Tag: Navy

Trump says he agrees with Navy Capt. Crozier’s firing

President Donald Trump defended the firing of Navy Capt. Brett Crozier during a coronavirus task force press conference Saturday afternoon, calling Crozier’s letter asking for help for the sailors of the USS Theodore Roosevelt “not appropriate.” 

Trump said he did not make the decision to fire Crozier, but he disagreed with Crozier’s actions and suggested the captain was at fault for the coronavirus infections on board the aircraft carrier for docking the ship in Vietnam.

“Perhaps you don’t do that in the middle of a pandemic,” Trump said, adding the letter was “not appropriate” and “he shouldn’t be talking that way in a letter.” 

Crozier had circulated a four-page letter later obtained by the San Francisco Chronicle asking for “decisive action” as the coronavirus ravaged his crew. 

“We are not at war, and therefore cannot allow a single Sailor to perish as a result of this pandemic unnecessarily,” Crozier wrote. 

Four days after he pleaded for help, Crozier was fired by the Navy. 

Acting Navy Secretary Thomas Modly said Crozier had “exercised extremely poor judgment” in distributing the letter. 

The Navy said Saturday 44% of the crew of the USS Theodore Roosevelt had been tested for the coronavirus, and 155 service members had tested positive. About 1,548 service members had been moved onshore. None had been hospitalized. 

[USA Today]

Navy captain fired by Trump administration for trying to save his crew

The Navy captain fired by the Trump administration for issuing a stark warning about the risk to his crew from the coronavirus outbreak has been given a standing ovation as he left his post.

Captain Brett Crozier, was relieved of his command of the aircraft carrier USS Theodore Roosevelt on Thursday after his superiors lost confidence in his ability to lead.

As Capt Crozier left on Thursday night he was given a standing ovation and cheered on by members of the 5,000-strong crew, who chanted “Captain Crozier, Captain Crozier” as he departed.

Earlier in the week, Capt Crozier sent a letter to the Navy, obtained by the San Francisco Chronicle, asking for the crew to be isolated completely in order to try and stop the spread of a coronavirus outbreak onboard the ship.

“Removing the majority of personnel from a deployed US nuclear aircraft carrier and isolating them for two weeks may seem like an extraordinary measure…This is a necessary risk,” he wrote.

“Keeping over 4,000 young men and women on board the TR is an unnecessary risk and breaks faith with those Sailors entrusted to our care.”

During his press conference on Thursday evening, acting Navy Secretary Thomas Modly said the decision to sack Capt Crozier was his alone and explained that the captain’s actions forced his hand.

“I have no doubt in my mind that Captain Crozier did what he thought was in the best interest of the safety and well-being of his crew,” he said. “Unfortunately, it did the opposite. It unnecessarily raised the alarm of the families of our sailors and Marines with no plans to address those concerns.”

Mr Modly added his admiration for the captain: “I expect no congratulations for it. Captain Crozier is an incredible man.”

Earlier in the day, at his daily press conference, President Donald Trump was asked by a reporter if he thought the decision was the correct one, replying: “No, I don’t think that at all.”

The decision to relieve the captain of his duties was criticised by the Democratic frontrunner for the presidential nomination, Joe Biden, who released a statement on Thursday evening saying that Capt Crozier should not have been fired.

“Donald Trump’s Acting Navy Secretary shot the messenger – a commanding officer who was faithful to both his national security mission and his duty to care for his sailors, and who rightly focused attention on a broader concern about how to maintain military readiness during this pandemic,” said Mr Biden.

“The Navy sent a chilling message to the rest of the fleet about speaking truth to power. The poor judgment here belongs to the Trump Administration, not a courageous officer trying to protect his sailors.”

According to a tracking project hosted by Johns Hopkins University, upwards of 245,601 people have tested positive for coronavirus in the US. The death toll has reached at least 6,058.

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has recommended a two-week ban on gatherings of more than 50 people as part of the battle to contain the spread of the contagion.

[The Independent]

The US Navy canceled a routine Black Sea patrol after Trump complained that it was hostile to Russia

Christopher Anderson, an aide to former Special Envoy to Ukraine Kurt Volker, testified that the White House canceled a Navy freedom-of-navigation operation in the Black Sea after President Donald Trump complained to then-national security adviser John Bolton about a CNN report that framed the operation as a counter to Russia, Politico reported.

According to Anderson’s testimony, the news report in question came from CNN and characterized the operation as antagonistic toward Russia. Anderson testified that Trump called Bolton at home to complain about the article, and the operation was later canceled at the behest of the White House, Anderson said.

“In January, there was an effort to get a routine freedom-of-navigation operation into the Black Sea,” Anderson testified. “There was a freedom-of-navigation operation for the Navy. So we — we, the US government — notified the Turkish government that there was this intent.”

While Anderson in his testimony placed the report in January, details from his testimony match a story from early December, which had the headline “US makes preparations to sail warship into the Black Sea amid Russia-Ukraine tensions.”

Anderson said the White House asked the Navy to cancel the freedom-of-navigation operation because the report portrayed the operation as a move to counter Russia, which has increased its naval presence there since annexing Crimea in 2014. In November 2018, its forces attacked Ukrainian assets transiting the Kerch Strait, which connects the Black Sea with the Azov Sea. Russia seized three Ukrainian ships and held 24 Ukrainian service members captive.

“We met with Ambassador Bolton and discussed this, and he made it clear that the president had called him to complain about that news report. And that may have just been that he was surprised,” Anderson said.

“We don’t — I can’t speculate as to why, but that, that operation, was canceled, but then we were able to get a second one for later in February. And we had an Arleigh-class destroyer arrive in Odessa on the fifth anniversary of the Crimea invasion.”

The White House and the US Navy’s 6th Fleet, which conducts operations in Europe, did not immediately respond to Insider’s requests for comment. 

[Business Insider]

Navy says it was asked to ‘minimize visibility’ of USS McCain for Trump visit

The Navy has acknowledged receiving a request to “minimize visibility” of the USS John S. McCain during President Trump‘s visit to Japan earlier this week but said the ship remained in its normal configuration.

“A request was made to the U.S. Navy to minimize the visibility of USS John S. McCain, however, all ships remained in their normal configuration during the President’s visit,” Rear Adm. Charlie Brown, chief of Navy information, told CNN in a statement late Friday. “There were also no intentional efforts to explicitly exclude Sailors assigned to USS John S. McCain.”

The spokesman said that the Navy is “fully cooperating with the review of this matter.” Acting Defense Secretary Patrick Shanahan said earlier this week that he had directed his chief of staff to look into the incident because he never authorized any “action around the movement of activity regarding that ship.”

Shanahan maintained Friday that the U.S. military would not “become politicized” amid questions over a White House order to keep the USS John S. McCain “out of sight” during Trump’s visit to Japan.

The ship is currently under repair, with one Navy official telling CNN that the White House request was impractical.

“Our business is to run military operations and not to become politicized,” Shanahan told reporters during a news conference in Singapore on Friday when asked if he shared Trump’s assessment that whoever gave the order was “well-meaning.”

“I’ll wait until I get a full explanation of the facts before I’ll pass judgment on the situation, but our job is to run the military. And I would not have moved the ship. I would not have given that direction,” he added.

Trump said Thursday that he “didn’t know anything” about the request to hide the guided missile destroyer during his visit to the Yokosuka Naval Base on Memorial Day. However, he went on to chastise the late Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.) over his vote that helped torpedo GOP efforts to repeal ObamaCare in 2017, saying he “was not a big fan of John McCain.”

“But I would never do a thing like that,” he added. “Now, somebody did it because they thought I didn’t like him. And they were well-meaning, I will say.”

[The Hill]

Fact-Checkers Bust Trump for False Claims During His Naval Academy Speech

Fact checkers are having a field day with President Donald Trump‘s commencement speech at the U.S. Naval Academy on Friday.

The New York Times pointed out that Trump provided alternative facts at least three times, including taking credit for ending the defense sequester, vowing to provide the Navy with “a couple hundred” more ships and falsely claiming the U.S. Navy had not had a pay raise in 10 years.

On the defense sequester, Trump said this: “We have ended the disastrous defense sequester. No money for the military, those days are over.”

The NYT  fact checkers noted that was wrong.

“Technically, Mr. Trump did not repeal the defense sequester, which refers to limits placed on military spending enacted in 2011,” the Times pointed out.  “Congress effectively erased mandated caps in February, but that doesn’t mean that the military received ‘no money’ at all before then.”

Both the NYT and the Associated Press also picked up on Trump’s dubious math in this statement: “We have now the lowest number of ships that we’ve had since World War I, and very soon you’re going to get to 355 beautiful ships. 355. That’s almost a couple of hundred more ships.”

As AP noted, “No it isn’t. The Navy now has 283 ships,” noting it is actually far less than “a couple hundred” beautiful new ships.

Both outlets and CNN’s Jake Tapper also called out Trump’s erroneous claim that the military has not had a pay raise in ten years.

“Going to have new equipment and well-deserved pay raises,” Trump told the Annapolis graduates. “We just got you a big pay raise. First time in 10 years. We got you a big pay increase. First time in over 10 years. I fought for you. That was the hardest one to get, but you never had a chance of losing.”

Yet, as AP pointed out, the “U.S. military members have gotten a pay raise every year for the past 10 years.”

The final false claim was also particularly vexing to Tapper, because, as he noted, Trump actually had a lot to brag about if he was just willing to keep his facts straight.

Odder still is POTUS here has a legitimate thing to boast about — 2018 brings the biggest military pay raise (2.4%) in 8 years,” Tapper noted,  before observing that if Trump had told the truth “that would be acknowledging Obama gave a bigger pay raise in 2010.”

[Mediaite]

Trump Wants ‘Goddamned Steam,’ Not Digital Catapults on Aircraft Carriers

Navy officials were “blindsided” on Thursday, a spokesman told me, by President Donald Trump’s suggestion that he has convinced the Navy to abandon a long-planned digital launching system in favor of steam on its newest aircraft carrier.

In a wide-ranging interview with Time magazine, Trump described his disgust with the catapult system known as Electro-Magnetic Aircraft Launch System, nicknamed EMALS, aboard the USS Gerald R. Ford. (Time has published only excerpts from the interview, not a full transcript.) The president described wanting to scrap EMALS, a key technological upgrade at the center of the multibillion-dollar carrier project, and return to steam.

I said, “You don’t use steam anymore for catapult?” “No sir.” I said, “Ah, how is it working?” “Sir, not good. Not good. Doesn’t have the power. You know the steam is just brutal. You see that sucker going and steam’s going all over the place, there’s planes thrown in the air.”

It sounded bad to me. Digital. They have digital. What is digital? And it’s very complicated, you have to be Albert Einstein to figure it out. And I said—and now they want to buy more aircraft carriers. I said, “What system are you going to be—” “Sir, we’re staying with digital.” I said, “No you’re not. You going to goddamned steam, the digital costs hundreds of millions of dollars more money and it’s no good.”

What is digital? To answer the president’s question without getting into too many 0s and 1s, “digital” means using a computer to make something happen. You know, the same sort of machine that connects us all to the cyber. Are you still with me, or should we get Einstein over here? (I mean, Einstein has done an amazing job and is being recognized more and more.) EMALS isn’t just computer-based but uses a linear induction motor. That motor—which uses electric currents to activate a magnetic core—propels a carriage down a track to launch an aircraft, rather than using a steam piston drive to pull the aircraft.

Despite Trump’s technological leanings—he’s TV obsessed, he was a semi-early adopter of the web, and he has a preternatural sense for Twitter drama—his question about “digital” calls to mind his apparent cluelessness about cyber security.

It’s not that EMALS has been a smashing success. Cost and schedule overruns have given the Navy carrier project a reputation for being “one of the most spectacular acquisition debacles in recent memory,” as Senator John McCain, the Arizona Republican, put it in 2015. “And that is saying something.” The construction of three Ford-class aircraft carriers has swelled from $27 billion to $36 billion in the last 10 years.

But the problems with the Ford-class carrier program are more organizational than technological—a common theme among infrastructural megaprojects. McCain blamed “misalignment of accountability and responsibility in our defense acquisition system” and the vast bureaucracy of defense acquisition systems, which span multiple offices and program managers.

Trump seems to have seized on the project’s bad reputation without appreciating—or at least without clearly articulating—the complexities of moving from steam to digital.

The steam-powered catapult systems that are being replaced have been used to launch airplanes from U.S. carriers for some six decades now. Not only are steam systems harder to maintain than electrical ones; they have a lower upper-limit during combat—meaning electrical systems can launch more aircraft in a shorter amount of time. Electrical systems can also better handle smaller aircrafts and drones compared with steam. Steam systems also put more stress on airframes, and make them more prone to corrosion. Not only that, but carriers themselves are exceedingly vulnerable to attack—meaning outfitting them with the modern defense systems is a priority.

The goal for the upgraded system is to use carriers to create “an operational honeycomb of interconnected forces with reach, range and lethality against air, sea, space, and land-based targets,” as Robbin Laird and Ed Timperlake wrote for the website Breaking Defense in 2015.

Despite some high-profile failures in early testing, EMALS is now nearly complete and ready for sea trials. It represents one of three major initiatives in the Navy’s push to go upgrade its weapons systems for the digital era.

Trump’s insistence on steam is perhaps bewildering, but also consistent with some of his other views about technology. After all, the president has repeatedly talked about returning to America’s golden age of manufacturing—an idea that’s laughable, if regrettable, to anyone who has looked closely at the forces driving the global economy. Among them: the rise of automation, which promises to dramatically transform the way humans work across multiple industries, and which Trump has all but ignored.

Then again, for a man who is clearly concerned with hugeness, you’d think Trump might appreciate EMALS: In working order, the system can launch anything from the sleekest drone to the sturdiest F-35, and it blasts through the technological limits imposed by steam. Trump has demonstrated a fondness for super carriers, and has said he plans to increase the U.S. fleet from 10 to 12.

He hasn’t, however, indicated how he plans to pay for that. The cost of a single new, Ford-class carrier—about $11 billion without cost overruns—would eat up nearly 20 percent of Trump’s proposed defense budget increase, Reuters reported in March.

The Navy says it is scrambling to figure out how to address the president’s concerns. A spokesman said it will issue a statement on Thursday afternoon, and figure out talking points for Naval leaders should the question come up at public events.

In the meantime, Trump might do well to worry more about the signature infrastructure promise of his own campaign, than a near-complete military project he doesn’t seem to understand.

(h/t The Atlantic)