Off the Deck
Monday, November 16, 2020
Saturday, November 14, 2020
On Midrats 15 November 2020- Episode 567: Carriers: Workhorse & Warhorse with Megan Eckstein & Sam LaGrone
If you use Apple Podcasts, and miss the show live, you can pick up this episode and others and add Midrats to your podcast list simply by going to here. Or on Spreaker. Or on Spotify.Fewer carriers are deploying more even as repeated warning lights have been going off that we are expending in peace what we will need in war when it comes to personnel and materiel in carrier aviation.
How did we get here, where are we, and where are we going?
Using her article, No Margin Left: Overworked Carrier Force Struggles to Maintain Deployments After Decades of Overuse, as a starting point and diving it to some of the additional insights she gained while writing it, Megan Eckstein from USNINews will be joining us along with Sam LaGrone.
Megan Eckstein is the deputy editor for USNI News. She previously covered Congress and the Pentagon for Defense Daily, and the surface navy and amphibious operations as an associate editor for Inside the Navy. She began her career covering the military at the Frederick (Md.) News-Post, where she wrote about personnel and family issues, military medical research, local reserve and National Guard units and more. Eckstein is a 2009 graduate of University of Maryland College Park.
Sam LaGrone is the editor of USNI News. He has covered legislation, acquisition and operations for the Sea Services since 2009 and spent time underway with the U.S. Navy, U.S. Marine Corps and the Canadian Navy.
(U.S. Navy Photo by MC3 Anthony Collier)
Friday, November 13, 2020
Italian Navy Thwarts Potential Gulf of Guinea Pirate Attack
Italian frigate Martinengo assistance to M/V Torm Alexandra was concluded yesterday at 2030. A #BrigataMarinaSanMarco team released by helicopter, cleared the vessel allowing crew to regain possession and keep navigating safely
Video here.
All happened in international waters.
Photos and video from the Italian Navy.
By the way, what nice looking frigate.
Wednesday, November 11, 2020
Veterans Day
Just a brief thanks to all the men and women with whom I served on active duty and in the reserves.
You are the veterans I honor on this day.
Thanks for all you taught me about service, sacrifice, and duty.
Photo by Chris Davies from here
Good Information: Law School is a Bad Investment - for Most People
At Texas Public Policy Foundation, Andrew Gillen has been doing some excellent work analyzing higher education. In a recent study, he used the Obama administration’s “Gainful Employment” methodology to see how law schools would fare if they were put to that test.
What he found was that the great majority of the schools would fail, which is to say that their graduates don’t earn enough to reasonably cover the debts they incur in getting their degrees.
***There is a large need for lawyers in America, but much of the legal work doesn’t pay well enough to justify the huge expense in time and money it takes to get into the field. For that, the American Bar Association is the culprit, since it insists on a needlessly burdensome model of legal education.
My suggestion is that state governments stop mandating graduation from an ABA-accredited school before anyone can take the bar exam. Where one learns the material shouldn’t matter.
When I was in law school some states, like Georgia, still allowed people who "read the law" (didn't attend law school) to take the bar exam. Legal secretaries often took this route and became successful lawyers. The ABA model described has always seemed to me like a "restraint of trade" pretending to be a quality control mechanism.
The other big secret is that attending law school does not, at least in my experience, prepare you for the bar exams, or even, really, much in the way of the practice of law. Instead, aspiring lawyers take various bar preparation courses that give you a rapid survey of the things that appear on bar exams, usually tied to the important legal aspects of the state whose bar you'll be taking. For example, I took bar exams in Georgia and Texas. To get up to speed for these bar exams, I took bar review courses. Not surprisingly, the Texas bar exam had questions on oil and gas law, the Georgia exam did not. The Texas bar review course covered it sufficiently for me to pass the Texas bar. See here for a listing of such courses, some of which may cost in the thousands of dollars above your law school costs. See here
Looking back, my view is that law school should take, at most, about 18 months not 3 years, and the the bulk of the important legal learning is in the first 6 months. The rest of the time could better be used to take practical topics in areas where a student thinks they might want to practice, like estate planning, maritime law, or real property law. For those who plan to become criminal defense attorneys or prosecutors, legal clinics are a great help. The idea of legal apprentices needs to be revived.
I have seen the results of the overproduction of attorneys.
Much legal "document review" work is contracted out to firms that hire recent law school grads or use offshore document reviewers. All use some sort of computerized key word document review scan to highlight certain key words or word groupings to make the hunt for privileged documents easier. But there's still a great deal of need for attorney reviewers to scan thousands of pages of documents.
Competition in this review business is high, and the result is that some review firms pay the bare minimum for human reviewers.
The reviewers, many of whom have significant debt from both undergrad and law school loans, taked these jobs because they have few other options. Too inexperienced to start their own firm, too low on the quality of their law school and/or class standing totem pole to get the fabled "high paying jobs," they become contract attorneys for review firms pitched as "cost savers." Being a contract attorney generally means few, if any, employment benefits.
See a pitch for review services. See reviewer benefits and disadvantages
There are even firms that specialize in recruiting and staffing document reviewers, see here:
We created DocReviewers.com to provide a better document review experience.
That means simplifying the recruitment process. One DocReviewers.com application makes you eligible for projects from multiple agencies and firms, including those you haven’t already worked with. It also means automating your conflicts and availability. You’ll receive invites to projects happening when you’re available and conflicts forms will become a thing of the past.
More at “Objection! Law schools can be hazardous to students’ financial health.” (pdf)
Monday, November 09, 2020
Saturday, November 07, 2020
On Midrats 8 November 2020- Episode 566: Post-Election Melee
The 2020 election is over … well, mostly over. Though there are a few threads to clean up, the fabric the next few years natsec policy will be sewn from is pretty well known – so where does that lead us?If you use Apple Podcasts, and miss the show live, you can pick up this episode and others and add Midrats to your podcast list simply by going to here. Or on Spreaker. Or on Spotify.We’ll get to that – but once again we need to invest some time to talk about Midrats’s contribution to NavyCon!
EagleOne presented a segment for NavyCon2020A, we we’re going to talk about that a bit … and then we’ll pick up where our pre-election left off.
Open topic ... and open phones!
Thursday, November 05, 2020
China's Government: The Bully Who Wants to Steal Your Lunch Money
The Chinese Foreign Ministry has denied it is ratcheting up economic pressure to win diplomatic concessions. On Wednesday, a day after a verbal notice relayed by customs agents was delivered to traders telling them to stop importing Australian products, it said any restrictions on imports were a matter for individual companies.Truth in China is a pretty flexible concept, but its bully boy actions speak louder than its lies.
Monday, November 02, 2020
NAVYCON 2020A: Someone Made the Mistake of Inviting Me to Talk
NAVYCON 2020A goes live November 5 at 7pm Eastern
Lots of great presenters, interesting topics combining science fiction and military thinking together.
I think I was invited because I watched Star Trek (original series) when it first came on the air back in the 1960's. By the time most of the other presenters were born those shows were over 20 years old. Designated old guy, that's me.
Abstracts and background documents here.
You can register here.
I get toSaturday, October 31, 2020
Friday, October 30, 2020
Tuesday, October 27, 2020
Recurring Item: "China Threatens"
In the last 70 years, one side's ally on the Korean peninsula has prospered and its people are free from repression and it's not the one on whose behalf China intervened.Xi’s speech echoed – but greatly expanded on – the themes of his remarks on October 19. First, he emphasized the Korean War as a David-vs-Goliath struggle, with China standing up for justice against a far more powerful enemy. In his words, the war started when the U.S., acting from its “Cold War mentality,” “interfered” in the resolution of the Korean civil war (translation: North Korea invaded the South, and the United States intervened).
In this “extremely asymmetric” war, Xi said, China won with “less steel, more spirit” against an enemy equipped with “more steel, less spirit”: “The forces of China and North Korea defeated their armed-to-teeth rival and shattered the myth of invincibility of the U.S. army.”
***But Xi also tries hard to paint this as a victory not only for China, but the world. According to his speech, the end of the Korean War was a triumph for “peace and justice” and a blow to “imperialism.” He claimed that the war “greatly encouraged” the trend toward Asian countries’ independence and liberation from colonial forces.
***But Xi also warns that “the road ahead will not be smooth,” and advises China that it will need the martial spirit of the war to overcome today’s challenges. “It is necessary to speak to invaders in the language they know: that is, use war to prevent war… and use a [military] victory to win peace and respect,” Xi said.
Just sayin'
 |
| NASA image from 2014 |
I wouldn't be too proud of a war "victory" that leaves my ally looking like that at night, Mr. Xi.
Carrier-Based Navy F-18s May Get Hypersonic Cruise Missiles
Earlier in the piece is this-
USAF photo
One hypersonic program that Bussey revealed is already in the works would eventually put a hypersonic cruise missile on a carrier-based F-18.She said the effort, which is being run by the Air Force Research Lab and has been contracted to Boeing, is developing a dual mode scramjet design. “We’re doing this so that we can have an option for the Navy that is compatible with F-18 based on carriers. We hope to have that testing wrapped up in time to support any decisions that either the Air Force or the Navy will end up making in terms of future hypersonic cruise missile activities.”
Universities in the US, Australia, the UK and Canada are eligible to work on the DoD program, said Gillian Bussey, head of the Joint Hypersonic Transition Office. But Bussey added Texas A&M has strict counterintelligence protocols in place, and the Pentagon will have strict rules for who can participate in the often classified work. The team in particular wants to ensure “we’re not training Chinese scientists that are going to go help their programs for example.”Way cool!
Sunday, October 25, 2020
On Midrats 25 October 2020 - Episode 564: Pre-election Melee
Please join us at 5pm EDT for Midrats Episode 564: Pre-election Melee
If you use Apple Podcasts, and miss the show live, you can pick up this episode and others and add Midrats to your podcast list simply by going to here. Or on Spreaker. Or on Spotify.We don't do politics here ... but we do touch on how politics can impact national security issues ... so here we go!
Why has national security almost been a non-issue this election?
What to expect if Trump gets a second term.
What and who will come to the front if Biden is elected.
What will drive the challenge regardless of who gets elected?
Come join us for the full hour as we discuss this and more with an open chat room and open phones if you want to join in.
