exactly true- after all, when is the last time the press was accurate about anything related to the military. The Army hasn’t bought a brand new tank since the early 1990s. What they have been doing is running tanks through a complete rebuild, upgrading to the latest configuration, known as M1A2 SEP v2. And it was never that the Army didn’t want to continue upgrading tanks. But under the sequester, the Army had to prioritize spending, and wanted to delay M1 upgrades in favor of other programs. Congress noted that delaying upgrades would force the plant to close, and potentially lose the skilled workforce. It was a matter of pay me now, or pay me later. In the long run, reopening the plant would cost more than simply keeping it open. And so Congress told the Army to do so. Don’t think for a moment the Army didn’t know the Congress was going to do this. There’s a very, very long history of the services, when faced with a budget crunch, putting important, popular programs on the block, knowing full well that Congress will put them back in the budget.
At any event, having played that game with Congress for a bit, the Army has now gone in the other direction, asking for quite a bit more money to upgrade tanks.
Army leaders have thus far taken up a losing battle against Congress to temporarily halt funding for its Abrams tanks. However, that changed in its latest budget proposal as the service has reversed course and asked for 50 percent more funding for the M1 Abrams tank over last year.
Army Chief of Staff Gen. Ray Odierno told Congress in 2o12 that the Army wanted to spend money on other modernization priorities. Congress pushed back saying it was a mistake to shut down the production line of the M1 tank, which is located in Lima, Ohio, even if it’s a temporary shut down. The Army would risk losing the skilled workers at the plants and spend more on training when they needed to reopen the production line for the Abrams upgrades the Army had said it needed in 2017.
The Army apparently listened to the critique, as service officials requested $368 million for upgrades to the M1 tank. Last year, the Army asked for $237 million.
What are some of the upgrades the Army is implementing in the fleet? Well, shortly the M1 fleet will have a new type of ammunition, and importantly, a new thermal sight/sensor.
The ability to identify targets prior to engagement remains one of the biggest obstacles to improving Abrams lethality. The new IFLIR solves this problem using long- and mid-wave infrared technology in both the gunner’s primary sight and the commander’s independent thermal viewer. The IFLIR will provide four fields of view (FOV) displayed on high-definition displays, greatly improving target acquisition, identification and engagement times – compared to the current second-generation FLIR – under all conditions, including fog / obscurants.
When the M1 was first introduced in the early 1980s, the tanks thermal sight was almost black magic. The ability to see through dark and smoke was astonishing to gunners trained on earlier systems. Up to that point, night gunnery was conducted with searchlights mounted above the gun tube!
The technology of thermal sights has greatly improved over the last 30 odd years, and the sights have been steadily improved since then. The original sight would seem crude to today’s gunners. A second thermal sight was added in the 1990s to give the tank commander an independent thermal vision device.*
The improvements, taken together, will establish the M1A2 SEP v3 configuration.
*That capability was planned from the outset of the M1 program, but not intially installed for cost reasons.
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The Other Shoe Drops
How timely. Ask Skipper wrote today about the limbo several senior naval officers are in because of the Fat Leonard bribery scandal.
My assumption for this post is that there is a knowledge baseline regarding the ongoing saga that surrounds Fat Leonard, Glenn Defense Marine Asia, and the US Navy. If my assumption is incorrect, you can get a primer here. It’s not the whole story, but you’ll get the basic idea. There have been a handful of charges and arrests, followed by an almost equal number of plea bargains. There are also many others who are wading in the nebulous cesspool that is purgatory – neither heaven nor hell. While they have not been charged with anything, they are not free to go and they are not free to continue forward with their careers. They are tumbling in a timeless abyss with no expiration date. No one tells them anything. Meanwhile, prosecutors and journalists are looking to make a name for themselves and leave a permanent mark on their professions.
Now comes news that administrative action has been taken against three of the officers in that limbo.
WASHINGTON — Three flag officers have become the highest-ranking officials thus far punished in the Glenn Defense Marine Asia (GDMA) bribery and corruption scandal, each receiving a letter of censure from Navy Secretary Ray Mabus.
Rear admirals Mike Miller, Terry Kraft and David Pimpo were all punished for conduct during the January to July 2006 deployment of the aircraft carrier Ronald Reagan. Miller was the strike group commander, Kraft the carrier’s commanding officer, and Pimpo the ship’s supply officer on that cruise.
In a statement, the Navy said the three officers “were found to have improperly accepted gifts from a prohibited source, two were found to have improperly endorsed a commercial business, and one engaged in solicitation of gifts and services from a prohibited source, when they were deployed to the Seventh Fleet area of responsibility during the 2006-2007 timeframe.”
It’s about time. If naval officers were guilty of bribery or other misconduct, by all means, haul them in front of a court martial or a federal court. But do not allow the process to become the punishment, particularly when that process is fouling the duties of others with no direct connection to the scandal.
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HMS Caroline
On the cusp of World War I, Great Britain and Germany were engaged in a naval arms race. Battleships and battlecruisers usually receive the bulk of attention when historians look at this. But cruisers were a major component of the fleet. Cruisers were armored warships designed both to serve as the scouts of the fleet and to screen the line of battle from enemy scouts and other light forces.
Just on the eve of World War I, Britain laid down what was to become the first of an eventual 28 “C Class” light cruisers, HMS Caroline.
HMS Caroline’s greatest claim to fame is that she participated in the Battle of Jutland, the great clash of the British and German fleets that, while indecisive, would do so much to shape naval theory in the interwar years.
Obsolescent even by the end of the war, HMS Caroline was shunted to the reserves in 1924. Used as a moored training vessel for the Royal Navy Volunteer Reserves, she would function in that role until 2011! During World War II, she served as the headquarters for the Royal Navy in Belfast Harbour before returning to her reservist training duties post-war.
Now the HMS Caroline has stepped into her well earned retirement, she’s slated to become a museum ship. For one thing, she’s known to a great number of sailors. Secondly, she’s the only surviving ship that was present at Jutland. Indeed, she’s one of only three British ships dating from World War I.
A £15 million-plus restoration project plans to turn HMS Caroline into a visitor attraction in time for next year’s centenary commemorations of the 1916 First World War battle off the coast of Denmark.
But before the refit could begin on the derelict vessel, which is docked in Belfast, urgent steps had to be taken to ensure it stays afloat long-term.
We can think of many sailors that would like to see any number of ships kept as museums. Sadly, however, there is only a limited market for such ships. And not only must the ship itself be of historical interest to make a go of it. Much of the success or failure of a museum ship has to do with the accessibility of the ship. The Midway in San Diego and Intrepid in New York are doing well, in large part because those cities are already prime tourist destinations, which greatly increases the traffic they get. Given that, one hopes HMS Caroline manages to stay afloat, both physically, and fiscally.
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TACTOM synthetic guidance- now with video!
We mentioned the use of offboard guidance to guide a TACTOM Tomahawk missile against a moving naval target. Here’s the video.
That’s not a warhead, by the way. That’s simply leftover jet fuel from the Tomahawk’s engine burning. For test shots like this, the warhead is replaced with ballast and telemetry. First, you want to gather as much information as possible. Second, you want to do as little damage to the (relatively expensive) target as possible. A warshot would have a 1000 pound blast/fragmentation warhead. While that likely wouldn’t sink the target, hitting so far above the waterline, it would certainly do a good deal of damage to any warship, likely rendering it a “mission kill” where it could not be expected to continue to operate in a threat environment.
And yes, pigeons is misspelled.
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Joni Ernst and the Democrat War on (combat veteran) Women
One is absolutely prohibited from saying anything negative about a woman, particularly a veteran. Unless, of course, that woman is a Republican. In that case, Huffington Post feels obligated to insinuate that she’s a liar and guilty of Stolen Valor.
When most people hear “combat veteran,” they think firefights with the enemy. But the military defines combat veteran differently — as soldiers who served in a combat area.
Which brings us to Senator Joni Ernst (R-Iowa), one of the GOP’s most recent stars. It was Sen. Ernst who was selected to give the Republican response to President Obama’s recent State of the Union message this year.
Is Joni Ernst really Jane Rambo? No. She went where she was told, and fulfilled her mission to the best of her ability. And the Army has seen fit to authorize her to wear Former Wartime Service Shoulder Sleeve Insignia (FWS-SSI), more commonly known as a “combat patch.”
We too are authorized a combat patch.
We spent 12 years in the service, eight of them in tactical units, five months deployed to the Persian Gulf, six weeks of which was during combat, four days of ground combat, and a total of about maybe two hours of actual shooting at the other guy combat. And of that time, our duty consisted of sitting in the back of a Bradley and once or twice loading the TOW launcher.
We don’t claim to be an extraordinary warrior. But we do claim to be a combat veteran. And so is Joni Ernst.
She’s never claimed any more than that. Shame on HuffPo. Of course, one is hardly surprised that an article about honor from them should be so dishonorable.
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Brown vs. CIMSEC
You’ll recall we linked a rather puerile piece of writing from a Brown University student yesterday. One can be forgiven for thinking that the intellectual depth of today’s youth is somewhat comparable to a rain puddle on an Arizona sidewalk in August.
But that isn’t quite the case. One reason we shared Mr. Makhlouf’s screed was because it was such a poorly written piece.
On the other hand, there are young Americans who can write quite well. CIMSEC, the Center For International Maritime Security, sponsored a high school essay contest. And lo, Mr. Templin, a senior at South Lake High School in Groveland, Florida, has won the prize.
One can find a few grammatical errors, and questionable word choices. One could also find fault with his conclusions and proposals. But overall, this is a well thought out piece that correctly identifies a problem, the environment that causes the problem, and possible corrective courses of action.
The nations of Somalia, Eritrea, Djibouti, Indonesia, Malaysia, Thailand and Singapore all share a unique strength. Despite being third world countries and overall economically weak, they have strength in their geographic position; each are located on crucial waterways. These waterways consist of some of the most heavily traveled commercial shipping routes in the world. In terms of crude oil alone, the strait of Malacca in Southeast Asia has an estimated 15 million barrels a day, while the strait of Hormuz that links the Arabian Gulf to the Indian Ocean has an even larger amount of oil cargo, estimated at 17 million barrels per day.
Do read the whole thing.
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Jordan Responds
It’s a few days old.
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LRASM Program Notes
We’ve discussed US Navy offensive Anti-Surface Warfare a bit here lately. One program the Navy is pursuing to rebuilt its offensive capability is the Long Range Anti-Ship Missile, or LRASM. It hopes to equip both aircraft and ships with LRASM in the next few years, starting with aircraft first, and a shipboard model later.
The LRASM is essentially the Lockheed Joint Air to Surface Standoff Missile (AGM-158 JASSM) with an anti-ship seeker in place of the land attack guidance system. Interestingly, the first platform expected to actually field the LRASM is the Air Force’s B-1B. Given the efforts the Navy and Air Force have made toward integrating their warfighting capability in the far Pacific, this makes some sense. It makes even more sense in that the B-1B is the prime carrier for the JASSM, so integrating it and training crews is a lower hurdle. After the B-1B, the Navy expects to integrate LRASM on the F/A-18 Hornet, and eventually the F-35C.
As for a shipboard version, tests are already underway to use a booster rocket to launch LRASM from the missile cells of Vertical Launch Systems such as the Mk41 aboard Aegis destroyers and cruisers. No full up guided tests have been done yet, but booster test launches have.
Earlier this week, the third successful LRASM flight from a B-1B took place.
On February 4, the Navy, Air Force and DARPA completed another successful flight test, marking a significant step in maturing key technologies for the future operational weapon system. The joint-service team, known as the LRASM Deployment Office (LDO), conducted the test to evaluate LRASM’s low-altitude performance and obstacle avoidance as part of the program’s accelerated development effort.
Lockheed and the Navy haven’t released any video of LRASM launches yet, but here’s some JASSM splodey to tide you over.
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