War Is Boring

Earlier this month I accompanied the USS Kearsarge on a medical mission to Latin America. It’s all part of Secretary of Defense Robert Gates’ “soft power” strategy. Now World Politics Review has the video! Click the thumb below.

Check out my Flickr stream from this month’s “soft-power” cruise to Nicaragua aboard USS Kearsarge. More pics and stories coming.

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When you work with the military, you expect to “hurry up and wait.” Sometimes complex operations just can’t be rushed. But when you’ve got hundreds of impoverished Nicaraguans depending on you for medical care, you can’t afford to wait forever. After a great start on Tuesday, the Navy assault ship Kearsarge — on a four-month [...]

Lizzie Mae Morris, 58, has problems with her eyes. But in her hometown of Puerta Cabezas on Nicaragua’s eastern “Mosquito” coast, any doctors — not to mention optometris — are scarce. When the USS Kearsarge amphibious ship pulled up along the coast loaded with hundreds of doctors, nurses and aid workers, offering free health care [...]

The Marine Corps CH-53E heavylift choppers aboard the assault ship Kearsarge on her humanitarian cruise to South America are more than 20 years old on average. For a helicopter, that’s pretty damn old. But the hardworking maintainers of squadron HMH-464, based in North Carolina, keep the classic birds in top shape … and in the [...]

How does an amphibious assault ship defend herself from attackers in small boats? Here’s how. Warning: adult language! [kml_flashembed movie="http://www.youtube.com/v/fjTFdHWPoS8" width="425" height="350" wmode="transparent" /]

For decades, the U.S. Navy’s roughly three-dozen amphibious ships have carried U.S. Marines across the world’s oceans in response to crises. Today the Marines are embroiled in long land wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. So the empty amphibious ships have assumed a new role: hauling military and civilian humanitarians to developing countries as part of [...]

The USS Kearsarge assault ship (pictured right) is just two days from the first stop on its four-month tour of South America doling out free medical care. It’s all part of the Pentagon’s new strategy for effecting “generational change” in the world’s neglected, unstable coastal zones. But for the hundreds of military doctors, dentists and [...]

“218” “206” “181” The huge red digital readout atop the USNS Laramie, a civilian-crewed supply and tanker ship (pictured), read out the distance, in feet, between the massive ship and the USS Kearsarge assault ship as the two vessels nervously edged together on the rolling Atlantic on Wednesday afternoon. It was an “underway replenishment,” or [...]

It’s unusual for one of the Navy’s capital ships to go it alone. Aircraft carriers and amphibious ships usually sail in the company of at least a destroyer –- and often with multiple destroyers, cruisers and frigates that screen them from potential attackers. But on her four-month mission to South America, USS Kearsarge is sailing [...]

In four months handing out free medical care to six South American countries, the USS Kearsarge assault ship and its crew of sailors, doctors and engineers will see just a few tens of thousands of patients, including at most a couple hundred surgical patients. Considering the millions of people the ship will never see, how [...]