Marinette, LCS-1 Shipyard, Announces Buildup:

Black Queen to Rook Four...

And the Littoral Combat Ship chessgame moves along, with Marinette Marine's new owner, Fincantieri Cantieri Navali Italiani S.p.A will spend some $40 million dollars to improve Bay Shipbuilding and Marinette Marine shipyards in 2009 and 2010.

If the LCS contract goes through, Fincantieri will spend some $100 million dollars over five years.

I still think Marinette should be building small conventional subs and UUVs. But that's just me.

I'm one of those sentimental types, see.

Ray Mabus Gives Roxana Tiron An Interview:

I've had my issues with Roxana Tiron. When she regurgitates industry screed, she drives me nuts (read this and this for examples). But I have no problem with good, clean "kick-the-can-down-the-road" reportage. And that's what this Q&A with Ray Maybus is. Here's a snippet:

I think we can get there if we are very diligent about cost and if we make sure that the design is mature when we build the ship; that the technology is ready when we start building the ship; that the perfect is not the enemy of the good, so if technology changes, instead of changing in the middle you put the technology on a block of ships...

Good, solid stuff. Read it all! Keep at it, Roxana!

(I want to know when Mabus will sit down with some of the good meat n' potatoes reporters at Navy Times or the groovy Inside Defense folks. Don't they deserve an interview or two?)

The U.S. Navy: America's Unrecognized Public Health Shield:

Not too many Navy people know their organization serves on the front line of America's disease defenses. Even fewer officers know--or even care--that the Navy occasionally beats the Centers For Disease Control and Prevention at disease detection, discovering, for example, the first domestic case of H1N1 Influenza.

The Navy's three angry associations of ship-drivers, aviators and bubbleheads don't give a flip that the Navy has long been a global public health force for good.

And that's a bad, bad thing. Because the Navy's under-appreciated, under-resourced battalion of dedicated public health researchers are always struggling to find resources...or even friends--in their own organization! For this old Public Health hand, it's deeply, deeply distressing to watch. So I cheer whenever I see somebody out there trying to raise the Navy's unhealthily stealthy Public Health profile:

The Navy played a key role last spring in the discovery of the H1N1 influenza's presence in the United States, according to a senior Navy medical officer.

In April, technicians at the San Diego-based Naval Health Research Center encountered a puzzling influenza specimen provided by a 10-year-old military family member, said Navy Capt. Tanis Batsel Stewart, director of emergency preparedness and contingency support at the Navy Bureau of Medicine and Surgery...

...The Navy has for years conducted influenza and other infectious-disease surveillance programs in conjunction with the other U.S. military services in partnership with foreign nations and public health organizations, Batsel Stewart said.

The U.S. military's infectious disease research capability "is the largest in the world," she said, noting the U.S. maintains labs in Egypt, Indonesia, Kenya, Peru and Thailand that fall under the auspices of the Department of Defense Global Emerging Infections Surveillance and Response System.

More than 100 countries, "from Afghanistan to Zimbabwe," participate in the surveillance program, Batsel Stewart said.

A presidential directive established the response system, which falls under the Armed Forces Health Surveillance Center, in June 1996.

Maybe that's one of the reasons the "Global Force For Good" has some trouble resonating--because much of the Navy isn't aware of just what the heck it's doing.

Coffee At Sea: Canada Arms Up!

With the United States Navy, under the solid guidance of CNO Admiral Roughead, shedding fru-fru, gold-plated, 5th-Generation stealth coffee, other regional competitors are stepping up, ordering coffee that might, in a conflict, out-awaken and over-stimulate our poor U.S. sailors who are being forced to ingest the tepid, COIN-inspired generic coffee now deployed aboard U.S. vessels.

Canada has decided their Navy will run on Tim Hortons coffee:

The Canadian Forces has issued a tender looking for a company to supply its beloved Tim Hortons coffee to navy customers in the Halifax Regional Municipality.

"There shall be no acceptable substitute," according to the tender issued. "Tim Hortons has been determined by MARLANT" — the navy's Maritime Forces Atlantic command — "as the product of choice based on expressed customer taste and preferences for boosting morale in Afghanistan, Sudan and Sierra Leone."

Sailors also want it on their ships, the tender documents state.

Jeri Grychowski, a spokeswoman for Canada's Atlantic fleet, said the tender is for a three-year period. The navy's current supply agreement expires at the end of the month.

Grychowski said the navy has spent $405,000 on Tim Hortons coffee over the last three years.

And the Canadians love this coffee so much they spend something like 4-5 million dollars a year to deploy a small Tim Hortons store in Kandahar. Crazy.

I just wonder how all that Tim Hortons brewed out there for military service, is, as per company policy, actually served within twenty minutes of brewing!

Israel Wants To MEKO-up! ASAP?:

No surprise that, after turning down the LCS 1, Israel would move to add a few MEKO Corvettes to her Naval inventory at some point in the future. But that future may come a lot faster than expected. From UPI comes this little nugget:

...the Defense Ministry decided to go for the option that would bolster naval strength in the shortest time possible.

This raised the possibility of Germany providing the two corvettes now off Lebanon, sailing them directly to Haifa for handing over to the Israeli navy...

Fascinating. Certainly a rumor, but...a "hot transfer" of unexpected naval forces into a tense region is something we're going to see far more often. It makes the stodgy, slow-moving business of predicting regional naval force levels a heck of a lot trickier.

If true, and if rapid naval force transfers become a regular practice, such moves (if the deals are done and the vessels are transferred in a matter of weeks) will certainly add a measure of instability to tense maritime regions throughout the globe.

Port Chicago Gets Honored, Becomes National Park. Finally!

I've agitated for this for a long time. And, today, it happened. Suisun Bay's Port Chicago Naval Magazine Memorial, the Bay Area site of the worst homeland disaster of World War II--the July 17, 1944 explosion that killed 320 people--is, as per legislation signed today, to become a unit of the National Park System.

The subsequent labor unrest (or, "mutiny") by the largely black ammunition handlers helped begin the Navy's push to desegregate.

Bravo. This is a win for everybody.

Korea Merchantman Disables Japan Destroyer In Night Action:

This has gotta hurt. The mid-sized Japanese Helicopter carrier/Destroyer Kurama had a very bad night--slamming into a Korean merchant ship one day after enjoying an enormous honor:

It had been on its way to its home port of on the island of Kyushu after participating in a naval review on Sunday off Yokosuka, southwest of Tokyo, where it was boarded by the deputy prime minister, Naoto Kan.

Second night collision in two years...I guess the old Japanese Navy's skills at night-fighting have, um, decayed? A bit?

But hey! Don't worry! Seapower tells me that Japan's newer helicopter carrier/destroyers are set to grow a bit...becoming more a full-service carrier than ever...

Seapower Magazine Needs Fact-Checkers And Guts:

So, while I was reading Seapower Magazine's latest--an issue full of stories featuring Congressman Gene Talyor who tells readers--at least twice--that the LCS is waaay overpriced.

But then I noticed a little tiny factoid in Seapower Assistant Editor John C. Marcario's piece on Coast Guard procurement:

"The cost for each NSC has increased $60 million to $90 million above the original estimated average cost of $500 million."

Really? Cost Growth of only $60 to $90 million? That's baloney! In May, Navy Times reported the Bertholf was estimated to cost about $700 million. And strangely enough, I don't hear Gene Taylor bitching about that program--even though the NCS Cutters offer far less capacity than either LCS.

Where the $500 million "original estimated average cost" figure come from? Was it completely fabricated? Where did Seapower find this information? Why isn't Seapower showing it's work here? The figure is baloney.

Am I the only person who remembers back to 2006, when cost over-runs--at that time the average per-hull price had grown to an estimated "about $300 million"--forced the procurement of the NSC Cutters be reduced from 12 hulls to eight? Hello? Remember that?

The NSC Cutter cost-bloat is comparable to the LCS. Don't let anybody else tell you otherwise.

And Gene Taylor should know better. And you Seapower guys should have asked him about this huge money-waster that's being built in HIS DISTRICT!!! Shame on ya'll.

Whimpy half-baked (and half-honest) journalism is not the way to a better Navy. I know it's hard, but hold 'em accountable for once, will ya?