Message follows:
R 031658Z MAR 22 MID200001540025U
FM CNO WASHINGTON DC
TO NAVADMIN
INFO CNO WASHINGTON DC
BT
UNCLAS
NAVADMIN 050/22
PASS TO OFFICE CODES:
FM CNO WASHINGTON DC//DNS//
INFO CNO WASHINGTON DC//DNS//
MSGID/GENADMIN/CNO WASHINGTON DC/DNS/DEC//
SUBJ/2022 CNO NAVAL HISTORY ESSAY CONTEST//
POC/Dr. Peter D. Haynes, Captain, U.S. Navy (Ret.)//LOC: WASHINGTON,
DC/EMAIL: peter.d.haynes.civ(AT)us.navy.mil//
RMKS/1. The Chief of Naval Operations (CNO) announces the 2022 CNO Naval
History Essay Contest and calls for the submission of papers no later than
31 May 2022.
2. The Naval History and Heritage Command (NHHC) is the lead for the contest
and the U.S. Naval Institute (which has been sponsoring essay contests since
1878) is supporting.
3. The CNO invites entrants to submit essays that apply lessons from
throughout naval history to establishing and maintaining maritime superiority
in an era of great power competition. Entrants should consider that today’s era
is marked by:
a. Determined and increasingly aggressive efforts by China and Russia to
coordinate their respective instruments of power (e.g., economic, political, and
military) to compete for commercial, geostrategic, political, and military
advantage and access.
b. Chinese and Russian expansion across the spectrum of military operations
(competition, crisis, and contingency) and domains (sea, air, land, space,
cyberspace, and electromagnetic spectrum).
c. The rise of China as an economic and maritime power and the importance
of the maritime domain as well as the need for the U.S. to integrate Navy, Marine
Corps, and Coast Guard operations and multi-domain operational concepts and
capabilities.
d. The increased importance of navies, sea control, and allies and partners
in a globalized world where 90 percent of world trade (by volume)and information
travels via the seas or undersea cables.
e. The proliferation of advanced weaponry and the erosion of key U.S.
technological advantages that make it difficult for the U.S. to project power to
manage crises, deter aggression, and reassure allies and partners.
f. Fundamental strategic and technological shifts and advances that promise
to change the character and conduct of naval warfare and challenge the Navy’s
ability to adapt conceptually and materially.
4. CNOs Intent: Engage and leverage the intellectual talents of the members of
the U.S. maritime services (i.e., the Navy, Marine Corps, and Coast Guard as well as
the Merchant Marine) to provide insights and catalyze discussion on how to establish
and maintain maritime superiority in an era of great power competition.
5. Eligibility. Based on feedback, the rules for entrant eligibility in both
categories have changed. Essays will be accepted from entrants qualified in the
Professional Category or the Rising Category.
a. Professional Category:
(1) Historians, professors, history curators, archivists, and persons
with history-related doctoral degrees;
(2) Authors of books on naval history (not including self-published
works); or
(3) Civilians who have published articles in an established historical
or naval journal or magazine.
b. Rising Category: Those that do not fall in the Professional Category and
are either:
(1) Active duty, reservists, veterans, and federal civilian personnel of
the U.S. Navy, Marine Corps, Coast Guard, and Merchant Marine; or
(2) Members of foreign militaries that have orders and are serving in an
official billet in one of the above Services.
6. Submission Requirements:
a. Deadline: 2359 Eastern Standard Time, 31 May 2022.
b. Word Count: Excluding footnotes, endnotes, or sources, no more than 3
,500 words for Professional Category essays and no more than 3,000 words for Rising
Category essays.
c. Co-authoring: For the Rising Historian category, an essay may be
co-authored, but both authors have to be qualified in the Rising Category.
d. Submissions must be the authors or co-authors original work, neither
previously published nor currently under consideration for publication, nor
previously submitted to the CNO Naval History Essay Contest.
e. Entrants may submit multiple essays, but the judging panel will select
only
one winning essay per entrant.
f. Essays shall be submitted electronically as a Microsoft Word attachment
via the appropriate link: Professional Category
(www.usni.org/cnonhessaycontestprofessional) or Rising Category
(www.usni.org/cnonhessaycontestrising). When filling out the electronic form,
the short biography should detail the authors or authors eligibility for the
contest.
g. On the essays title page, include the word count (excluding
footnotes/endnotes, and sources). Essays are judged in the blind; please do not
include the name of the author or authors anywhere in
the essay.
7. Essays will be judged on the following criteria:
a. Relevance to the topic: Applying lessons from naval history to
establishing and maintaining maritime superiority in an era of great power competition;
b. Readability;
c. Thoroughness of research;
d. Quality of insights based on historical events;
e. Uniqueness and novelty of ideas presented.
8. All essays will be judged in the blind. A six-person panel will select the
winning essay, the second-place essay, and the third-place essay for the Rising
Category, while a different six-person panel will select the winning and runner
-up essays in the Professional Category.
9. The winning authors will receive:
a. Invitational travel orders to the 2022 CNO Naval History Essay Contest
Awards Reception (to be determined) to meet the CNO and potentially present
their papers.
b. Cash prizes (courtesy of the U.S. Naval Institute). (Note: cash prizes
of co-authors will be split equally):
(1) First Place – $5,000 (both categories);
(2) Second Place – $2,500 (both categories);
(3) Third Place – $1,500 (Rising Category only).
c. Publication of the essays in the U.S. Naval Institute’s Proceedings and
Naval History periodicals (first-place essays) and on the NHHC website (all
winning essays). Some non-winning essays may also be selected for publication.
d. Copper sheathing from USS CONSTITUTION (provided by NHHC).
e. Recognition on NHHCs website.
f. A one-year U.S. Naval Institute membership and a one-year subscription
to Naval History magazine (courtesy of the U.S. Naval Institute).
10. Responsibilities:
a. Director, NHHC shall:
(1) Coordinate receipt, acknowledgment, and blind judging of submissions
;
(2) Nominate two senior staff members to serve as judges; one for each
category.
(3) Coordinate with the Office of the Chief of Naval Operations(OPNAV),
U.S. Naval Academy, Naval War College, Naval Postgraduate School, and the U.S. Naval
Institute, each of which shall nominate two judges, one for each category;
(4) Coordinate announcing the contest winners;
(5) Coordinate the 2022 CNO Naval History Essay Contest Awards Reception
with the U.S. Naval Institute and invitational travel for the winning authors;
(6) Coordinate publication of winning and selected essays; and
(7) Capture and forward lessons learned.
11. For more details about the contest, please visit
https ://www.history.navy.mil/get-involved/essay-contest.html or
www.usni.org/essay -contests. For questions, please contact Dr. Pete Haynes,
NHHC: email:peter.d.haynes.civ(AT)us.navy.mil. For advice and guidance on writing essays,
please email:essayquestions(AT)usni.org.
12. Released by Mr. Andrew S. Haeuptle, Director, Navy Staff.//
BT
Station HYPO 
6 March 2022 at 16:19
The Naval History and Heritage Command is hardly the organization to serve as the lead for a US Navy History Essay Contest.
Evidence the NHHC official US Navy account of the June 8, 1967, Israeli attack on the USS Liberty.
Samuel J. Cox, U.S. Navy (Retired) Director of the Naval History and Heritage Command and Curator of the Navy, authored that history and used as his basis not the account presented by USS Liberty Survivors but on a version created by the IDF.
Instead of posting the lies RADM Cox used in his history of the attack on our ship here, you can read those issues in two blog entries I wrote on the subject.
Given the fact that the US Navy has ignored our pleas to investigate the attack on our ship–even to the extent of waiving its obligation under the DoD Law of War Program to investigate all allegations of violations of the laws of war whether committed by or against the United States–we’re curious to know why the official Curator of the US Navy went to the extreme of writing an obvious apologia for the forces that attacked us all the while committing War Crimes during the attack.
Not only have the forces that attacked us been allowed to commit War Crimes with impunity during their attack on our ship, the official US Navy Historian has been allowed to write the official history of the attack on our ship that bears no resemblance to the attack we witnessed.
While we hold out no hope that the US Navy Historian will correct his apologia that he is passing off as an accurate history of the attack on our ship, we owe it to our fallen shipmates and their families to go on record that his account is outrageous and provably false.
Since this note is in response to the publication of a message from the CNO, if there is anyone here would persuade the CNO to contact us in an effort to seriously address the issues we have been raising for over 50 years we’d appreciate it. It might be just us but we feel the deliberate machine gunning of life rafts we had dropped over the side in anticipation of abandoning ship warrants a bit more than the deaf ear we have received from the DoD.
Warmest regards,
Joe Meadors
USS Liberty Survivor
Director of Operations, USS Liberty Veterans Association
Email: joe@ussliberty.com
https://usslibertyveterans.blog
https://usslibertydocuments.info
LikeLike
8 March 2022 at 05:51
Joe Meadors is quite right to object to the NHHC’s characterization of the deadly attack on LIBERTY as a “mistaken attack by four Israeli jet fighters and three motor torpedo boats”. No honest, rational person who has considered even the most basic information about the attack thinks it was anything other than deliberate.
The dispute, such as it is, centers on whether the LIBERTY was misidentified by Israeli forces as the Egyptian naval vessel EL QUSEIR. As Rear Admiral Cox admits in Attachment H-007-1 of H-GRAM 007 of 08 June 2017, EL QUSEIR was “a 1929-vintage horse-and-passenger transport armed only with two antiquated three-pounder guns”. For all its serious flaws and shortcomings, even the report of the US Naval Court of Inquiry, convened on 10 June 1967, did not support the implied Israeli claim of mistaken identity.
Instead, according to DoD Media Release 594-67 of 28 June 1967: “In commenting on this possibility, the Court stated: ‘While EL QUSEIR bears a highly superficial resemblance to LIBERTY, she more closely resembles the majority of old tramp steamers operating in ocean shipping. EL QUSEIR is less than half the size and lacks the elaborate antenna array and distinctive hull marking of LIBERTY. The location of the superstructure island, a primary recognition feature of merchant type ships, is widely different. By this criteria as a justification for attack, any ship resembling EL QUSEIR was in jeopardy.’ ”
In any case, Israeli forces had an affirmative legal obligation to positively identify any ship as a belligerent before attacking it. Either they wholly failed to meet this obligation—which, considering the deaths, injuries, and damage inflicted, would amount to nothing less than gross negligence—or their attack on the LIBERTY was a case of known, rather than mistaken, identity.
The unnamed author of H-GRAM 007 claims: “To this date, no evidence has ever surfaced that the Israelis deliberately attacked what they knew to be an American ship …” This is demonstrably false.
On September 19, 1977, CIA Director Stansfield Turner appeared on ABC’s “Good Morning America”. Host Steve Bell asked Turner about “raw CIA data” published in “The New York Times”. As Bell noted, “The accusation is made that Moshe Dayan specifically ordered the attack on the U.S.S. Liberty …” In his reply, Turner said, “I’m glad … that you emphasized the word ‘raw’ intelligence data.”
Following the Turner interview Sen. James Abourezk contacted the CIA regarding the intelligence implicating Israeli political leaders in a knowing attack on the LIBERTY. Turner’s response to Abourezk, which was not made public until 1985, indicated that the reports were still unevaluated and had been dismissed out-of-hand as “hearsay and speculation”. Despite this, these three reports assuredly are “evidence … that the Israelis deliberately attacked what they knew to be an American ship …” They are not conclusive, final evidence but they clearly are evidence.
One of the intelligence reports is titled “PROSPECTS FOR POLITICAL AMBITIONS OF MOSHE DAYAN/ATTACK ON USS LIBERTY ORDERED”. In May and July 2020, I filed Freedom of Information Requests with the CIA requesting the Dayan report and I also requested “An unredacted copy of any and all records pertaining to the response, analysis, evaluation of, and/or decision not to evaluate [the Dayan report]”.
Nearly two years and one lawsuit later, the CIA has failed to release any records concerning the evaluation of the Dayan and related reports. Moreover, nearly fifty-five years after the attack, the CIA is still refusing to release more than 173 pages of relevant USS LIBERTY records it admits possessing.
LikeLike