I had a good time trading emails with Marc Chalamet, Le Parisien’s New York correspondent, about who might be profiting from Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. Part of the discussion made it into Marc’s latest column, which you can read here.

Exploiting European suspicion of American profiteering is fertile ground for Russia’s ever-willing cadre of disinformation experts. It’s easy to point at the booming stock of American defense contractors, highlighting the sector’s expansion as it builds out some woefully ignored sectors–munitions and back-end support stuff.

Going forward, it’s going to be important for U.S. diplomats–and U.S. military contractors–to highlight how Russia’s poor gear and mismanaged invasion have both destroyed Russia’s arms industry AND created opportunities for all kinds of European arms innovators. It might also be smart for big primes (waves at Lockheed, gestures to the F-35 program) to highlight the contributions from European subcontractors and/or foreign offsets.

It also might be smart to point out that European dithering over weapons–like the German effort to slow-walk efforts to provide any Leopard tanks-not even defensive-oriented Leopard I’s-only opens opportunities to others. Folks bordering Russia want the rest of Europe to back them, and when European suppliers balk, they look elsewhere. South Korea, for example, is a major beneficiary of German recalcitrance in heavy weaponry.

But there are a lot of other European arms providers that are getting big opportunities from the Russian invasion. Turkey’s unmanned sector–after proving to be so useful early in the conflict–is getting a huge global boost, and Turkey’s shipbuilding sector is setting up to build Ukraine’s future Black Sea Fleet.

As I said (with apologies to google translate), basically, the rising tide of demand raises all boats:

“the dramatic change in security and the collapse of the reputation of Russian military equipment, have created enormous opportunities for Western defense contractors,”not just Americans, then. He adds: “Everyone wants to make sure you have enough ammunition, drones and other battlefield tools Ukraine has used so effectively to survive.”

There’s also concern that the U.S., as a natural gas exporter, is somehow reaping a profit too. I’d suggest that commentators take a moment to explain that moving America’s otherwise locked natural gas production into the global market doesn’t do great things for average U.S. citizen. I don’t think Europe understands that our crash effort to ship gas over to Europe is going to leave the US electorate facing big, permanent natural gas price increases.

I had a great talk with the Times Record’s John Terhune about Senator Susan Collins’ new role as ranking member of the Senate Defense Appropriations Committee. As always–after watching Richard Shelby run the place for years–it’s interesting to see how a new Senator will craft this role to suit their individual interests.

Collins–obviously–is focused on shipbuilding and wants ship numbers to go up, but I think her primary effort going forward will be to move beyond just shipbuilding and in distinguishing the hype from investments that are really necessary. The Army, Air Force and Space Force can be just as tech-blinded as the Navy and Marine Corps. As I say in the article:

It’s like high fashion: Every season there’s going to be something new,” Hooper said of the lengthy and sometimes fraught process of designing warships. “Is it always necessary? Sometimes it is, sometimes it isn’t. The trick for our naval and political leaders like Susan Collins will be in trying to distinguish the reality from the hype.”

I think Collins is bringing in some great staff who will help her balance between the proven stuff and things that might be a tad too ambitious–they’re certainly not brand-new “babes in the woods” who can get pushed around easily. They’re going to focus on things that are proven and have real-world field/operational experience.

It’ll also be interesting to see how quickly defense contractors work to lay down a footprint in Maine. It’s a tough sell–the State’s not set up to really absorb a whole lot more economic activity. Collins will need to twist a few arms in the state to get the locals to get serious about worker training, affordable housing and worker recruitment–but if Shelby’s record in Alabama is any sign of things to come, defense contractors are going to be setting up shop wherever they can, because:

“If you are a defense contractor and you are not trying to figure out how to maximize your investments in Maine or to get a footprint in Maine, you’re not doing defense contracting,”

Anyway, this will be fascinating to watch. General Dynamics must be relieved–Bath has been kind of spinning in the wind for some time. Huntington Ingalls, however, can’t be super thrilled that somebody from Maine controls Congressional largesse.

Everybody knows that America’s two big hospital ships are largely useless unless lashed to a pier.

They’re so big that, if we had to fully staff them, we’d have trouble operating some stateside medical facilities–they are THAT big a drain on the medical community.

They’re also too big to work in most ports, and, if the port is imperfect, it’s really hard to get folks on and off the ships from a tricky anchorage.

I’ve been hammering on about these problems for more than two decades now (go look at my publications list!). But, every few years, some bright bulb in DoD someplace forgets how operationally feeble our hospital ships are. Somebody ALWAYS tries to push the limit, treating these old former oil tankers as if they were fully kitted-out amphibious vessels. And then we get into situations where some yahoo (no thanks to the spilt command structure on Hospital ships where the civilian master and the driven Navy mission leader end up squabbling and, where, ultimately, everybody in the command cadre has plausible deniability for any mishap) decides that lugging a personnel-packed small boat 40 feet up to the boat deck at night is a good thing.

Of course, the rigging came undone and we came really, really close to losing a whole lot of people.

Anybody going to get their feet put onto the coals over this latest screwup? Probably not.

This is no way to run a Navy. I know nobody wants to fund it, but we’ve known the hospital ships were flawed from day one. It’s time to sigh and pony up the cash. Let’s get some smaller, more useful hospital/medical ships, staff them (!!) with volunteers on a medical school debt forgiveness program (!!!) and then actually put them to real use as part of a coordinated regional strategy (!!!!).

It can be done. I mean…look, if MercyShips can field two hospital ships–albeit pier-bound ones–for the annual DoD equivalent of chump change ($130 million), the Navy can do something similar. We’ve been debating about hospital ships for decades, and, because they aren’t a neat whiz-bang fit with the ‘ole warrior ethos, nobody funds them. They’re the Light Amphibious Warships of the maritime medical set. I mean, it’s not all bad. Getting a few EPF hospital “ambulances” into service is nice, but, again, nobody’s lashed these craft to an actual strategy. And with nobody really sure as to how they’ll actually be used, they’re just, well…I fear they’ll just sorta sit.

Meanwhile, over in China, somebody’s gone and developed a comprehensive strategy for medical support and is building a fleet to match. And, before long, those boats (two large, two medium and a bunch of tiny ones) are going to be all over Africa, the Caribbean and the Indo-Pacific, while we sit, either dithering or freaking out, frozen over a fatal hospital ship catastrophe–a catastrophe that is going to happen aboard the old hospital ships if we keep pushing those old oil tankers into amphibious support roles.

Over in Forbes, I’ve put up a few Coast Guard pieces–a summary of the USCG funding proposal in the NDAA, and a suggestion that the USCG toss the troubled C-27J MPA for a mix of C-130s and the V-280 Valor, the Army’s choice for a replacement of the epic Black Hawk helo.

The first, looking at the Army’s decision to move forward with a second-gen tiltrotor, really crystalizes some concerns about the Coast Guard–and other utility-oriented players. For decades, the Coast Guard has been content to be a “second mover,” taking mature products and adopting them to USCG needs. That’s great when USCG and military requirements match.

But military requirements are changing. The “warfighters” are pushing more towards artisanal assault assets, and de-emphasizing raw utility. We’ve seen this in the USMC evolution towards the MV-22. Years ago, during California fire season, the skies were full of CH-46s doing bucket work at the latest/greatest wildfire. You don’t see that anymore. MV-22s don’t seem to do well hauling water, and they cost more to operate.

It’s pretty obvious that the V-280 Valor will be hard-pressed to meet the USCG’s SAR standards. But I think there is a niche role for the platform in the Pacific and Caribbean. In time, they might be very good for the DC air interdiction effort, or for tracking things in the Gulf. But we don’t know yet. My sense is that the USCG should get into the game, test the platform in a less demanding mid-range MPA like role with VTOL benefits, working to marinize the tiltrotor for island work. If anything, the Army will be grateful, and, heck, they might even be willing to pick up some of the cost.

I am also a little concerned at the Coast Guard’s stance on future rotary wing assets. For years, the line was that the Coast Guard was going to neck down the the UH-60, and then follow along wherever the Army’s Future Vertical Lift took us. That’s great, but…it was pretty obvious, pretty early that the FVL decision had a strong likelihood of failing to get the Coast Guard a good solution. Was anybody from the Coast Guard in the room for FVL? Was this something USCG should have had more input/vision on? I don’t know.

I’m really proud of the USCG NDAA. A lot of things that I pushed for made it into the NDAA.

One of the big “wins” is the $630 million slated for the Coast Guard Yard in Baltimore. Remember, back when I had to chide Senator Wicker for leaving the Coast Guard Yard out of the SHIPYARD Act? I’m glad to see that Maryland’s Congressional delegation pushed for Coast Guard Yard funding, and that Wicker supported it, but…it would have been nice to see the two parties pull together more overtly. But with that small irritation aside, I’m really amused to see the Coast Guard Yard go from zero to something of a SIOP hero. It’s a testament to the forward planning done at the yard over the past several years.

Likewise, I’m pleased to see the Congress demand a list of shore improvements the USCG expects over the next seven years–as well as a study on what USCG might need in the Western Pacific. This is great. It forces the USCG to plan–just like it did with the Coast Guard Yard–and it lets Congress know what the service needs. So…it drives strategy and helps the friendly Coast Guard keep from getting bullied and its lunch money stolen by an aggressive CBP.

And, finally, I’m thrilled to see the Congress demand an aviation study. I have wanted more insight on this for awhile. Coast Guard availability rates for the aging Dolphin helo are, at best, a shell game. So is the UH-60 conversion rate. Congress will need to dig to make sure the Coast Guard isn’t blowing smoke, but, at least it is a start. (This isn’t meant to be a dig at Elizabeth City, but my sense is that they need to scale up pretty quick, and the only way to do that is to fund ’em.)

In the aftermath of the holidays, a few ugly old Navy bugbears are popping up. In one week, we have a fire aboard a carrier, another leak–this time of some nasty firefighting foam–at Red Hill, a near-collision in San Diego harbor, and now news that four sailors at Norfolk’s MARMC died by suicide just this month….If this keeps up, we’d better prepare for another major mishap.

Where’s the leadership? Where’s the SECNAV and CNO?

It’s frustrating to see these ugly things start to pile up right on the eve of the Air Force roll-out of their new B-21 bomber. And with the Navy’s “good news” on the operational side being the USS Gerald R. Ford’s somewhat lackluster shakedown, the Navy’s PR larder is pretty bare.

It’s frustrating to see. Air Force, Space Force and the Army are eating the Navy’s lunch. And the Navy’s apparent continued failure to keep their thumbs on some longstanding operational areas of risk, I sometimes wonder just who is minding the store. Navy leadership doesn’t seem to understand the likely consequences of a major operational incident right now.

It’s time for a change.

It’s not that the Navy needs to be more cautious. There’s far too much feigned helplessness and careerist timorousness in the Service already. Instead, the organization needs to be bold, while also keeping a strong managerial focus on the Navy’s persistent pain points.

It’s really frustrating to go back and read mishap reports from the last two decades. They’re all the same. They all indicate the same general problems–folks that take too many risks, don’t know their equipment, and fail to institute normal procedures. In essence, they’re basically picking and choosing what rules to follow. The Officer Corps knows this and, for far too many years, they’ve not cared. A close read on some of these things, and you’ll see folks getting rewarded for overlooking things and NOT causing the boss problems. The fact that those things that get overlooked may just end up sinking the boat, but, you know, right now it lets the Department Head and the Skipper keep their career trajectory. It’s just frustrating as all heck to see. It is clear to me that Navy leadership isn’t going to change things unless they are pushed–and their careers put at risk–to do so.

It’s also becoming clear that the various communities in the Navy are not listening to each other–there’s a lot of “stay in my lane” baloney. “Oh, well gosh,” says the submariners, “those 7th Fleet skimmers have real problems,” as they go and make what appear to be pretty similar operational mistakes.

Add in the wider, general lack of accountability in the Navy, and it just adds up. We had a huge cheating scandal at the Academy, and only a handful got axed. Why? Because the Navy, as an institution, didn’t want to make problems in the personnel pipeline. But what lesson are we teaching the folks who broke the honor code and got a slap on the wrist? It’s personal to me…a childhood friend got expelled in the last big Navy Academy cheating scandal, and he’s the man he is today because he was held accountable. Had he been offered some limp “redemption” opportunity, he’d be a different guy. And poorer for it. We have another big “Fat Leonard” bribery scandal brewing, despite, well, Fat Leonard being “a thing.” There’s a slow decline in standards at nuke school. Admirals can glibly claim that, say, the USS Ford’s elevators are going to be delivered in a matter of a few weeks without any sanction. It’s ridiculous.

Somebody has to get the Navy in hand. Hopefully it’s going to be Carlos Del Toro. But I think the Navy’s made the SECNAV office staff so small, that the only way he’s going to be able to do anything is to get out and see stuff for himself. When Big Navy isn’t telling the SECNAV the real deal, it’s a problem. And I bet it happens more often than not these days.

And, to be frank, the Navy hates pursuing accountability. Mabus tried. The whining about how “Fat Leonard” killed the Pacific Fleet was mendacious and wrong–I’ve written about it here. Yes the disciplinary process was long and complicated. Yes, it hamstrung careers by casting a very wide net. But it had to be done. If there was anything I could offer, I’d say that the discipline should have been done far faster with less legal plodding. But I digress. Pursing accountability is as hard as it is unpopular, and, if you’re unpopular in today’s Navy, you’re not going anywhere. And with more folks than ever ready to politicize good naval discipline–bashing folks for cancel culture or zero defects or for culture war baloney–it’s hard.

But it’s going to get worse. If COVID has taught us anything, there’s a strain of “I’m not going to let authority tell me what to do” in American society. And that’s going to get increasingly prevalent–making the maintenance of good order a real challenge. When you have officers and sailors “doing their own thing” because nobody can tell “them” what to do, it’s…a recipe for a lot more avoidable mishaps.

To fix things, the Navy’s going to need skilled pressure from the top on all levels. Modly tried–with the USS Ford–but he ended up self-immolating and anything he touched was either mocked into irrelevance or canceled.

It’s unfortunate. The Navy has so much potential, and there are so many good people out there doing good things, it’s a shame that their contributions are overshadowed by avoidable screw ups. The Navy has got to do better. Go read the piece, here.

Not to be a downer, but the Navy has, in the space of a little less than a year, probably lost a second multi-billion dollar frontline asset. First the Bonhomme Richard, and now, possibly, the USS Connecticut.

The last time a sub publicly suffered a controlled flight into terrain was in 2005, and the ONLY reason it returned to service was because we had a spare bow available. We just chopped off the damaged structure and replaced it. That option is no longer available–we’ll have to fix things from scratch. And that’s going to be a CHALLENGE. I fear we don’t have the money, yard availability and time to fix the Connecticut, and, even if we do take the stupid route of fixing the unfixable, we’ll end up eking just a few years of deployments out of a severely restricted platform.

If the sub is in bad shape–the mentioning of “grounding” and that two forward ballast tanks were compromised–suggest that may well be the case, then, well, the faster the Navy and the Congress realize the USS Connecticut will never again be a Seawolf, the better. Let’s not go wasting a ton of money because we lack the guts to be the bearer of bad news.

Also, now that the Chinese are hammering away at our continued silence, we need to be doing some serious thinking about how to roll out the facts–particularly if somebody, somewhere on our side, actually did make a stupid mistake. And if the mistake was made due to behaviors we’ve already targeted as problematic but have, up till now, failed to address, we’re not gonna tap-dance our way out of this by over-classifying everything. It’s making us look dumb internationally.

It’s time for real accountability. Big Navy won’t like this, but we can’t keep losing capital ships and then blithely acting like nobody is to blame but some hapless JO’s someplace. It may well be time for some high level Navy leaders to face the music, and it will be interesting to see what SECNAV Del Toro will do in the days and weeks to come.

Here’s the link.

Over on Forbes, I’m banging away at the opportunity Joe Biden and Emmanuel Macron have this week to deepen an ongoing Franco-US maritime relationship at the G-20 meetings. I have long extolled the strategic value of France’s strategically-useful maritime holdings, and, as we are already working together on maritime security and carrier integration, we should deepen and formalize our relationship. It’d give Macron something really high-profile while advancing our mutual strategic positions at sea.

Go read it here.

I’m quite interested in the potential for a viable mid-sized carrier design. While a range of strategists have urged the U.S. Navy to consider mid-sized carriers, the Navy, for a lot of reasons, has slow-walked every proposal to look beyond the Ford Class. The excuse was that a new design would be expensive, and nobody wanted to fund it, etc etc.

Well, now, with France getting into the game, we’re going to get one of the first modern mid-sized carrier designs since, oh, the Kennedy was launched. It’s pure opportunity. And with the design not owned by Huntington Ingalls, there’s, suddenly, real potential for the Department of Defense to open the innovation aperture and, potentially, look at introducing some modest threat of competition into America’s flat-deck manufacturing industrial base. Neat stuff!

Mississippi’s Senior Senator, Roger Wicker, has been pushing for two things–a simple, full accounting of Coast Guard needs as well as full funding for the Coast Guard. And he’s gotten none of them. As you can tell from his comments, in the article here, the Senator is fed up.

That’s good. Maybe some righteous indignation for a good cause can help get the Coast Guard the money it needs to move ahead over the next couple of decades. And if we can get the Coast Guard in a good place for the price of a big-deck amphib, that’s…an investment well worth the money.

The problem here though, is that the Coast Guard is a popular cause. It’s so popular, everybody wants to freight Coast Guard funding proposals with a lot of junk. We never really get a stand up “yes-no” vote on pure Coast Guard funding. It either gets lumped in with a whole bunch of extra garbage — like in the infrastructure amendment, or there’s some other poison pill addition that makes Coast Guard funding unpalatable.

But even a stand-alone Coast Guard funding bill has poison pills. Wicker’s Coast Guard bill tacked on a request for funding the Coast Guard during government shutdowns. Now, I’m a Democrat, and, while I really want to see Coast Guard folks get funded during shutdowns, I sure as heck don’t want to make it any easier for my Republican colleagues to shut down the government. I believe shutting down the government is a serious proposition, and steps to make shutdowns as politically-painless as possible are wrong.

We need more irked Senators out there who are willing to help get the Coast Guard ready for the next couple of decades. For once, let’s go get the Coast Guard fully funded.

If you want to know about defense journalism and the state of the Coast Guard in relation to the rest of the Uniformed Services, just look at the latest HASC markup. Defense media got the topline messages–that the HASC had grown Biden’s defense budget by $25 billion, and that the Navy got several ships. They covered the heck of out that–it was easy to digest. But, once you dig a little into the details–which, frankly, I don’t understand why the reporters weren’t out there digging–there are all kinds of neat-and-interesting Easter eggs in the HASC markup. Like Mike Gallagher’s $350 million Great Lakes icebreaker and $20 million icebreaking tug deal, that I talk about over in Forbes (here).

Look, I like Mike Gallagher (WI-8). He’s a sharp guy and he legislates. His up-and-coming defense role, along with 2nd-termer dfsElaine Luria (VA-2), make the House Armed Services Hearings far more lively. But, that said, the “Great Lakes Winter Shipping Act of 2021” is just too much. I get that the Great Lakes Congressional delegation is powerful, and that one crosses them at one’s own peril, but when we have real national security challenges at both the North and South Poles and our ocean-going icebreaker fleet is either breaking down or catching on fire–or both–then, the last thing we should be doing is funding the recapitalization of a purpose-built icebreaker of little use anywhere beyond the Great Lakes. Mike knows this, and that makes his maneuver here a little off-putting.

I mean, heck, the Coast Guard put an open ocean icebreaker on the unfunded priorities list. Fund that!

I think Mike knows we should be building (or renting) mid-sized, open-ocean icebreakers, and that the best route is to get a design funded, get a few started building, reserving one for Great Lakes use in a pinch. Once we have a brace of open-ocean breakers, then we can get about recapitalizing or supplementing the existing Great Lakes icebreaker, the 15-year old USCGC Mackinaw (WLBB-30). But Mike’s not going for that.

I get it–there’s another thing here. Mike’s gotta accede to his local power-players–and yes, everybody does this–but the Great Lakes industries are being way too grabby. Mike, if he wants to be a true great, needs to have the guts to tell his folks “the way it is.” His constituents want luxurious levels of icebreaking–to the point where every single little puddle-jumping ferry gets icebreaking help. But that, in the current budget environment, when the Coast Guard is already stressed to the breaking point, is far too much of a subsidy. Mike needs to do some more work–go get the billions that FEMA’s port security grants people hand out, and make it bend a little towards supporting local icebreaking capabilities. Get States and Locals need to pony up if they want the icebreaking support that the “Great Lakes Winter Shipping Act of 2021” tries to mandate as a USCG performance metric. And heck, even if the Congress forces the Coast Guard to ante up, at least Mike needs to recognize that flooding and high-water levels (along with other more free-market types of things) are probably going to catch commerce and delay transits anyway, further down the Great Lakes, for even longer than Lake ice ever will.

It’s not all bad. The really good thing in the bill is the $20 million targeted for the 140-foot Bay Class icebreaking tugs. You can never have too few tugs! And the Coast Guard’s six 140-footers in the Lakes handle the lion’s share of regular breaking, anyway. But they’re old, they’ve been SLEPPED and and they’ll need to be replaced with modern variants. It’s prudent to move forward with a full-press recapitalization there. (And, maybe, we should also recognize the good, solid work done on those 140-footers by the Coast Guard Yard, and send more money over there than Rep. Elaine Luria is trying to do elsewhere in the NDAA.)

So, as I said, Mike’s NDAA amendment isn’t all bad. But it does need some tweaks to stay in the NDAA. Right now, it’s a commerce/infrastructure deal and belongs in the stew of fraught infrastructure legislation that’ll probably not pass. If the icebreaking targets are removed, and the language requiring a purpose-built cutter gets replaced with something that supports a mid-sized open ocean breaker to back Great Lakes needs, then this amendment firmly belongs in the NDAA. But right now, as it’s written, it’s just authorizer bluster that won’t survive the appropriations process.