What is the major malfunction of our senior Navy leadership?
Truly, I have lost confidence in the leadership abilities of our senior officers.
Our crews aren't trained to handle their ships at sea.
Our crews can't handle damage control in port.
Our shipbuilding industry can't build ships.
Our maintenance can't put ships back into the fight.
With all those problems, I have no idea if our Navy is capable of defending control of the seas:
Is the U.S. Navy ready for war? A new report prepared by Marine Lt. Gen. Robert Schmidle and Rear Adm. Mark Montgomery, both retired, for members of Congress paints a portrait of the Navy as an institution adrift. The report, reviewed exclusively by the Journal, concludes that the surface Navy is not focused on preparing for war and is weathering a crisis in leadership and culture.
But thank God our Navy leadership finally realizes there is a problem in the Navy, and is acting:
The US Navy said it was expanding it's eight-week boot camp program to include two more weeks of classes focusing on suicide prevention, sexual assault, hazing and racism.
The change, the first major overhaul in nearly 20 years, comes as the Navy grapples with major shipboard issues over the years that include failures to address sexual assaults, fires and deadly collisions and the rise of extremism within the ranks.
Wait. What?
What extremism in the ranks? It surely exists. Limit it. Punish it when acted on. Maintaining discipline and unit cohesion requires that. But don't make that the mission rather than one of many things needed to carry out the mission--fighting for sea control. The Union military that ended slavery in America had some extremists on racial issues in it, no? Fighting is the military's job. It is not a woke finishing school. That's what we have colleges for.
But I digress.
The Navy is crippling morale and effectiveness by making a small problem the crisis of the day to fix. I'm not saying those problems shouldn't be addressed. But it should not be the top priority while actual operational combat effectiveness has cratered even as China's naval power rises:
There is no sign that the armed services, or the defense establishment more broadly, are intellectually prepared for a Sino–American clash.
A military organization’s first peacetime task is preparing for combat. Americans could be forgiven for forgetting this fact, given the state of our contemporary political debate, some of which has drawn the military into the political fray. ...
The U.S. military today is focused on budget battles, procurement issues, social engineering, and the permanent quest of large central military staffs to increase their hold on everything from strategy to force architecture. As important as these are, they distract from warfighting. The understanding that the U.S. is in an interwar period does not exist. The notion that the military’s first task is to defeat our increasingly powerful adversaries is a relic from the unexamined past. If it animated the U.S. high command, there would be unrelenting emphasis on selecting officers more like Grant than McClellan for promotion at all ranks.
What we should do but won't is revamp selection and training for our senior officers to reduce the climate of stupidity that cripples American warfighting abilities.
Somehow our flag officers are convinced that there are many substitutes for victory. But the truth is that woke lips sink ships.
But no worries. A Navy with fewer suicides, sexual assaults, hazing, extremism (all extremism?), and racism (all racism?) will hold its head high as its woke sailors burn and drown in distant oceans as enemies crush them in battle.
That will count for something, right?
UPDATE: Fine:
The United States today suffers from a critical deficit in strategic thinking about the most consequential challenge of the current era: the rise of China and the threat it poses to U.S. interests in the western Pacific and beyond. Addressing that deficit is a matter of the utmost importance and urgency.
But without a fleet that can fight, the Navy is putting the cart in front of the horse.
