After a great start on Tuesday, the Navy assault ship Kearsarge — on a four-month “soft power” mission to deliver humanitarian aid to South America — suffered reversals on Wednesday. What began as a mere delayed chopper flight cascaded into widespread screw-ups that threatened to undermine the Navy’s “hearts and minds” strategy here.

But in one sense, screw-ups are meant to happen. This mission is, after all, a “learning experience,” according to Commodore Frank Ponds. “As we do this from year to year, we’ll learn. We’ll find efficiencies,” Ponds told me.

Wednesday’s snafus started when one of the day’s initial CH-53E heavylift chopper flights, used to ferry people and supplies ashore to Nicaragua’s remote Mosquito Coast, suffered a delay of at least an hour. That pushed back the day’s whole flight schedule, stranding people on the ship when they should have been ashore at medical sites. The delays were compounded when the Nicaraguan soldiers assigned to escort Kearsarge crew to their work sites were themselves some three hours late.

Worse, nobody had bothered to set up a communications link to the main medical clinic, where hundreds of Nicaraguans had begun gathering at dawn. They waited, confused, without any explanation, as the temperature and tempers rose. By the time the first doctors arrived, several hours late, there was an angry crowd at the gates. Nicaraguan soldiers and cops held them back as the Kearsarge teams scrambled to prepare their stations.

Ponds hovered in the wings, livid. He in fact had been the very first from Kearsarge to show up, early in the morning just after the clinic was scheduled to open. He’d arrived with the 4th Fleet commander, a 2-star admiral, hoping to show off his forward-thinking new mission –- only to find it shuttered, with a growing mob of neglected patients outside. “I’ve never seen anyone reach for a cell phone so fast,” said one young sailor who witnessed the commodore’s reaction.

Late in the afternoon, the harried clinic staff finally caught up to the day’s patient quota and made plans for a radio link to keep patients informed of future delays. In the end, it appeared no lasting harm had been done. Because they’d stayed late to make up for their tardiness, the weary humanitarians had missed the last chopper flight of the day. So they trekked to the beach to catch a landing craft to Kearsarge.

It took an hour to load the flat-bottom boat. The last aid worker had just boarded when the boat’s Navy crew told everyone to get off and board a different boat. The first one, they said, was supposed to carry only equipment.

Loading the second landing craft took another hour. The doctors, nurses and journalists had to wade from beach to boat with their backpacks held over their heads (pictured). Soaking wet, hungry and tired, they probably felt just like their scorned patients had that morning. The landing craft was just a couple hundred yards offshore when there came a call over the radio: the other boat, the one carrying the equipment, had lost an engine and would need a tow. In other words, more delays were in the cards.

Instead of groans from the heaps of weary people, there was only sardonic laughter. It’s a noble mission that Kearsarge is undertaking, and a good one for the Pentagon’s emerging soft-power strategy. Plus, it’s totally necessary to make some mistakes in order to learn anything. But for Kearsarge’s exhausted humanitarians that evening, the big picture was lost in the gritty, unhappy details.

(Photo: me)

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 to residents, Morris was one of the first in line. After a five-hour wait on Wednesday, she, her mother and two kids were admitted to an “exam room” –- actually, a classroom at the local high school — for a check-up with one of the Kearsarge’s teams. “We are very glad you are here,” she said in accented English.

After a long commute from Norfolk, Virginia, Kearsarge has finally arrived at work. For two weeks, the daily routine will be roughly the same. Every morning, bright and early, the Marine CH-53E helicopters and Navy landing craft will haul people and supplies out to five or six sites centered on the high school. Locals will line up hundreds deep for their free care -– just one treatment per person per day, please. Around two o’clock, when the sun high and hot, the Navy will call it a day. The humanitarians will trek to their choppers and boats, then back to Kearsarge for a hot meal and some sleep.

In the days before Kearsarge’s arrival, there was some hand-wringing over interpreters. Seemed there weren’t enough to go around. But an Air Force linguist team hurriedly canvassed the ship for Spanish speakers and found 30. At the high school, everyone had their interpreter. In fact, some of the terps seemed bored. There wasn’t enough work to go around.

Still, there were snafus. A landing craft got stuck on a sand bar, leaving an IT tech stranded ashore without a much-needed generator for his satellite terminals. A couple Humvees went for a brief swim as their drivers tried to get from the landing craft to shore. At least one interpreter got carried away in Spanish, essentially holding a private conversation with some local officials while her military “customers” tapped their toes and waited impatiently for translations. In the afternoon it rained heavily. And one of only two menu items at the local cafe, where me and my fellow writers had lunch, was a truly horrifying turtle-flipper soup.

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It’s a pitch black night on Saturday as six of 464′s pilots take turns flying one CH-53E for touch-and-go landings on Kearsarge‘s deck. They’re keeping their night landing qualifications current. Meanwhile, several squadron members including Corporal Justin Bauer, an avionics specialist, and Captain Jeff Hullinger, a flier, keep watch in the cockpit of a parked CH-53E. Outside, you can’t see your hand in front of your face. But inside the two choppers -– one flying, one parked -– the world is crystal-clear in crisp blacks and greens, courtesy of new Forward-Looking Infrared turrets and the latest night-vision goggles.

The turret –- a black ball hanging under the CH-53E’s nose -– feeds an IR image to two flat-screen displays in the cockpit, one each for the pilot and co-pilot. The image is better than TV quality. Paired with new night vision goggles that are sensitive enough to work on starlight but smart enough to “dial down” many sudden light blooms, the IR system makes night flying possible in all but the hairiest conditions.

On the other hand, the system is a pain to maintain, Bauer says. He surveys the CH-53E’s cockpit equipment: the new IR system; the GPS, a vintage model from 1993; the analogue dials, from the 1980s; and one ancient warning light panel lit by tiny, fragile incandescent bulbs that require constant changing. All this tech –- both cutting edge and nearly obsolete –- is kluged together by a nightmare of wires and harnesses. In sum, it’s one of the most capable chopper cockpits around, but it’s far from ergonomic.

But all that could change in the next couple years, if the 25-year-old CH-53Es get a promised “glass cockpit” upgrade that will replace all the mixed-and-matched systems with newer and better-integrated ones feeding five big displays. And then, just a few years after that, the Marines should begin replacing the long-serving E model birds with K models, which will be even more advanced.

There’s a downside, Hullinger says. All these high-tech systems can actually be a “crutch.” He points at the fleeting green-and-black image, seen on the CH-53’s displays, of a Navy MH-60S search-and-rescue chopper flying cover over the Marines. As far as he knows, Hullinger says, the Navy aviators aren’t using any IR systems at all, just their eyeballs … and sheer skill.

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Warning: adult language!

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The new strategy was most famously expressed in Defense Secretary Robert Gates’ November 2007 speech at Kansas State University, where he called for the United States to “integrate and apply all the elements of national power . . . strengthening our capacity to use ‘soft’ power.”

But the Kearsarge‘s 1,100 crew and 550 humanitarians (medic Steve Heiss pictured) are discovering that with every new strategy come new and unexpected challenges. Just days away from calling on the first of six South American countries to hand out medicine and perform surgeries, the crew discovered shortages of generators and interpreters that could cripple the mission. This despite months of planning …

Read the rest at World Politics Review.

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But is it the right kind of work for any military force? It’s an open question …

All day every day in the week prior to landfall in Nicaragua, Kearsarge‘s medical personnel hunch over tables in the ship’s expansive medical ward (the second-biggest in the Navy) and divide mountains of pills into individual-size plastic baggies. In the belly of a 40,000-ton ship, thousands of miles from home, counting your thousandth pill of the day, it’s understandably hard to see the forest for the trees. Many of the doctors and nurses I’ve spoken to said they never questioned the mission, even in private.

Which is perhaps why Commander David Damstra, the mission’s senior Navy surgeon, spent most of our meeting on Thursday talking about the technical details of his mission: how many doctors he’s got and of which specialties, what kinds of surgeries they’ll perform and the methods for getting patients to Kearsarge then back home (helicopters and boats, in case you’re wondering).

But never mind all that. I wanted to know whether the mission is even a good fit for the military. Sure, Damstra’s people, representing a dozen different military forces, are undoubtedly highly skilled. But they’re soldiers, sailors and airmen, for the most part trained to look after other sick and injured soldiers, sailors and airmen. These doctors wear uniforms. Some of them are even trained to carry weapons. But where we’re going, there are just sick civilians, whose only previous exposure to a military might have been in less, ahem, friendly circumstances. In light of this, can military personnel really make good humanitarians?

All over the world, many agencies have answered this question with a resounding NO. In Central Africa, civilian aid workers are often reluctant to work alongside military peacekeeping forces because they don’t want their charity associated with weapons, uniforms and potentially oppressive governments. The U.N. doesn’t allow the E.U. army in Chad to enter the very refugee camps that the troops are supposed to protect. They all fear the creeping “militarization” of what should be strictly peaceful functions. Even U.S. Secretary of Defense Robert Gates last month warned against a similar militarization of U.S. foreign policy, which he said should remain squarely in the hands of the (unarmed) State Department.

So can military personnel make good humanitarians? Damstra (pictured right) thought about it for a moment then said, yes. Indeed, in certain places, he said, humanitarian operations require military help. Take, for instance, Puerta Cabezas, Kearsarge’s first stop on Nicaragua’s Mosquito Coast. Operation Smile, a U.S. charity that donates plastic surgery to kids with severe cleft palates, has long wanted to visit Puerta Cabezas help scores of deformed children there. But the town is highly isolated and very, very poor. To get there with the right equipment requires a sophisticated logistical operation, of the kind at which Kearsarge excels. So Operation Smile staff will be meeting Kearsarge in Puerta Cabezas, and the civilian and military doctors will form one team, using the ship as a floating surgical hospital.

“What we bring is operating rooms and surgical capability to where these people live [since] they couldn’t get to Managua [the Nicaraguan capital] themselves,” Damstra said. But the Navy doesn’t have the skill repairing cleft palates that Operation Smile does, so the sea service couldn’t perform this mission alone, Damstra said. “There are certain scenarios where a partnership can accomplish what organizations alone could not.”

But Damstra admitted that for many kids, coming aboard Kearsarge for surgery could be a terrifying experience. To help take some of the hard edges off their mission, the Navy is inviting a family member to accompany every surgical patient who comes aboard. That’s a burden on the transports and on the staff who must screen all visitors for tuberculosis, but it’s worth it to put a friendlier face on what is, deep down, still a military operation, albeit one that’s giving out free medicine instead of free ass-kickings.

It was a good answer Damstra gave me, but it still didn’t settle the issue in my mind. Sure, it’s great that the Pentagon is shifting away from solving all of our security problems with overwhelming firepower. “Soft power” really is a better strategy in many cases –- but it’s still just that: a strategy. Kearsarge isn’t sailing to Puerta Cabezas for the crew’s health or for fun: she’s going to gradually, subtly shape the world in the ways we Americans and our allies want it shaped. This is war by radically different means.

I’m not saying that’s a bad thing. Quite the contrary. But it is something we should be conscious of. And the next time some unfriendly leader like Venezuela’s Hugo Chavez points to the Navy’s soft power operations and accuses the U.S. of trying to rule the world, we shouldn’t be surprised.

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“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 UNREP, the Navy’s term for connecting two moving ships on the high seas to swap fuel and supplies. Plowing ahead at 15 miles per hour through unpredictable water currents, the two ships can stray dozens of feet in seconds. The goal is to hold them just 180 feet apart for a couple hours, as sailors on the receiving ship fire lines across the water to the supply ship then haul across huge hoses for transferring fuel. Meanwhile, helicopters can hop from deck to deck to bring aboard ammo and supplies. It’s a delicate and dangerous couple’s dance –- and one of the keys to U.S. dominance on the high seas.

Amateurs study tactics; professionals study logistics. That’s the old military adage –- and nowhere is it more true than at sea. The distances are vast, the requirements for gas and supplies huge and the waves and weather complicate everything. The difference between a true “blue-water” navy with global reach like the U.S. Navy, and a glorified coastal protection force like most navies, is the former’s UNREP capability. It’s because of our logistics ships … and our skill in using them … that we as a nation can deploy military forces anywhere in the world at short notice.

Logistics underpin Kearsarge’s entire “soft power” deployment to South America. The idea is to haul medical staff, construction workers and their medicine and gear to some of the continent’s remotest, poorest places in order to win hearts and minds and help jumpstart economic development. The UNREP is just the most obvious and dramatic facet. Once we get to Nicaragua in a few days, sailors will start shifting cargo down below in the ship’s holds to get at the needed medical supplies; up on the flight deck, the ship’s detachment of Marine aviators will fire up their workhorse CH-53E choppers to ferry people and stuff; and the landing craft now lashed in Kearsarge’s well deck will motor out on their own supply runs. If Wednesday’s underway replenishment was a couple’s dance, the logistics operation off of Nicaragua will be one big hoedown.

These days all eyes are on the Navy’s ambitious plans to build new stealthy destroyers, shallow-water fighting ships and revamped nuclear aircraft carriers. But behind the scenes there’s an effort underway to boost the sea service’s already world-beating logistical capability. It’s called “seabasing,” and it’s all about designing better ways to move people and supplies from ship to shore. The seabasing plan includes new cargo ships, new floating docks and, most importantly, new planning tools and ways of thinking. Seabasing got one of its first big tests off the West African coast a few months ago, during a humanitarian deployment a lot like Kearsarge‘s.

If everything goes according to plan with seabasing, in the future the Navy will be able to pull off far bigger and more complex humanitarian operations than this. In that way, Kearsarge‘s current medical mission to South America is just a preview of even greater things to come.

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Is her skipper worried? “In our region, we feel pretty secure,” Captain Walter Towns tells me. Besides, he adds, “the ship has an awesome self-defense suite -– 40 millimeter [guns], .50-caliber [guns] -– so we’re designed for self protection.” Not to mention Kearsarge sports sets of both Rolling Airframe Missile launchers and Phalanx guns plus Navy H-60 choppers that can be fitted with their own guns.

Still, these are all just last-ditch “point” defenses. Against any serious threat, Kearsarge would be a sitting duck. But there is no “enemy” on this South American cruise -– at least not in the conventional sense of the word. The enemy is poverty, ignorance and desperation -– the societal ills that lie at the root of many conflicts. Kearsarge, with her hundreds of doctors, dentists and nurses and tons of humanitarian supplies, is trying to get at those roots instead of whacking at the weeds after they’ve sprouted.

The implications for the rest of the Navy are huge. Today’s “soft” threats have done what the Soviet Navy never managed to do: they’ve broken the U.S. Navy’s traditional battlegroup: that massive, overwhelmingly powerful assembly of warships sailing with enough firepower to devastate most countries. In many places ships, even lightly armed ones, can sail alone … and still be effective.

If this new trend is a factor in the shipbuilding debate currently raging in Congress, it’s an unmentioned one. The Navy wants to buy new versions of old Burke-class destroyers. Some in Congress want to buy stealthy DDG-1000s armed with land-attack missiles. But my favorite naval analyst Galrahn at the excellent Information Dissemination blog advocates buying more amphibious ships, and leaving the destroyer fleet at its current size. Inasmuch as amphibs can act alone in many regions, the balance of capital ships to escorts can shift in favor of capital ships. Maybe, just maybe, Kearsarge’s solo cruise is a sign of things to come.

Then tonight I stepped outside on Kearsarge’s observation deck to watch a helicopter take off and realized we weren’t alone at all. Schools of silver flying fish darted out the water and skipped like stones across the waves.

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Through me, that’s how.

Okay, so that’s not entirely accurate. But what Ponds calls “strategic communications” is critical to Kearsarge’s mission. For every one patient the ship treats, Ponds wants hundreds or even thousands, all over the planet, to hear about that treatment, and to walk away with a wider view of the world — and a more favorable view of the United States.

Hence the bloggers and other journalists embarked aboard Kearsarge. There have been around a dozen of us so far: the civilian milblogger “Boston Maggie,” Chris Albon from War and Health, Danny Glover from Eyeblast.tv, and representatives of several political sites including Red State. And when we hit the beach, the doctors and engineers will be interacting with loads of local media.

I was worried that a looming shortage of Spanish interpreters – seemingly a result of poor planning – would cause friction at the point of contact between the Kearsarge and local reporters. Ponds insists it’s not a problem. “We’re not trying to tell our own story,” he says. “We’re letting each country tell their own story.”

That doesn’t require translators to mediate the conversation? No, Ponds says. “The story begins at the point of contact between us and the patient. Strategic communications is not what you put on paper. It’s what you do.”

(Photo: me)