Part I, Part II, Part III, Part V, Part VI,
Part VII, Part VIII

Part IX

Please pardon the skipped month, but if you have read the other three parts, I’m now going to just shift to the events of 20 years ago. I’ll work on “Life Between the Catapults, or What I Did on My Indian Ocean Cruise” will come later.

When you last read about the SARATOGA/CCDG-8 Battle Group, we had received orders to head for the Suez Canal. That we did. It was still Janaury, and we made our way into the Red Sea and to Port Suez in full EMCOM at top speed that conditions allowed.

We made the 24 hour long northern transit and headed for the Ionian Sea (the central part of the Mediterranean Ocean, to join with the CORAL SEA/CCG-2 Battle Group. With the join up, Admiral David Jerimiah (COMCRUDESGRU 8) was named Commander, Battle Force Zulu. With this entery into the Med, the meetings aboard SARATOGA (CV-60) between Adm Jerimiah and Admiral Frank Kelso, COMSIXTHFLT, began as well.

Muammar Khadaffi had once more proclaimed his claim to the Gulf of Sidra as Libyan territorial waters (first made in 1973), and told the world he would defend his territory. Thus began what we called “OVL” (pronounced “oval”) for “Operations in the Vicinity of Libya.”

I can’t recall all the dates associated with the Ops in late January, but off we went, two CVBGs worth of assets, to challenge the claims of Khadaffi to the rights to navigate in international waters. It was more than just to drive about in the water, waving the flag, but also to carry the message that President Reagan was ready to muster significant military capability to counter state supported terrorism. In December, 1985, Libyan supported terrorists had bombed discos in Germany, killing several people, to include US service personnel.

This series of operations gave me the opportunity to see the effects of moving large forces around, and the intricacies involved. I was afforded a special seat to this “play,” with my squadron, DESRON 32, being assigned as the Battle Force ASW Commander. When we moved aboard the SARATOGA per CINCPACFLT doctrine (The ASW Commander for the battle group will be embarked on the CV) the previous December, we were berthed with Adm Jerimiah’s staff (I roomed with the Intelligence Officer) and we ate in the Admiral’s Mess. The good side of this was we generally knew most of what was going on from these close arrangements, but the bad side was the CCDG-8 Ops Boss tended to look at us as augmetees to his staff. There were a few discussions over who could task who, but things worked out for the best.

My assignment was the Combat Systems Material Officer, so I had to keep the handle on logistics for the ASW ships, and I regularly interacted with the CCDG-8 logistics guys, so I got a glimpse into the “big picture” regulalry.

On top of all these things, the USS AMERICA Battle Group was also dispatched from stateside to make the Battle Force Zulu a three CV formation. That hadn’t happened since the Vietnam Conflict….

Things got raelly busy, and for the first time for me and many others, the “bad guys” were not the “orange” forces, and there were no umpires, nor back door copies of the enemy’s schedule of events….More on that in the coming posts on this topic.

Side note: The most favored movie for the Admiral (and therefore his staff as well) was “Zulu”, starring Michael Caine.

Just a thought…if you have about $80-100K in spare change, and a need, then this just might do the trick.

The best part (besides service in a serene place, far from the maddening crowds, is it’s “parachutable.”

Remember the young man of 16 who disappeared from Florida in Dec, 2005, to head for Iraq in search of a story for his journalism class?

It looks like his parents did know…

And there isn’t such a jounalism class…

And his father has been arrested for forging US Passports and Military IDs before…

And they live in a $4M dollar house…

So what’s the real story?

Read an expose here.

Update 03/14/2006: From a cheesel (a commenter on the LGF thread):

#27 cheesel 3/14/2006 09:29AM PST
#5, Curt…

New Muslim flick–Boy tries to join Hezbollah to fight the infidels:

“Ferris Hassan’s Day Off”.

Thank you, Cinnamon Stillwell and Tom Blumer for doing some real reporting!

Thanks to Mudville Gazette for the Open Post!

Ben Garrison, one of the crew members of the USS MASON (DE-529) told me the movie “Proud” would be showing in NYC @ the Magic Johnson Theater beginning on the 10th of this month.

Quick background: The USS MASON was the only large ship in WWII manned by an African American crew. The story is quite amazing.

Ben also mentioned the movie would be being released on DVD soon.

Thanks to Mudville Gazette for the Open Post!

Ah, the wonderful world of OPDEC….

I spent an afternoon with the widow of a B-29 pilot, who flew with the 20th Air Force in the Pacific Theater. Walter was the Co-Pilot of the “Ancient Mariner” (“Z Square 53”).

She let me sort through many of her husband’s books and then she told me an interesting story.

It turns out the whole deal about eating your carrots to improve your eyesight was actually operational deception to cover for the fact that the Norden bomb sight had been placed in service. So long as the enemy believed our aircrews just had eagle eyes from eating many carrots, then they’d not realize there was a piece of equipment they needed to place on their capture and exploit plans. Just think, it was such a good plan that it has hung on all these years in the common knowledge data base of parents and those trying to get that little advantage hunting or flying.

Moral of the story: You can tell your mom you won’t see any better if you eat your carrots….nor any worse if you don’t.

Update on Vegtable Mythology – 3/7/2006: I had breakfast with my friend, Jim, Sr and told him this story. He said they were sort of force fed carrots as pilots, and also said he didn’t have much need for a Norden Bomb Sight, so he was never in on the plan to confuse the enemies of Democracy.

Prototype 19D anti-terror device. Go and read the technical data!

HT: Mudville Gazette’s Open Post.

From Part I, the “Bottom Line”: The F-14 Tomcat was a superior piece of technology that would counter the threat posed by the Soviet Union and her client states. All things have their purpose.

In this part, I will present some things from my life that I saw of the influence of the F-14. Way back in 1971, I went to take a physical and when asked to “read line 6 on the chart on the back of the door.,” I squinted and said little for about 10 seconds> Next I heard: “Do you wear glasses?” Next I thought: “I CAN”T FLY!”

Yep, it was true. No 20/20 for me. In retrospect, I then also realized why it was sometimes a challenge to read things the teachers wrote on the chalkboard, but I had never connected it with bad eye sight, just to liking to sit in the back of the classroom. I also should have known that if both parents wear glasses, it most likely the offspring will also be so afflicted. Anyhow, as you might have grasped, I had planned on being a go fast kind of guy for many years before that fateful day in 11th grade.

Fast forward to fall of 1975. It was the early part of Senior year and time to tell the people in the NROTC office which career path I wanted to go for. I still wanted to fly, but knew the only opportunity was to be a Naval Flight Officer (NFO) (also referred to as the “Guy in Back” (GIB)). I sat down with the officer teaching us and asked his opinion of that choice. His advice was to look for something else I would enjoy, for, at that time, he said, you could be the best GIB in the world, and even a great leader, but…..it was rare to make it past Lt Commander. It seems the pilots had a lock on the upper level ranks, and also things like command of anything avaition. It certainly didn’t sound like a career path for the option of longevity. Message to midshipman closing in on commissioning date was: You better love being the guy in the shadows due to your bad choices in genetic stock.

Ok, other options: Explosives Ordnance Disposal (EOD)? Wow! Get paid to play with things that go “BOOM!” and skydive/parachute and SCUBA dive all day (when not doing PT)? Sign me UP! Not so fast, due to the rule change that very year which required you to serve a tour in “Unrestricted Line” prior to applying to be accepted in the EOD. Ted Strong, discussed here had told me how much fun it was few months earlier when we met at the NAS Cubi Point O Club. So, scratch option #2. So, I told them I wanted to dress like this:

to go to work in the Navy. That one worked. I would become a Salvor! Well, to make a long story shorter, a discovered when a whole bunch of diving school instructors were all over you at the bottom of the pool, I was getting a little too stressed, so I chose to take a different path, hence my adventures for the next 19 years in Surface Warfare. I did learn you can swim, tap dance on the slit at the bottom of the Ancostia River, and do so much more while wearing 198 lbs of “stuff,” and that “Shorty,” an Army Sgt assigned to the school had little short, stubby legs, and he could beat us in any calestenics, but we’d just leave him behind on the morning 4 mile run.

The F-14 is now reaching significant number in the Fleet at the time. THe special thing is the NFO, specifically called a “Radar Intercept Officer” (RIO) in the back seat became a significant player in the full use of the F-14 system. As a matter of fact, the pilots became relegated to being bus drivers, so the GIB could get to wear he could open up a 55 gal drum of brush on whoop ass for any Soviet bombers coming inbound to the CVBG. The old “lineage” of pilots being supreme beings, in the footsteps of Eddie Rickenbacker, Richard Bong, Manfred von Richtofen and Werner Voss were fading. The crack in the armor began to split. The pilots still got a workout in the Naval Fighter Weapons School (TOPGUN), in case they had to cozy up to the bad guys, yet they had no capability to target and launch the AIM-54 Phoenix missile. The RIO did the job.

That is the crucial way that the F-14 Tomcat community, from my outside view. By the middle of my career(mid 80s), some NFOs began to be selected for squardon commands. As time went on, that “ticket punch” than opened doors for the NFOs to command wings and eventually aircraft carriers.

Another phenomena of the times was the economics of the late 70s – early 80s made it better for pilots, particulalry multi-engine rated, to get out after their obligated service was copleted. The airlines were recruiting heavily, and many pilots went. I remember the day I saw the ALNAV message that announced that NFOs could apply for pilot training, if they had served two years in their community. If selected, you would move forward (sideways) in the same airframe only, so P-3 ATACCOs could become P-3 pilots, and F-14 RIOs would go to the front part of the Tomcat cockpit. The vision requirments for the move were 20/200 (correctable). At the time, I was 20/50.

Had I been able to know this in 1975, I’d have gutted out two years in the backseat, knowing I could fly, and eventually have a fair shot at command. Water under the bridge, and I still did exciting things as a “shoe.”

As a note on the diving career that never happened, they made a Special Operations designator (not to be confused with Special Warfare (the SEALS)), which was comprised of Salvage Divers, EOD and Ordnance Management experts. Had I been a diver, I could have entered that program. I didn’t and what happened was there were only 6 CAPT (O-6) billets in the entire community, and the 4 stripers wouldn’t retire, so some great guys never made it very far in rank, only because of personnal issues, and nothing to do with their performance. Most likely, I’d have made LCDR and been “continued” until 20 years, then told to retire. One classmate from the Naval War College, Ed Kittel, happened to have this happen to him. He didn’t get to the NWC because he was just someone filling a billet, he was there because he was very good at what he did. Ed Kittel became a special agent in the FAA, and worked on many crash cases after his retirement in 1992.

The “Bottom Line” here: The Tomcat manning conditions helped elevate the NFO to a greater professional plateau in the eyes of the “system.” Not only did it affect the RIOs in the F-14s, but it helped all the NFOs in all airframes become more of value to the Navy.

Thanks to Mudville Gazette for the Open Post!

Thanks to Cao’s Blog for the OTB!

Idle reading night a few days ago brought this to me. I was reading Seed, a new periodical I just noticed, for the article “The Harsh Light of Science.” The premise is the ansgt of both the scientists and the religious leaders having a serious scientific study of religion, but I digress.

This quote on page 54 (Feb/Mar 2006 issue) jumped right out at me”

“For instance, eating disorders, such as anorexia nervosa and bulemia are much less common among women from Muslim countries in which the physical attrativeness of women plays a muted role, relative to that in Westernized countries.”

There you have it. It’s the evil western world destroying women again.
Thanks to Little Green Footballs for the Open Thread!

Last Trap of the Tomcat – Part II

I began this post on 2/22/2006. I filed it as a draft. Today, whislt driving about for work, I began to ponder the effect of the F-14 Tomcat on my “generation.” Part I will cover some history, and in that, a discussion of how/why the Military gets such toys, and also why it quits using them, too.

Military.com reports the last F-14 combat mission ever has occurred.

The “Anytime, Baby!” guys got their airframe about the time I was commissioned. A few years later, as counter-battery in the recruiting wars, the Navy gleefully helped Hollywood make “Top Gun.”

I stopped there, but had captured the article. Here we go….

The Tomcat went into service the same year I did, 1972. It, as with all other equipment the US Military buys, was bought with a purpose in mind, with the operational requirements laid out by a bunch of people trying to project into the future, many years before then. Being a major procurement program to replace the McDonald F-4 Phantom II, the entire process received an equivalent amount of scrutiny by all levels of government.

The story within this story is instructive for those who often wonder “What were they thinking?” when they see some piece of expensive military equipment being a perceived “misfit” in it’s role of the moment. The beginning of a development is a “threat assessment.” What does the bad guy have now (since you just got surprised) or what do you think he is building, based on available intelligence? The answer to the threat assessment then makes the “OR” (operational requirement) pretty clear. You have to be able to counter the threat. The ORs come from the “Fleet” (in the case of the Navy), making sure the people currently assigned to the duties of war fighting make the major input to the capabilities the new system will have to meet. Shore duty “pukes” and contractors have to sit on the side lines and bite their tongues, or lobby at the bar after the big meeting, hoping to get their 2 cents into the equation. The purpose is keep the people who are not going to have their body parts on the line from “gold plating” projects, at the expense of the tax payers’ good graces. For all the grumbling about these decisions, know it’s a pretty good system to keep costs down, but, yes, sometimes a really expensive hammer does show up in a project plan.

Along the way in all of this, the ORs become reality when the actual contractor is chosen to build the item. In most all cases, this comes many years later, and the warfighters who suffered through the many hours of meetings, at the expense of their professional development, have moved on the retirement or shore duty, and now the people behind them have to keep the flame burning and answering questions of the contractors, the Pentagon at large, and taxpayers. This can be a daunting task, for even if the note taking in the early days was exceptionally well done, there never seems to be the time, nor were many of the side conversations that supported some of the decisions captured to aid in the present discussions. In this, the oversight of the Operational Test Force comes into play, and the project officers “ride herd” on the Fleet guys and the contractors to make sure the equipment does what was laid out in the system requirements, which came from the ORs.

That’s the short way into the F-14 story. In the 60s, the Soviet Union was building up its fleet for defense of the Motherland. While the oceans provided a great buffer, our ability to conduct long range air strikes with several varieties of conventional and nuclear capable platforms, such as the A-3D Sky Warrior, the A-4 Skyhawk, and the A-6 Intruder, the Soviets wanted to take out our carriers before they could get within launch range of the homeland. The counter force to ours was not Soviet aircraft carriers, but massive amounts of SNAF (Soviet Naval Air Force) bombers, equipped with supersonic cruise missiles. Additionally, they put guided missile submarines (SSG/SSGN) to sea, and also put the missile capability aboard surface ships, mostly of the cruiser size, when it was a missile designed to sink air craft carriers quickly.

Soviet TU-16 “Badgers,” TU-95 “Bears,” and later TU-22 “Blinders” and TU-160 “Backfires” would come in massive formations, guided towards CVBGs (Carrier Battle Groups) by forward observer platforms, usually of the TU-95 “Bear D” variant, using it’s underslung “Big Bulge” search radar and video data link to pass the information of the location to the armed aircraft, submarines and surface ships, waiting over our long range radar horizons. The bombers would be armed with cruise missiles that were essentially the size of a small fighter aircraft, packed with explosives. The AS-2 “Kipper,” AS-4 “Kitchen,” -5 “Kelt,” and -6s “Kingfish” were all in this category, capable of being launched from 100 to 200 miles from the carriers. The AS-4 and -6 were particularly nasty, as the climbed high, then approached at several times the speed of sound, and then pitched over towards the target at a very steep angle, making it exceptionally difficult for our gun systems to track and engage the missile in its terminal phase (think ORs for those gun systems that did not envision that threat capability when they were developed, rather than people consciously building a “bad” system).

Welcome to the party the Grumman F-14 Tomcat. Admiral “Hammerin’ Hank” Mustin, while the Second Fleet Commander, often stated his doctrine of “shoot the archer, not the arrow” to say the easier shot is the one at the sub, or not too supersonic, large profile bomber, than to deal with multiple, small, high speed inbound cruise missile, and the F-14 did this in spades. Capt Lex may yuck it up that the F-14 is gone, but even he knows it was the right platform for its time. In a match up between the two aircraft for some DACT (dissimilar aircraft training), and “BVR” (beyond visual range) weaponry being used as it was intended, the “Anytime, Baby!” aviators would be the first ones back with notches in the belts, drinking a few at the O Club and saying things like “Yeah, we had them on radar in plenty of time to smoke them like cheap cigars at about 100NM. You should have heard them whining all the way to impact about how it was so unfair for us to have Phoenix onboard!”
>/p>

The AIM-54 Phoenix missile, targeted by the AN/AWG-9 radar was more than a match for the Soviet bombers. Being able to be punched off the deck with 6 AIM-54s, it could “buster” (in afterburners) out to Combat Air Patrol (CAP) station on a threat vector quickly (combat radius of 500 miles +), being capable of doing more than twice the speed of sound (think 1500+ mph as a round figure, and BTW, that’s Mach 2+!). The AWG-9 radar could scan a sector, and simultaneously track a target for each missile. The AIM-54 range was demonstrated to be in excess of 100 NM. Add a CAP station about 200 miles down the threat axis and a few sections of F-14s, and the bad guys were going to have tough sledding to reach their launch points. More than likely, they would be swimming with the fish before they could get their cruise missiles off their rails, which, from my perspective, was a very, very good thing. Oh, I forgot to mention, not only could these cruise missiles of the Soviets go really fast, and carry a lot of explosives (enough to do serious damage to an armored aircraft carrier), they could carry nuclear warheads, as well, which meant those of us in the “screen” in small boys, or aboard the supporting oilers and ammunition ships in the vicinity would be in serious danger as well. I really liked the idea of the F-14 being the main fighter in service.

Compare and contrast this with the oh, so sexy “lawn dart” known as the F/A-18 Hornet. Is this an aircraft the pilots dearly love? Does it have a really cool radar that does serious magic, can be used in air-to-air or air-to-ground modes? Yes, it does. Can it be equally at home yanking and banking in ACM (air combat maneuvers), as well as “mud moving?” Yep, that too. Can the Hornet dogfight successfully without having the jettison stores meant for a ground target? Check. Does the Hornet have the “legs” to get way out on station and still put a major hurting on a bomber with a 200 NM reach? Not so sure (with out lots of tankers, which then decrements the number of fighters being fighters)? Nope. Interestingly enough, the initial OR for the F/A-18 had a combat radius that wasn’t attainable during operational testing. It seems the then SECNAV, John Lehman directed the combat radius for the F/A-18 in the test documents be lessened, so that we could get the production rolling, hence the knick name of “lawn darts” being applied. Toss them up, and they come back down. The F/A-18E/F “Super Hornets” that came along later provided more fuel tank space in the wings, addressing this issue.

Enough for now….if ou’ve hung on this long, stay tuned for Part II, where I will discuss how the Tomcat was a revolutionary aircraft in the annals of the Navy from a personnel perspective…

Thanks to Mudville Gazette for the Open Post!

Thanks to Little Green Footballs for the Open Thread!