Happy 242nd Birthday To The United States Navy

Happy 242^nd Birthday to the U.S. Navy.

The U.S. Navy’s website offers a piece on the birthday and the Navy’s history and heritage.  

The theme for the Navy’s 242nd Birthday is “Sea Power to Protect and Promote.” Our commemoration of the Navy’s birthday offers us an opportunity to honor the brave men and women who conduct a wide range of combat, training, humanitarian, rescue, and other missions worldwide, protecting the nation’s interests, promoting its security, and helping to shape our history and culture.

You can read the rest of the piece and watch a video clip via the below link:

http://www.navy.mil/ah_online/navybirthday/index.html

New U.S. Navy Recruitment Video

As an old Navy veteran I got a kick out the new U.S. Navy recruitment video.

You can watch the interesting ad via the below link:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dBHt_gu6ZzQ

Note: Above is a U.S. Navy photo of the USS George Washington CVN 73. The aircraft carrier appears in the video.

Command Authority: Tom Clancy's Last Thriller

Veteran journalist and author Joseph C. Goulden offers a good review of Tom Clancy's Command Authority in the Washington Times.

A feeling of sad finality gripped me as I read the last of the 739 pages of Tom Clancy's 18th and final thriller. Once again, the acrid scent of cordite wafted through my imagination during the climactic gunbattle as Clancy’s characters from the world of intelligence achieved yet another victory over the forces of evil.

Clancy, who died on Oct. 1 at 66, had boosters as disparate as President Ronald Reagan, who pronounced “The Hunt for Red October,” his first of 18 books, “the perfect yarn” and “non-put-downable.” National Public Radio's Alan Cheuse called him “Faulkner in a flak suit.”

Let’s be blunt about it. Clancy was an acquired taste — beloved by patriots who support a strong military and an effective intelligence community; mocked by leftist woo-woos who argue that a turned-cheek is the best defense against an adversary.

Clancy was an unabashed hard-liner. In his first novels, his heroes fought the USSR and its KGB. When the Iron Curtain tumbled, burying world communism under a heap of rubble, he made a seamless segue into a war against terrorism. I was one of the millions of fans who put him on the best-seller list for 17 straight books.

In “Command Authority,” Clancy has at it again with his original foes, correctly equating the current regime in Moscow as merely a relabeled version of what Reagan once termed “the evil empire.” The Russian president, one Valeri Volodin (somewhat rhymes with “Putin,” eh?) is threatening the military annexation of  Estonia, Ukraine and other former states of the USSR. 

Volodin's plan includes enhanced powers for the FSB, successor to the KGB as a vehicle to subvert his targets from within. He accuses the United States and other Western powers of instigating anti-Russian provocations in Estonia.

You can read the rest of the review via the below link:

http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2014/jan/17/book-review-tom-clancys-final-thriller/

Note: In 1984 my wife and I visited Jamaica, our favorite vacation island. I brought along several thrillers to read, including Tom Clancy's The Hunt for Red October.

I had not heard of Clancy at this point, but being a Defense Department civilian employee, as well as a Navy veteran who spent two years on an aircraft carrier during the Vietnam War and another two years on a Navy tugboat at the nuclear submarine base at Holy Loch, Scotland, I was drawn to the novel by the subject matter.

Reading the book on the beach and by the pool, I was surprised at how accurate the details were (he even got the nickname right of a phone dropped into the sea by surface craft to communicate with submarines), and I was even more surprised at his detailing what I believed at the time was classified information. (I later discovered that I was wrong - the information had been declassified).

I became a Clancy fan and I've enjoyed reading all of his subsequent thrillers and his nonfiction books.

Tom Clancy died far too young at 66 and he shall be missed.

Showdown At The North Pole: How The United States Can Win The Arctic War

I've long been interested in submarines, even before I served two years on a U.S. Navy tugboat that was attached to Submarine Squadron 14 at the nuclear submarine base at Holy Loch, Scotland in the mid-1970s.

I have vivid memories of our rendezvous at sea with the big "boomer" nuclear missile submarines, and the smaller, faster and lethal "attack" submarines. Even though I previously served two years on an aircraft carrier during the Vietnam War, I found the submarines to be quite impressive.

So it was with some interest that I read a piece at Wired.com on how the United States would win an Arctic War if such a war were to happen.

Proponents of global climate change see a day when there will be ice-free Arctic summers, which, as David Axe notes, will allow shipping and oil and natural-gas extraction. Some fear the United States is not prepared to "secure our slice of the Arctic pie."

"The thing is, it’s not icebreakers and patches of wind-blasted tarmac that would really matter in some future North Pole showdown," Axe wrote. "In the Arctic, as in any sea battle, American nuclear attack submarines — quiet, versatile and lethal — would make all the difference. U.S. subs have been sneaking around under the Arctic ice and occasionally surfacing, for decades. Today, they even carry geologists and other scientists in order to help map Arctic mineral deposits."

“In addition to being more heavily armed than most foreign boats, U.S. submarines generally have superior quieting and combat systems, better-trained crewmen, and much more rigorous maintenance standards,” Bob Work wrote in 2008, before becoming Navy undersecretary. “As a result, the U.S. submarine force has generally been confident that it could defeat any potential undersea opponent, even if significantly outnumbered.”

You can read the piece via the below link:

http://www.wired.com/dangerroom/2011/01/how-the-u-s-wins-the-coming-arctic-war/