Insight from our Nation’s Best

The role and responsibility of our military as outlined in the preamble to the United States Constitution, ‘We the People of the United States, in Order to form a more perfect Union, establish Justice, ensure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defence, promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity, do ordain and establish this Constitution for the United States of America.’

Marion and I were fortunate to see first-hand how our Navy “provides for the common defence” of our nation. We spent a day with our son-in-law and his fellow sailors and aviators aboard the USS Carl Vinson. We were allowed to see the operation of the ship and aircraft and meet many of the men and women in uniform. Combining that one day with my forty-year experience building USAF bases and nuclear weapons facilities left me with much to think about on that late-night flight back to Albuquerque.  

In the mid-1970s, I briefly worked on the docks at the Alameda Naval Air Station when a carrier was docked. I remember being disappointed with the chipped paint and the streaks of rust that I saw. Knowing that the CVN-70 is a forty-year-old ship, I was impressed. Not only did I not see any chipped paint or streaks of rust, but all the surfaces were also in great shape and clean. I saw no lock-outs/tag-outs for systems that were not operational.

Once we sailed out of the San Diego harbor into the Pacific, the CVN-70 aircraft flew by all of us on the flight deck. When the F-35 Lightning (too fast to get a good photo of the vapor cone) and the F-18 Super Hornet (landed and took off) flew by, I could feel the power of their engines in my chest. Seeing the E-2 Hawkeye (fly-by) in a steep bank around the ship seemed to defy gravity. The H-60 Seahawk (land and weapon display) displayed its many roles.   

It was the men and women in uniform that truly impressed me.  Without them, the ship is just a hunk of steel and the aircraft sheets of aluminum. They showed pride in their role of defending the United States, understanding how to carry out their responsibility and ability to work with one another. An individual placing bags of chips on the table for lunch told me she was responsible for ensuring everyone on the ship is fed three meals a day with the best possible ingredients (our breakfast and lunch were better than most restaurants I have eaten in). I met one of the rescue swimmers assigned to the Seahawks. I thought, “Wow, you are called upon when everything has gone wrong, probably in awful conditions, and must act without hesitation.” His attitude was, "I just sit in the back."  We had the opportunity to get behind a fifty-caliber gun placement and look out over the ocean. I asked the sailor how he could hit anything 2,000 yards out, and his response was you wait for them to get closer. I thought, “They are closer to you, too, and there is little protection as you defend the ship.”  

Having worked thirty years at a nuclear weapons facility, I tend to notice many things most people don’t. I will not discuss in detail what I observed, only that it was apparent that most likely everyone had secondary roles, including fire suppression, damage control, damage repair, or defense against an attack. Like working at a nuclear weapons facility, I would assume everyone is on edge until they are out of harm’s way.

It was clear to me that the men and women of the USS Carl Vinson understood their role and their responsibility to the American People, “provide for the common defence.” But do the American People understand our responsibility to the men and women of the USS Carl Vinson and all the men and women in uniform?

We must stop adding to the military’s primary responsibility, “provide for a common defence.” Every new responsibility added diminishes the ability to achieve the primary responsibility. Requiring the military to enact unresolved social changes diminishes the military’s ability to field a cohesive force. Requiring the military to be sustainable can have unintended consequences.

An example of what can go wrong when adding to the military’s primary responsibility. Los Alamos National Laboratory’s added to their primary responsibility, “Our environmental stewardship commitment… Creating a sustainable future”. LANL’s staff choose sustainable organic cat litter instead of inorganic cat litter to pack low-level nuclear waste containers. The organic cat litter reacted with radioactive waste, rupturing the container after being placed and sealed in the underground repository. The cleanup closed WIPP for three years (the nation’s only low-level radioactive waste repository), cost two billion dollars, and risked the lives and health of those on the clean-up crews.

Our responsibility is to hold our Leaders in Washington accountable for their international blunders, which led our country into military conflict. The most concerning blunders, one almost sixty years ago and today. Those two Presidential missteps brought the world to the brink of nuclear war. President Kennedy’s failed action at the Bay of Bigs and failure to act when Russia built the Berlin Wall demonstrated to Premier Khrushchev that JFK was a weak President. This led to the Cuban Missile Crisis, bringing the world close to nuclear war.

President Biden’s “green light to Putin” has led to the war between Ukraine and Russia. Now Russia has re-armed Belarus (Ukraine’s neighbor) with tactical nuclear weapons. The world is now closer to the brink of nuclear war than during the Cuban Missile Crisis, and we do not know who in Washington controls our nuclear arsenal.