USS Hopper - Articles - Zimbio

U.S. Navy Independently Validates and Demonstrates Its Missile Defense System

Mon, 4 Nov 2008 06:54:00 GMT

posted by Kobus
Riki Ellison, Chairman of the Missile Defense Advocacy Alliance, MDAA, reports that the United States Navy independently validates its Aegis Ship based missile defense capability. Details of the event follow.

"This past Saturday, off the coast of Hawaii, the United States Navy conducted their own live test of their ballistic missile defense systems with full operating crews of U.S. sailors on the USS Paul Hamilton (DDG -60) and USS Hopper (DDG-70).

The Japanese ship JS CHOKAI (DDG-176), who later this month will be outfitted with defensive SM-3 ballistic missiles observed, tracked and simulated a defensive engagement with the target missiles.

Read more

POLITICS-US: Official Version of Naval Incident Starts to Unravel

Fri, 12 Jan 2008 05:46:00 GMT

posted by kamran1919

POLITICS-US: Official Version of Naval Incident Starts to Unravel
Analysis by Gareth Porter*

Credit:Press-TV
Image from Iranian video depicting the Jan. 7 encounter with U.S. warships in the Strait of Hormuz.

WASHINGTON, Jan 10 (IPS) - Despite the official and media portrayal of the incident in the Strait of Hormuz early Monday morning as a serious threat to U.S. ships from Iranian speedboats that nearly resulted in a "battle at sea", new information over the past three days suggests that the incident did not involve such a threat and that no U.S. commander was on the verge of firing at the Iranian boats.
The new information that appears to contradict the original version of the incident includes the revelation that U.S. officials spliced the audio recording of an alleged Iranian threat onto to a videotape of the incident. That suggests that the threatening message may not have come in immediately after the initial warning to Iranian boats from a U.S. warship, as appears to do on the video.
Also unraveling the story is testimony from a former U.S. naval officer that non-official chatter is common on the channel used to communicate with the Iranian boats and testimony from the commander of the U.S. 5th fleet that the commanding officers of the U.S. warships involved in the incident never felt the need to warn the Iranians of a possible use of force against them.
Further undermining the U.S. version of the incident is a video released by Iran Thursday showing an Iranian naval officer on a small boat hailing one of three ships.
The Iranian commander is heard to say, "Coalition warship 73, this is Iranian navy patrol boat." He then requests the "side numbers" of the U.S. warships. A voice with a U.S. accent replies, "This is coalition warship 73. I am operating in international waters."
The dramatic version of the incident reported by U.S. news media throughout Tuesday and Wednesday suggested that Iranian speedboats, apparently belonging to the Iranian Revolutionary Guard navy, had made moves to attack three U.S. warships entering the Strait and that the U.S. commander had been on the verge of firing at them when they broke off.
Typical of the network coverage was a story by ABC's Jonathan Karl quoting a Pentagon official as saying the Iranian boats "were a heartbeat from being blown up".
Bush administration officials seized on the incident to advance the portrayal of Iran as a threat and to strike a more threatening stance toward Iran. National Security Adviser Stephen Hadley declared Wednesday that the incident "almost involved an exchange of fire between our forces and Iranian forces". President George W. Bush declared during his Mideast trip Wednesday that there would be "serious consequences" if Iran attacked U.S. ships and repeated his assertion that Iran is "a threat to world peace".
Central to the depiction of the incident as involving a threat to U.S. warships is a mysterious pair of messages that the sailor who heard them onboard immediately interpreted as saying, "I am coming at you...", and "You will explode after a few minutes." But the voice in the audio clearly said "I am coming to you," and the second message was much less clear.
Furthermore, as the New York Times noted Thursday, the recording carries no ambient noise, such as the sounds of a motor, the sea or wind, which should have been audible if the broadcast had been made from one of the five small Iranian boats.
A veteran U.S. naval officer who had served as a surface warfare officer aboard a U.S. Navy destroyer in the Gulf sent a message to the New York Times on-line column "The Lede" Wednesday pointing out that in the Persian Gulf, the "bridge-to-bridge" radio channel used to communicate between ships "is like a bad CB radio" with many people using it for "hurling racial slurs" and "threats". The former officer wrote that his "first thought" was that the message "might not have even come from one of the Iranian craft".
Pentagon officials admitted to the Times that they could not rule out that the broadcast might have come from another source
The five Iran boats involved were hardly in a position to harm the three U.S. warships. Although Pentagon spokesman Bryan Whitman described the Iranian boats as "highly maneuverable patrol craft" that were "visibly armed," he failed to note that these are tiny boats carrying only a two- or three-man crew and that they are normally armed only with machine guns that could do only surface damage to a U.S. ship.
The only boat that was close enough to be visible to the U.S. ships was unarmed, as an enlarged photo of the boat from the navy video clearly shows.
The U.S. warships were not concerned about the possibility that the Iranian boats were armed with heavier weapons capable of doing serious damage. Asked by a reporter whether any of the vessels had anti-ship missiles or torpedoes, Vice Adm. Kevin Cosgriff, Commander of the 5th Fleet, answered that none of them had either of those two weapons.
"I didn't get the sense from the reports I was receiving that there was a sense of being afraid of these five boats," said Cosgriff.
The edited Navy video shows a crewman issuing an initial warning to approaching boats, but the footage of the boats maneuvering provides no visual evidence of Iranian boats "making a run on U.S. ships" as claimed by CBS news Wednesday in its report based on the new video.
Vice Adm. Cosgriff also failed to claim any run toward the U.S. ships following the initial warning. Cosgriff suggested that the Iranian boat's manoeuvres were "unduly provocative" only because of the "aggregate of their manoeuvres, the radio call and the dropping of objects in the water".
He described the objects dropped by the Iranian boat as being "white, box-like objects that floated". That description indicates that the objects were clearly not mines, which would have been dark and would have sunk immediately. Cosgriff indicated that the ships merely "passed by them safely" without bothering to investigate whether they were explosives of some kind.
The apparent absence of concern on the part of the U.S. ships' commanding officers about the floating objects suggests that they recognised that the Iranians were engaging in a symbolic gesture having to do with laying mines.
Cosgriff's answers to reporters' questions indicated that the story promoted earlier by Pentagon officials that one of the U.S . ships came very close to firing at the Iranian boats seriously distorted what actually happened. When Cosgriff was asked whether the crew ever gave warning to the Iranian boats that they "could come under fire", he said the commanding officers "did not believe they needed to fire warning shots".
As for the report circulated by at least one Pentagon official to the media that one of the commanders was "close to firing", Cosgriff explained that "close to" meant that the commander was "working through a series of procedures". He added, "[I]n his mind, he might have been closing in on that point."
Despite Cosgriff's account, which contradicted earlier Pentagon portrayals of the incident as a confrontation, not a single news outlet modified its earlier characterisation of the incident. After the Cosgriff briefing, Associated Press carried a story that said, " U.S. forces were taking steps toward firing on the Iranians to defend themselves, said the U.S. naval commander in the region. But the boats -- believed to be from the Iranian Revolutionary Guard's navy -- turned and moved away, officials said."
That was quite different from what Cosgriff actually said.
In its story covering the Cosgriff briefing, Reuters cited "other Pentagon officials, speaking on condition of anonymity" as saying that "a U.S. captain was in the process of ordering sailors to open fire when the Iranian boats moved away" -- a story that Cosgriff had specifically denied.
*Gareth Porter is an historian and national security policy analyst. His latest book, "Perils of Dominance: Imbalance of Power and the Road to War in Vietnam", was published in June 2005.

POLITICS-US: Official Version of Naval Incident Starts to Unravel

Amazing Grace - Computer scientist

Wed, 27 Mar 2008 00:04:49 GMT

posted by VicGrace

Rear Admiral Grace Murray Hopper (1906 - 1992) was a US naval officer and mathematician who invented the computer compiler in 1952. Her compiler revolutionized computer programming, making computers easier to understand. Hopper and a team developed the first user-friendly business programming language, COBOL . There is an unconfirmed story that Hopper determined than an error in the early Mark II computer was caused by a moth that was trapped in it; she then coined the term “computer bug.” Because of the breadth of her accomplishments and her naval rank, she is sometimes referred to as “Amazing Grace”.

Just some of her honours are:

She won the first “man of the year” award from the Data Processing Management Association in 1969.

She was the first woman of any nationality to be made a Distinguished Fellow of the British Computer Society in 1973.

USS Hopper (DDG-70) was launched. Nicknamed Amazing Grace, it is on a very short list of U.S. military vessels named after women in 1996.

Also women at the world’s largest software company, Microsoft Corporation, formed an employee group called “Hoppers” and established a scholarship in her honor. Hoppers has over 3000 members worldwide.

Grace Hopper Celebration of Women in Computing October 1-4, 2008, Keystone Resort, Colorado.

Saturday, June 21st is Destroyer Escort Day by Ed Eastman

Wed, 19 Jun 2008 19:16:00 GMT

posted by rswier
Did you know that the third Saturday in June is Destroyer Escort Day in Florida every year? I approached Governor Jeb Bush at the Groundbreaking for the Veterans Administration Douglas T. Jacobson State Nursing Home in Port Charlotte, FL. Gov. Bush promised me that if he won reelection that Fall, he would have a Resolution drawn up and signed by himself and his Cabinet to declare the third Saturday in June every year as Destroyer Escort Day. Gov. Bush was as good as his word. We display the Resolution at the Military Heritage And Aviation Museum at Fishermen's Village in Punta Gorda.

The Southwest Florida Chapter of the Destroyer Escort Sailors Association will observe DE Day at the Inner Court at Fishermen's Village on 21 June 2008 at 1100 hours. The National President, Thomas L. Kidd, will be officiating. The program will be emphasizing the War for the North Atlantic, honoring American, Canadian, and British sailors who were involved, some making the ultimate sacrifice for our freedom.

The Color Guard will be provided by the Charlotte High School Naval JROTC. Representatives of the Navy and Coast Guard DE Sailors will provide the Wreath Ceremony, at which, the wreath will be cast upon the waters in memory of those who sacrificed their lives, and those of our DE Veterans who have crossed over the bar.

The Military Heritage And Aviation Museum will have a display of DE Sailors' artifacts.

Destroyer Escort Day will be observed in several States upon the same day. DESA has a Destroyer Escort berthed at Albany, NY. It is better known as the USS Slater DE 766 Museum. It is being restored meticulously to it's WW II condition. The Slater's website is:
www.ussslater.org.

A Japanese film company is in preparation of making a movie in which the USS Slater plays a prominent part.

Article by Ed Eastman.

Strait of Hormuz Incident, ‘unduly provocative’ 5th Fleet Commander

Tue, 9 Jan 2008 11:51:06 GMT

posted by libnot

LibNOT.com believes that the Iranian “speedboat boys” didn’t think they were at the Hamptons and late for a “cafe latte” party. These guys were looking for a fight!

The question remains, “why now?”

Was the Iranian Revolutionary Guard hoping that a confrontation would end in the destruction of the speedboats and the death of it’s occupants? Is it because President Bush is in route to the Middle East and anything that could embarrass the USA would be a good thing? Could a confrontation with the 5th Fleet that resulted in gunfire help take some of the pressure off Ahmadinejad and his failed economic and domestic policies? Is the recently reported disagreement(s) between Supreme Leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei and the apparent marginalizing of Ahmadinejad causing dangerous, far reaching decisions to be made?

Or….can it be that the Americans were on the eve of an important presidential election primary?

There’s probably a “yes” to some degree to all of the above, but now….what are these loose cannons going to do next?

Admiral Details Iranian Challenge to U.S. Ships

By Jim Garamone
American Forces Press Service

WASHINGTON, Jan. 7, 2008 – The commander of the U.S. 5th Fleet in the Middle East today called the behavior of Iranian Revolutionary Guard boats that buzzed three U.S. Navy vessels in the Strait of Hormuz yesterday “unduly provocative.”

Navy Vice Adm. Kevin J. Cosgriff, who also commands U.S. Naval Forces Central Command, briefed Pentagon reporters via video teleconference from his headquarters in Manama, Bahrain.

He said the USS Port Royal, USS Hopper, USS Ingraham were inbound to the Persian Gulf via the Strait of Hormuz yesterday morning. The ships were in the midst of a routine transit in the early daylight hours, the admiral said. Five Iranian Revolutionary Guard high-speed craft came from the north and approached the U.S. ships.

“The five boats approached the U.S. formation on its starboard bow in international waters slightly inside the Gulf from the apex of the strait,” Cosgriff said.

The Iranian boats broke into two groups and went on both sides of the U.S. formation. “The groups maneuvered aggressively in the direction of the U.S. ships,” Cosgriff said.

U.S. captains called on the radio and sounded the ships’ horns to warn the Iranians off, he said. “The (U.S.) ships received a radio call that was threatening to our ships to the effect that they were closing our ships and that the U.S. ships would explode,” Cosgriff said.

Subsequently, U.S. sailors observed two of the Iranian boats dropping objects in the water generally in the path of the USS Ingraham. “These objects were white box-like objects that floated,” the admiral said. “Obviously the Ingraham passed by safely.”

The boats maneuvered close astern, and after 30 minutes they returned in the direction from which they came, back toward Iranian territorial waters. The Iranian boats approached within 500 yards of the U.S. ships, the admiral said.

“It was transit passage in international waters incidental to a routing inbound transit of the Strait of Hormuz,” Cosgriff said. “The U.S. ships were clearly marked. It was daylight, (with) decent visibility.

“The behavior of the Iranian ships was unnecessary,” he continued, “without due regard to safety of navigation and unduly provocative in the aggregate of their maneuvers, the radio call and the dropping of objects in the water.”

The admiral praised the U.S. ships’ crews, saying they stepped through procedures carefully, with good discipline and with due regard for all the factors. “I was very proud of their performance and the training they received,” Cosgriff said.

Biographies:
Vice Adm. Kevin J. Cosgriff, USN

Ahmadinejad, cosgriff, iranian revolutionary guard, navy vessels, supreme leader ayatollah ali khamenei, uss hopper, uss ingraham, uss port