Hoisting the flag

By lex, on September 2nd, 2007

Something there is among certain elements of the left that gets weak kneed at the notion of Bu$hitler’s legions of myrmidons finally coming to their senses and Flipping On The Man. It serves to explain how the New Republic fell for the Scott Thomas Beauchamp diaries, and perhaps explains the tone of breathless, schoolyard tattletaling in this dKos diary entry. Whoever the diarist’s correspondent is, s/he clearly knows a bit of the inside lingo but still manages to get details glaringly wrong in a way that coincidentally serves to reinforce the Kossacks’ prejudices, garnering over a thousand comments when I first looked in this morning.

It’s not that there’s any one thing wrong in the post, which purports to tell the inside story of an upcoming US naval attack on Iran, but rather the accumulation of many, many little things that aren’t quite right:

She started in the Marines and after 8 years her term was up. She had served on a smaller Marine carrier, and found out through a friend knew there was an opening for a junior grade LSO in a training position on a supercarrier. She used the reference and the information and applied for a transfer to the United States Navy. Since she had experience landing F-18Cs and Cobra Gunships, and an unblemished combat record, she was ratcheted into the job, successfully changing from the Marines to the Navy. Her role is still aligned with the Marines since she generally is assigned to liason with the Marine units deploying off her carrier group.

A smaller “Marine” carrier would be a Navy LHA or LHD, embarking a Marine Air Combat Element, or ACE. They carry attack helicopters, transport helicopters and a small number of Harrier jump jets. They don’t (can’t) land F-18s.

It’s not impossible for an aviator to have an unblemished combat record flying Marine helicopters from amphibs and then have flown the FA-18 – a test pilot might do so – but it’s very, very rare. You bloom where you’re planted, and these days, with the Navy getting smaller and the Marine Corps under burden, transferring from the Corps to carrier aviation is well nigh unheard of.

As for hearing from a friend that a “junior grade” LSO position was available, that’s hooey. That’s not how it’s done, we don’t advertise for LSO’s, we grow them up from within the squadrons embarked aboard the carriers. Nor, for that matter, do we call them “supercarriers” any more, since they’re all supercarriers. The last ship not in the supercarrier weight class was the USS Midway, which weighed in at a bit less than 60,000 tons but was decommissioned 15 years ago.

“I know this will sound crazy coming from a Naval officer”, she said. “But we’re all just waiting for this administration to end. Things that happen at the senior officer level seem more and more to happen outside of the purview of XOs and other officers who typically have a say-so in daily combat and flight operations. Today, orders just come down from the mountaintop and there’s no questioning. In fact, there is no discussing it. I have seen more than one senior commander disappear and then three weeks later we find out that he has been replaced. That’s really weird. It’s also really weird because everyone who has disappeared has questioned whether or not we should be staging a massive attack on Iran.”

More hooey. The “say-so” of “daily” combat operations under the purview of XO’s is how to execute the mission, not whether or not it ought to be done, and anyway, XO’s do “heads, beds and haircuts” not national policy. And since the correspondent talks of doing “traps” and “FARP” training later in the post – events that are at the very beginning of the training cycle, and a year or more before the ship and air wing deploy – she’s nowhere near being in the fight in any case, with two ships on the line right now and at least one between her ship and deployment. Something doesn’t add up.

As for all of those “disappearing” senior officers, there are a couple of well-trodden paths to professional ignominy – DUIs and “zipper failures” are among the most common – but no one gets vanished for “questioning whether or not” we ought to attack Iran, or any other country for that matter and if they had, you can be sure we’d all have heard about it by now. It’s also passing strange to hear a former Marine complain that orders come down from the “mountain top”, as though at some time in the cherished past they use to bubble up from the mess decks. But even in such a bizarrely constructed paragraph, it’s hard to plausibly and consistently argue on the one hand that orders aren’t being questioned and that people are being relieved for doing so.

“We’re not stupid. Most of the members of the fleet read well enough to know what is going on world-wise. We also realize that anyone who has any doubts is in danger of having a long military career yanked out from under them. Keep in mind that most of the people I serve with are happy to be a part of the global war on terror. It’s just that the touch points are what we see since we are the ones out here who are supposedly implementing this grand strategy. But when you liason (sic) with administration officials who don’t know that Iranians don’t speak Arabic and have no idea what Iranians live like, then you start having second thoughts about whether these Administration officials are even competent.”

I have to wonder what administration official a lieutenant would be performing “liason” with, or who it is among those officials doesn’t know that Iranians speak Farsi or how the subject would have even come up. While this is exactly the kind of paragraph that people personally invested in the narrative of the administration as a bunch of wooden headed bumblers would drink down like fine wine, it rings as false as a football bat on a tin cymbal to anyone who understands the way the Navy – and junior officers within the Navy – actually work.

JO��s avoid talking to their embarked flag officer if ever they can manage to, and even a shipboard flag wouldn’t speak directly to political types on policy matters, reporting instead to a 3-star ashore, who reports to the 4-star joint force commander who reports to a theater combatant commander – Admiral Fallon, in this case. The COCOM would be the first guy to routinely coordinate with the political arms of government and would be in any event be rather unlikely to share with a shipboard lieutenant his observation that administration officials didn’t know that Iranians spoke Farsi even in the unlikely event that the opportunity presented itself.

More jangling language here:

“But if you asked any of the flight officers whether they have a clear idea of what the goal of this strike is, your answer would sound like something out of a think tank policy paper. But it’s not like Kosovo or when we relieved the tsunami victims. There everyone could tell you in a sentence what we were here doing.”

The dKos diarist is quoting here, so I think it’s safe to point out that “flight officer” has a specific and restrictive meaning in naval aviation, referring to the weapons systems operators, navigators and mission specialists who, along with a Navy pilot, execute the aircraft mission in a multi-seat aircraft. The term “flight officer” itself is an awkward formulation – “naval flight officer” or NFO is the common term – and would never in any case be used in this way. Much more likely would be the more generic term “aviators” or even “aircrew.” We just don’t talk about ourselves that way, especially pilots – and all LSO’s are pilots.

Next up:

Last night in the galley, an ensign asked what right do we have to tell a sovereign nation that they can’t build a nuke. I mean the table got EF Hutton quiet. Not so much because the man was asking a question that was off culture. But that he was asking a good question. In fact, the discussion actually followed afterwards topside where someone in our group had to smoke a cigarette. The discussion was intelligent but also in lowered voices. It’s like we aren’t allowed to ask the questions that we always ask before combat. It’s almost as if the average seaman or soldier is doing all the policy work.”

The galley is where food is cooked for enlisted men, and an air wing ensign would have no business being there. There are no tables in the galley. Officers dine in a wardroom. Very few aviators smoke these days, and you certainly don’t go “topside” to do so – smoking galleries are on sponsons that give off the hangar bay. The questions we always ask before combat are all related to “how do I get in and do my job without getting bagged,” not whether or not it’s a job worth doing.

It’s almost as if the average seaman is a little out of his or her swim lane talking about things s/he has only heard about and in every case, getting it almost right. But missing.

Is there a plan to attack Iran? Absolutely there is: We plan for everything, always have. Before World War II we planned with equal intensity to fight Britain and Canada on the one hand, and Japan on the other. As you start heading towards a place that has an existing plan, you dust that puppy off, check the intel for updated threats and cross-check the other planner’s math. Having thus paid obeisance to the household gods of war planning, the entire package is laid aside until the next time you go by. Makes the time pass faster.

But every little bit of this story reads like BS to me, with the only real surprise being that there are so very many eager rubes in the world, waiting to be taken in by it.

So, as I said: I’m hoisting the flag.

04-21-16 – Me being a non-nautical Army type, I had to ask the Lexicans exactly what these signal flags Lex hoisted signify. 

The first one is “Bravo” – “B” in the phonetic alphabet. The second one is “Sierra” – “S”. 

IOW B.S. 😉 Incidentally, follow the link Lex gave to the Daily Kos and you will learn that they took that post down. I wonder if this post got back to them. 

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