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Grump drives the Tier IV US destroyer Clemson like a boss, and totally dominates the battle for his team.

The air attack threat posed to the fleet during World War II, especially the kamikaze, convinced the Navy to pursue airborne early warning radars to extend the radar horizon, and give the fleet greater warning time of incoming raids.

By the late 1950s, the Grumman E-1B Tracer, based on the Grumman S-2 Tracker anti-submarine airframe, entered service. It mounted an APS-82 radar above the fuselage, and the plane and its radar were valuable additions to the fleets security.

But the E-1B was clearly only an interim aircraft. First, its piston engines limited its performance, which in turn reduced the  radar horizon. Second, the relatively small size of the airframe limited it to only two radar officers. Third, and most importantly, the E-1B could not interface with the then new Navy Tactical Data System, which severely limited its ability to assist in management of the defense picture.

As a result of these limitations, the Navy and Grumman worked together to design an entirely new aircraft that would be bigger, more powerful, and capable of working with NTDS. The result was the Grumman E-2A Hawkeye, which entered squadron service in 1964.

The basic E-2C concept has been highly successful, and improvements in the airframe, engines, radars, and electronics has served the Hawkeye well, and today the E-2D model is in service, and expected to remain so for many years.

Usually by the time someone is playing at the higher tiers of World of Warships, they’re pretty attuned the threat analysis, and can pick up on who is the greatest immediate threat.

Not these two jokers tonight.

I can’t remember the last time I saw a pair of high tier battleship drivers that were as clueless about what the real threat was.

Mind you, I’m not complaining!

Military suicide and sexual assault remain intractable problems, despite extraordinary efforts by the Department of Defense and Congress. What more can be done in the next administration? A place to start is with better data. This suggestion might not seem that far-reaching, but it is actually nothing short of revolutionary. Better data will allow policymakers to tailor interventions, measure program effectiveness, and establish goals by which to measure success — tasks all but impossible today. While it seems hard to argue against collecting and publishing better data, the Department of Defense seems loath to do so. After all, opacity is not a bug, but a feature – indeed a central stratagem – in large bureaucracies.

via warontherocks.com

Spend the five or ten minutes it takes to read this.

While the current administration pursues personnel policies wholly unconnected to warfighting and, well, reality, Carson and Plummer have outlined serious issues that the DoD, the individual services, and junior commanders especially, face on an ongoing basis.

I think I last checked up on Argentina’s readiness a couple years ago. The status has only gotten worse since then.

We damn near lost a battle on points.

Too bad he died there at the end.

The images of that Day of Infamy, of the burning ships settling in the mud, the slumping foremast of sunken battleship Arizona engulfed in smoke and roaring flame, smashed and ruined aircraft, grainy images of Japanese aircraft lifting off the pitching decks of the carriers, blaring headlines on the day's newspapers, these are all seared into the consciousness of anyone who cares to know how we got here, today, at this point in our history.  

Three quarters of a century ago, barely, now, within living memory, powerful forces of the Imperial Japanese Navy attacked United States military installations on the Hawaiian island of Oahu.  Wheeler Field, Hickham Field, Ewa, Schofield Barracks, and of course the Naval Station at Pearl Harbor would feel the destructive power of the IJN's Kido Butai.  Three hundred fifty Japanese aircraft in two waves had caught the American installations nearly entirely unprepared, despite the political and military signals which may have portended the attack.  

In the end, 180 US Navy, Marine, and Army aircraft were destroyed.  Four battleships, Arizona, Oklahoma, West Virginia, and California, were sunk.  Four others were damaged, Nevada severely.   Target ship Utah was also sunk, as were a handful of auxiliaries and tenders.   Two destroyers in dry dock, Cassin and Downes, were damaged beyond salvage.   Several ships suffered varying degrees of damage.  More than 2,400 US military personnel (and 68 civilians) were killed in the attack, most on Arizona and Oklahoma, and more than 1,100 were wounded.    West Virginia and California eventually would be raised, repaired, and returned to service.  Oklahoma was righted, also, in a two-year project, but she would be written off due to extensive damage and obsolescence.   Utah, and of course, Arizona, remain where they settled.  The hull of the latter is still visible from the beautiful memorial which spans her, honoring the more than 1,100 Sailors and Marines who died aboard her that day and remain entombed still.  

The United States, slow to anger and reluctant to go to war, was on 8 December a nation incensed.  As the US grieved her dead, Roosevelt's famous request for a declaration of war against Japan summed up the mood of the greatest industrial power on the globe.   When the war against Japan ended with unconditional surrender in August of 1945, the Japanese Navy had been completely destroyed.  Much of her army had been killed, pushed back, or left to starve on island outposts across the Pacific.  Her industry lay in ruins, as did many of her cities.  Two of those cities would vanish beneath nuclear detonations.  Such was the price of Japanese aggression, and for the atrocities in captured lands that took the lives of millions of Chinese, Filipino, Korean, Vietnamese, Chamorro, and Papuan civilians, as well as US, Australian, British, Dutch, and Filipino prisoners of war.  

But all that was yet to come on the morning of December 7th, 1941.  Seventy-five years ago today.   URR here, BTW.