Tag Archives: responsibilities

Hypocrisy

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Planned Parenthood has it.  On the matter of DACA and President Donald Trump giving Congress six months to fix the thing—including codifying its current structure in law, but do the law, not Executive Order—Planned Parenthood, through its CEO Cecile Richards had this to say:

Here at Planned Parenthood, we firmly believe that every person has the right to live, work, and raise a family freely and without the threat of deportation or separation[.]

Every person but babies, apparently.  Far too often, they’re just inconveniences to be aborted and either thrown away or their body parts peddled to…researchers.  These inconvenient babies are not to be permitted to live, work, and raise a family freely.

Not Current

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It turns out that most of the 7th Fleet ships were not—are not—current on their training.  In my old USAF parlance, that would render them non-OR—not operationally ready, not capable of doing their wartime mission.

As of late June, eight of the 11 cruisers and destroyers in the Seventh Fleet, and their crew members, weren’t certified by the US Navy to conduct “mobility seamanship,” or basic steering of the ship….

“And their crewmembers.”  That means, to me, that not only were the crewmen individually not positionally qualified, they weren’t qualified as the ship’s unified crew—the ships were not qualified.  Not operationally capable.

The Navy also said that seven of those ships had expired training certification in the areas of cruise missile defense and surface warfare, which test a crew’s ability to defend a ship or to conduct attacks.

That’s a cynically euphemistic way of saying those ships—63% of the cruisers and destroyers—were not capable of carrying out their wartime tasks or missions.  This is appalling.

It is unclear what role the lack of proper certification played in the collisions, and Pentagon investigations are under way both into the collisions and into larger questions of naval operations.

What it means is that the crews were not current in their training in these things.  What it means is that the crews were not capable of performing those tasks.  It’s likely that most of the individual crewmen knew their specific tasks (the old heads, anyway, maybe not the new accessions), but the lack of certification—the lack of being Operationally Ready—meant they had not practiced their tasks recently, more importantly, had not practiced in concert with their fellow crewmen in their respective departments or across departments, and most importantly, had not been evaluated by independent examiners on their ability to perform.

The crews were not capable of coordinated action in the stress of a crisis.

And that’s on each ship’s commander, on his Training and Standard/Evaluation (or the Navy’s equivalent independent testing section) Officers, and it’s on the 7th Fleet’s commander and his Fleet Training and Stan/Eval Officers for not enforcing the requirements down to the individual ship level.

It doesn’t end there.  This is a failure of the entire chain of command and adjacent staff chain—the quintessential REMFs, which folks here earn for the staff the MF part of the acronym.  The commander and training and stan/eval officers of the United States Pacific Fleet, which owns the 7th Fleet, should be required to explain, publicly, why they allowed this to happen, and their jobs, their continuance in the Navy, should be at peril of their own failure to perform.  Nor should it stop there.  The Chief of Naval Operations and his staff are responsible, among other things, for the training of Naval personnel and units, and so they are responsible for not pressuring the chain of command.  These Pentagon wonders also should be called to account at peril of their continuance in the Navy.

These ships are not toys for imitation officers to play with; they’re necessary—and expensive—instruments of national security.  Every Pilot in Command, whether Navy, USAF, Army, or Marine, is fully aware of the importance of his jet or helicopter or prop-driven cargo aircraft every time he straps it on to go fly a mission.  There’s no excuse for a ship commander not constantly carrying the same understanding.

It would be interesting, did the White House, certain Congressional committees, SecDef and SecNav have the political courage to publish, for us to be able to see the correspondence exchanges among CNO/staff, USPACFLT commander and staff, the 7th Fleet commander and staff, and the ship commanders and staff regarding the status of training, why the status was that way, what the respective higher ups were doing about those statuses—and whether the correspondence even exists.

Nor is this the fault of President Barack Obama’s (D) sequester agreement with Congress.  Effective training can be carried out with existing resources, given only two things: a threshold resource level sufficient to sail and remain at sea, and commanders, training officers, and stan/eval officers with the imagination, initiative, and level of interest in their duties needed to develop and carry out training programs and exercises.

I’ll close this with a thought and a couple of questions.

A great man once said, In theory, there’s no difference between theory and practice.  In practice, there is.

It’s critical to train like you’ll fight, for you will fight exactly as you’ve trained.  (I have to ask the ship commanders in particular: “Do you expect to throw your human relations training slides at the PLA Navy?”)

Along those lines, a question for the 7th Fleet and USPACFLT commanders: “How do you expect your ships in a flotilla or task force to maneuver under fire without colliding with each other if your ships can’t even maneuver in a peacetime, if busy, strait or harbor approach?”

Interagency Coordination

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Despite being dead for years, hundreds of veterans remained on the Social Security Administration’s (SSA) payroll and received nearly $38 million in benefits, according to a report from the Social Security inspector general.

The SSA says this is the fault of the VA for not supplying accurate information, and it may well be.

Unfortunately, though, this failure isn’t unique to the VA.

The SSA, Medicare, and the IRS badly coordinate routinely, so that it’s often the case that Medicare recipients get overcharged for their Medicare premiums until the IRS and CMS (which runs Medicare) catch up with each other or the recipient appeals (which actually is a pretty prompt process, but it needn’t occur in the first place).

It’s also the case that the IRS and ObamaMart don’t coordinate well, so that Obamacare subsidies either are wrongly withheld or are wrongly paid.

It’s also the case at the State level, most blatantly in our voting records where the State agencies don’t coordinate to remove ineligible or non-existent voters from the rolls, or (more rarely, but at a non-zero rate) eligible voters are absent from the rolls.

Most Cabinets and Agencies fail to share information—sometimes for good reasons, but too often from laziness or incompetence or turf imperatives.

College Pupils and Administrators

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Jean Twenge, a Psychology Professor at San Diego State University, theorizes that the problems the current generation of college pupils has with free speech stems from their having spent “their entire adolescence with smartphones in their hands,” thereby avoiding missing the rough and tumble of face to face interactions with other children, and from their having led an otherwise dismayingly soft life:

iGen’ers grew up in an era of smaller families and protective parenting. They rode in car seats until they were in middle school, bounced on soft-surface playgrounds and rarely walked home from school. For them, unsurprisingly, safety remains a priority, even into early adulthood.

And

Nor are they just concerned about physical safety. The iGen teens I have interviewed also speak of their need for “emotional safety”—which, they say, can be more difficult to protect.  …  This is a distinctively iGen idea: that the world is an inherently dangerous place because every social interaction carries the risk of being hurt. You never know what someone is going to say, and there’s no way to protect yourself from it.

Twenge’s thesis certainly is a major component.  However, she has missed another major component.

School pupil populations always have had a significant fraction of crybabies and snowflakes. What’s also changed is the onset of cowardice by college/university faculty and administrators. When pupils look to college administrators to settle disputes, for instance, those administrators need to have the courage to say, “No, settle your own dispute” instead of taking the easy way and intervening in order to quiet the squawling toddlers.

When pupils cry that it’s administrators’ jobs to create homes and not an intellectually challenging environments, those administrators need to have the courage—here the integrity—to say, “No, go back home; this isn’t the place for you.”

When pupils riot over their manufactured hurt-feelings re speakers of whose speech they style themselves afraid or disapproving, those pupils need to be arrested and brought to trial for their crimes; administrators must encourage police in this rather than build their administrator escape hatches through which to scuttle away from a problem that, in large part, is of their creation.

Related—closely—is a Letter to the Editor by Oriel College, Oxford, albeit of uncertain provenance, addressing a pupil who decided to be offended by a statue to Cecil Rhodes.  Here’s the money quote, via WillowSpring, writing for Ricochet:

Cecil Rhodes’s generous bequest has contributed greatly to the comfort and well being of many generations of Oxford students—a good many of them, dare we say it, better, brighter, and more deserving than you.

This does not necessarily mean we approve of everything Rhodes did in his lifetime – but then we don’t have to. Cecil Rhodes died over a century ago. Autres temps, autres moeurs. If you don’t understand what this means—and it would not remotely surprise us if that were the case—then we really think you should ask yourself the question: “Why am I at Oxford?”

And

And then please explain what it is that makes your attention grabbing campaign to remove a listed statue from an Oxford college more urgent, more deserving than the desire of probably at least 20,000 of those 22,000 students to enjoy their time here unencumbered by the irritation of spoilt, ungrateful little tossers on scholarships they clearly don’t merit using racial politics and cheap guilt-tripping to ruin the life and fabric of our beloved university.

Understand us and understand this clearly: you have everything to learn from us; we have nothing to learn from you.

I might have added words with the effect of further calling out this precious snowflake: “This school exists in large part because of that Evil Man’s evil money, and so you’re able to present yourself with your whine in large part because of that Evil Man’s evil money.  Of course, you knew of Cecil Rhodes and his donation well in advance because Mumsy told you before you applied.  So, indeed: why are you here?”

Republicans and Obamacare

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Too many now are begging for surrender on repeal and replace.

[F]ew congressional Republicans have signaled they are ready to let the health-care market deteriorate while their constituents are still battling higher premiums and fewer insurers to choose from on the individual marketplace.

This means those Republicans are signaling that they don’t have the stomach to repeal Obamacare at all, which would be the ultimate deterioration of it.

This is a betrayal of their constituents along two dimensions: the cynical destruction of their promise to repeal and replace, and their decision to continue inflicting Obamacare with its steadily increasing premiums and fewer insurers to choose from on their constituents.

President Donald Trump’s move to just let Obamacare die on the vine and hope for something better to rise out of the sewage is just as foolish and immoral.  Republicans need to remember what they promised and who sent them to Congress to honor their promise and get back to work on repeal and replace.  On that score, Trump is entirely correct, even if the doable path is stages as originally proposed last winter or via another path proposed by Senators Lindsey Graham (R, SC) and Bill Cassidy (R, LA) whose bill (as an interim step, I say) would “take ACA funding and distribute it to the states through block grants.”

Voters should remember this pending abject failure in the upcoming primary elections.