Category: Navy

The other day, we talked about the naming ceremony for the USS Carl M. Levin. Mabus ignored the hundreds of other heroes that the Navy has produced in the last several decades to make the political decision to name a destroyer after the Congressman? Apparently their sacrifices don’t compare to the contribution of Carl Levin – who has never served a minute in uniform – anyone’s uniform. Well, there was that time at Band Camp….

According to the Washington Times, naming a ship for the Congressman doesn’t meet Navy Secretary Ray Mabus’ own guidelines for naming ships;

Capt. Patrick McNally, Mr. Mabus’ spokesman, told The Times: “He names ships for American heroes and considers Senator Levin’s long commitment to the nation worthy of recognition …. The naming conventions are guidelines set by the secretary. He can deviate from them if he desires.”

The Times notes;

The George W. Bush administration named a Virginia-class attack submarine after former Sen. John Warner, who also served as a Marine enlisted man in World War II and as a Navy secretary.

Actually, Warner enlisted in the Navy during final months of World War II right after his 18th birthday, and then reenlisted in the Marine Corps when the Korean War started and served as a ground aircraft maintenance officer in the 1st Marine Division. See the difference, there, Mabus? Mabus also named an entire class of ships after John Lewis, the civil rights fellow, turned Congressman who admits that he can’t even swim. He’s also named ships for former president Lyndon Johnson, the fellow who embroiled us in Vietnam using the non-event of the Gulf of Tonkin as an excuse, Cesar Chavez, another civil rights fellow (who spent two uneventful years in the Navy) and John Murtha who falsely accused the Marines at Haditha of being murderers before the investigation even began. And then there’s the USS Gabrielle Giffords. I’m seeing a pattern here.

Levin’s most valorous moment was the event pictured above where he “twerked” for the press at the naming ceremony.

HMC Ret sends us a link from ABC News about an unnamed Navy officer who was arrested and placed in pre-trial confinement eight months ago on charges that he spied for a foreign government;

The unidentified officer is currently assigned to Commander Patrol and Reconnaissance Group, a maritime patrol and reconnaissance unit in Norfolk that provides airborne anti-submarine warfare and intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance using P-8A Poseidon aircraft, P-3 Orion aircraft and MQ-4 unmanned aircraft.

[…]

Charge sheets presented at an Article 32 hearing were heavily redacted and did not disclose the identity of the Naval officer nor where the alleged acts of espionage occurred.

According to the charge sheets, the officer has been charged with five counts of espionage and attempted espionage. The documents allege that on “divers occasions” the officer did “with intent or reason to believe it would be used to the advantage of a foreign nation, attempt to communicate SECRET information relating to the national defense to a representative of a foreign government.”

Bobo sends us a link to the story at Stars & Stripes which reports that he’s a Lieutenant Commander – an O-4.

The officer also is charged with three counts of attempted espionage, three counts of making false official statements, five counts of communicating defense information, prostitution-patronizing, adultery, and multiple violations of a lawful general order and failure to obey a lawful order.

The Navy and the officer corps in particular is having a rough year.

Update; Bobo sends us an update to the story, the officer is Lieutenant Commander Edward C. Lin, a Taiwanese-born naturalized citizen and he was selling secrets to China, according to USNI News.

According to a 2008 Navy release on a naturalization ceremony at which he spoke, “Lin was 14 years old when he and his family left Taiwan. They had to travel halfway around the world, stopping in different countries along the way.”

He speaks fluent Mandarin and had been a department head for the Hawaii-based Special Projects Patrol Squadron Two ‘Wizards’ (VPU-2) that flew EP3-E Aries II signals intelligence aircraft, two sources confirmed to USNI News.

Lin’s job on the Aries II, which bear a resemblance to the maritime surveillance and anti-submarine warfare P-3 Orion, was to manage the collection of electronic signals from the aircraft – a central coordinator.

The specifics of how the U.S. gathers signals from potential adversaries are among the military’s most closely guarded secrets.

WTKR reports that the commander, the XO and the senior enlisted man of the USS BAINBRIDGE (DDG-96), an Arleigh Burke-class guided missile destroyer, were fired yesterday because they had either smuggled or had knowledge of the smuggling of fireworks on board the ship. And, oh, yeah, there was gambling;

Cmdr. Sean Rongers was relieved of his duties due to loss of confidence in his ability to command following an investigation into the storage of commercial fireworks onboard the ship in violation of Navy instructions, unlawful gambling aboard the ship contrary to Navy regulations, poor program management and a poor command climate.

Former executive officer, Cmdr. Brandon Murray and Command Master Chief Richard Holmes have been temporarily reassigned. The investigation found that both Murray and Holmes were fully aware of the purchase and storage of fireworks.

I’m guessing that the Navy needs a shooting war that they can get involved in. Idle hands are the Devil’s tool kit.

But, someone in the crew reported the malfeasance. The motto of the BAINBRIDGE is “Competence, Dedication, Discipline”

“Yesterday I wrote a humor piece, “Yeomama?” for my favorite military blog, This Ain’t Hell, where I jokingly pointed out that Obama’s Secretary of the Navy, Ray Mabus, who in his holy quest to give his liege lord, Barack, the rainbow-hued, unicorn mounted force the Narcissist-in-Chief so desires, has, in naval jargon, run aground.”

The problem according to Mabus and his chief enlisted naval adviser is that, try as they might, their naval social justice retitling team can’t seem to come up with a satisfactory gender-neutral replacement for the Navy’s traditional title for a clerk, which, as it has been since the birth of the United States Navy, is yeoman. I kid you not, folks: with all the problems our military faces in this very dangerous world, our secretary of the Navy has his top chief petty officer, Master Chief of the Navy Michael D. Stevens, busy changing the titles of the countless combat specialty ratings in that force, which includes the United States Marine Corps. This quixotic quest is necessitated by the relentless insistence of the Obama administration that women be allowed to serve in all combat units and positions regardless of continuing demonstrations that this is a clearly foolish program with coming deadly consequences.

While my recent piece drew many humorous suggestions for a replacement title for yeoman, one commenter soberly noted that this is no laughing matter when it comes to the Navy’s real budget needs. Barack Obama and the Democratic Party have taken an accounting axe to our military forces, demanding drastic reductions everywhere, across every fleet and every force. In the Navy, that means not only fewer ships, but also fewer sailors to man and support those ships remaining. Because of Obama’s budgets, naval aviators aren’t allowed to fly sufficient training missions to retain their flying proficiency. Even special naval helicopter units that fly SEAL missions are being shut down, with their mission being shifted onto the Army. Point is, money’s tight, and the budget constraints are affecting mission training and performance.

And yet Ray Mabus wants to spend scarce funds to rewrite hundreds if not thousands of Navy and Marine Corps manuals governing training, maintenance, and operations of those forces while reprinting virtually every form with application to the combat arms of both those forces. I can guarantee you there is absolutely no one in the office of Ray Mabus who has a clue as to the needless and unaffordable costs of these changes they are pushing at a time when every penny of the budget should be earmarked for combat operations and not such administrative idiocy.

I’m particularly interested in how Rainbow Ray and his Unicornians are going to rewrite MCRP 3-02B, Marine Corps Martial Arts Program, so that it instructs 130-pound female infantrypersons in how to engage and overpower 180-pound male jihadists in the bloody, vicious, unrestrained fury of hand-to-hand combat.

Crossposted at American Thinker

In case you haven’t heard, the Navy is naming it’s newest Arleigh Burke-class destroyer after US Senator Carl M. Levin, because there haven’t been enough real heroes in the Navy to provide their names. Levin’s claim to fame was as the chair of the Senate’s Armed Services Committee. I guess there was a naming ceremony yesterday in Detroit, and of course, the Secretary of the Navy Ray Mabus was on hand for the ceremony. Levin has been involved in Detroit and Michigan politics since 1968 and never served a day in the Navy.

In its rush to social engineer the Navy and Marine Corps into something that resembles an urban college campus, Pentagon leaders have hit a snag according to Master Chief of the Navy, Michael Stevens, as reported by the New York Times. The Pentagon’s self-appointed chief of social engineering, Navy Secretary, Ray Mabus, ever eager to remake America’s fighting forces into Obama’s UniCorps, has determined to rename all military specialties to reflect their increasingly bi-gender status. According to Mabus, job titles with the suffix man, rifleman or mineman, can be replaced with specialist, technician, professional or something of the sort.

The problem is with the time-honored naval term yeoman which designates a clerk. In the case of yeoman, the ‘man’ syllable is not a suffix but the second syllable of a Middle English term for young man. So the Navy is up the Potomac without a paddle and I thought, knowing the generous nature of all you creative types who comment here at TAH, that perhaps you could suggest a proper nomenclature for this naval job specialty. As you can see, I have started off the process with yeomama. Any help out there?