Neptunus Lex

I’m feeling vaguely dyspeptic and out of sorts in this blogging thing, for all that I had a wonderful bike ride this afternoon up the coast. Carmel Valley to Del Mar, and up that miserable hill. Then down again, through Solana Beach, which soon gave way to Cardiff and then finally Encinitas. At Swami’s in Encinitas I turned around and came back the way I’d gone, to the tune of 23-odd miles or so of a very pleasant day.

So to put it all away and just write something, I thought it’d be fun to share a mini-sea story with you.

Now, I may have mentioned somewhere along the way that a pilot signals his readiness for a night catapult shot by turning on his external lights, usually by means of a pinkie switch outboard on the throttle(s), an “exterior lights master switch.”

It’s important that the switch be located there, since he’ll want to brace the throttle up against the full power stops on the cat shot - the natural tendency would be for the inertia to roll the throttle back to idle as the cat fired otherwise, which would be in so very many ways a lamentable thing to have happen, once flung into the thin insubstantial air.

Which, it must scarcely need be said, is even thinner and more insubstantial at night.

Now, having done all that is necessary to link the jet to the catapult, roger the weight board, finish the take-off checklist and run the engines up to military or even combat-rated power (afterburner), there will still be a number of fairly consequential cockpit tasks to accomplish before actuating the external light switch, signalling that willingness to leave the cold comfort of the carrier deck for the aviator’s natural element. These take only a moment or two to complete, but sometimes that moment or two is just too much to an anxious catapult officer or deck-edge operator.

At least it must be so, since I had the opportunity one dark and storm-tossed night (they are all dark and storm-tossed in the gladitorial halls of aviator memory) to hear this exchange between the S-3 crew but an instant before launched off Catapult 1 into the murk, and the Air Boss, up in his tower:

“Viking off Cat 1, turn your lights on please!”

“Wilco Boss, I’ll turn them on just as soon as I’m ready to go flying.”

Which I’d have loved to have the presence of mind to say something like that, if it had ever happened to me.

What would you do, if, on the night of your rehearsal dinner, with wedding nuptials just around the corner (chronologically speaking) a band of sturdy young men clad all in black and sporting ski masks for to hide their features burst into the Chinese restaurant where you, your betrothed and your several, sundry and assorted friends and family members were dining? And having thus burst in on this charming, almost Rockwellian tableau, the happy band of miscreants and ne’er-do-wells made off with the struggling, squirming, muffled bridegroom? By dint, you know: Of overwhelming physical force?

Taking him, I might add, heavens knows where?

Well, I’ll tell you what one fellow’s friends and families did, on that night that we, the fraternal order of the junior officer protective association (hereinafter referred to as the “JOPA”), crème de la crème and flower of the nation’s youth, made off with our squadron Operations Officer, having burst into his rehearsal dinner all regardless of the fact that we were quite uninvited, unexpected and indeed, (say it!) unwelcome: They let out a collective “Eek!” and then sat quietly in their chairs, frightened nearly to stupefaction by such an unanticipated turn of events.

Which suited our purposes perfectly, the strong desire not to actually hurt anyone warring at all times with the compelling need to take it to The Man on this, his Special Night.

Harv was not merely a representative of the departmental officer’s professional association - or DOPA – although as a lieutenant commander he certainly was that. He was also a hell of a good fellow, for all that he’d earned his call sign by graduating from that last bastion of eastern academic liberalism (Oh, that it were true!) on the Charles River. Destined for eventual carrier command and flag rank, he had the misfortune to arrive in a squadron of experienced young FA-18 lieutenants – look it up in the dictionary between “honest arrogance” and “superabundant ego” – and repeatedly attempt to tell us tales of how it used to be back in the good old A-7 days. Which is precisely as interesting as maybe it sounds, if the sound of hearing tales told about constant-thrust/variable-noise, sewer pipe-looking, single engine mud movers is as boring to you as it was to us.

All of his attempts to inform and educate us about the good old days were met either with scoffing abuse which somehow managed to stay just the proper side of naval discipline (aviation-style – our boundaries being somewhat broader than elsewhere in the service, and subject to more or less continuous testing) or else with something quite approximating a reptilian indifference. But we were silently keeping score, gentle reader, making a list of him and his dinosaur stories. We were keeping account of his transgressions.

And the evening of his rehearsal dinner provided, we thought, the perfect opportunity for a reckoning.

The evening came and our preparations went on apace. Being but callow youths, our exquisitely designed plan amounted to little more than, “Dress up in black, wear a ski mask and let’s go get him.” So when that deed was done and we’d hustled him out to the van, bound hand and foot and working right hard to stop his gob without risking actual suffocation, it occurred to us severally and by degrees that we had thought things through no further than this. This in itself was nothing like sufficient humiliation, and it would never do to just turn him back to his guests. In our discussions while driving around it was clear from the sudden relaxation in his shoulders - not to mention the ferret-like darting of his eyes – that he had finally determined who in fact we were, and was keeping a kind of score on his own account.

Seeking to regain the moral high ground, it occurred to us that it couldn’t hurt to strip him down to a form his maker would recognize him in, and that dark deed was quickly done. In a matter of moments we had a Harvard-educated lieutenant commander bereft of both clothes and dignity, but increasingly garbed in what was to be a rather towering rage.

Off to a country back road we took him, lacking any better plan, discovering a dirt track far away from any chance of discovery by stray passers-by. Out of the van our hero was unceremoniously dumped, and we drove away again giggling, wondering what might become of him, bound, alone and naked on a dirt road in rural California.

Which, the more we thought about it, the worse that idea seemed.

So having driven away just far enough, we turned back around and picked him up again. He was evidently relieved enough to inadvertently encourage us to greater endeavors, and a plan was quickly effected to drive him on the nearby naval air station, where, it was hoped, further inspiration awaited.

This we discovered in the form of an AD-1 Spad happily decorated in our squadron’s colors, a-setting on a pin hard by the front gate. With a length of rope, rudimentary boy scout skills and a lucky toss, we soon had Harv trussed up sailor-fashion and suspended from the Spad’s wing, the better to take pictures of him. Just as this was being affected, base security rolled up with lights flashing and beefy hands on be-pistoled hips. If they were surprised at the sight of a Navy lieutenant commander swinging naked, bound and gagged from a Korean war-era turboprop while surrounded by a group of grinning junior officers they hid it well. “Never to fret,” some one of us offered up, “We’ve permission from the base CO, and anyway this man is getting married.” Which was at least half true, and good enough an explanation for security to return to their vehicle, having warned us all to be careful in the letting of him down.

At last it was done, the man returned to terra firma and re-acquainted with his slops. We generously offered him a trip back to the restaurant, which he generously accepted. Once there we escorted him back to a wedding party which had only just began to bestir themselves, offering our apologies and quietly whispering to himself that if all went according to plan, he’d soon have access to both the photos and the negatives.

And that was the end of the A-7 stories, at least for a while.

(Previously)

There it is: Left external tank nearly empty, 300 pounds of fuel. Right tank completely full – 2300 pounds. Quickly did the math: Two thousand pounds of unusable gas, also meant fourteen thousand foot-pounds of lateral asymmetry. Out of landing limits, or nearly. And a lot less gas than he’d thought he’d had, just a moment ago.

Thought for a moment, keyed the throttle-mounted radio mic switch down, flight admin frequency, just him and his lead: “Dragon one, Dragon two – I’ve got a right external transfer failure.”

“Dragon one,” came the thoughtful reply.

Over in Dragon One’s cockpit, the already darkened world outside the Plexiglas canopy went a shade darker as the flight lead’s mind turned within itself, turning over the folds of time layered flat within, sifting through nearly twenty years of flying experience for a solution to this problem – innocuous enough ashore, but potentially uncomfortable in a shipboard environment. Might as well start with the procedures in the flight manual:

“Have you put your external pressurization switch to override yet?”

“No sir, I’ll get that now,” replied the JG looking down and to his left to find the switch. He found that he was starting to get hot again, to sweat as he strained to twist around and see the switch, especially with the night vision devices blocking out all but the peripheries of his vision. The JG grunted, briefly unhappy with himself - you were supposed to be able to know every switch in the cockpit by touch even if blindfolded, and he was almost entirely sure that the pressurization override switch was the middle one in a bank of three switches directly aft of the throttles. But there was also a premium in an emergency on ensuring that the procedures were followed exactly, and many aircraft, even people’s lives had been lost by harried pilots activating the wrong switch when faced with an emergency. He knew that being upset at himself for simple things was a way to make a little problem into a larger one, so he took counsel of his lieutenant friend from earlier that day and put his discomfort in a box. “Skipper, I’m going off goggles,” he announced.

The CO pursed his lips inside his O2 mask for a moment, and as he completed the formation rendezvous, he cast an evaluating glance into his wingman’s cockpit, as though he could somehow see the young man’s face, measure his stress level before shrugging slightly, “Roger that. Step three is to cycle the external pressurization switch from ‘ORIDE’ to ‘NORM’ to ‘ORIDE’ again.”

The only cue that the CO would have as to his wingman’s mental state was the sound of his voice on the UHF radio, but already he was sifting and weighing the options should the tank fail to transfer entirely – the JG would have to take some gas from the overhead tanker into his other external to get within asymmetric landing limits and then stop that gas from transferring. That would put his useable gas “on the ball” at something like 2500 pounds – easily half what he’d normally have, too little to divert ashore with and only one attempt away from a barricade landing, and that for a kid who’s been having trouble getting aboard.

Barricade - the CO mind recoiled at the image of a barricade arrestment for this young man. Even apart from the millions of dollars of damage the barricade netting would do to the fighter, a barricade was truly the landing option of last resort: To affect the landing, the LSO’s would bring a barricade jet aboard almost dangerously low, so low that on a normal landing they’d probably wave him off. Too, since the barricade engine didn’t have the self-centering function of the normal arresting gear, he’d have to be tracking straight down centerline with no drift or else he’d probably go over the side, and with the netting covering his canopy he’d be unable to eject. Finally, he would shut his engines off just prior to landing on the LSO’s “Cut – cut – cut!” call, so it was truly a one-shot deal. No, the CO reflected, a barricade landing was not in any way an acceptable outcome.

Having followed his imagination down that line as far as it would go, the CO briefly turned over the path of least resistance – if the tank wouldn’t transfer, they could just jettison the damn thing into the sea. The JG could tank up to an acceptable landing weight to make up for the lost gas, and he’d just look a little funny coming aboard, with one tank on and one tank gone.

But external tanks were rather alarmingly expensive – there were only so many spares in the carrier’s hangar bay - and hurling them into the sea regardless was considered very bad form. Keep that sort of thing up and pretty soon the FA-18Cs were out of the fight. Like most of his breed, the squadron CO was not a “path of least resistance” kind of guy.

“OK, I’m on step 4 now, checklist page E51: Bleed air knob – Cycle through ‘Off’ to ‘Norm.’”

“Two.”

(to be continued…)

Well. It’s official.

I dunno. The Sailors are going to like the new working uniforms I think (although we’re going to have get them some new words to use when complaining about “the khakis”) and the digital cammies look sorta cool. Even if the last thing you want to do if you go over the side and into the ocean is “blend in.”

But I guess it could have been worse.

Hey, Jonboy! First flight in the TA-4 - How do you like it so far?

“Taco,” a SERGRAD (ed.- a recently winged pilot retained as an IP rather than sent to the fleet straightaway) was the instructor in the back. We took off with me in control for my first front seat hop and there was a thump when the gear came up, but I didn’t know if it was a normal thump or excessive.

We went out to the working area to run through the training items and when we reached the part where I was supposed to simulate coming into the break (ed. - a hard, airspeed dissapating turn to downwind) and then dirty up downwind, the nose gear position indicator stayed barber-poled (ed - an “unsafe / not down and locked” indication).

When I raised the gear the barber-pole immediately disappeared while the main gear took some time to come up. We were sharing the working area with another TA-4 from VT-7 so we joined up and he passed me the lead so he could check us out. The nose gear door was open and the strut was visible inside the wheel well, but wasn’t coming out or moving at all when we cycled the gear.

We went through the NATOPS check list and informed base of the problem.

We burned down all the fuel in the dual drop tanks and then proceeded to burn down the fuel in the wing tank. The base crew stripped the short field arresting gear wire from the east west off duty runway while we circled overhead.

With two drop tanks, one on each wing, the NATOPS procedure was to land with the gear up, flaps down and as you can see in the picture, speed brakes open, after all the wing fuel was used to minimize the potential for fire.

Because of the modification to add a back seat to the A-4 frame, the fuselage tank in the TA-4J doesn’t hold a lot of fuel, so once the wing tank is empty, you have a relatively short time period available to land.

TACO did the landing from the back seat. He flared prior to landing and held the aircraft off for a little bit and then settled to the runway.

I had a front row seat for the landing and can still remember watching the big white stripes sliding under the nose of the jet. It reminded me of the beginning of the TV show “The Fugitive.” For a moment I was a little worried that the probe would catch one of the expansion joints and we would pole vault over, but we slowed down pretty quickly.

The drop tanks collapsed, first one and then the other and that is why we ended up just a little sideways and off centerline.

TACO shut the engine down on touchdown so once we stopped the engine was spooling down and we realized we had to unlock and open the canopy before the engine stopped turning or we would not have any hydraulic pressure.

It was a funny feeling stepping out over the side of the cockpit onto the runway. Of course the emergency crews were driving up as we were standing there, and Taco was bouncing up and down with the adrenaline rush. The corpsmen trundled us into the ambulance and off we went to the medical facility for the post mishap examinations.

I called my wife from there to let her know there had been a problem at the field and that I was all right. I was worried she would hear something about me being in a mishap from someone and get worried not knowing what happened.

It turned out that the bolt connecting the shrink link to the strut had snapped from a fatigue crack. It is impossible to see on preflight.

The nose gear strut on the Skyhawk retracts with the wheel going toward the front of the plane and the top of the strut hinged toward the back of the wheel well. As the strut is pulled up, there is a separate connecting rod called the shrink link that compresses’ the strut, pulling the wheel end aft and making the strut shorter as it comes up so it fits in the wheel well.

The bolt that snapped is located right next to the tire.

So the nose gear came all the way up into the wheel well and then the bolt broke and the strut extended straight forward into the bulkhead. They had to drain the hydraulic fluid and vent the gas from the strut and still had to use a breaker bar to pry the nose gear out of the wheel well.

One funny thing about this is that the aircraft sustained much more damage from the wheel strut extending into the forward pressure bulkhead than from the wheels up landing.

A little paint and body work and two new drop tanks would have had this “727″ back in the air. But with the bulkhead damaged, the aircraft could not maintain cabin pressure. This jet became a hangar queen for a few months until that was fixed.

Most of the “interesting” flights I’ve had have been first flights of some sort.

I told you about the first fleet squadron flight on the carrier during workups when the aircraft started rolling backwards toward the side of the boat before the engine was started.

I’ll have to tell you about my first hop in the the A-7E when the pitot tube feed came off halfway down the runway during take off.

Wooo Hooo!!! Lot’s of fun.”

Any landing you can walk away from. Nice work, Jonboy.

Speaking at the retirement ceremony of the finest leader I ever met, my departmental master chief petty officer aboard USS Last Ship. Thirty years of service and the Navy’s senior enlisted air controller. We’re doing the service aboard the USS Midway museum, which should be great, so long as I don’t get any part of my dress whites that isn’t the soles of my shoes in contact with any part of the ship. Don’t care how “decommissioned” she is, she’s still an aircraft carrier and that means grease topside.

The Master Chief is the kind of leader that I wish I could have been, and I hope I’m up to it.

The uniform at least is all rigged up and ready to go:

Wish me well.

(Previously)

Committed now he rested his helmet back against the seat box, braced the throttles up against the stops with his left arm, raised his right hand to the canopy rail handle and waited for the shot which came, as it always did, with unexpected, almost unimaginable violence.

In a screeching mist of noise and steam, shaking and bouncing in the cockpit like a rag doll as the jet went from a standstill to 165 MPH in two and a half seconds, he fought against the acceleration to look at his HUD, hoping to see three numbers in the airspeed box. With three numbers he could fly, said a prayer so abbreviated that the only word in it was “God” and finally she fell off the edge, released by the catapult and he was flying, flying, flying. A good shot.

“311 airborne.”

“311, Departure, roger. Passing angels 2.5 switch Red Crown, check in.”

“311.”

Up and further up into the inky darkness, focused on the airspeed and altitude boxes on the head’s up display, ten degrees nose up pitch at first to capture 300 knots, then 8 degrees nose up as he passed 12,000 feet, now targeting an optimal mach number. The reassuring thrum of the GE F404 motors behind him almost masking the whirr of cockpit cooling fans, the rhythmic surging of the environmental conditioning system, or ECS as it kept pace with the increasing altitude and decreasing outside air pressure.

Between his legs on the horizontal situation indicator – the HSI – he selected the ship’s tactical air navigation set, or TACAN as the steering source and using a toggle switch just to the side of the flat panel display, dialed in a course line of 320 degrees magnetic. His flight lead and squadron CO would be on the 320 radial at 80 miles, waiting for the JG to take station at 30 miles on the same radial and commence their air intercept training runs. A short cycle this evening, only a 1+15 (with no launch to wait for upon return) so no tanking required for this mission. Which, he reflected with a grimace, was really not so very much about tactical air training as it was him landing on the first try back at the end of the flight.

(more…)

I know that some of my readers are young officers and midshipmen, and because nothing ever really changes in the service but the faces and the names, you are by now, or very shortly will be, very likely tired to death of senior officers telling you how envious they are of what you have in front of you. I know that I was, back in the way-back. It was always some grizzled and graying captain – maybe at a winging ceremony, maybe at a “tie cutting” after the first solo, who’d look out into all the fresh faces and say, “I’d give it all up and trade with you in a minute.”

To the extent that I took them seriously at all, I guess I always thought that they missed the flying, maybe were jealous of the new technology we were going to get our hands on. But looking back on it now from a different perspective, I think I may have misread them entirely.

I may have mentioned a few weeks back that I’d been to one of those career “transition seminars.” The command I work at is gracious enough to provide the most superannuated and enfeebled of us the opportunity to attend these workshops, which are designed partly to help us translate “blowing stuff up from 30,000 feet,” “landing on an ice-coated carrier deck moving crabwise through the sea while pitching up and down twenty or more feet in a forty-knot gale” and “partying like rock stars in foreign ports” into hard-hitting, high impact, hire-this-guy-yesterday bullets on a corporate résumé. Over the course of three days you also learn how to negotiate for compensation packages with people who smile at you while secretly regarding you as a line item cost to be minimized, whether to wear cuff-links to the interview (don’t), and are encouraged to “Cheer up there, big buckaroo – it’ll all work out. Somehow. Promise.”

(more…)

(Previously)

On the bow cats, the lieutenant junior grade saw a yellow-shirted director walk up to his jet, with a single light want pointed up: “Is your jet up?”

The JG took his red-lensed flashlight out of his chest harness, fumbled for a moment before turning it on and then moving it in a rapid circle: “Up jet.” The director responded with an upward thrust of his wand, followed by brushing motions across his forearms: “Off chocks and chains,” followed by crossed wands over his head: “Hold brakes.” The young pilot felt his heart jump in his chest. He’d heard that in the old days, during Vietnam, there had been an experiment wherein the attack pilots were wired to measure their pulse during combat, as a way of determining their stress levels. It had surprised the flight surgeons to discover that, almost to a man, all of the pilots had manifested higher pulse rates during their approach to land aboard the carrier at night than they had during final attack run of a defended target under flares, with the terrain rushing up to meet them as they refined their targeting solutions in 45 degree bomb runs, the altimeter unwinding crazily even as the SAMs and AAA rose up to meet them. He didn’t have any idea how that might have felt, the JG reflected. But he knew that his heart rate had to be at least a hundred and twenty just at the signal to break down the jet’s chocks and chains. Once he started rolling forward, he’d be committed to the cat. Once on the cat, he’d have to launch. Once airborne, he’d have to land. And he hadn’t been landing very well lately. He knew he didn’t have many more chances to prove that he could. You either hack it or you don’t, he thought. Sooner or later, non-hacks get scraped off. Nothing personal. Just business.

A Hornet rattled down Cat-3, afterburners shouting in the darkness. “Departure, 304 airborne,” said his commanding officer.

“Roger 304, passing angels two-point-five, switch Red Crown, check in.”

“304.”

The squadron CO rolled to Red Crown, the check-in frequency for the strike group’s air defense commander, “Red Crown, Dragon 304 up for a parrot/India.”
“Stand-by Dragon,” came the controller’s reply, followed shortly by, “Say posit?”

“Red Crown, Dragon 304 is Mothers, ah…” looking down at the horizontal display between his g-suited legs and verifying the TACAN data, “Mothers 340 for 7, passing angels six.”

“Dragon 304, Red Crown, sweet and sweet, cleared to proceed.”

“304.”

Back on the flight deck the JG raced through as much of his take-off checklist as he could with the wings still folded:

“SEAT” – Armed, the ejection seat was a handle pull away from blowing the canopy off over his head, catapulting him into the sky before the rocket motor fired, vaulting him further in to space before the ballistic firing of his drogue ‘chute, which in turn would pull his main parachute out of the headbox behind him. This would carry him safely back to the flight deck, where in 25 knots of wind he would be dashed against something sharp or unyielding, or flung into a propeller, or into the waiting sea below, ensnared in his parachute lines and gasping for air. No, he though. Let’s don’t eject on deck if we can avoid it.

“RADALT” – set at 40 feet. If the radar altimeter went off and he wasn’t positively climbing it’d mean he’d somehow lost thrust or taken a soft shot – it’d be time to stroke the blowers and jettison external stores, maybe even eject depending upon the rate of descent. Which was always hard to tell at night.

“TRIM” – trim set 16 degrees nose up on the stabilators, rudder and aileron neutral, rudders check for 30-degree toe-in. The nose up trim sets the rate of capture for optimal flyaway angle of attack. With a properly trimmed jet, it would be a hand’s-off cat shot, with the flight computers setting the climb attitude.

“HARNESS” – check locked. The FA-18 cat shot is a rowdy ride, and if he wasn’t strapped in he’d be sitting sideways at the end of the stroke and there was the yellowshirt with lighted wands beckoning to him, “Come Ahead,” followed by “Turn Left,” and “Harder” finally “Hold left brake!” and the jet sharply pivoted down the starboard side of the bow, the wind over the deck helping to push his aircraft’s nose through the darkness before “Hold Brakes!”

Knowing what was coming next the JG quickly flipped a switch to cool the AIM-9M sidewinders on his wingtips and now another series of signals from the director, “Spread wings,” “Hook down,” and finally “Hands up.”

With the wingspread engines shaking the jet slightly he selected IR missile on the stick-mounted weapons select switch to hear a reassuring, sibilant hiss in his headset, the sound of a cooled seeker head, before throwing the hook handle down and raising his hands and arms above the canopy rail. There would be troubleshooters under his jet, manually checking his tailhook prior to launch, and his raised hands were their guarantee that the hook would not be raised while they were entangled, maiming them.

An ordnanceman passed a red-capped mag light in front of first his starboard, then his port missiles, and each of them agreed with a hearty growl that the sight was highly attractive to them, even worth dying for, if that was asked.

Everything in order, the director cleared the troubleshooters out from under before signaling, “Fold wings,” “Hook up,” and once again, “Come ahead.”

(more…)

In a quarter century of naval service I’ve never known anyone who was court martialed. Never have I been called to serve on one. In command, I never felt the need to convene a court martial, although such was in my power - all the sundry offenses brought before me were in the nature of military-style misdemeanors, and courts martial are generally reserved for very grievous offenses, felony equivalents that for whatever reason were not referred to civilian jurisdiction.

We do not do courts martial so very often in the US military.

Which might be a mistake.

Our predecessor service will court martial an officer pretty much at the drop of a hat. Run your ship aground? Court martial. Crash a jet? See you in the dock. Wasn’t your fault? Good - It will all be there in the legal record, for all the world to see. You will have clearly delineated rights: You may question your accuser, assail his (or her) motives, and independently examine evidence. There are due process protections, and evidentiary custody rules. You’ll have a fully empowered attorney by your side. There will be a formal review process, to ensure your rights were protected. The UCMJ is a branch of federal law, and court martial decisions may be appealed all the way to the Supreme Court of the United States. Which is maybe why we so rarely convene them.

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No, we over here are much more likely to take a disciplinary problem to non-judicial punishment, NJP - much lower on the scale of military justice than any of the various courts martial. The accused has rights, but not so very many. Once he has been read his rights, such as they are, and has agreed to participate in the process - at sea he does not even have the privilege of refusal - he is committed to the end result, whatever that might be. There are no rules of evidence. Witnesses may not be questioned or impeached. No one stands by the side of the accused, and is on his side - his division officer and his chief will be there to speak either for him or against him as his performance has merited, but ultimately these individuals work for the commanding officer himself, the man convening what we in the Navy call Captain’s Mast, and in the Marine Corps is referred to as Office Hours.

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This CO that convened the Mast will be the same man will decide upon the guilt or innocence of the accused, and is the same man who will decide upon his punishment. Having been found guilty, the accused will have the right to appeal to higher authority, but such appeals are almost inevitably fruitless. It is an administrative, rather than judicial process, and as such the penalties are less severe, although in my service a man can still be sentenced to three days bread and water in the brig, demotion, extra duties, “extra military instruction,” loss of pay and restriction of liberty.

Which is why I think that so much of the criticsm of the Black/Whisenant issue is so misguided. Because the Academy has another tacit mission apart from that explicitly quoted in the linked post - Survival: In order to continue “preparing midshipmen morally, mentally and physically,” the Academy must itself continue unhampered and unhindered. The institution believes in itself.

Letting an issue such as LT Black’s boorishness - never mind the institutional response to his boorishness - become the topic of Congressional conversation is strategically unwise. Even if that conversation does not actually threaten the institution’s survival - and let us be clear, the enemies of the several service academies and their theoretical “elitism” and “miltarism” are both powerful and numerous - it will at least make it difficult to complete the assigned mission.

LT Black made an egregious error in judgement, but that error is his alone - he owns it. On the other hand, a decision to “let bygones be bygones” would take the ownership of his malfeasance and transfer it to the Academy. This would allow his behavior to be imputed to the institution and, by extension, the officer corps and naval service in its entirety. That decision might be critically examined by forces inimicable to the institution’s survival, not to mention those unsupportive of the naval mission.

A lesser UCMJ process such as NJP would manage the not inconsiderable tasks of being both more dangerous to LT Black’s prospects while also opening up the motivation of all participants - Black, Whisenant, the Admiral, the officer corps, the Navy - to unwelcome, even tendentious scrutiny. No matter what is decided, partisans on every side will have the grass with which to make their sectarian hay.
Black’s misdeeds, as trivial as they might seem are now a matter of open discourse, but very little else is besides - everywhere is whisper and unhealthy innuendo. Let us have our court martial, let us swear in all witnesses, question their motives and examine all evidence.

Let us shine the light.