How a preventable disaster killed six marines
propublica.org
propublica.org
PS: A roommate of mine in college was a Marine Herc Navigator MOS, for KC-130 and C-130. They would frequently get on the plane drunk from the night before but be expected to function. Squad meetings? At the bar, with mandatory alcohol. He bemoaned the V-22 Osprey as an overpriced death-trap, which it definitely was, in the beginning. I think many military cultures needs to strongly encourage less binge alcoholic consumption for operational effectiveness and because more personnel end up alcoholic, like my grandfather, for one (who was a paratrooper and later an AP (MP)).
Not blaming anyone specifically of course. I feel for anyone who feels like they need to drink to get through their days. Just think it's also a good example of CO's talking big but meaning nothing, and that attitude trickles all the way down the chain.
If the meeting attendees where not driving after the meeting, I don't see the problem with social drinking and bonding.
Anyone who's worked for a big corporation will know what I mean. "what the anti brbary course dint we do that 6 weeks ago "
https://www.duffelblog.com/2017/12/soldiers-accidentally-sum...
As both of those use NAD+ as cofactors, something that may sober someone up faster without causing hangover symptoms is a combination of tryptophan and niacin, but only to the extent that NAD+ availability is a limiting factor in the liver. A dietary sufficiency of zinc is necessary for production of alcohol dehydrogenase. Experiments suggest that 1 g fructose/kg body mass also helps process alcohol faster, but I'm not clear on how, and the research has inconsistent reproducibility.
If you have a healthy diet already, and have a healthy liver, there is very little you can actually do to sober up faster, beyond building up a tolerance, which increases the amount of alcohol dehydrogenase your body produces when exposed to ethanol.
The pure oxygen may counteract some of the symptoms of drunkenness and hangover, but the health effects of hyperoxia can be even worse than ethanol intoxication. It would be less dangerous to intravenously infuse tryptophan and niacin-associated nicotinamides, or use direct hepatic injection, and even that sounds reckless.
Short version of the paper (hopefully accurate enough):
The alcohol in the body is "burned" in a chain of multiple reactions. Using multiple steps because you can store the energy extracted in each step and store it in ATP or NADH to use it later in other reactions.
The first step is to extract two Hydrogen from the alcohol CH3-CH2-OH --> CH3-CH=O. This step needs an enzyme. There is not too much of this enzyme, so a small amount of alcohol saturates the maximum conversion capacity (that is ~7g/h). All the other steps have a better conversion rate, so this is the important step for alcohol metabolism.
Note that this step doesn't use oxygen. Oxygen is use in the step four and later. (I'm not sure if I'm counting all the steps correctly, but the use of oxygen is much later.)
It may wake you up a bit, you're still impaired relative to where you'd have been without the alcohol in your system (or lack of sleep or whatever other impairment is present).
Overall I think the guy above boiled it down pretty well, some mistakes were made, but these marines were not prepared with enough training or properly functioning equipment to do the job safely, and senior commander’s are just pointing the blame at the squadron and middle management instead of taking ownership of the real problem (not responding to warnings about unpreparedness).
There is also oxygen dissolved directly in blood rather than saturating hemoglobin, but that constitutes a tiny fraction of o2 in comparison.
Please don’t make shit up.
Killing anything less than a 6-pack is generally not considered binge drinking by the population at large. There's also an intent element. Binge drinking involves drinking to get drunk. Killing a 6-pack because you're sitting around with your buddies drinking and watching (edit: American) football is not binge drinking to anyone who isn't a card carrying member of MADD.
I served on the ground side and never experienced this level of incompetence. (There was plenty of other fun stuff...) But maybe the shear fact that Marine Officers are on the front line with the enlisted, curbs dangerous behavior. The Air Wing in the Marine Corps is it's own branch. Marine Air Wing commanders are constantly being relieved, and usually make the cover of the Marine Corp times.
My thoughts and payers go out to the families.
Semper Fi
Retired CWO2
It's truly an awesome sight. The aircraft are so big, and so close together. The tanker has colored lights all over it, I expect to help guide the following plane.
Through the windshield, it looks larger than life and a little surreal.
The priorities aka politics of each military branch are different.
Canonical example: At Guadalcanal in WW2, the Navy was supposed to land supplies and support the Marines, but when the Japanese Navy showed up, the US Navy weighed anchor and left - with most supplies still aboard. The Marines are still mad about that 75 years later.
In more recent times, the problem is that the Air Force doesn't want to fly low and risk AF pilots - ie. provide CAS. And the F35 is the worst at CAS - high, fast and expensive with no loiter time.
I'm not even an amateur pacific theater historian, but I know that this story is more nuanced than that, and your implication that the Navy didn't cooperate sounds naive.
It's true that the US armed forces suffer from high division. My canonical example is the retirement of A-10 in favor of F-35.
When I read history, I try to imagine it with at least 3 points of view - the individual soldier, the commander, and the whole conflict.
It is possible to take someone's lived experience seriously while still realizing that they don't have all the answers and they have biases.
We are largely the stories we tell ourselves. One of the stories that Marines tell is that they hold fast where others retreat. Semper Fidelis. I can hold a nuanced view and still understand their viewpoint.
(I am not a Marine, but I did just read Lewis (Chesty) B Puller's biography)
That's excellent advice for almost any encounter in day to day life, including tech support. Something that the people I work with love is that if they say there is a problem, I believe there is a problem. It might not be specifically what they said, or what they said might be impossible, but if you can picture their point of view, their knowledge, and try to imagine a situation that would look like what they described you can often dive directly to the problem.
It has become so limited in the CAS role due to poor survivability that we can't deploy it for most CAS missions. And for the environments where it can survive, the US has many other platforms that will work for CAS in the absence of effective air defense. The A-10 was designed for a very different battlefield that increasingly no longer exists.
Seriously, the world's second-largest carrier fleet, after the USN, is operated by the USMC, and it's bigger than everyone else's carrier fleet combined. (Speaking as a Brit, this is just crazy stuff.)
True, but it's there quick (compared to the A10, C130 and any helicopter) which counts for a ton. Nobody ever called for air support and didn't need it now.
But a human brain in the cockpit of a reusable munitions-delivery vehicle is probably cheaper and more resilient.
If you know in advance where you're going to need the extra firepower (i.e. "we're gonna take that village over there") then you set up artillery. It's accurate gets where you need it quick, is cheap and can't be shot down en-route.
If you are fighting a war of occupation and patrolling basically everywhere and don't know where you'll run into a fight then you need some way of getting your extra firepower to the ground units that need it. This is traditionally handled by fixed and rotary wind aircraft carrying bombs or air to ground missiles. I'm unaware of surface to surface missiles being used in this role.
The difference between IDF and direct fire is mostly to reduce collateral damage. Direct fire can be more accurate and limit damage to surrounding areas. It is also easier to hit moving targets with direct fire.
Ground troops have a hard time lasing a target they can't see due to being pinned down in a ditch by a machine gun.
Having dedicated CAS aircraft is nice and it's probably wise to keep something of that nature in service at all time but it's foolish to pretend that a modern multirole fighter can't be shoehorned into that role with reasonable effectiveness.
Edit: You people (you know who you are) seem hellbent on interpreting what I have to say as being a much stronger statement than I am making. I am saying that aircraft like the F35 can do the job and that there are some pros to having those kind of aircraft do the job (namely speed). I am not saying they are better than a purpose built aircraft.
That is true but what is also true is that using expensive aircraft designed for near-peer conflicts for that mission burns through airframe hours at an unsustainable rate.
The A-10 is a death trap in a modern air defense environment. The USAF hasn't gone against one of those since Kosovo, and even back then it was all high-altitude fast movers and stealth aircraft dropping ordinance because of the threat of Serbian AD.
What the A-10 is perfect for is counter-insurgency, which is pretty much all the shooting action the US has seen since Kosovo. There's an argument to be made that, considering US engagements, a dedicated COIN aircraft is a good thing to have in the US inventory. It's a niche, though, and the US military is currently resistant to fielding niche systems.
Unfortunately, they're largely too cheap and not sexy enough for the US to field.
I would say it is foolish to make such a broad generalization like that a plane being new and designated multirole is enough for it to fill all CAS roles (there's more than 1 type of CAS mission) "with reasonable effectiveness". In the case of F-35 replacing A-10, we know that it won't be able to fill some of those roles.
The US has air dominance in Afghanistan, so even a Stuka would look good.
And the F35 has such a small production run that the Air Force would run out in months. Which they won't do for another agency for CAS.
In Vietnam we learned that having airplanes in-theater are much, much cheaper to operate than carrier and remote-based aircraft that take multiple refuelings to arrive on target.
For those not familiar with high-performance figher/bomber jets, they have to be refueled immediately after carrier launch and typically at least one more time after that before a bombing run. It's ridiculous, and exposes the tankers to risk.
USAF had air dominance in all recent wars, and A10s suffered the highest losses. Going against an enemy with functioning air force and air defence with those would be unwise.
But the easy one is: there are 490 F-35s built, with the next 3 lots buying almost that amount more, for less than it'd cost to buy F-16s/-18s. It's not a small production run.
Also specific to the Marines is the idea of delivering a fully-operational fighting force anywhere in the world in a short time: infantry, armor, artillery, CAS. Marines even have their own specops (Recon). So while the Marines rely on the Navy for transport (the Marines are a part of the Navy, after all) their land warfare doctrine calls for combined arms. Can't have CAS if the wingwipers are busy doing top-cover 100 miles out from your beach assault.
Air Force is general flight missions. They tend towards support and recon.
Navy is focused on carrier support and sea missions.
Marines are focused on CAS and both land and sea missions. Lot of helicopters as well.
So each branch takes different responsibilities. I don't think this is an issue of Marines not being good enough to fly, as there are very talented Marine pilots around the world. Instead, these Marines weren't being given the resources and training they needed, and were being ignored by the higher chain. The argument that Marines don't take things as seriously is a little ridiculous.
To me this says that the Marines high enough to make decisions do indeed not take things seriously enough.
Specialization is inevitable in an organization as large and complicated as the US military, and it's worth considering whether the service level split is the better way to manage it, especially at the top where it would be better for the decision makers to have diversified experience than to be in-fighting.
Maybe I'm naive, but I always thought it was a nice way of approaching the rest of the world. In reality, the most effective militaries in history have been the ones where everyone can fight.
Logistics win or lose wars. The support is the most important part. Arguably the people "fighting" wars (or at least vulnerable to incoming fire) should be reduced to as close to zero as possible, replaced by drones of various sorts.
Strategic bombing has never recognised this distinction, anyway. Both sides in WW2 spent extensive effort bombing each other's supply lines and factories. The 9/11 attack on the Pentagon, the notorious Benghazi incident, etc: does that count as "fighting"? Most of the US wars since WW2 have been lost during the occupation phase due to the difficulties of COIN. There's no glamour of "fighting" there, it consists of spending years going to work in an office but never forgetting to check under your car.
> Things like supply ships, bases, hospital ships, aircraft carriers, merchant marine, peace corps, etc all go to providing aid in peacetime and supporting the military in times of war.
There is no such thing as peacetime for the United States. https://www.globalresearch.ca/america-has-been-at-war-93-of-...
Edit: while I was writing this comment, protestors have stormed the US embassy in Baghdad. Do the embassy staff count as "fighting"?
Stormin’ Norman once said that logistics is not the army’s tail, but its spine.
Another thing to consider is that supply lines are a target too; in recent conflicts logistics soldiers have very much been at the sharp end.
Isn't it already less than 10% for most militaries?
A post[1] and working link[2]. The two HN submissions got no traction.
[1] https://warontherocks.com/2015/03/lying-to-ourselves-the-dem... [2] https://apps.dtic.mil/docs/citations/ADA615274
I think the question "why there are social hierarchies" is the biggest open problem in social sciences. There are many plausible explanations, but no clear winner.
This is not an open problem at all. It is a _well_ explained phenomenon.
There are many partial explanations, but all of them are flawed.
The difference is with formal hierarchies there is also formal authority and responsibilities. A lack of explicit expectations means that informal the leadership can shirk responsibility or invent authority.
And that's a software company; a military org that's ordering people into dangerous situations is going to have a much harder time without explicit authority; POUM in the Spanish Civil War comes to mind.
So while it's true that holacracies can quickly turn into hierarchies rather than democracies, it's still doesn't explain why hierarchies are preferred by humans over democracies, while the latter is obviously more acceptable on the state level.
Democracy on the state level mostly refers to bureaucratic heirarchy where the leaders are (sometimes indirectly) accountable to the electorate; heirarchy and democracy coexist rather than being mutually exclusive. Heirarchy dominates state-level organization with or without democracy, just like it does virtually all other human enterprises.
Democracy, on the state level, seems to be more reliant on formal reservation and delineation of powers and well-institutionalized means of enforcing those formalities than non-democratic heirarchy, which is perhaps why holacracy becomes informal non-democratic heirarchy rather than something democratic.
Exactly, that is my point, in the army they are exclusive though. The people lower in the hierarchy have little say in whether they trust the people upper in the hierarchy.
> Heirarchy dominates state-level organization with or without democracy, just like it does virtually all other human enterprises.
That is true, but that's my point also. Why does it dominate, if we know from our (rather limited) experience with democracy that at least on the state level, it leads to better outcomes?
We have almost no experience with non-heirarchical democratic state-level organization. We have experience with heirarchy with democratic accountability and heirarchy without it, and from that we can conclude that:
(1) the former may lead to better outcomes for those that aren't at the top of heirarchy, but
(2) the former definitely relies on formal delineation of authority and institutionalized structures enforcing those formal rules. (That is, democratic control at the state level requires formal heirarchy.)
Holacracy eschews formal structures of authority, and therefore the (informal) heirarchies it produces are not restrained by democratic accountability.
And even very small-scale democracy (which may not require formalization) still has heirarchy; people (social animals generally, people aren't special in this regard) form heirarchies.
In fact, I consider democracy to be explicitly against power hierarchies. (In this sense, it is very leftist concept.)
From my perspective, the whole problem with holacracy is the lack of rules that guarantee the distribution of power, unlike in democracy, where this is guaranteed by agreement of participants with the decision-making method (i.e. votes of all people are equal).
Finally, you still state that hierarchy is a natural phenomenon, but that still doesn't explain why people insist on it even culturally. Just like the fact that humans evolved on African savannah doesn't mean that they would like to continue do so. But humans are surprisingly insistent on hierarchies of power even in the face of f-ups mentioned in the article.
For some use cases the strengths outweigh the flaws.
Combat operations are certainly such a use case.
The existence of other, non-hierarchical structures participated in by the military does not negate their efficacy in the military.
Possible solution is more democratic control (by the people down in the hierarchy) over the people who are in charge, for example an independently elected accountability board with a power to penalize and recall the leaders.
I am not sure if it's practiced in the U.S., but in Europe lot of universities were historically actually run democratically, the management was elected by academics and students. So something like that.
The only plausible explanation for that phenomenon is that democratic group (military in this case) is more efficient/willing at asserting its own status as a group than an autocratic (hierarchical) one.
And that is, in fact, internally contradictory. If intent of the military as a democratically-controlled social group was to overthrow the democracy in the state as a social group, then it would be acting against the very existence of ts own democratic process.
There is also some research into universal values like Jonathan Haidt does, which shows that liberals value hierarchy less than conservatives. So people in fact do have somewhat different value systems.
Also, there was a fascinating story from Robert Sapolsky, which showed that in baboons, lack of strict hierarchy can actually benefit the group.
Personally, I am totally willing to take orders from my boss if I have good relationship with him, but I perceive it as helping a fellow human, I am not doing it out of respect to hierarchy. I think this can alternatively explain what you observe.
As I already stated, we have many possible explanations (and also perplexing examples) both pro and against hierarchies, but there is no clear unifying theory. The above is just a sampling.
The Navy is hugely important, and I think there’s even a good argument to be made in favor of the USMC continuing to exist in a quasi-spec-ops/rapid deployment infantry role. I think there’s no good argument to be made in favor of the USMC having fighter jets.
The Navy can do close air support, but likes to keep its planes on its ships rather than forward deployed where the Marines need them.
The Army uses helicopters for close air support to get around the Air Force, but those have the problem of loiter time.
If you did manage to bludgeon the Air Force into handling air support, those units would have to be so tightly tied to the Marines and Army that their careers would be compromised in the Air Force.