Surface Navy Association - Day One News

There are a couple of news items that have come from Day 1 of the Surface Navy Association conference worth mentioning. The first is fantastic news from the Navy Times.

The surface Navy’s optimal manning experiment is over, the Navy’s No. 2 officer declared in a speech before the Surface Navy Association’s national symposium on Tuesday.

“We’re going to effectively migrate, reconstitute in a way, the surface fleet afloat,” Vice Chief of Naval Operations Adm. Jonathan Greenert told the audience of about 200 contractors, sailors and officers. “We’ve just taken too much risk in things like optimal manning and others and that’s pretty well documented.”

...

“We’ve got to sustain the fleet. We’ve had a decade of higher op tempo than we anticipated and we planned for and that has taken its toll. We have got to get to the expected service life of our units.”

Now we know what it meant when Gates said he was shifting 6000 billets back to sea and maintenance duty. This is the first major policy change we have seen publicly as a result from the Balisle Report. Is there anyone, anywhere, who would suggest this is a bad thing? There is certainly a cost involved, but given the cost of maintenance to ships that fall into disrepair without proper crew sizes for upkeep, I'm thinking the overall costs become a wash in the long run.

The second news item is the announcement by Rear Admiral Pandolfe regarding a replacement for NLOS. As mentioned back during LCS selection, the Navy has been evaluating a replacement for NLOS for several months, and has finally found one. This was first reported by Sam LaGrone of Janes, but DoD Buzz also has an article.

The U.S. Navy is moving towards selecting Raytheon’s Griffin missile as the replacement for the cancelled Non-Line of Sight missile on its Littoral Combat Ships, according to the director of the service’s surface warfare division.

After evaluating its options for replacing one of the key parts of the LCS’ surface warfare mission systems for six months, the surface warfare division settled on the Griffin due to the fact that it can hit targets at acceptable ranges for less money than the NLOS system, said Rear Adm. Frank Pandolfe today during a speech at a Surface Navy Association convention in Arlington, Va.

The Griffin — with its launchers pictured above mounted on a Humvee — will also be cheaper to install on the LCS than the larger NLOS system, according to Pandolfe.

The Griffin missile uses parts of the Javelin anti-tank and AIM-9X Sidewinder air-to-air missiles, and was originally designed as a replacement for the Hellfire for Reaper UAVs. The Griffin has a 13 pound warhead and semi-active laser seeker. As an missile system evolved from existing weapon systems, it probably will cost a lot less. Too bad it will need to be integrated into two combat systems, but that's part of the gig at this point.

Thoughts on SNA

Sam LaGrone mentioned that the "SNA staff that was upset" that he posted to Twitter the news of the Griffin revealed by Rear Admiral Pandolfe at SNA. I think that is ironic in context. According to the Surface Navy Association, the purpose of the SNA is:

• To promote recognition of the role of the Navy and Surface Forces in United States' security.
• To recognize and publicize professional excellence in Surface Naval Forces.
• To deal with the challenges in the role of Naval Forces in national security.
• To promote liaison and communication among military, academic and business communities.
• To foster and preserve the heritage of the Surface Naval Forces in the United States Navy.
• To provide forums on professional matters affecting Surface Naval Forces and the United States Navy.

You mean to tell me that on the same day ADM Mullen is noting the difficulty of communicating with the American people, warning of the dangers of the military-civilian divide, the SNA staff is complaining because a reporter is discussing news about the Navy, and surface warfare related topics specifically, to a broad external audience through Twitter? Give the SNA website a look tonight and you will find exactly zero - nothing - regarding the days events of the conference.

Well done SNA, you effectively perpetuate the perception of the military-industrial complex by insuring that the communication network SNA is focused on is military and industrial, and has no bandwidth with the American people. Perhaps a casual review of the first paragraph here might suggest more thought towards why communications are warranted.

You know how many news items promoted the Navy as a result of the SNA conference today? According to Google - there were two articles written (both linked above) and two press releases by companies there (here and here). I don't know what the communications strategy is for communicating the priorities of the Surface fleet are, but the board of directors might as well be signaling the American people with flags in their promotion of Navy surface forces.

You know what we learned today? That VADM Derwood C. Curtis, USN, FLTCM (AW/NAC) Mike Stevens, USN, and MCPOCG Michael P. Leavitt, USCG gave keynote addresses and apparently no one found what they said very interesting, because no one who was in the room mentioned their speech even in passing online. Put another way, in the digital communication age, absent a late entry by a reporter or a random review of the SNA website at some later date to see a video, the only way the content of what those folks says reaches a broader audience is through word of mouth.

Since the SNA Conference appears to be run by folks more comfortable in the telegraph era of communications, perhaps the Navy can make use of their available tools to get the word out regarding what is said by the Navy at SNA. Just a suggestion. In all honesty, if ADM Mullen thinks the civilian-military divide is a legitimate problem, and I agree with him it is, it takes almost no brainpower to highlight opportunities for communications the DoD fails to take advantage of all the time. I find it interesting how the Navy sends a lot of Flag clout to talk at these high dollar conferences where information is solely disseminated to broader audiences through external press channels, and at the same time the Navy can't figure out why Americans don't understand the Navy?

Probably the same reason three active duty officers post on a blog (here, here, and here) to an average internet audience of 14.3k individual readers on a navy inside baseball issue, but CLIPS doesn't even run the articles. I must be the fool on the issue. Maybe I am missing something. Everyone says SNA is a really big deal. These news items are clearly big news items for discussion. But if SNA is really such a big deal, why does it generate so little buzz?

Maybe I am the fool on the issue, but I don't think so. Later this month I'll be in San Diego at AFCEA/USNI West, and the amount of buzz that got generated from that conference last year was incredible. If a tree falls in a forest and no one is around to hear it, does it make a sound? How many people does that riddle apply to today from SNA? Since virtually every speaker at the conference works for the taxpayer, it is more than a legitimate question.