Surface Warfare Quotes

The concept of surfaces and gaps is one of several concepts that bear on tactics. It is of the same level of importance as mission tactics and the main effort, which will be the subjects of the two tactics lessons following this one. All of the concepts should be constantly at work during the execution of battle.

Peace I leave with you; my peace I give to you; not as the world gives do I give to you. Let not your hearts be troubled, neither let them be afraid.” — John 14:27 Whenever events surface that cause us anxiety, they are an invitation from God to healing. They are similar to the warning lights on the dashboards of our cars. They let us know that something is wrong and needs to be remedied.

The greatest crime in human history was not the creation of the armaments of warfare and destruction of life, but the invention of hand mirror, which enticed humankind to peer at their surface appearance instead of seeking spiritual salvation. Prior to the invention of the mirror, people saw themselves through other people’s eyes or by looking deep within themselves.

Look at the pebbles in the bottom of the pool, Miss Emily, so round and smooth and shining." "Yes, but where did they get that beautiful polish, that satin skin, that lovely shape, Rebecca? Not in the still pool lying on the sands. It was never there that their angles were rubbed off and their rough surfaces polished, but in the strife and warfare of running waters. They have jostled against other pebbles, dashed against sharp rocks, and now we look at them and call them beautiful.

Employment of this concept of surfaces and gaps, then, gives us many advantages over what could be called slower moving forms of combat, where strength is thrown against strength. Attacking through gaps, avoiding surfaces, gives us an advantage of economy of force. If we are pitting strength against strength, assaulting enemy strong points, we are consuming our manpower as well as ammunition and supplies as we go along. If we go through the gaps, we are practicing economy of force. We are reaching our objective without using up our men. We are leaving the enemy behind. Because we are moving faster, we have the advantage of rapid exploitation.

The concept of surfaces and gaps demands leadership from the front as opposed to leadership from the rear. The commander must be where he can make swift decisions. He must be where the situation is developing. Obviously, leadership from the front had become a scarcity by World War I. J. F. C. Fuller, in his book, Generalship, wrote: In the World War, nothing was more dreadful to witness than a chain of men, starting with a battalion commander and ending with an army commander, sitting in telephone boxes, improvised or actual, talking, talking, talking, in place of leading, leading, leading. The result was unresponsive leadership and slow reactions.

With the lessons learned from the Mike SSN disaster in the North Sea off Norway, the Typhoon’s captain decided to remain where he was to await rescue. Mack knew the Russian captain had lost his cool; he was now in the South China Sea, where no Russian ships could come to his rescue. What’s more, Cheyenne had finally picked up the last Akula, whose captain had elected to pull off to be able to fight another day and which had managed to distance itself from the fray. Cheyenne was there as the Typhoon reached the surface. The Russian submarine had been severely damaged, but Mack ordered four more torpedoes into the defenseless Typhoon. There was seldom mercy in wartime, and Cheyenne’s and Mack’s orders were clear. If he had allowed the Typhoon to survive, its crew would have cut the missile hatches open with blow torches and completed their launch against Taiwan. The result of the additional four torpedoes exploding beneath the Typhoon caused major seawater system flooding. The ensuing scene was similar to the devastation experienced by the Yankee class SSBN southeast of the Bermudas years before. Only this time there was no capability to protect and remove the crew. Life rafts were put over the side, only to be attacked by the South China Sea shark population, so the crew watched helplessly from the huge, flat missile-tube deck. The oversized submarine started settling slowly deeper, the water level rising to within meters of the missile- tube deck, with the crew topside. The captain—the admiral-to-be-had already sent a message to his North Fleet Headquarters concerning the impending demise of his capital ship and the lack of help from his Akula escorts by name, two of which had been sunk. He had not been given any means to communicate with the Chinese, so he resorted to calling home. After that he went topside to be with his men, sat down, and held hands in a circle as their submarine slid beneath the surface of the sea, sailors to the end, for eternity.

When the rest of the world was engaged in seizing the open spaces, Germany was in the throes of religious warfare. The foundation of St. Petersburg by Peter the Great was a fatal event in the history of Europe; and St. Petersburg must therefore disappear utterly from the earth's surface. Moscow, too. Then the Russians will retire into Siberia. It is not by taking over the miserable Russian hovels that we shall establish ourselves as masters in the East. The German colonies must be organised on an altogether higher plane. We have never before driven forward into empty spaces. The German people have absorbed both northern and southern Austria, and the original inhabitants are still there; but they were Sorb-Wends, members of basic European stock, with nothing in common with the Slavs. As for the ridiculous hundred million Slavs, we will mould the best of them to the shape that suits us, and we will isolate the rest of them in their own pig-styes; and anyone who talks about cherishing the local inhabitant and civilising him, goes straight off into a concentration camp !

May 5th 2018 was one of the first nice spring days the beautiful State of Maine had seen since being captured by the long nights and cold days of winter. Ursula, my wife of nearly 60 years and I were driving north on the picturesque winding coastal route and had just enjoyed the pleasant company of Beth Leonard and Gary Lawless at their interesting book store “Gulf of Maine” in Brunswick. I loved most of the sights I had seen that morning but nothing prepared us for what we saw next as we drove across the Kennebec River on the Sagadahoc Bridge. Ursula questioned me about the most mysterious looking vessel we had ever seen. Of course she expected a definitive answer from me, since I am considered a walking encyclopedia of anything nautical by many. Although I had read about this new ship, its sudden appearance caught me off guard. “What kind of ship is that?” Ursula asked as she looked downstream, at the newest and most interesting stealth guided missile destroyer on the planet. Although my glance to the right was for only a second, I was totally awed by the sight and felt that my idea of what a ship should look like relegated me to the ashbin of history where I would join the dinosaurs and flying pterosaurs of yesteryear. Although I am not privileged to know all of the details of this class of ship, what I do know is that the USS Zumwalt (DDG 1000) first underwent sea trials in 2015. The USS Michael Monsoor (DDG-1001) delivered to the Navy in April 2018, was the second ship this class of guided missile destroyers and the USS Lyndon B. Johnson (DDG-1002) now under construction, will be the third and final Zumwalt-class destroyer built for the United States Navy. It was originally expected that the cost of this class would be spread across 32 ships but as reality set in and costs overran estimates, the number was reduced to 24, then to 7 and finally to 3… bringing the cost-per-ship in at a whopping $7.5 billion. These guided missile destroyers are primarily designed to be multi-mission stealth ships with a focus on naval gunfire to support land attacks. They are however also quite capable for use in surface and anti-aircraft warfare. The three ship’s propulsion is similar and comes from two Rolls-Royce gas turbines, similar to aircraft jet engines, and Curtiss-Wright electrical generators. The twin propellers are driven by powerful electric motors. Once across the bridge the landscape once again became familiar and yet different. Over 60 years had passed since I was here as a Maine Maritime Academy cadet but some things don’t change in Maine. The scenery is still beautiful and the people are friendly, as long as you don’t step on their toes. Yes, in many ways things are still the same and most likely will stay the same for years to come. As for me I like New England especially Maine but it gets just a little too cold in the winter!

according to one naval historian his submersible was probably nothing more than a large leather-covered barge . . . weighted until the crew was below the surface’.7 Drebbel’s craft merely had water washing over its hull rather than actually diving, the fast-flowing current of the Thames assisting the exertions of the oarsmen. With the English naval establishment losing

Great faith surfaces in great problems - have faith

Naval Warfare: For surface vessels and even submarines there was much continuity between the First and Second World Wars. The battleships, cruisers, destroyers, and submarines of the 1939-45 period were generally bigger, faster, and better armed than their 1914-18 predecessors but not fundamentally different. Indeed, they had not changed much since the Russo-Japanese War of 1905. Yet naval warfare was nevertheless transformed by the introduction of aviation. Fleets that were once built around battleships came to be built around aircraft carriers instead. Aircraft proved superior not just to conventional surface ships but also, in the Battle of the Atlantic, to submarines as well. German U-boats preying on Allied shipping were foiled through a variety of means including convoying of merchants ships and the use of radar and sonar. But the weapon that proved most effective was an aircraft dropping depth charges. The dispatch of long-range B-24s equipped with the latest radar to patrol the North Atlantic in 1943 helped to turn the tide against the U-boats. The proliferation of small escort carriers also allowed air cover for convoys even in the middle of the ocean. Submarines proved more effective in teh Pacific, where the vast distances precluded effective patrolling by aircraft and where the Japanese did not devleop the types of advanced antisubmarine techniques employed by the Allies in the Atlantic. U.S. submarines took a heavy toll on Japanese merchantmen and warships alike once they managed to fix the problems that bedeviled their Mark 14 torpedo early in the war. "A force comprising less than 2 percent of U.S. Navy personnel," naval historian Ronald Spector would write of U.S. submariners, "had accounted for 55 percent of Japan's losses at sea." The torpedo, whether launched by submarines, surface ships, or airplanes, proved the biggest ship-killer of the war.

The content of the ego varies from person to person, but in every ego the same structure operates. In other words: Egos only differ on the surface. Deep down they are all the same. In what way are they the same? They live on identification and separation. When you live through the mind-made self comprised of thought and emotion that is the ego, the basis for your identity is precarious because thought and emotion are by their very nature ephemeral, fleeting. So every ego is continuously struggling for survival, trying to protect and enlarge itself. To uphold the I-thought, it needs the opposite thought of “the other.” The conceptual “I” cannot survive without the conceptual “other.” The others are most other when I see them as my enemies. At one end of the scale of this unconscious egoic pattern lies the egoic compulsive habit of faultfinding and complaining about others. Jesus referred to it when he said, “Why do you see the speck that is in your brother’s eye, but do not notice the log that is in your own eye?”1 At the other end of the scale, there is physical violence between individuals and warfare between nations. In the Bible, Jesus’ question remains unanswered, but the answer is, of course: Because when I criticize or condemn another, it makes me feel bigger, superior.

Ball in the Well As future rulers of the land, the princes of the ancient kingdom of Hastings were required to master various skills like archery and sword play. Their grandfather, Peter decided that they should have only the best teacher and so he was on the constant lookout for such a person. One day, the princes were playing in the garden with their ball, which unfortunately fell into the palace well.   The princes ran to the well and peered inside. All they could see was the bright red ball floating on top of the water far down in the well. The princes were disappointed because they could not continue with their game. Just then, they saw a young man dressed in black clothes passing by. From his dress, they knew immediately that was a sage, a wise and pious man with little concern for the cares of the world. They called out to him. “Sir, can you help us?” When he approached them, Durand, the eldest prince, told him how their ball had fallen into the well and they could not reach it. The man smiled. “You are princes of royal blood and you cannot solve such a simple problem?” he said. “Now watch me.” The princes looked on as the sage plucked a blade of grass, chanted some holy words and threw it into the well.   Amazingly, the blade of grass hit the surface of the ball and remained stuck on it. The sage took a second blade of grass and again after chanting some words, threw it into the well. The second blade of grass stuck to the first blade of grass. The man kept chanting and throwing blades of grass into the well. Each blade stuck to the earlier blade of grass and soon formed a chain leading to the very top of the well. The sage then used this to pull out the ball. The princes stared at him in astonishment.   Later, they told their grandfather what had happened. He then asked them to describe the man who he realised was none other than Sayer, a famous warrior who had given up fighting to become a sage. So their grandfather hastened to find him and never stopped until he persuaded Sayer to come and teach the princes how to shoot and to fight with a sword. Sayer faithfully taught the princes all kinds of warfare and military skills. As a result, the kingdom of Hastings became extremely powerful. In the process, Sayer became one of the most important and powerful men in the land. Moral of story: Once skills are learned they are not easily forgotten.

Frank Fiorini, better known as Frank Sturgis, had an interesting career that started when he quit high school during his senior year to join the United States Marine Corps as an enlisted man. During World War II he served in the Pacific Theater of Operations with Edson’s Raiders, of the First Marine Raiders Battalion under Colonel “Red Mike.” In 1945 at the end of World War II, he received an honorable discharge and the following year joined the Norfolk, Virginia Police Department. Getting involved in an altercation with his sergeant, he resigned and found employment as the manager of the local Havana-Madrid Tavern, known to have had a clientele consisting primarily of Cuban seamen. In 1947 while still working at the tavern, he joined the U.S. Navy’s Flight Program. A year later, he received an honorable discharge and joined the U.S. Army as an Intelligence Officer. Again, in 1949, he received an honorable discharge, this time from the U.S. Army. Then in 1957, he moved to Miami where he met former Cuban President Carlos Prío, following which he joined a Cuban group opposing the Cuban dictator Batista. After this, Frank Sturgis went to Cuba and set up a training camp in the Sierra Maestra Mountains, teaching guerrilla warfare to Castro’s forces. He was appointed a Captain in Castro’s M 26 7 Brigade, and as such, he made use of some CIA connections that he apparently had cultivated, to supply Castro with weapons and ammunition. After they entered Havana as victors of the revolution, Sturgis was appointed to a high security, intelligence position within the reorganized Cuban air force. Strangely, Frank Sturgis returned to the United States after the Cuban Revolution, and mysteriously turned up as one of the Watergate burglars who were caught installing listening devices in the National Democratic Campaign offices. In 1973 Frank A. Sturgis, E. Howard Hunt, Eugenio R. Martínez, G. Gordon Liddy, Virgilio R. “Villo” González, Bernard L. Barker and James W. McCord, Jr. were convicted of conspiracy. While in prison, Sturgis feared for his life if anything he had done, regarding his associations and contacts, became public knowledge. In 1975, Sturgis admitted to being a spy, stating that he was involved in assassinations and plots to overthrow undisclosed foreign governments. However, at the Rockefeller Commission hearings in 1975, their concluding report stated that he was never a part of the CIA…. Go figure! In 1979, Sturgis surfaced in Angola where he trained and helped the rebels fight the Cuban-supported communists. Following this, he went to Honduras to train the Contras in their fight against the communist-supported Sandinista government. He also met with Yasser Arafat in Tunis, following which he was debriefed by the CIA. Furthermore, it is documented that he met and talked to the Venezuelan terrorist Ilich Ramírez Sánchez, or Carlos the Jackal, who is now serving a life sentence for murdering two French counter intelligence agents. On December 4, 1993, Sturgis suddenly died of lung cancer at the Veterans Hospital in Miami, Florida. He was buried in an unmarked grave south of Miami…. Or was he? In this murky underworld, anything is possible.

A neurosis is a poor solution to conflict, or, more correctly, not a solution at all but a bad compromise. Underground, the conflict persists in a disguised form and, since the real conflict is not resolved, a neurosis perpetuates itself in a series of attempted compromises—neurotic symptoms. On the surface a neurosis resembles a cold war between two nations where strong demands are made by both sides and temporary compromises are achieved in order to avoid war. But since the basic issues are never dealt with, fresh grievances and demands are constantly in the making and more and more compromises and bad bargains are required to keep the conflict from breaking out into the open. The analogy of a cold war suggests another parallel. If each of the nations in conflict must be constantly prepared for the possibility of open warfare, it must expend larger and larger amounts of its wealth for defense purposes, leaving less and less of the national income for investment in other vital areas of national welfare. Eventually, so much of the national income and the energy of its people is tied up in defense that very little of either is available for the pursuit of healthy human goals. Here, a neurosis affords an exact parallel. For a neurosis engages a large amount of the energy of a human personality in order to prevent the outbreak of conflict. Energy which should be employed for the vital interests of the personality and the expansion of the personality must be diverted in large quantities for defense purposes. The result is impoverishment of the ego, a serious restriction of human functioning. Whenever the underground conflict within the personality threatens to break out in the open, anxiety is created by the anticipation of danger. Anxiety then sets the whole process of neurotic defense and compromise into action once again, in the self-perpetuating process we have described. It would be correct to say that anxiety generates the neurotic process, but we must not deduce from this that anxiety is in itself a pathological manifestation. Anxiety need not produce a neurosis. In fact, anxiety may serve the widest variety of useful and healthy adaptations in the human personality. WHAT

He employed a weaponized pathogen, a virus with a short half-life sprayed onto a surface he knew his target would touch, in this case the door handle of his target’s personal vehicle. It was genetic warfare, the next evolution of chemical warfare. Half as messy as a snipper bullet but twice as effective, it left no trace after the virus’s half-life expired.

A “can-do” attitude drove sailors and surface warfare officers to deploy in unworthy ships without basic seamanship skills. The navy wanted to preserve that “can-do” attitude, Admiral Richardson told Pentagon reporters upon the report’s release, but “when that becomes ‘I’ve got to go out at any cost,’ it becomes toxic.

the political strategy of divide, demonize, and conquer has worked for centuries in the United States—since the days of slavery—to keep poor and working people angry at (and fearful of) one another rather than uniting to challenge unjust political and economic systems. At times, the tactics of white supremacy have led to open warfare. Other times, the divisions and conflicts are less visible, yet lurk beneath the surface.

The French government employs teams of démineurs, roving bomb-disposal specialists, who respond to calls when villagers discover shells; they collect and destroy 900 tons of unexploded munitions each year. More than 630 French démineurs have died in the line of duty since 1946. Like those shells, the First World War itself has remained in our lives, below the surface, because we live in a world that was so much formed by it and by the industrialized total warfare it inaugurated.

I loved the sound he could get on tape for my drums. In rock music, getting this right is still one of the great tests for any engineer. Since the drum's original use was to spur on troops to warfare, rather than winning over a maiden's fair heart, it is hardly surprising that many a battle has been fought over the drum sound. The kit - virtually the only remaining acoustic instrument in a standard rock context - consists of a number of different constituent parts which insist on vibrating and rattling through a remarkable range of sounds and surfaces. Worse, hitting one element will set up a chain vibration in the others. In the days of four-track recording, the engineer needed to capture, but keep separate, the firm impact of the bass drum and the hi-hat for marking the time, the full fat sound of the snare drum, the tuned tones of the tom-toms and the sizzle or splash of the cymbals. Setting up the mikes to capture this is one of the black arts of the business, and is a pretty good way of detecting the best practitioners of them. Alan's full range of engieering skills were self-evident as we began to piece the record together.

We fight our wars and leave in our wake the redolent reek of suffering and misery. These plains are vast, are they not? What terrible cost would we face if we just left each other alone? An end to this squabble over land - Father Shadow knows, no-one really owns it. The game of possession belongs to us, not to the rocks and earth, the grasses and the creatures walking the surface in their fraught struggle to survive.