Mine Countermeasures Emphasis

Recently, a reader (username “Chinese Gordon”) made the astute observation that mine countermeasures (MCM) was not a path to flag rank.  He’s correct, as far as I can tell.  Of the 250 or so  flag officers we have, how many are former MCM operators?  I don’t know but my guess is somewhere between none and almost none.  This may explain, in part, why the Navy has, for all practical purposes, abandoned MCM.  If we had a couple dozen flag officers with MCM career backgrounds, I’d like to think the Navy would be paying more than lip service to MCM.
 
How do we get more MCM officers into flag ranks?
 
Well, this is where we run into a brick wall.  Even if the Navy magically decided to add MCM officers to the flag ranks … … there aren’t any to add.  There simply are no MCM focused officers left in the Navy.  The Avengers are essentially gone, parked pierside, rotting as they wait to be officially retired.  The LCS has yet to field a viable MCM module so there are no LCS officers that have worked LCS-MCM.
 
You’d have to go down to the Lieutenant level to find anyone who deals with MCM to any degree and those few are doing one-at-a-time, unmanned mine hunting technology development, not real world MCM.
 
Who in the Navy has ever cleared a thousand-mine field, or even just a hundred, in the real world?  No one.  Who has engaged in an amphibious assault exercise that included actual clearance of mines from a 50 mile approach to the beach?  No one.  Who has cleared mines from a chokepoint while under enemy fire, real or simulated?  No one.  And so it goes.  No officer in the Navy has even a rudimentary level of MCM expertise as it would pertain to a peer war or even a disagreement with a group of radical Girl Scouts.
 
We can’t develop flag level focus on MCM because no one in the Navy has any MCM experience.
 
We’re screwed.  We’ll be forced to learn MCM on the fly in a real war and that is a very costly way to learn anything.
 
By the way, the same applies to offensive mine warfare.