Boundary Condition #2 (1)

November 14, 1910, Eugene Ely makes the first take off from a ship from a wooden platform on the bow of the USS Birmingham; December 23, 1910 LT. T.G. Ellyson reports to the Glenn Curtis Aviation Camp at North Island, as the first naval officer to undergo flight training; 18 January 1911, Ely lands on a specially built platform aboard the armored cruiser USS Pennsylvania. 8 May, 1911, Captain W.I. Chambers requisitions its first airplane. That day becomes the official birthday of Naval Aviation. We'll be celebrating our 100th this coming year.

 Naval Aviator #1: Lt. T.G. Ellyson

Boris sends:

God bless the United States of America and all its fighting men and women.

Merry Christmas

The Ghosts of Christmas Past…Fly Navy, the BEST Always Have

by Ed 'Boris' Beakley, December 1999

Sometimes it's the flight deck of Midway in Singapore Harbor, Christmas '72, Bob Hope.  Our A-6 guys have really had an interesting few nights along with the BUFs.  The Christmas card from Randy, college buddy, flight school roomie, VF-111, just back in the states, sticks in my mind  FLY NAVY it says, THE BEST ALWAYS HAVE.  Ghosts of Christmas past.

What brings this ghost hunting on is chance meetings with old pals, some news item with Navy guys in it, a bad war movie with Navy jets, you get the picture.  In the last few weeks I've gotten bombarded with multiple inputs and therefore this little e-mail shot.  First was on a random channel flip,  catching William Holden in the binjo ditch just as he tells Mickey Rooney about the wrong war, wrong place –you fight because you're there, leading into the famous comment by the admiral on the carrier Savo "Where did we get such men?"  The next, learning of the loss of Admiral Pat Moneymaker's son in an S-3 off JFK.  Munt once flew on  my wing,  he's family.  Finally, a joyous input. My daughter, made in Hong Kong during that '72 cruise,  is bringing home, Christmas Eve, for a first meeting,  my son-in-law to-be, a LCDR F-14 RIO.  Seems "Fly Navy"  is gonna be around some more.

And so, I thought  I'd pass on some of the pieces as Christmas ornaments, if you will,  thoughts that  are important,  written by people who can tell the story so much better than I. 

MERRY CHRISTMAS
FLY NAVY THE BEST ALWAYS HAVE

From every Chief Petty Officer I ever met

Pay attention, Sir. Learn, use it, and pass it on.

"Testimony of Pilot" from AIRSHIPS by Barry Hannah

"And what are we supposed to do?"  cried Lilian.
"We've just got to hang around.  He didn't have to lift off and disappear straight up like that.  That was to tell us how he isn't with us anymore."

THE BRIDGES AT TOKO-RI by James a Michener

For many hours the admiral remained alone.  Then toward morning he heard the anti-submarine patrol go out and as the engines roared he asked, "Why is America lucky enough to have such men?  They leave this tiny ship and fly against the enemy.  Then they must seek the ship, lost somewhere on the sea.  And when they find it, they have to land upon its pitching deck.  Where did we get such men?"

He went out to watch the launching of the dawn strike.  As streaks of light appeared in the east,  pilots came on deck…..Majestically, the task force turned into the wind,  the bull horn jangled and a voice in the gloom cried,  "Launch jets."
Admiral Tarrant watched them go,  two by two from the lashing catapult, planes of immortal beauty whipping into the air with flame and fury upon them.  They did not waste fuel orbiting but screamed to the west, seeking new bridges in Korea.

FW:  Cubi…'being there'  e-mail   from "Turtle"

Sadness and Hope:  Some Thoughts on Modern Warfare  from the Raymond A. Spruance Lecture at the Naval War College April 1980  by Herman Wouk

Two months ago,  in routine duty at sea,  Butch was being catapulted. The catapult failed and his plane fell in the sea.  He ejected,  but something went very wrong with the rescue procedure he was so familiar with, and Butch drowned.  He isgone.

…..But what did Butch do with his death-this wonderful fighter, this first-class man who I believe would have been an important American leader,  military and possibly more than military?  What did he achieve with this accidental death in routine operations?

I'll tell you what he did-he served.  He was there. 

When Raymond Spruance sailed to Midway he was taking two carriers against nine;  no battleships against perhaps twelve.  …The victory that Spruance won against those rough odds,  the stand of this one man in one dark hour on the Pacific Ocean near the island of Midway,  turned the tide of history from the blackness of totalitarian barbarism into the troubled world we have today:  a world-however troubled- in which we Americans can still talk as free men and work as free men toward the future.

….. They are here among you…men who are such,  or aspire to be such.  I tell you that you are right in what you are doing,  that you are answering the noblest of calls.  In all my sadness,  you are my hope.

The Truest Sport:  Jousting with Sam and Charlie  by Tom Wolf

Now, that really was too much!  Why…. You bastard!  But they said nothing,  except the usual.  What they wanted to say…well,  how could they have put it into words?  How,  within the inner room,  does one say:  "My God, man,  we've just been into the Jaws!... about as far into the goddamned Jaws as you can go and still come back again! and you want to know why we flew so low!  We've just been there!  At the lost end of the equation! where it drops off the end of the known world!  Ask us about… the last things,  you bastard,  and we will enlighten you!

There were no words in the chivalric code for such thoughts,  however. But all at once the skipper of the Coral Sea, the maximum leader, a former combat pilot himself,  appeared-and he smiled!  And that smile was like an emission of radio waves.
"We're glad to have you back,  men."
That  was all he said.  But he smiled again!  Such ethereal waves!
Invisible but comprehensible,  they said,  "I know.  I've been there myself."  Just that! – not a sound! -and yet a doxology for all the unspoken things.  How full my heart, O Lord!
Flint took off one day before going out on his next mission,  on New Year's Eve.  Dowd had suffered a back injury in the ejection from the F-4B,  and so it was another two days before he climbed back into the metal slingshot,  got slung off the skillet,  and went flying over North Vietnam again.

A GIFT OF WINGS by Richard Bach

To Frenchy,  welcome to the family

Ed "Boris" Beakley
(Champ 9 VA-56 USS Midway Christmas '72)

Update December 2010:  So how's that going so far?

Well, Tracey (made in Hong Kong on that fateful '72 cruise) and Frenchy (1975 Operation Baby Lift) celebrated their 1oth anniversary this year, Frenchy retired from the Navy summer before last – the Tomcat pic is in his honor – and India's now wearing Liam's flight jacket.  Going really well, I'd say.  Fly Navy, the BEST did and will continue to do. Boris sends

Veterans Day 2010

In high school, Joleta McNelis was never far away from a man she had never met. She carried Lt. John "Jack" Ensch in her heart — and on her wrist.  Aside from his name, the only thing McNelis knew about Ensch was the date his fighter jet was shot down over North Vietnam: 8-25-72. It was etched under his name on the metal bracelet she bought when she was 14.

When Ensch arrived there (Hanoi Hilton) in August 1972, he brought news that he passed along to his fellow prisoners through tap codes between cells: People across America were wearing bracelets with their names on them. "They were dumbfounded," Ensch said.

 By the time Midway aircrews flew those missions in 1972,  most of us were under no illusions about how the country felt about the war and indeed sometimes about us – the Yankee air pirate "war criminals." The air war, particularly over North Vietnam had long been a pawn in Secretary of Defense Robert Strange McNamara's flawed strategy of war.  The "stick and carrot" ploy having failed, President Nixon pulled off the gloves that Spring and sent Air Force and Navy pilots back "down town" – Route Pack Six, Hanoi, Haiphong, Thud Ridge, the Red River Valley. 

No one has deemed us the "greatest generation," but  we didn't much care then or now.  We were proud to be American fighting men, we loved our country as much as any from any time since the Revolutionary War, we were well trained, really  loved being Naval Aviators and that special aspect flying off of carriers, and despite all too real and rationale fear, relished the challenge – as Right Stuff author Tom Wolfe  described – of "jousting with SAM and Charlie." Most of all, we simply liked being around the kind of people who chose to do that kind of stuff. And truth be known, we knew we were fighting not to win a war but to gain position strong enough for Nixon and Kissinger to negotiate the U.S. out of Vietnam.  That meant bringing home those "kind of people we liked being around" who currently enjoyed the hospitality of North Vietnam residing in the Hanoi Hilton, our POWs.

One of those POWs, Paul Galanti (the Life Magazine "birdman"), shot down in an A-4 Skyhawk on 17 June 1966, was best friend of my squadron commanding officer Lew Chatham. 

In a time honored tradition for fighter aircraft, the Skipper's name was painted on the side of the cockpit of NF 401, as was each pilot's name down the pecking order on squadron aircraft. Chatham had Paul's name painted under his own.  Indeed, a POW name was stenciled on all Champ aircraft under each of our names.  The  picture below is of me manning up in our operations officer's aircraft NF 403 showing Navy POW Capt Mel Moore's name.  Moore was an A-4 pilot and Executive Officer of VA-192, shot down on 11 March 1967 while flying a surface to air missile suppression or Ironhand mission.  As far as I know, the VA-56 Champs were the only Navy or Air Force squadron to place POW names on their aircraft. We knew for what and for whom we were fighting. 

The vietnam War was an extremely devisive period for America. But as Jack Anton wrote in the Los Angeles Times on November 4th, "The plight of the POWs gave people a way to separate their feelings toward policymakers from their feelings toward those who fought in the war — a shift in public attitude still evident today. Whatever people think of U.S. policy on Iraq and Afghanistan, support for the troops remains strong.  So, too, do the connections made by Vietnam-era bracelet wearers. ... More than 5 million POW/MIA bracelets were sold for $2.50 to $3 apiece in the early 1970s. ... Thirty-seven years after the wars end, the Defense Department's Prisoner of War/Missing Personnel Office receives requests for information on former POWs or relatives of missing servicemen nearly every day."

This post was originally intended to be a short link to Anton's article, which being in the La Times, many of you would not see.  "Vietnam war bracelets come full circle," on the front page of all things, caught me by surprise.  It intertwines the story  of how the bracelets came to be  with stories of POWs like Jack Ensch and the people who wore their bracelets, some as teenagers. Ensch said he is still struck by the outpouring of goodwill. "Even those people who were against the Vietnam War could identify with us being held captive there — the torture and the mistreatment. Nobody could argue that wasn't wrong," he said. "I think it was a collective learning experience for our society." Anton's article is well worth your time to  read and I offer my thanks to him for writing it.

If the Vietnam War had one good aspect, it was that our citizens relearned that what you think of war or a particular war should not reflect on what you think and how you treat the warfighter. No one cheered service men coming through airports in those days – they do now. No one lined the streets for miles for a soldier's funeral, or placed American Flags along the route then – they do now. Something that was not right, now is. Once again we honor our veterans – all of them.

Similar to what I  noted several years ago in the Ghosts of Christmas Past;Memories of Fly Navy, Anton's bracelet story generated one of those flashback/reflection moments and caused me to recall a comment by my golfing partner and retired Navy Phantom puke John "Dancing Bear" Evans. He reflected one day that with no disrespect meant to the "greatest generation,"  the WWII guys went off to war, did their business of warfare and did it exceptionally well, but with a country strongly behind them. The Vietnam warriors were no less brave, also did their country's biding, but did it not only in the hostile combat environment but returned to a hostile environment at home. They indeed deserve recognition as a very great generation.

 As we honor all our veterans, I suggest to you a separate moment of thought for those who indeed stood alone. I for one am proud to have shared the St Crispin's Day Agincourt "band of brothers" moment with you.

And Crispin Crispian shall ne'er go by,

From this day to the ending of the world,

But we in it shall be remembered-

We few, we happy few, we band of brothers;

For he to-day that sheds his blood with me

Shall be my brother

Naval Aviation = Night in the barrel (no exceptions)

From Thucydides, to Michael Yon today in Iraq and Afghanistan,  confrontation, conlict, warfare, wars AND War have been recorded for some  2500 years. We are discussing differences in this series.  But Thermopylae to Gettsburg to Midway to Baghdad to mountains of Afghanistan, much remains the same for those who do the  fighting.  This is the carrier Navy piece – in color.

Hat tip to Jim Dunkle for this one.  Sometimes Supply officers do come through.

 Essential Elements of Information for a Culture of Preparedness

Prior to Desert Storm, Gen. Norman Schwartzkopf created a small cell of four majors and a colonel to act as his intimate "brain trust" to plan his campaign. The group became known as the "Jedi Knights." All were graduates of the School of Advanced Military Studies, essentially the Army staff college's second year honors program. The success of SAMS was emulated by other services and became the model for a similar program at the Army War College focused on strategic studies.
Success of the SAMS model provides a good template for an advanced learning program for specially selected strategic staff officers.

EEI #5 – "The Big Picture"- The Nexus Between Education and Grand Strategy - begins with (Mark Safranski at Zenpundit) questioning our educational preparedness to deal with 21st century problems.

Why would our societal orientation in complex, dynamic, fast moving situations be good when our educational system trains people only to think through simplified, linear, sequential problems? Strategic thinkers need to be able to see "the big picture" and handle uncertainty, or they cannot be said to be strategic thinkers.

As a second offering (for the first, see EEI#5) on a thread of "learning, unlearning, relearning," as an Essential Element of Information for a Culture of Preparedness, this post provides an excerpt from Armed Forces Journal by retired Army Major General Robert Scales.  General Scales is a former commandant of the US Army War College, now president of Colgen Inc., a consulting firm specializing in land power, war gaming and strategic leadership, and is a  graduate of West Point, with a PhD in History from Duke University He served more than 30 years in the Army, commanding two units in Vietnam.

As a major theme he notes "The complexities of recent wars suggest that the reforms that dictated jointness, while necessary, are no longer sufficient. Today's conflicts demand officers who can lead indirectly and perform in an uncertain, ambiguous, complex, chaotic and inherently unpredictable environment. Our educational system needs to produce more men and women who can anticipate conditions that do not yet exist. They must be capable of dealing with unfamiliar cultures and an enemy who is unconstrained by Western values and methods of warfare. To be sure, the services possess many talented, and indeed some brilliant, practitioners of the strategic art. But the demand for strategists is greater than the supply. Our system of professional military education produces too few officers capable of understanding and dealing with the complexities of war at the strategic level."

To that I would add/ask  and is it not the same for all this country's leaders?

I highly recommend the full article at Armed Forces Journal, but here in part:

Return of the Jedi

They will fail because the services will not be able to attract the brightest and groom them through proper schooling for positions of responsibility unless the intellectually gifted are rewarded with selection for promotion and command. Unless intellectual excellence is tied to the services' personnel systems, true reform is impossible. Only once in the past century have powers of reform overcome the cultural glue that binds together the services' systems of professional rewards. In the mid-1980s, Rep. Ike Skelton, D-Mo., as part of the Goldwater-Nichols legislation, forced the services to learn how to operate efficiently – the essence of "jointness." Skelton's effort gained traction because of the failure of the services to fight together as a team during the invasion of Grenada in 1983. Skelton leveraged the law to hold the services' reward systems for promotion and command hostage to a meaningful commitment to jointness. To ensure that his reforms would last, Skelton legislated that staff and war colleges bring together student officers from all services to study joint as well as service-specific subjects.

The complexities of recent wars suggest that the reforms that dictated jointness, while necessary, are no longer sufficient. Today's conflicts demand officers who can lead indirectly and perform in an uncertain, ambiguous, complex, chaotic and inherently unpredictable environment. Our educational system needs to produce more men and women who can anticipate conditions that do not yet exist. They must be capable of dealing with unfamiliar cultures and an enemy who is unconstrained by Western values and methods of warfare. To be sure, the services possess many talented, and indeed some brilliant, practitioners of the strategic art. But the demand for strategists is greater than the supply. Our system of professional military education produces too few officers capable of understanding and dealing with the complexities of war at the strategic level.

We have too few of these officers because the services tend to accelerate the careers of officers who, early in their careers, show talent at the tactical level of war. Battalion, squadron and ship commanders habitually reward subordinates who mirror themselves. These subordinates tend to be officers who get things done, the go-to, can-do types who make their mark with managerial brilliance. The irony of the system is that the requirement for competence shifts from the tactical to the strategic at just the time in their careers when tactical officers leave command to move on to higher levels of responsibility at the colonel and flag level. As a result, too often we see skillful tacticians thrust into strategic staff jobs they are ill-prepared to perform.

HOW TO DEVELOP STRATEGIC THINKERS
We have met the archetype strategic warrior, and his name is David Petraeus. He is joined by a remarkably successful cadre of leaders who have demonstrated exceptional talent in the chaotic environments in Iraq and Afghanistan. Some names are familiar because they reached three or four stars: Chiarelli, Stavridis, Dempsey, Ward, Dubik, Eikenberry. Others are equally successful but less well known because of their lesser rank and profile. These are behind-the-scenes officers who have offered advice and insight to their flag officer bosses: Nagl, Yingling, McMaster and Mansoor, among a few others.

Most of these proven strategic thinkers share a remarkably common provenance. Very early in their careers they learned to think critically and communicate strategically by attending a government-financed graduate program at a top-tier civilian university. Later, most of them sharpened these skills by teaching at a service academy. They all share (along with fellow intellectual travelers such as Adm. Mike Mullen and Marine Gen. Jim Mattis) a lifelong obsession with reading history and studying the art of war. At some time in their careers, they ignored the caution of personnel officers about spending too much time in school while under scrutiny for command selection. Today, this is a critical period for upwardly mobile officers because those who are screened for command are on the fast track to flag rank. Those who don't command will not grasp the brass ring. The proclivities of service culture cannot be easily overcome. The reality is that educational reform hinges on the ability to create a path for the intellectually gifted to be promoted to flag rank. But the climate today tends to reward tactical rather than strategic excellence. This must change.

BEGIN AT THE TOP
Flag officers with highly developed strategic skills are needed principally in the key operations, planning, strategy and civil-military billets – a relatively small cohort that embraces conservatively about a sixth of flag and general officers from all services. Consider a reform scheme that establishes a Senior Strategist Program (SSP) that would identify key strategic appointments and fence them for officers educated in a program of demanding, selective advanced schooling and preparation. ... As in any profession, our young officers are ambitious and seek promotion. They will see that intellectual excellence has become a prized credential for promotion, and they will actively seek higher education and intellectual preparation as the surest means for achieving flag rank.

Promotion of these specially selected and accredited officers to flag rank would begin early in their careers … These officers would study the human and social sciences with particular emphasis on history, international relations, anthropology, economics, language and culture. Officer students would be expected to complete the course requirements for the Ph.D. A successful preliminary examination would waive the education and service requirements necessary to gain credit for joint service, thus leveling the career playing field by giving these officers the same amount of time to command as their conventionally educated peers.

CREATING JEDIS
Prior to Desert Storm, Gen. Norman Schwartzkopf created a small cell of four majors and a colonel to act as his intimate "brain trust" to plan his campaign. The group became known as the "Jedi Knights." All were graduates of the School of Advanced Military Studies, essentially the Army staff college's second year honors program. The success of SAMS was emulated by other services and became the model for a similar program at the Army War College focused on strategic studies.

Success of the SAMS model provides a good template for an advanced learning program for specially selected strategic staff officers. In this scheme, each service would be responsible for teaching their respective version of SAMS. The SAMS course would last two years with eligibility reserved principally for officers who completed the two-year program at civilian graduate schools. Others could be accepted provided they pass a very rigorous entry examination. During the course, SSP students would be required to finish their dissertations for the doctorate degree and demonstrate proficiency in a foreign language. Like today's SAMS, the course would be enormously rigorous. The curriculum would be history based. Students would follow the case study method and would be evaluated and graded by an experienced faculty, most of whom would be SSP program alumni. Graduates would then return to operational assignments and subsequent selection for battalion, squadron and ship commands…

MAKING THE CUT
.......The Skelton reforms have shown that often legislation is the only sure way to achieve what cultural friction cannot overcome. To be sure, no effort as culturally disruptive as this can be implemented quickly. At least five years would be needed to get it off the ground, and more than a decade would pass before SSP-qualified officers would advance to positions of authority. But if we are to create a body of gifted officers capable of dealing with the complexities of modern warfare, we soon must begin to break the stranglehold of the service personnel systems and offer the proper rewards to those young, talented and ambitious officers who are most gifted in the strategic art. AFJ

Complete article at AFJ

Invest in preparedness, not prediction…I will never get to know the unknown since, by definition, it is unknown. However, I can always guess how it might affect me, and I should base my decisions around that."     The Black Swan, Nassem Nicholas Taleb

In  2001, the Defense Science Board investigated what they termed  "a revolution in training."  

The superb performance of our military in the 1990s was not just a result of technological superiority but equally of TRAINING SUPERIORITY.   Analysis of air, submarine and other combat showed that individuals who survived an engagement in which a kill was achieved were much more likely to win the next one. This had been originally thought to be battlefield Darwinism. But the combat training approach invented some 30 years ago (now 40 years, see  Scream of Eagles – Happy Birthday TOPGUN ) beginning with TOPGUN, showed this can be a function of learning. 

But they also noted that while there had certainly been a "Revolution"  (Top Gun, Red Flag, National Training Center {NTC}),  the results had not been appreciated nor expanded to other areas such as for joint warfare training. Indeed, today, there certainly appears to be no awareness of the truly spectacular results by the Department of Homeland Security, nor the public sector in general beyond that related to Maverick and Goose.

In this light, worth considering is a recent story based on remarks by new Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano and the December 2008 Defense Science Board  report Challenges to Military Operations In Support of National Interfaces:   

As governor of Arizona, ... Napolitano sent a searing two-page letter to her predecessor as secretary, Michael Chertoff, complaining that a $25 million national exercise in October 2007, which she and 23,000 other federal, state and local emergency workers participated in, was too expensive, too long in planning and 'too removed from a real-world scenario.'

Now, in her first weeks as head of the Homeland Security Department, Ms. Napolitano has ordered a review of that program and several others, including cybersecurity, a strategy for protecting the border with Canada, and the vulnerability of power plants and other critical infrastructure.

The directives implicitly raise questions about how well the Bush administration prepared the nation's defenses against a terrorist attack … Her pointed comments on the emergency preparedness exercise, which she repeated last month at her Senate confirmation hearing, offer a glimpse into how Ms. Napolitano may retool one the centerpieces of the Bush administration's domestic security architecture.

'If we're going to be doing these kinds of things, and they are valuable, the underlying philosophy is a good one, but they need to be in my view streamlined,' Ms. Napolitano told the Senate Committee on Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs last month.

Ms. Napolitano's frustration with the system in place for rehearsing responses to natural disasters and terrorist attacks has struck a chord among state and local emergency managers, many of whom have long complained that the Homeland Security Department and its crisis-response component, the Federal Emergency Management Agency, have failed to consult fully with local communities in disaster planning. [For complete article and comments see RC#29]

The Department of Defense must change its conceptual approach to homeland defense … (it) can no longer think in terms of the 'home' game and the 'away' game.  There is only one game. [Vol. II, Part IV, Chapter 13, pg 203]

(and further) ... processes to ensure that plans are practiced and capabilities measured against readiness metrics are lacking.  While there are many exercises (possibly too many) the exercises are highly scripted, unconnected to each other, and typically focus on top-down approach (where the supporting organizations are 'training aids' to the senior-level players) instead of bottom-up approach (focusing on an integrated and layered response beginning with the initial event). Even the national-level exercises have not been effective… often stopped before the more difficult issues of transfer of command, employment of specialized assets, or unknowns (like public panic) come into play. ... More worrisome than the disjointed nature of the exercises is the lack of any process for effectively 'learning from' the lessons of these exercises, (or) ... no mechanisms to promulgate … to the wider (HLS & HLD) community.  [Vol. II, Part IV, Chapter 16, pg 250]

Mumbai attackers had hit list of 320 world targets http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2009/feb/19/mumbai-attacks-list-target s

Lashkar-e-Taiba ringleaders had ambitions well beyond causing mayhem in India, the Guardian has learned – Western intelligence agencies have accessed the computer and email account of Lashkar's communications chief, Zarar Shah, and found a list of possible targets, only 20 of which were in India.  The plotters behind the Mumbai attack, which left more than 170 people dead, had placed India's financial capital on a list of 320 worldwide locations as potential targets for commando-style terror strikes, the Guardian has learned.  It suggests that Lashkar-e-Taiba, the outlawed terror group that planned much of the attack from Pakistan, had ambitions well beyond causing mayhem in India.

As worthy of historical reflection, remember that Napoleon's army was not only great in terms of winning battles, but when his enemy broke and fled the battlefield, his troops pursued relentlessly, bloodily  insuring that there indeed, would not be "another day"  to fight.  Red-teaming  the world right now, what better time to pursue the "far enemy" (us) and destroy his will and confidence to go about in the world than now in our time of immense financial crisis when everything and everybody is focused on pure survival – all running in one direction, our backs to all other aspects of the environment?

Considering current preparation and readiness, there are two key elements missing from most training programs.  First is the notion of dedicated opposing force and second,  the need to include non-scripted decision making situations.   Most training events and drills are based on availability of resources – both human and physical - necessary for the management of, or the consequences of, a specific disaster type.  As stated previously, these mostly pre-scripted drills fail to address crisis development, eliminate the Observation and Orientation stages of the Observe Orient Decide Act (OODA) Loop by pre-determining their characteristics, thus eliminating uncertainty, and therefore, bypassing the essential element of critical command thinking.

The result: Level of readiness defined as instantaneous ability to respond to a suddenly arising major crisis based on locally available, un-prepositioned and un-mobilized countermeasure resources is either unchanged or decreased due to these flaws built into current philosophy of drills.  Therefore, this approach reduces or negates achievement of performance that our technical superiority promises. 

Resolution suggests a TOPGUN or "combat training center" type approach for homeland security and defense education, training, and exercises.  Elements would include:

• Highly competent Opposition Force using "enemy" equipment & tactics


• Objective, no-holds barred feedback so that no longer does first person to blackboard (or Bar) win


• Expectation of failure in the trained unit AND its commanders


• Metrics – You can't know there is a training problem until you have ways to measure proficiency

Development of an HLS/HLD "TOPGUN" will require answering these Questions?

1. Can the "train to the ace level" concept behind Top Gun, Red Flag, National Training Center at Ft Irwin, i.e. the combat training center or "CTC" concept be applied to hyper complex crisis, worst case  disaster command control learning?


2. Would "first mission" exposure for operational level decision makers provide value added? (consideration that  given funding constraints, daily normal real world law enforcement, fire response, emergency management, and job rotation, there may be only one opportunity in a three year cycle to expose the candidates. Can one exposure make a difference?  What would be the impact of dynamic simulation interjected into the classroom?


3. What needs to be included in pre-exercise classroom and simulated command problems to make the learning and training effective? In particular, by who and how are cognitive elements and related decision making in crisis taught?


4. What kind of research needs to be done in this area?

In closing, based on reports like that on Mumbai and Secretary Napolitano's concerns, is there a need and a receptive ear for a Scream of Eagles II from the first responder community?

Forty years ago, 3 March 1969, the first TOPGUN class  began "graduate level" fighter pilot education and training at Naval Air Station Miramar at the Fighter Weapons School. They were there because eagles screamed.

They were there because fighter pilots will not accept failure. In 1966 North Vietnamese fighter pilots (flying MiG 17 Frescos and MiG 21 Fishbeds) had accounted for only 3 percent of U.S. air losses. In the first three months of 1968, the MiG pilots now were responsible for 22 percent. The U.S. kill ratio was just about 2 to 1 (Air Force a little below, Navy, a little above) – as compared to the 10 to 1 of WWII and the Korean War – notably the worst ratio in the history of Naval aviation. Air crews were getting killed or becoming Hanoi Hilton residents, missiles and tactics developed to shoot down Russian bombers at long range were useless against an enemy intending to engage at close range coupled with U.S. rules of engagement prohibiting firing until positive ID obtained (which therefore put your aircraft inside the missile launch parameters.)

 Eagles screamed. Sometimes leaders listen and do what they're supposed to do – pay attention to those who've been in the crucible, and then act to take care of their people. This time they did.

Vice Admiral Tom Connolly (Deputy Chief of Naval Operations (Air) and Rear Admiral Bob Townsend (Commander Naval Air Systems Command) together representing both the operational and technical sides, assigned former Commanding Officer of the USS Coral Sea, Captain Frank "Whip" Ault to find out what was wrong. Ault was the right man. His nickname/call sign, "Whip," came from Korean War days as Executive – soon to be Commanding – Officer of VA-55 on USS Essex. He had told his squadron pilots "I can out-drink you, out-fight you, and out-fly you," and there's nothing more obnoxious than a guy who can back up what he says. When being interviewed for consideration to be Executive Officer of the Navy's first nuclear powered aircraft carrier, USS Enterprise, he so outraged the interview game playing Admiral Hyman Rickover, that Rickover called his boss and told him Ault was the most irreverent Naval Officer he'd ever interviewed – but he got the job.

... we sent our people out there not trained for dogfighting. We sent the aircraft out there not equipped for dogfighting… and we got into nose-nose combat situations where neither the guy flying the airplane nor the airplane itself had ever fired a missile.  Further, based on the expected nature of air war and our technical developments to intercept bombers at long range, we have lost expertise and continuity in 'being dogfighters' ... there is a need to establish a fighter weapons school to reverse this trend and to eliminate aircrew and ground personnel error…

Using Thomas (The World is Flat) Friedman's terms, they created a "different context, different narrative, different imagination" and they changed the Navy fighter pilot paradigm.

By January 12, 1973 when the last air-air MiG kill occurred (by TOPGUN graduate Vic Koveleski, VF-161, CAG 5, USS Midway) Navy fighter pilot kill ratio had risen to 15 to 1. Air Force, (had not yet established any higher level training) ratios remained throughout the war at 2 to 1. These statistics helped to create a virtual revolution in air combat training.  They had proven that what had been originally thought to be battlefield Darwinism can be a function of learning.
It is possible to train to the "ace" level without bloodshed

In 1975, the Air Force initiated "Exercise Red Flag," a graduate level air-air course.

Happy 40th

Fly Navy, The BEST Always Have

[Article sources: Friends and personal experience 1) while at the Naval Missile Center (NMC) Point Mugu (1970-1971) providing adversary support for Air Test and Evaluation Squadron Four (VX-4); 2) while flying with VA-56 off USS Midway in the Gulf of Tonkin, 1972-73 (MiG killers of VF-161 resided in Ready Room next to VA-56): and 3) Rober K. Wilcox's Scream of Eagles]

TOPGUN today – from Wikipedia:

On 11 July 1996, The Navy Strike and Air Warfare Center (NSAWC) consolidated three commands into a single command structure under a flag officer  to enhance aviation training effectiveness. The Naval Strike Warfare Center (STRIKE "U") based at NAS Fallon since 1984, was joined with the Navy Fighter Weapons School (TOPGUN) and the Carrier Airborne Early Warning Weapons School (TOPDOME) which both moved from NAS Miramar as a result of a Base Realignment and Closure (BRAC) decision in 1993. The Seahawk Weapon School was added in 1998 to provide tactical training for navy helicopters.

New York Times, 16 February, 2009— 

The homeland security secretary, Janet Napolitano, is re-evaluating the largest federal program for testing the country's ability to respond to terrorist attacks, one of several Bush administration initiatives she has ordered to come under review.

PWH Chapter 1 (Part 1 of 2) The Constant Gardner http://www.projectwhitehorse.com/pdfs/B[1].%20PWH_Chapter1(1of2).pdf

(From Page 11) ... Studies clearly indicate that highly trained (i.e., prepared) personnel exposed to a sudden crisis whose nature falls outside the scope of prior preparation commit grave errors of judgment and procedure. Current training and drills are focused on availability of resources, both human and physical, necessary for the management of, or the consequences of, a specific disaster type. These mostly pre-scripted drills fail to address crisis development, eliminate the Observation and Orientation stages of the Observe Orient Decide Act (OODA) Loop by pre-determining their characteristics, eliminate uncertainty, and therefore, bypass the essential element of critical command thinking.

Result: Level of readiness defined as instantaneous ability to respond to a suddenly arising major crisis based on locally available, un-prepositioned and un-mobilized countermeasure resources is either unchanged or decreased due to current flaws built into current philosophy of drills.

In this high-end crisis, where orientation to the problem is so essential, where potential is very high for decisions that could save or cause to be lost the most number of lives – decision makers have NOT been exposed to and are not aware of ingrained decision making biases, nor trained, or exercised in complex decision making in chaotic, uncertain environments.

The transnational and "total warfare" aspect of 21st Century conflict and the always possibility of "Category 5" natural disasters dictates a need for changes in how we educate and train, including exercise design and evaluation processes. The chaotic intent of terrorism and the complexity of the required multilevel, multi-agency response dictate that learning opportunities in complex environments must be provided.

RE-EVALUATION OF NATIONAL SECURITY ORDERED
By Eric Schmitt
16 February, 2009 The New York Times

In part:

WASHINGTON — The homeland security secretary, Janet Napolitano, is re-evaluating the largest federal program for testing the country's ability to respond to terrorist attacks, one of several Bush administration initiatives she has ordered to come under review.

As governor of Arizona, Ms. Napolitano sent a searing two-page letter to her predecessor as secretary, Michael Chertoff, complaining that a $25 million national exercise in October 2007, which she and 23,000 other federal, state and local emergency workers participated in, was too expensive, too long in planning and "too removed from a real-world scenario."

Now, in her first weeks as head of the Homeland Security Department, Ms. Napolitano has ordered a review of that program and several others, including cybersecurity, a strategy for protecting the border with Canada, and the vulnerability of power plants and other critical infrastructure.
The directives implicitly raise questions about how well the Bush administration prepared the nation's defenses against a terrorist attack. But they also reflect what homeland security analysts say is Ms. Napolitano's desire to apply her practical experiences as a border-state governor to several important homeland security policies.
Her pointed comments on the emergency preparedness exercise, which she repeated last month at her Senate confirmation hearing, offer a glimpse into how Ms. Napolitano may retool one the centerpieces of the Bush administration's domestic security architecture.

"If we're going to be doing these kinds of things, and they are valuable, the underlying philosophy is a good one, but they need to be in my view streamlined," Ms. Napolitano told the Senate Committee on Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs last month.

Ms. Napolitano's frustration with the system in place for rehearsing responses to natural disasters and terrorist attacks has struck a chord among state and local emergency managers, many of whom have long complained that the Homeland Security Department and its crisis-response component, the Federal Emergency Management Agency, have failed to consult fully with local communities in disaster planning.

… It will not take long to put Ms. Napolitano's new thinking to the test. FEMA is completing plans for the next major exercise, scheduled for late July.

…The exercise this year, for the first time, focuses on preventing a potential attack, not just responding to a crisis, federal officials say.

Emergency planners say they have already taken Ms. Napolitano's criticisms to heart, improving federal coordination with state and local partners in planning the disaster drill this summer, increasing the frequency of national exercises to every year from every two, cutting costs to encourage wider participation and providing feedback within 90 days to participants on what went well and what did not.
"Most of them were already on the radar scope in one way, shape or form," said Steve Saunders, a retired Army National Guard major general who is an assistant FEMA administrator overseeing the national exercise division, "but her letter helped crystallize, I think, some of the things we needed to do."

Mr. Saunders said he expected some changes as a result of the review ordered by Ms. Napolitano, but he cautioned in an interview, "don't mess around" significantly with this year's exercise or drills on the drawing board for 2010 and 2011 that will simulate an improvised nuclear bomb attack and a catastrophic earthquake.

Mr. Saunders said states and localities had already started budgeting for those exercises. "If we start shifting near-term activities," he said, "it becomes fairly problematic."

… States and cities routinely conduct emergency preparedness drills. Specialists in domestic security agree that it is also essential to hold large-scale national emergency exercises to test how federal, state and local officials and emergency personnel work together to prevent or deal with terrorist attacks.
Congress directed the government in 1998 to carry out a national exercise program, formerly called Topoff for the "top officials" who participate. There have been four major exercises since then, simulating chemical, biological and nuclear attacks. The exercises now also include foreign partners, like Britain and Canada.

Specialists in domestic security say Ms. Napolitano offers a new perspective to the program.
"She brings to the table real-world experience as a governor, as a person responsible for implementing these programs where the rubber hits the road," said David Heyman, director of the domestic security program at the Center for Strategic and International Studies.

Ms. Napolitano's unhappiness with the program stems from her participation in the five-day October 2007 exercise, which simulated a dirty-bomb attack against Phoenix; Portland, Ore.; and Guam. It was planned to test how well federal, state and local officials responded to such a cataclysm.
Within days after the exercise wrapped up, Ms. Napolitano complained to Mr. Chertoff that federal officials never contacted top Arizona emergency officials during the drill, did not involve her as much as she said she would have been during a real disaster, and gave participants too much advance information about the drill.

"When you have months to prepare for an exercise and you know the exact scenario being contemplated," Ms. Napolitano said, "a large part of the exercise's value is lost."

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/02/17/us/politics/17terror.html?pagewante d=1&_r=1

After more than 37 years of uniform service to the U.S. army and our nation, I will spend the second half of my life committed to a new mission: Creating a "Culture of Preparedness'' in America. Every effort I take, whether it is this new Web site, public speaking/lectures, fund-raisers, or the books I have written or will write, will be committed to this cause.

Please Visit General Honore's Website: http://www.generalhonore.com/

Ed @PWH

The development and exploration of critical "operational threads" for future editions is still necessary. It would appear to me that education for wearing a uniform in Detroit … or in Baghdad requires a global focus as well as local. Lessons in one are needed in the other.
Here are some issues under consideration: