Navy Week sets sail next week in St. Louis

St. Louis Navy Week kicks off next week – Monday, May 9 through Sunday, May 15 – and is one of the Navy’s signature outreach programs.

St. Louis is one of 15 cities selected to host a 2016 Navy Week, which provides opportunities for local residents to meet Sailors face-to-face and learn about the Navy, its people and its importance to national security and prosperity.

Dozens of public and private events are planned throughout the week at various locations, including parachute jumps from planes at area high schools by the Navy parachute team, “Leap Frogs”; Navy band musical performances; demonstrations by the Navy Explosive Ordnance Disposal Team with Robots; and community service activities. St. Louis Navy Week will conclude next weekend with the Spirit of St. Louis Air Show and STEM Expo, featuring the Blue Angels.

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Every branch of the military has a nickname for it: the pointless, time-wasting and annoying duties that are the bane of enlisted personnel everywhere and that have very little to do with mission success.

For Air Force airmen, the term is “queep.” And Maj. Gen. Michael Fortney, vice commander of Global Strike Command, wants to get rid of it.

In an April 19 memo, Fortney told leaders that they need to get serious about identifying and rooting out queep. And now, one general officer wants to actually do something about the pointless, annoying duties that are the bane of airmen everywhere, according to Air Force Times.

“We’ve been talking about this for too long ... let’s do something!” Fortney scrawled at the bottom of the memo.

In the memo, Fortney defined queep as “mandates that exceed wing capacity, ‘don’t make sense,’ and/or add little or no value to mission accomplishment (and possibly detract from it).”

“We are empowered to stop doing the things that don’t make sense and detract from the mission as long as it does not violate law and endanger our airmen,” Fortney said, citing recent guidance from Vice Chief of Staff Gen. David Goldfein.

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U.S. and Russian military officials will sit in the same room 24 hours a day and jointly pore over maps and intelligence to monitor cease-fire violations in Syria under a new system they hope will save a fast-collapsing truce, Secretary of State John F. Kerry said Tuesday, according to the Washington Post.

Under the new arrangement, which Kerry said could be finalized by Wednesday, lines will be drawn in and around Aleppo, scene of the heaviest recent fighting, to prevent new incursions or attacks from any party in the Syrian civil war.

The city will not be allowed to fall to the government, Kerry said. “If [Syrian President Bashar al-] Assad’s strategy is to somehow think he’s going to carve out Aleppo ... I’ve got news for him,” he told reporters at the State Department.

He spoke just hours after another deadly strike on a hospital in Aleppo, this time by opposition forces. The official Syrian Arab News Agency said “scores” of people were killed in a rocket assault on government-held neighborhoods in the western part of the city, which has been divided between the opposing forces since 2012. Activists put the number of dead at 19.

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The U.S. service member killed near Irbil, Iraq, by ISIS gunfire was a Navy SEAL. The Associated Press later identified the casualty as Special Warfare Operator 1st Class Charlie Keating IV.

Keating died around 9:33 a.m. local time from a gunshot wound, according to two defense officials, according to Navy Times.

Defense Secretary Ash Carter said “it is a combat death” at a Tuesday press conference.

Keating is the third American serviceman to die in combat in Iraq since the U.S.-led coalition launched its campaign against the Islamic State in the summer of 2014, according to military officials.

Keating’s grandfather, Charles H. Keating Jr., who died in 2014 at age 90, was the notorious financier who served prison time for his role in the costliest savings and loan failure of the 1980s.