Posted on 10/15/2021 11:24:12 AM PDT by Attention Surplus Disorder
The FAA is headed by a pilot, NASA is headed by an astronaut, the US Marine Corps is headed by a Marine but for the fourth time in a row, and during the worst shipping crisis of the century, the US Department of Transportation, has appointed someone to the US Maritime Administration (MARAD) who is not a captain and has no commercial shipping experience.
Yesterday afternoon, President Biden announced his intention to nominate Rear Admiral Ann Phillips, US Navy (Retired), as the next US Maritime Administrator, a position that has been vacant since Rear Admiral Mark Buzby stepped down following the insurrection at the U.S. Capitol in January.
Phillips is a highly decorated Navy leader with a long list of accomplishments and is highly respected by everyone gCaptain has interviewed. She was head of the Navy’s Climate Change Task Force and is a highly sought after consultant on climate security issues. She holds an MBA. She was chairman of a local government Sea Level Rise Preparedness and Resilience project. She once captained a Navy warship. The appointment looks great on paper except for one minor problem. There is only one problem. This is not a warship position. It’s a commercial shipping appointment and she has zero experience aboard any commercial ships. She does not even have experience leading navy military sealift ships.
The US Maritime Administrator The position of US Maritime Administrator is traditionally held by a commercial shipowner or captain, but President Obama left the position unfilled for years then selected a former congressional staffer, David Matsuda. He was highly unpopular and was pushed out in 2013. Obama followed the appointment with a relatively low ranking navy submarine commander Chip Jaenichen.
The Trump administration appointed US Navy Rear Admiral Mark Buzby for the position. Buzby, while not a commercial mariner or ship owner, was a graduate of the US Merchant Marine Academy (USMMA), and spent years traveling around the country, meeting with ship captains and commercial maritime stake holders. He reached out and listened to stakeholder needs. Buzby became highly popular within the industry on his promise to publish a new US Maritime Strategy. That strategy was finished but was lost in the malaize of government bureaucracy.
Mark Buzby did accomplish one seemingly impossible task, he saved Aker’s Phillidelphia Shipyard from closing by purchasing four new state maritime academy training ships, valued at over $1.5 billion. Construction of the NSMVs supports over 1,000 direct shipyard jobs in Philadelphia. Buzby also convinced the US Transportation Command to do a major “turbo-activation” of the Ready Reserve Fleet which proved the abysmal state of our nation’s readiness to move materials for war.
Buzby was popular, but he had numerous failures. Despite working with USMMA alumni to roll out a major advertising campaign to increase funding for the school, that funding never materialized. He failed to expand the US Maritime Service. He failed to publish a new National Maritime strategy (the one MARAD eventually did get approved was a lightly edited copy of the last failed strategy). He failed to get the US Navy to include commercial shipping and sealift in its strategy. He failed to fund the Short Sea Distribution and Short Sea Shipping networks he championed.
Many of these failures were not his fault. The Trump Administration arrived with three major shipowners in cabinet position (Chao, Ross and Tillerson), Trump arranged weekly meetings between Buzby and his top advisor (Navarro), opened a maritime desk in the Council of Economic Advisers, and brought maritime experts in to advise the US Export-Import Bank. At the time congress was lead by Senator Mitch McConnel who married into one the world’s most successful shipping families. But despite a promising start, Buzby’s most new policies got pushed to Trump’s second term, a term that never happened. Senior Washington sources also claim that his boss, Elaine Chao, lost interest in MARAD after the New York Times published an article highly critical of her family’s shipping fortunes.
Buzby’s final act as administrator was endorsing a licensed ship captain as his replacement but Biden never called his nominee in for an interview. Biden appointed no ship owners to his cabinet, he closed the White House maritime desk, he delayed his MARAD appointment for 278 days. The Biden administration is so sea blind that they even forgot to recall critical republican appointed positions to the International Maritime Organization in London.
“I respect the hell out of Buzby,” one White House insider told gCaptain. “He did a lot of great work but it’s already been lost or forgotten. Some of his work is classified, some were shipped off to the National Archives by Biden aids, but what really killed his legacy is a lack of continuity at MARAD.”
Numerous sources inside the beltway have told gCaptain that MARAD is fundamentally broken. Nearly a decade of neglect by the Obama Administration left MARAD with a broken, tired, and ineffective workforce. Buzby made only one major internal move of significance, replacing the highly unpopular Obama selected Army Colonel running USMMA with a major shipping CEO. “The rest of MARAD he naively thought he could motivate and foster, as he had done many times during his naval career,” says a US Navy Officer who works with MARAD. “But commercial shipping is not something the Navy understands. The dead wood inside MARAD showed some signs of life under his strong leadership but, once he left, the place reverted to infighting and morass. If Buz had fired more people like Hellis, and replaced them with shipping experts, his legacy might have continued.”
The Global Shipping Crisis The appointment of Rear Admiral Ann Phillips comes as the shipping crisis dominates the world media headlines and the USMMA, which MARAD runs, faces the biggest scandal in its history. Biden has taken strong action in response to these problems. This summer he elected a port envoy to fix the shipping crisis. Last month MARAD hired a high level GS15 to handle media relations. Just last week took MARAD took strong and positive action against allegations of rape at USMMA.
Each action however has been a misstep. To the untrained eye the 139 ships waiting to leave Los Angeles may look like a port crisis that can be solved by a US Port Envoy, it is not. It is a SHIPPING crisis. Numerous ports around the United States including Oakland and San Diego, have extra capacity, what we don’t have is anyone with recent SHIPPING experience at MARAD directing the SHIPS to empty ports. This week Biden addressed the nation with a plan to prevent containergeddon from ruining Christmas but experts say his plan is doomed to fail because, again, not a single ship captain was called to give advice on how to fix this SHIPPING crisis.
While MARAD’s strong and decisive action to address reported rapes initially looked highly productive, it is not enough. It has now been weeks after the allegations were made public and no arrests have been made. MARAD has also failed to engage commercial shipping organizations with experience handling this problem, organizations like WISTA or Human Rights at Sea, or Safer Waves to address the wider industry problem of rapes.
(They have, thankfully, engaged with Woman Offshore or, at least, WO engaged them.)
Worse still is the fact, while addressing the topic of rape at USMMA, they have not issued a single statement about allegations of sexual assaults, hospitalizations, and coverups aboard MARAD owned training ships mastered by US Merchant Service captains who, while employed by state maritime academies, are uniformed officers sworn in and commissioned by MARAD.
And now with what Forbes has called Biden’s single most critical appointment, he appoints a highly capable and impressive leader to run MARAD but one with zero industry experience.
It is clear that President Biden and Secretary Buttigieg have good intentions but continually fail to consult the right experts.
“If the international space station was disintegrating as fast as our shipping and logistics network currently is,” said one ship owner at this week’s Connecticut Maritime Conference. “They would have experts of all types inside mission control, but astronauts would be reviewing each plan. Now we have a shipping crisis and not a single ship captain is called? Nuts.”
But you can’t blame Biden and Buttigieg and MARAD alone. MARAD has been pushed aside by politicians for many decades… and it’s not just a government problem, thousands of small businesses, large businesses, militaries, NGOs, and world councils are struggling to fight the problem yet none of them showed up for the United State’s single most important shipping conference of the year, the CMA conference. Neither did the world’s largest ship owners Maersk CMA CGM, and the US Navy. According to the President of CMA, Chris Aversano, attendance was fifty percent lower than pre-covid levels.
Driving into the nation’s most important conference held just outside the world’s media capital, during the worst crisis in decades, gCaptain was worried we would even be able to get a media pass. We should not have worried, we were the only journalists who even bothered to attend.
It’s not just Biden who doesn’t understand shipping and is failing to consult with ship captains and ship owners, it’s media and logistics professionals around the world.
No wonder that Christmas will be canceled. Santa and the reindeer are getting lots of attention but nobody has asked the elves who maintain the sleigh what help they need.
I’m surprised he hasn’t advised them “Work smarter, not harder.”
I always LOVED it when my bosses told me that (they didn’t stay my boss long after telling me that pablum).
Homer Simpson?
By being an Affirmative action pick in a time where that was being used as a cudgel to destroy the military. Succeeding quite brilliantly, too.
“She was head of the Navy’s Climate Change Task Force ...”
Oh jeez. Put a democrat in charge of the Sahara desert and in 6 months they’d have to import sand.
Yeah. She is as qualified for any job she has ever held, as Michelle Howard, the first female four star admiral was for the jobs she held.
When she made “history”, I saw a list of the people she jumped over to get that promotion, and every single one of them had far more real experience and better records than she did.
She was a black, female administrator. (she was also on Biden’s transition team as a reward)
It is promotions like that which have resulted in our ships colliding on open oceans due to abject stupidity, poor maintenance, and non-existing training.
And that training that does exist has been so watered down and ignored it is meaningless.
Damn all these people to Hell.
Maritime shipping is different from most other government agencies' work in that it's tied to geographical limitations, weather, physics, and actual work getting done while the government employees face intense scrutiny from their private industry peers across the table.
Failures are usually immediately apparent and could be catastrophic, unlike other departments in government where workers can fail upward for decades like Mr. Fauxi.
Mark Buzby’s only expertise is in the field of Alinsky stratagery. Thts enough to float joe’s boat
Mark Buzby’s only expertise is in the field of Alinsky stratagery. Thts enough to float joe’s boat
Nailed it.
So then all women should be banned from the military?
No. I didn’t say that.
Women have, can, and do serve honorably in the military.
Women should not be in combat. Period.
And promoting women because they are women over men to break a barrier that shouldn’t be broken so they can serve in combat is just as bad as putting women in combat.
It’s obvious this admin does not appoint people for their experience. More like an Affirmative Action admin.....
They serve honorably but they can only advance through affirmative action, right? There has never been a case where a woman outperformed a man or advanced through merit alone? That's what you're saying, isn't it? Apparently it's the same for Black officers are well, based on other posts.
Another woman with limited experience. Maybe she is not a communist, socialist, asian, russian, latino, black? So far just about every plugs nominee has been some degree of radical wack job.
Of legal knowledge I acquired such a grip
That they took me into the partnership.
And that junior partnership, I ween,
Was the only ship that I ever had seen.
Beat me to it.
Climate Change 'expert'? Sea Level Rise 'expert'? This is another Affirmative Action hire who has been groomed to
present an "impeccable" resume'.
It’s OK because the Transportation Secretary is a pillow biting fudge packer on maternity leave so we have that going for us.
..From a captain's chair on the quarter deck, while a strategically placed XO does all the work. As well you know, eh, swabby?
I don’t see anything constructive in going straight to the racism card as you appear to do with your “...Apparently it’s the same for Black officers are well, based on other posts...” commentary. However, if you wish to pursue that, please copy and post anything I have ever posted that stated someone was an affirmative action hire, and I will provide you with the evidence, or what I see as the evidence.
If it wasn’t me who posted it, don’t bother, because I don’t buy into that. But just because I don’t buy into that based on race or sex alone doesn’t mean it doesn’t happen, because it damn well does.
That said, from the perspective of these two female naval officers advanced during the Obama administration, for them it seems absolutely true that they were advanced through affirmative action.
I defy you to look at the service history of the people in both cases they were promoted over and come to any other conclusion. I have not done more than read a lengthy interview she gave some time ago to form my opinion on her based on the pap coming out of her mouth, but when Howard was promoted to four star admiral, I did indeed look up available service history information on her as well as the other officers being considered, and there was no question she was a political affirmative action hire.
Some people might say that pointing this out because she is both black and female makes me both a racist and a sexist, but I don’t have a problem backing up my assertion which I regard as accurate in both cases.
And it isn’t as if this is anything new in the US Navy either. Kara Hultgreen was a prime example, though I do feel she was trying to make it through on her own merits and not those of being a female. She just wasn’t good enough, and if she had been a male, would have been washed out, but they pushed her through, sadly for her. However, the female aviator (given an alias in the book to protect her identity, was Lt. Mary Louise Cummings) described in the book “Bogeys and Bandits: The Making of a Fighter Pilot” was an example of the toxic damage they were doing to the Navy by pushing people like her through because she was a woman. She was allowed to repeat errors (such as “Blue on Blue” kills which means shooting down your wingman or other friendly aircraft by accident) which would have washed any male pilot out. And she knew it. She KNEW the leverage that the politically correct leadership was handing to her.
So please forgive me if my refusal to accept less qualified people being shoehorned into slots (in a way that ensures a less qualified person will occupy it) where actual human life in the form of our valuable military personnel can be uselessly expended, and eventually, success in a conflict depends.
It isn’t like we didn’t just see that happen in utter failure in Afghanistan resulting in an exclamation point of 13 Marines losing their life because both the civilian head of the military as well as the military heads being far more interested in social experimentation and homosexuality advancement than they are in the lost lives of our sons, daughters, husbands, wives, mothers and fathers.
That is the exact same driving force, that killed those 13 Marines, that drives people to want to put women in combat roles, and to advance them for social purposes into roles they are less qualified or completely unqualified for.
And I don’t support it.
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