SERE has added other scenarios to its curriculum within the past 10-15 years that covers gray areas such as being detained by a hostile government during peacetime, and also being held in a hostage situation.
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Iran Detains 10 U.S. Navy Personnel
- Thread starter HH-60H
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President's mistake I suppose. Should have maneuvered to keep from sending it to the Senate as a treaty.
Yes they have. Addapt and overcome.
You mean all three Presidents who haven't sent it to Congress since we signed it?
They have covered those topics a lot longer than that but nothing beats some of the 'extra' training only a few folks are fortunate enough to get.
I wasn't sure the exact time frame. I vaguely remember the staff saying a lot of changes took place close to 9/11.
The executive branch of our government has been accumulating power since 1861. Challenges in the the Court's that move at a glacial pace to rule during the presidential term is a Constitutional flaw, and both parties have abused it.
The RIVRON mission has been suffering from a decreasing budget since its inception which has compromised training and maintenance. In my humble opinion, the surface Navy's riverine mission has totally run its course. I have no idea what value, beyond port security, the CRS construct currently adds to our national security. Might as well scrap these Riverine Command Boats and their mission and transition entirely to the port security RHIBs.
What they said was that they don't want to lose the institutional knowledge and culture.
And from a TSC perspective, for many of our allies, they're far more interested in what a RIVRON unit can teach them compared to us showing up with anything grey hull. Particularly so in SOUTHCOM and parts of SE Asia.
Whether or not it's worth keeping around to do that, the few other things they do that can't be talked about here, and to retain the capability for the couple of OPLANs out there that call for it...I don't know. That's probably up to some budget guy.
But the more cynical side of me speculates that the MSRON types in charge of the CRF, after years of feeling underfunded, unappreciated, and neglected, are using the groundwork laid down by the RIVRON RCB work, and the budget/rep built by the Iraq RIVRON guys, and cashing it in to try to expand their role with the MK VI stuff. Hope it works out.
Considering they had the RCBs sitting around doing nothing for the past few years, I wouldn't be surprised if they didn't reactivate it to lay the proof of concept base for when the MK VI shows up.
I'd be happy to be totally wrong, and that it was all in good faith...but it really wouldn't surprise me.
Yeah, I don't know what we really add to the "coalition" training piece WRT RIVRON. No doubt there is some good will there. What is SWCC up to these days? Could they absorb that once a year training mission for these countries?
In terms of the "not to be spoken of here" stuff that RIVRON does, that mission is broad, not at all unique to small boats, and is easily absorbed by many other assets.
My bottom line: the party line is that "RIVRON is a SOF mission executed by conventional forces." BULL. Either let SOF absorb the mission if it's so important; or abolish it completely because it's clear that it's not been properly executed by said conventional forces.
RIVRON is not a SOF mission.
Navy inherited it from USMC conventional forces (manned with grunt riflemen/machine gunner MOSs) because the USMC wanted their grunts to go back to doing infantry shit, instead of boat shit.
For the traditional riverine mission, it revolved mostly around:
Waterborne Guard Post. Anything from interdict waterborne traffic (riverine VBSS) in broad daylight in highly trafficked waters to set up somewhere at night to ambush the shit out of some insurgents who want to sneak around on a river because Coalition ground forces don't usually operate there.
Cache searches. You deploy the organic ground element, roughly squad size, who search possible cache sites either on the river itself or within LOS of the river.
Infrastructure Protection. Patrols near Haditha Dam.
Combat Taxi. Drop off some infantry (or sometimes SOF) dudes who need a ride.
It's what they did in Iraq, and that was just a repeat of Market Garden/SEALORDS in Vietnam.
SWCC doesn't do that, because SWCC's job is to support the SEALs...and both SEALs and SWCC are (or at least were) too busy doing high speed shit to go poking around a river for weapons caches or inspect busy river traffic.
The only real overlap with SWCC is that they both use boats, one of the boat types is the same, and both units are to be capable of performing a hot extract for friendlies under fire from a river or beach. Or at least we used to...I have doubts that they're still doing live fire exercises in support of troops in contact in the current environment.
I do agree that you need to either do it right, or not bother doing it at all. The mission set is too risky to half ass it.
The other stuff, other assets could absorb it, but small boats do offer some unique advantages.
There's also an intangible benefit to the community in developing leadership in its JOs, IMO. And you learn a LOT about operational planning and joint ops.
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Huh? I honestly have no idea what you are trying to say, could you write something comprehensible so we could understand?
WeaponsMan gives a very good analysis - lots of decent analysis in comments as well:
http://weaponsman.com/?p=28693
http://weaponsman.com/?p=28693