Winning hearts, minds in Latin America

This article confirms that Navy has excess capacity & no substantive role in Iraq or Afghanistan. Both hospital ships contributed almost nothing to the war effort & should be decomissioned rather than being sent on tours of Latin America. The medical & dental personnel to staff them come from the Navy hospitals at Bethesda & San Diego. If the hospitals can afford to allow hundreds of their personnel to be gone for months on such public relations stunts rather than treating wounded Marines here or oversees, that indicates excess capacity. It is telling that after the deployments of COMFORT & BOXER, the KEARSARGE visit to Nicaragua suffered from many glitches. ADM Stavridis hopes to create a name for himself because he realizes he’s stuck in the backwater of SOUTHCOM. CAPT Pond is clearly a sycophant. There was no need for him or his staff to embark on KEARSARGE. The care & feeding of such useless staffs by the host ship is a major distraction & never do anything beneficial for the host ship based on my 20 years as a surface warfare officer. These staffs should remain ashore. The repeated outbursts of CAPT Pond cast doubt on his fitness for command. How was it that he didn’t realize there weren’t enough Spanish speakers assigned to this ill-prepared mission until 3 days after sailing? Rather than throw one of many temper tantrums he should have accepted the blame. It wasn’t the fault of KEARSARGE. One can bet that Stavridis was screaming at Pond. It would be interesting to know how much the fuel spent on this effort cost.