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The Army, like the rest of the military, says its top worry is trying to prepare soldiers to fight when Congress can’t even give them a budget.

It’s something of a Washington tradition: the parting shot at Congress by a national-security leader on the way out. On Monday, Army Secretary John McHugh criticized his former fellow lawmakers for not providing clear and predictable funding for the U.S. military. McHugh also had strong words for Beltway types who favor a smaller force with a smaller budget.

“If the last 18 to 20 months haven’t proven the necessity of a viable land force, I’m not sure what will,” McHugh said, at the Association of the U.S. Army’s annual convention in Washington, the largest annual gathering of Army leaders.

McHugh departs a Pentagon that is relying yet again on temporary funding to keep the doors open and troops paid. The current measure lasts through December, and there’s talk on Capitol Hill of extending it through next year.

“The critical issue” facing the Army right now, McHugh said, is getting beyond budget caps, continuing resolutions, and the uncertainty they foster.

McHugh wants more room for Army planners to breathe and for commanders to operate in the face of fast-moving and unpredictable threats.

“I didn’t foresee the U.S. Army to be the foundational force to fight the Ebola outbreak in Western Africa,” McHugh said, nor did U.S. leaders predict the “rapid pace of expansion of terrorist cells” through Africa. And, he said, “We really didn’t plan for Putin.”

For the near future, the Army secretary fears “what don’t we see,” he said. “Will we have an army agile and ready enough to meet that challenge?” he asked, or will Obama’s next secretary face a “future where the Army is built for a fantasy world that does not exist”?

McHugh’s chosen successor is Eric Fanning, acting undersecretary of the Army, former chief of staff to Defense Secretary Ash Carter and former acting Air Force secretary. McHugh urged Congress to confirm Fanning swiftly.

Another new face atop the Army, chief of staff Gen. Mark Milley, called the budget talk worrisome. But he spoke first about global threats.

“As I look around the world today, there’s no doubt in my mind that the United States is safe,” Milley said. “But having said that, the world outside the boundaries of the United States, the velocity of the instability is increasing as we sit here.”

Therefore, he said, it warrants the U.S. maintaining the capabilities of plus-sized forces, budgets, and equipment stores.

What does McHugh think is behind the push to shrink the size and budget of the Army?

“At its core, it’s probably an unsupportable abundance of optimism,” McHugh said, including “the wish that we could win wars totally from the air and from the sea…While optimism is a nice trait to have, it’s probably not the best foundational basis upon which you build a military strategy.”

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Jura said:

read a moment ago at DefenseOne
The US Army’s Biggest Concern Right Now Is Congress

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strehl said:

US Navy R&D center located way up in northern Idaho in Lake Pend Oreille. They can test all their new hull shapes without worrying about who may be watching except maybe Jeff if he lives nearby.

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Seeing stars, again: Naval Academy reinstates celestial navigation
Tim Prudente Tim PrudenteContact Reporter
[email protected]

The same techniques guided ancient Polynesians in the open Pacific and led Sir Ernest Shackleton to remote Antarctica, then oriented astronauts when the Apollo 12 was disabled by lightning, the techniques of celestial navigation.

A glimmer of the old lore has returned to the Naval Academy.

Officials reinstated brief lessons in celestial navigation this year, nearly two decades after the full class was determined outdated and cut from the curriculum.

That decision, in the late 1990s, made national news and caused a stir among the old guard of navigators.

Maritime nostalgia, however, isn't behind the return.

Rather, it's the escalating threat of cyber attacks that has led the Navy to dust off its tools to measure the angles of stars.

After all, you can't hack a sextant.

"We went away from celestial navigation because computers are great," said Lt. Cmdr. Ryan Rogers, the deputy chairman of the academy's Department of Seamanship and Navigation. "The problem is," he added, "there's no backup."

Among the fleet, the Navy ended all training in celestial navigation in 2006, said Lt. Cmdr. Kate Meadows, a Navy spokeswoman. Then officers' training returned in 2011 for ship navigators, she said. And officials are now rebuilding the program for enlisted ranks; it's expected to begin next fall.

"There's about 10 years when the Navy didn't teach to celestial," said Rogers, the Naval Academy instructor. "New lieutenants, they don't have that instruction."

The Navy also began pilot programs this fall in celestial navigation for ROTC students at colleges in Philadelphia, Rochester and Auburn.

In Annapolis, midshipmen studied celestial navigation more than a century, until 1998. So what happened?

The Air Force.

In the 1990s, airmen launched two dozen satellites nearly 13,000 miles above Earth. By 1995, this network, the Global Positioning System, could pinpoint your location within feet.

Since then, GPS has never been shut off, according to the government's website gps.gov.

Today, 31 satellites circle the Earth, each twice a day, costing taxpayers about $1 billion a year.

"The perceived need for sextants was taken away," said Peter Trogdon, president of Weems & Plath in Eastport.

The company has sold sextants, and other nautical instruments, since it was founded in 1928 by Naval Academy navigation instructor Capt. Phillip Van Horn Weems. He taught Charles Lindbergh navigation during the pioneer days of aviation.

The current president, Trogdon, said sales of sextants plunged after GPS.

"There's only a few thousand sold a year," he said. A lightning strike to a ships' mast could disable GPS receivers. "Most of those are sold to yachtsmen that want to have a backup."

Still, GPS has transformed humanitarian and rescue efforts around the world.

Celestial navigation, by comparison, isn't exact. A skilled celestial navigator may calculate locations to within 1.5 miles, Rogers said.

Using GPS "you're within feet. You're not even in the same ballpark. If you can use GPS, it's just so much more accurate," Rogers said, adding, "we know there are cyber vulnerabilities."

In 2004, he spent two weeks at Naval Station Norfolk studying stars — Betelgeuse, Capella, Pollux — before navigating aboard the cruiser Thomas S. Gates.

He didn't once need a sextant.

Still, a world without GPS isn't too remote a possibility for retired Navy Capt. Terry Carraway, of Silver Spring.

He formed the nonprofit Navigation Foundation in the early 1980s to sustain proficiencies in celestial navigation. That organization peaked with more than 500 navigators, he said.

"In the event that we had to go into a national emergency, we would probably have to shut the GPS down because it can be used by potential enemies," he said. "It would be pretty hard to train a lot of people in celestial navigation, so we wanted to keep contact with all the people who taught it."

The foundation disbanded in 2002.

"The old celestial navigators all passed away," said Carraway, 88.

Cadets at the U.S. Coast Guard Academy in New London, Connecticut, used to have a course devoted entirely to celestial navigation. It ended about 10 years ago, said David Santos, the academy spokesman.

Some classroom instruction remains in theories of celestial navigation, Santos said. Also, cadets use a sextant aboard the tall ship Eagle.

Instructors at the U.S. Merchant Marine Academy, in Kings Point, New York, have continuously taught celestial navigation, said Benjamin Benson, the academy spokesman. In fact, instructor Capt. Timothy Tisch shared materials to help the Naval Academy rebuild its program.

Benson provided a statement from Tisch:

"Knowledge of celestial navigation in the GPS era provides a solid back-up form of navigation in the event GPS becomes unreliable for whatever reason," Tisch said in the statement. "It is also good professional practice to use one navigational system to verify the accuracy of another."

In Annapolis, celestial navigation instruction ended loudly.

The Capital reported in June 1998:

"First came the old salts, who fear the military school will no longer produce 'real' sailors. Knowing how to navigate by the stars, they say, is the mark of a mariner. Then came the profit-seekers, who asked if they could inherit the academy's $1,500 sextants. Such devices, inquirers said, would be a nice addition to their museum, a nice mantle piece, or of some use out on the yacht." (The academy still has its sextants, Rogers said.)

The decision to cut the academy's long-standing class on celestial navigation was even raised in a New York Times editorial calling the move "a melancholy surprise."

Still, that decision came after months of discussion that began with a 1996 curriculum review. That review came partly in response to a cheating scandal in the early 1990s that ended with 24 midshipmen expelled.

The review committee decided the required sophomore course on navigating by stars was outdated. Then-Superintendent Adm. Charles Larson, after consulting with commanders of Navy ships, cut the course and added extra lessons on computer navigation.

Midshipmen were relieved. Celestial calculations were painfully difficult, requiring a nautical almanac and volumes of tables. Still, the news caused more than a dozen letters to the editor in Proceedings, the magazine devoted to naval service.

"It fired people up," Fred Rainbow, the magazine's editor then, told The Capital.

Some lessons continued, but instruction in celestial navigation ended entirely within years. The 2010 curriculum manual didn't even mention celestial navigation.

Five years later, the Navy reinstated the subject in the manual issued two months ago.

The first midshipmen to receive training were juniors during this past summer school. Future classes will learn theories of celestial navigation during an advanced navigation course. And the Class of 2017 will be the first to graduate with the reinstated instruction.

But it's only three hours of celestial navigation — so students won't be skilled with sextants.

"This is the first semester we added it in, so we're just baby-stepping it," said Lt. Christine Hirsch, who teaches navigation at the academy. "We just added the theory, but we really do have the capabilities to expand."

Still, it's welcome news to maritime enthusiasts.

"Fantastic," said Trogdon, the president of Weems & Plath. "How cool is it to go back to the ancestral technique?"

Rogers at the Naval Academy said, "That's a victory. I agree with them. I think, if you're out at sea, you should be able to navigate without GPS — things happen."

In the 1990s, midshipmen were tested on the sextant. They took celestial measurements, then entered data, sometimes 20 figures, for each star, time, distance, angle.

This year, Midshipman Phillip Lowry, of North Ogden City, Utah, learned the general theory of celestial navigation. He considered those past mids.

"I don't envy them."

Copyright © 2015, Capital Gazette, a Baltimore Sun Media Group publication | Privacy Policy

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USS Teddy Roosevelt and USS Normandy


Indian Shivalik Class FFG

JMSDF Akizuki Class DDG
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Naval Today said:

Naval ships, aircraft and personnel from India, Japan and the United States are participating in exercise Malabar 2015, in Chennai, India, Oct. 14-19, 2015.

Malabar 2015 is a complex, high-end warfighting exercise that has grown in scope and complexity over the years and is the latest in a continuing series conducted to advance multi-national maritime relationships and mutual security issues.

The exercise will feature both ashore and at-sea training. The at-sea portions will be conducted off the east coast of India and are designed to advance participating nations’ military-to-military coordination and capacity to plan and execute tactical operations in a multinational environment.

Events planned during the at-sea portions include liaison officer professional exchanges and embarks, submarine familiarization, surface warfare exercises, search and rescue exercises, helicopter cross-deck evolutions, underway replenishments; gunnery exercises, visit, board, search and seizure (VBSS) exercises; and anti-submarine warfare.

Participants from the U.S. Navy include the Nimitz-class aircraft carrier USS Theodore Roosevelt (CVN 71) with embarked Carrier Air Wing 1, the guided-missile cruiser USS Normandy (CG 60); the littoral combat ship USS Fort Worth (LCS 3), a P-8A Poseidon aircraft and a Los Angeles-Class fast-attack submarine.

The Indian Navy is participating in the exercise with a Rajput-class destroyer, a Brahmaputra-class frigate, a Shivalik-class frigate, a fleet support ship and a Sindhughosh-class diesel-electric submarine while the only vessel from Japan is the Akizuki-class destroyer Fuyuzuki.

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08Sep-03Oct2015, Persian Gulf
04Oct-07Oct2015, Jebel Ali, United Arab Emirates
08Oct2015, Persian Gulf
09Oct2015, transited the Strait of Hormuz
10Oct-13Oct2015, North Arabian Sea

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FORBIN said:

Roosevelt left Persian Gulf the 9 en route for return to USA in several weeks, change homeport new San Diego now Norfolk have left in march a deployment of 8/9 months.
Stennis and Truman completely ready COMPTUEX finish there are only the passage by the ammunition depot.

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ATLANTIC OCEAN (Oct. 14, 2015) Aviation Ordnanceman 1st Class Ray Hardy transports ammunition through the hangar bay of the aircraft carrier USS Dwight D. Eisenhower (CVN 69) during an ammunition onload with the Military Sealift Command dry cargo and ammunition ship USNS Robert E. Peary (T-AKE 5). Dwight D. Eisenhower is underway as part of the basic phase of the Optimized Fleet Response Plan (OFRP). (U.S. Navy photo by Mass Communication Specialist Seaman Anderson W. Branch/Released)

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