It's called discipline to make everything work. If you do the little things it's easier to do the big things. Appearance of the ships matters. You want to be proud of yourself, your vehicle, your ship, and your ability to fight.
I'm inclined to agree. But I'd like clarification from readers of this Substack who know far more than I do.
The Chinese navy has lots of shiny new ships with that new car smell still evident. But corruption has reduced the value of those ships for warfighting. And I sincerely doubt that the rapid expansion of the PLAN hull count has been matched by training expansion or command and control capabilities to fight the ships as effectively as the U.S. Navy can.
And I'll note that despite the rust on U.S. Navy ships, they have functioned well in the air defense mission this last year against both Houthi and direct Iranian missile and drone attacks.
My question is does the rust really show lack of proficiency? Or is it due to minimal manning that lets rust build up during a deployment? That peacetime "end of history" manning that doesn't allow for enough sailors to cope with battle damage and casualties also doesn't allow for surface maintenance, no?
Or am I mistaken on that issue?
Certainly, I'd like a Navy that is manned and trained enough to do both. And I'd rather friends and enemies see a sharp looking ship that also can carry out missions effectively. But I don't want to be lulled into complacency by rust-free ships returning to port if that masks serious problems in what counts.
Not that I don't think the Navy has much to do to restore capabilities to fight for control of the seas. I'm not trying to make excuses and pretend all is well.
But I would like to know if surface rust is a proper metric of warfighting ability. If not, what are the metrics that we can see from publicly available information?
Fair point. Let's take a look at something as mundane as the Weishanhu, a Type 903 replensihment ship that supported a joint Russia-China fleet exercise this past summer. Laid down in 2000 and launched in 2002, she is a pack mule getting long in the tooth. Let's see what kind of love she was getting in the joint ex. Here is a grainy but passible picture published June 23rd. Here captain and crew seem to be keeping the old girl in nice makeup and jewelry. This could be a one off - just keeping her sexy for that important date with the Bear. https://www.newsweek.com/russia-china-navy-patrol-east-china-sea-korea-japan-1921187#slideshow/2422490
By the age of 3 or 4 your mom let you bathe in a shallow tub alone because she had taught you hygiene and water safety. That's how I remember it. Sailors don't like scrounges. Why would they put up with a scroungy ship? Why did hygiene become unimportant? There used to be a remedy for the ship's scrounge. It was brutally effective.
Not too long ago, I flew into LaGuardia and we taxied past Trump’s Boeing 757. A crew was working on the plane, cleaning it up nice and shiny. I noticed one guy working on the engine nacelle, polishing the silver Rolls Royce builder plate on the engine. So perhaps there’s hope.
Plenty of businessmen do this but very few care about the details. I will give Trump credit he cares about the details. The little things matter because it instils a standard in everyone.
Another indicator of the Navy’s death spiral. It’s perhaps best captured by the quote attributed to various individuals: “How you do anything is how you do everything.”
There is no excuse, but there are plenty of sand crabs in nausea (funny how spell check changed this from NAVSEA) who should be given COVERALLS, a knuckle buster and a paint brush UNTIL THIS NONSENSE STOPS. Lord knows the side walking beach creatures aren’t getting anything else done at the yacht club house, let’s put em to work!
This is the way every "leader" in SEANAV along with the CNO should be ordered into coverall & PPE & assigned this duty. I am sure then they would find a solution at warp speed.
Just as We the West are having our demographic clocks cleaned by “elsewhere” women doing the work American women refuse to do, an analogy from my West-Pac days bubbled to the surface of my near bottomless and ancient memory:
Mary Soo doing the work American sailors usually did but always didn’t want to do--“sidecleaning”
High time to go back to khakis are the every day uniform for Chiefs and Officers. We ought to look like the Navy again. Another is the Two Piece Organizational Clothing, which is what we should have gone to in the first place!
2nd Fleet posted some images from a homecoming for USS NEW YORK (LPD-21) last week. One of them had three uniformed men on the pier. An Admiral in SDBs with overcoat, a Master Chief with the black parka over his SDBs, a SWO CAPT/CDR wearing a bomber jacket instead of the blouse with his SDBs, and a Naval Aviation LT wearing his flight suit and leather jacket. Maybe update the uniform regs here to allow the same rules for the SWO jacket as the Aviation.
I once had a CO who used to talk about how he didn't want his personnel "looking like the French Foreign Legion." And it was XO's & Chiefs' job to police the apparel regime. One would think that such a thing is easy, but no... People drift towards their own styles. Sartorial Vigilance! The Price of Liberty!
When I made Chief in 1974 Dress Khaki was on the way out, but I did buy 6 sets of tailored gaberdine khakis along with wash khakis for grubby work. Chiefs and Officers on my ship wore long sleeve khaki shirts with a black tie, brown shoes and tan socks. Yes, Black Shoes wore brown shoes. All for naught. The pants I bought were size 32. No one told me about the perks of the Chief's Mess. I ballooned to a 36 waist in 4 months. Shortly after, the black tie went away, so too, the brown shoes and tan socks. Wash khaki's (extra starch, please) were my favorite uniform. Same looking khaki uniform my dad wore in the 50's. He was USAF, a Captain at the time, and I fancied myself looking just like him, but with different collar devices until I made LT. Clothes make the man, Mr. Thompson. ☺
Tell the 3 stars and 4 stars they have 60 days to get rid of the rust or they will be no stars and a new group will get 60 days. Fire the people at NAVSEA that have lied about paint and hire some new ones. If it can't be done then the Admirals need to stand up tall and say why. Accountability is what it takes.
Just pick a Panana Canal live webcam and observe the external condition of the Cosco container ships going through. Not one of them will look like the McCain. If a major shipping company can figure out something as old as the relationship between saltwater and steel, surely the braintrust in the Department of Defense can handle this in a weekend. Unless.....
I would amend your suggestion to read "Tell the 3 stars and 4 stars they have 60 days to get rid of rust *and provide a viable plan to keep it off"..." Otherwise, we'll get the usual stupid spike in appearance on Monday, looking crappy by Friday approach.
I have an accountability philosophy that says "Fire everyone at the top of the chain of command until you get to the first worker bee and put them in charge." Obviously if our navy is not getting the attention and support it needs, we don't need those admirals and executives who can't do their jobs. And don't backfill those flag billets.
Gunmakers and after-marketeers came up with Nitride and Cerakote. NAVSEA should be challenged to do as well. A friend of mine read the article and had this to say: "I love the NAVSEA quote about the chemical composition of coatings. If you run it through the BS filter, you get a different answer: Every other navy except the USN uses the same tough maritime paint that costs way less and lasts a long time. The USN uses super expensive but environmentally friendly paint supplied by a gender neutral racially challenged start up company."
Back in 2011 NAVSEA brought together all the players to work on addressing this problem. At that time the Navy was spending over $4 billion every year on corrosion control, the equivalent (then) of the cost to construct a DDG. Recognizing how wide and prolific this problem is for the fleet we formed a team that included every member of the- from R&DT&E, ship design engineering, corrosion control engineering, material engineering, program management, maintenance planning, maintenance execution at depot, RMCs, TYCOMs, unit level - soup to nuts, etc. - from the PHD to the E-3. Systems engineered process of designing and building control avoidance up front to corrosion mitigation and disciplined planning to execution through the ship’s life is the only way to achieve what is needed.
The aim was to focus every damn dollar to fixing this as far as humanly possible. But the fiefdoms within the PEOs would not cooperate. And what finally killed it was a change in command which ushered in another Flag who had other priorities, to put it nicely. Fighting corrosion is not glamorous as it will not easily provide the notoriety on a FITREP in DC.
This is the one issue that makes my blood boil. How can this continue to happen? Once is too often. Hope these pictures are seen by the new SECDEF and SECNAV (and likely new CNO) under the headlines, this is the Navy you are inheriting.
Does MSC use the same systems as NAVSEA- they were pushing back at one point particularly on the tank coatings assessed as tricky to apply and a pain to maintain.
Battleship New Jersey Foundation raised its own $12 million, and this past spring gave the old girl a cleaning & paint job that's a thing of beauty. Sure, static museum ships are different from sailing warriors. But there's something beautiful about taking it down to bare metal and then rebuilding the finish. OBTW... the paint job on BBNJ is about 12x what you might have on your car.
What happened to going over the side in a bosun's seat to chip, scrape, and brush prior to repainting? Can't apply those new coatings except in the yards? Or are they too busy training the crew on the latest DEI PowerPoint deck?
This doesn't have to be hard, folks. The first concept to grasp is that our ships don't have to look perfect, but they should look like we care and that we know what we're doing. My first CO, CAPT Charles S. Christensen, Jr., had a very simple approach to keeping the rust at bay that did not include looking "flag inspection best" at all times; it did involve practical ship upkeep. He authorized all of our divisions with external space responsibilities to effectively deal with rust one square foot at a time. We did not try to re-paint the entire ship in one day or even one week. A "day's work" of clean off, prep, and paint would be defined for each area needing maintenance, with the edges nicely squared off. With the paints we had at the time, that newly painted area would initially look a bit fresher than the rest of the ship when viewed at close range, but within two weeks you couldn't find it against the rest of the hull/superstructure. A nice steady pull rather than panic and bust.
These laser ablation systems are becoming popular in industrial applications. Buy one for each ship - it is quick, does a better job, and allows for quicker painting. I think it is still cheaper to put the guys over the side to bust their knuckles, but this would facilitate it. https://shop.laserphotonics.com/products/marlin $58K.
Of course, maybe once they get these anti-missile/drone lasers on the ships they can just modulate them and shoot the rust off each other (hahaha).
I’m all for working smarter and not harder, and I’m VERY familiar with the good work being done by the National Shipbuilding Research Program. However, technology alone won’t solve this problem. Leadership and adequate OMN budgets are needed.
Real easy fix at the TYCOM level...centrally manage and 100% fund the entire forces' paint budget including haze grey and whatever else is needed to keep the ship looking like a real navy ship. Then the problem becomes a 100% leadership issue.
I wanna see the oven you stick an LPD in, after you powder coat it.
Look at those ships. Has the Navy run out of Bosun's Mates?
"Optimal manning" isn't.
It's called discipline to make everything work. If you do the little things it's easier to do the big things. Appearance of the ships matters. You want to be proud of yourself, your vehicle, your ship, and your ability to fight.
I'm inclined to agree. But I'd like clarification from readers of this Substack who know far more than I do.
The Chinese navy has lots of shiny new ships with that new car smell still evident. But corruption has reduced the value of those ships for warfighting. And I sincerely doubt that the rapid expansion of the PLAN hull count has been matched by training expansion or command and control capabilities to fight the ships as effectively as the U.S. Navy can.
And I'll note that despite the rust on U.S. Navy ships, they have functioned well in the air defense mission this last year against both Houthi and direct Iranian missile and drone attacks.
My question is does the rust really show lack of proficiency? Or is it due to minimal manning that lets rust build up during a deployment? That peacetime "end of history" manning that doesn't allow for enough sailors to cope with battle damage and casualties also doesn't allow for surface maintenance, no?
Or am I mistaken on that issue?
Certainly, I'd like a Navy that is manned and trained enough to do both. And I'd rather friends and enemies see a sharp looking ship that also can carry out missions effectively. But I don't want to be lulled into complacency by rust-free ships returning to port if that masks serious problems in what counts.
Not that I don't think the Navy has much to do to restore capabilities to fight for control of the seas. I'm not trying to make excuses and pretend all is well.
But I would like to know if surface rust is a proper metric of warfighting ability. If not, what are the metrics that we can see from publicly available information?
Thanks in advance.
Fair point. Let's take a look at something as mundane as the Weishanhu, a Type 903 replensihment ship that supported a joint Russia-China fleet exercise this past summer. Laid down in 2000 and launched in 2002, she is a pack mule getting long in the tooth. Let's see what kind of love she was getting in the joint ex. Here is a grainy but passible picture published June 23rd. Here captain and crew seem to be keeping the old girl in nice makeup and jewelry. This could be a one off - just keeping her sexy for that important date with the Bear. https://www.newsweek.com/russia-china-navy-patrol-east-china-sea-korea-japan-1921187#slideshow/2422490
Back in the day (early 1970s) we painted on deployment, and sometimes even underway, in areas not exposed to salt spray.
By the age of 3 or 4 your mom let you bathe in a shallow tub alone because she had taught you hygiene and water safety. That's how I remember it. Sailors don't like scrounges. Why would they put up with a scroungy ship? Why did hygiene become unimportant? There used to be a remedy for the ship's scrounge. It was brutally effective.
Not too long ago, I flew into LaGuardia and we taxied past Trump’s Boeing 757. A crew was working on the plane, cleaning it up nice and shiny. I noticed one guy working on the engine nacelle, polishing the silver Rolls Royce builder plate on the engine. So perhaps there’s hope.
There is something or said for a businessman who makes money by satisfying a customer better than his competitors.
Plenty of businessmen do this but very few care about the details. I will give Trump credit he cares about the details. The little things matter because it instils a standard in everyone.
He did not enforce being addressed as Mr. president in the oval office on camera for the world to see.
Another indicator of the Navy’s death spiral. It’s perhaps best captured by the quote attributed to various individuals: “How you do anything is how you do everything.”
Rust is unavoidable after a long deployment. What is worse is not seeing lots of sailors chipping and painting following the return to the homeport.
💯
There is no excuse, but there are plenty of sand crabs in nausea (funny how spell check changed this from NAVSEA) who should be given COVERALLS, a knuckle buster and a paint brush UNTIL THIS NONSENSE STOPS. Lord knows the side walking beach creatures aren’t getting anything else done at the yacht club house, let’s put em to work!
This is the way every "leader" in SEANAV along with the CNO should be ordered into coverall & PPE & assigned this duty. I am sure then they would find a solution at warp speed.
Navy Brigs (Jails) are still a thing, right? Why not drag the inmates out and make them scrub the deck as punishment?
Just as We the West are having our demographic clocks cleaned by “elsewhere” women doing the work American women refuse to do, an analogy from my West-Pac days bubbled to the surface of my near bottomless and ancient memory:
Mary Soo doing the work American sailors usually did but always didn’t want to do--“sidecleaning”
See: https://schoonermoon.com/2010/02/5-mary-soo/
Reminds me of stories of the pre-WWII US military presence in China. Also the movie "The Sand Pebbles".
Sal is correct.
Appearance matters. A lot.
We can start with uniforms.
It’s time Navy personnel wore Navy uniforms not fatigues.
If you look like you are in the Navy you might think you are in the Navy and you might act like you are in the Navy.
Furthermore, anyone serving on a major staff or at an embassy should be in SDBs or summer whites.
It might even be time to bring back dress khakis.
We are too busy with the Bro mentality and everyone get a call sign.
Call sign: ZC (Zinc Chromate).
RL-ly? How about Red Lead?
High time to go back to khakis are the every day uniform for Chiefs and Officers. We ought to look like the Navy again. Another is the Two Piece Organizational Clothing, which is what we should have gone to in the first place!
2nd Fleet posted some images from a homecoming for USS NEW YORK (LPD-21) last week. One of them had three uniformed men on the pier. An Admiral in SDBs with overcoat, a Master Chief with the black parka over his SDBs, a SWO CAPT/CDR wearing a bomber jacket instead of the blouse with his SDBs, and a Naval Aviation LT wearing his flight suit and leather jacket. Maybe update the uniform regs here to allow the same rules for the SWO jacket as the Aviation.
I once had a CO who used to talk about how he didn't want his personnel "looking like the French Foreign Legion." And it was XO's & Chiefs' job to police the apparel regime. One would think that such a thing is easy, but no... People drift towards their own styles. Sartorial Vigilance! The Price of Liberty!
When I made Chief in 1974 Dress Khaki was on the way out, but I did buy 6 sets of tailored gaberdine khakis along with wash khakis for grubby work. Chiefs and Officers on my ship wore long sleeve khaki shirts with a black tie, brown shoes and tan socks. Yes, Black Shoes wore brown shoes. All for naught. The pants I bought were size 32. No one told me about the perks of the Chief's Mess. I ballooned to a 36 waist in 4 months. Shortly after, the black tie went away, so too, the brown shoes and tan socks. Wash khaki's (extra starch, please) were my favorite uniform. Same looking khaki uniform my dad wore in the 50's. He was USAF, a Captain at the time, and I fancied myself looking just like him, but with different collar devices until I made LT. Clothes make the man, Mr. Thompson. ☺
In lawfirms, fancy silks wear $600 blue chambray shirts on casual Friday. The Navy used to issue them to enlisted men for free.
I don't know if there was ever a better set of clothing for working on a ship than the old bellbottoms and chambray shirts.
And another thing, why all the ball caps? A dixie cup is a far more nautical cover.
Tbf, ball caps can shield your eyes from the sun better.
Tell the 3 stars and 4 stars they have 60 days to get rid of the rust or they will be no stars and a new group will get 60 days. Fire the people at NAVSEA that have lied about paint and hire some new ones. If it can't be done then the Admirals need to stand up tall and say why. Accountability is what it takes.
Just pick a Panana Canal live webcam and observe the external condition of the Cosco container ships going through. Not one of them will look like the McCain. If a major shipping company can figure out something as old as the relationship between saltwater and steel, surely the braintrust in the Department of Defense can handle this in a weekend. Unless.....
https://y.yarn.co/25c224ce-97f2-4717-bc7d-7d17556f6245_text.gif
I would amend your suggestion to read "Tell the 3 stars and 4 stars they have 60 days to get rid of rust *and provide a viable plan to keep it off"..." Otherwise, we'll get the usual stupid spike in appearance on Monday, looking crappy by Friday approach.
I have an accountability philosophy that says "Fire everyone at the top of the chain of command until you get to the first worker bee and put them in charge." Obviously if our navy is not getting the attention and support it needs, we don't need those admirals and executives who can't do their jobs. And don't backfill those flag billets.
Make those at NAVSEA who lie about paint actually do the painting. You will be amazed how quickly they back track on the lies.
Gunmakers and after-marketeers came up with Nitride and Cerakote. NAVSEA should be challenged to do as well. A friend of mine read the article and had this to say: "I love the NAVSEA quote about the chemical composition of coatings. If you run it through the BS filter, you get a different answer: Every other navy except the USN uses the same tough maritime paint that costs way less and lasts a long time. The USN uses super expensive but environmentally friendly paint supplied by a gender neutral racially challenged start up company."
As a multiple degreed metallurgist, I can say:
Fact Check: TRUE
How about that iron carbon phase diagram?
Sexy wench, eh?
I especially like it when her crystal structure changes from BCC to FCC.
This is a family blog, sir…
That’s OK as there are six Crystal families. LOL.
Back in 2011 NAVSEA brought together all the players to work on addressing this problem. At that time the Navy was spending over $4 billion every year on corrosion control, the equivalent (then) of the cost to construct a DDG. Recognizing how wide and prolific this problem is for the fleet we formed a team that included every member of the- from R&DT&E, ship design engineering, corrosion control engineering, material engineering, program management, maintenance planning, maintenance execution at depot, RMCs, TYCOMs, unit level - soup to nuts, etc. - from the PHD to the E-3. Systems engineered process of designing and building control avoidance up front to corrosion mitigation and disciplined planning to execution through the ship’s life is the only way to achieve what is needed.
The aim was to focus every damn dollar to fixing this as far as humanly possible. But the fiefdoms within the PEOs would not cooperate. And what finally killed it was a change in command which ushered in another Flag who had other priorities, to put it nicely. Fighting corrosion is not glamorous as it will not easily provide the notoriety on a FITREP in DC.
I suspect that Trump could say one word to one flag, and she would pick up on the hint.
There's "good" notoriety and there's "bad" notoriety. Let the chips fall where they may.
This is the one issue that makes my blood boil. How can this continue to happen? Once is too often. Hope these pictures are seen by the new SECDEF and SECNAV (and likely new CNO) under the headlines, this is the Navy you are inheriting.
Does MSC use the same systems as NAVSEA- they were pushing back at one point particularly on the tank coatings assessed as tricky to apply and a pain to maintain.
BZ on the Neil Young reference!
You can have your warship in any color you like as long as it is steel grey and rust free.
Battleship New Jersey Foundation raised its own $12 million, and this past spring gave the old girl a cleaning & paint job that's a thing of beauty. Sure, static museum ships are different from sailing warriors. But there's something beautiful about taking it down to bare metal and then rebuilding the finish. OBTW... the paint job on BBNJ is about 12x what you might have on your car.
What happened to going over the side in a bosun's seat to chip, scrape, and brush prior to repainting? Can't apply those new coatings except in the yards? Or are they too busy training the crew on the latest DEI PowerPoint deck?
This doesn't have to be hard, folks. The first concept to grasp is that our ships don't have to look perfect, but they should look like we care and that we know what we're doing. My first CO, CAPT Charles S. Christensen, Jr., had a very simple approach to keeping the rust at bay that did not include looking "flag inspection best" at all times; it did involve practical ship upkeep. He authorized all of our divisions with external space responsibilities to effectively deal with rust one square foot at a time. We did not try to re-paint the entire ship in one day or even one week. A "day's work" of clean off, prep, and paint would be defined for each area needing maintenance, with the edges nicely squared off. With the paints we had at the time, that newly painted area would initially look a bit fresher than the rest of the ship when viewed at close range, but within two weeks you couldn't find it against the rest of the hull/superstructure. A nice steady pull rather than panic and bust.
These laser ablation systems are becoming popular in industrial applications. Buy one for each ship - it is quick, does a better job, and allows for quicker painting. I think it is still cheaper to put the guys over the side to bust their knuckles, but this would facilitate it. https://shop.laserphotonics.com/products/marlin $58K.
Of course, maybe once they get these anti-missile/drone lasers on the ships they can just modulate them and shoot the rust off each other (hahaha).
I’m all for working smarter and not harder, and I’m VERY familiar with the good work being done by the National Shipbuilding Research Program. However, technology alone won’t solve this problem. Leadership and adequate OMN budgets are needed.
Real easy fix at the TYCOM level...centrally manage and 100% fund the entire forces' paint budget including haze grey and whatever else is needed to keep the ship looking like a real navy ship. Then the problem becomes a 100% leadership issue.