A couple of thoughts, if I may. First, I would note that “urgency” in a live fire event (especially with incoming rounds zeroed on your position) is a function of distance from the problem. That is, higher echelon concern about my personal inability to return fire seems to drop off with the square of the distance between me and the FO responsible for the click that should have been a bang. Second is a memory that in the immediate, repeat immediate, after match of the Falklands War, we buddied up to our RN brethren to learn what we could from their experience. How closely is the Potomac Fleet following up with the other navies represented in the Red Sea? I would think that our naval attaches could be doing some very valuable work about now. Just my two cents.
On more then one commentary, the lament has been made that "the US Navy no longer has destroyers tenders". Even when the USN had Submarine Tenders, when did even they train to/ execute missions replenishing subs at sea?.
Often times didn't they sit static in places like Holy Loch with safe harbor, in order to forward replenish so as to keep subs forward in operating patrol areas? Rather then subs return to east coast bases.......
Asking as a 28 year Army guy with a lot of Joint time, who was at Holy Loch as a kid because of my old man. But has had to start getting smart on more navy/ maritime stuff recently.
It was never really possible to replenish a submarine at sea. Freeboard is too low, and there would be significant noise and drag penalties from exposed deck equipment.
A tender or repair ship is a strategically mobile repair facility, or one that can be established without the extensive real estate a shore base needs. Often, they'd be station ships, and not move for very long periods of time.
I had the opportunity to tour the Iver Huidtfelt several years ago when she was visiting Baltimore. She’s a good looking ship. Sad to hear about the combat system issues.
Rather than making success in training too easy, I have seen the opposite problem, making success in training impossible. As Coast Guard Liaison Fleet Training Group San Diego for three years, I saw lots of anti-air exercises using 5"/38s with Mk 56 fire control systems. Almost every AAW exercise was a failure using exercise ammunition. When the last few exercises we used service ammunition it was a very different story. We were taking the target, towed by a Learjet, down in the first couple of rounds. Turned out the batteries in the proximity fuses of the exercise ammunition were all way past their service life. The fuses were just not working. Needless to say, this had a serious impact on confidence in the installed systems.
Served on an OHP Frigate 38 years ago. My fuzzy recollection was that our 76mm OTO Melara had 80 rounds at the ready in the loader and more in the lower magazine (which the Gunner's Mates said "wasn't much"). The gun could fire about 80 rounds a minute. I often thought of the system as weak and Winchesterly. Am not abreast of the technology now, but having read the article, the people factor (good, bad, and ugly) seems to have remained the same. BZ for the front line Danes. BZ for the firings and outrage.
I was informed in another post here the 76 can only fire relatively few rounds before overheating and jamming. Don't know how accurate that is, but that's what I was told.
4 years on that FFG and I'll bet we didn't fire more than 25 rounds (except for that fiasco of an NGFS test off of Luzon. And as I recall, that test gotten written off PDQ.) All of our fire was slow and deliberate.
In theory the Compact could fire 80-round/minute, but in practice the Compact jammed after only 71-rounds were fired continuously causing the gun to overheat jamming a live round in an open breech which hand to be cleared manually by hand! As for the main magazine of the OHP frigate 70-rounds were stored with an additional 6–round within the central screw hoist…
European naval readiness has always been a problem, going back to the middle-Cold War era of the 1960's, One need only read the late Eric Grove's book "Vanguard to Trident," to see the slippage in Royal Navy readiness over time. After the blip of the Falklands war it again went down in number of ships and their readiness. Sal covered a lot of this with expert Jeremy Stohs: https://cdrsalamander.blogspot.com/2018/09/european-naval-power-with-jeremy-stohs.html
It takes 4-5 NATO frigates tied up at the pier to make one NATO frigate "ready" for deployment in terms of crew, weapons, ammunition and repair parts.
Re: "There is nothing wrong with getting the most use out of older weapons" - I recall a missile shoot on my frigate where we did some testing, in the course of which we had old SM-1s to get rid of as follow-on missiles. We'd fired the first round and loading the 2nd missile, we fired it to spectacular (so I'm told from the folks on the bridge) results. It left the rail and got about a hundred yards away and then...boom! Lesson to me: old ordnance is untrustworthy.
Now--question: Which of us (US or allied) will lose a ship (or take a big hit) to the pirates first? I think it's inevitable and no way the powers that be are ready for it.
"...no way the powers that be are ready for it. I dunno. Pretty sure TPTB have already formed a committee of PAO's, spinmeisters and expendable SWO's to craft a press release. "Fog of war", "human error", "COVID supply chain crisis", "Trump deregulation", "a Chinese supplier of key components" will satisfy those who get their 30 second soundbite news from MSNBC and CNN. You want to unset the apple cart? Bring torches, pitchforks and plenty of rope.
I recall that USN had fuse problems with our trusty 5"/38. Same result: Shells exploded right after leaving the muzzle. Yes, that got your heart rate up. I also recall that it was a manufacturing issue. Low bidder wins again.
It's something that people don't think about. That's why the Army in WWII was still using weapons from WWI and why the Marines didn't have the M1 Garand until the middle of their island hopping.
That's why reserve units still use old equipment and arms. Unless there's a reason to have new and improved, nobody sees the need.
That can go back to armies in the past. The European armies didn't change tactics and weapons until Bonaparte conquered half of Europe. The American military forgot about how to fight insurgents until they were forced to adapt in Vietnam.
Tbf, the jarheads didn't trust the Garand until they saw them used in combat. The Rifleman's Creed was originally a sell job for the newfangled semi-automatic rifle.
Fun fact, some Army units has the M1903 as their issue rifle through the end of WWII - not just CONUS ones. Especially in Italy and Burma, the M1903 was in widespread use well into 1944. Some units who came ashore in Normandy had the M1903 as their issue rifle.
The M1 was adopted by the Army in 1936. A bit of a delay in fielding the rifle came from the fact that it was designed around a .276 cartridge but TPTB (1 each Douglas MacArthur, Chief of Staff Army) required it to be chambered for .30-06 because the Army still had LOTS of ammo left over from the Great War.
The comment from the radar manufacturer floors me: "does not indicate a problem with the APAR radar." I spent some time in IT, and it always amazed me that when two systems had to link up but didn't, each area said their system worked perfectly. If no one takes responsibility for the interface, it won't work.
Gah! Gave me a flashback, Jim. Force converted to EW1 from RD1 in 1972. Wasn't sent to BEEP School for a 6 week Elex primer. Was sent to 51 weeks of EW"A" School for technology, ops, some other more classified system, passive system receiver and active system deception repeater. Was given a 4 week course (abbreviated from 8) on the AN/ULQ-6B deception repeater and was sent to an Aircraft Carrier to maintain the AN/SLQ-22A(V)1 deception repeater which was a hybrid system cobbled together from 3 different systems. That system was unique to CVA's because of the high power required to be effective because of the huge radar echo from the Carrier that needed to be overcome. There were 3 sets of tech manuals but no blueprints of interconnectivity between the subcomponents. Some of the connecting cables had 120 pins. The pin numbers meant nothing without interconnectivity diagrams...near impossible to troubleshoot and signal trace. Back in 1973 there were no built-in diagnostics. There was a compact (36" square) heat exchanger (chilled water to FC77 fluoro-chloro chemical to PCB laden oil) to keep the $40K TWT cool. That TWT looked like a spark plug but was about 32" tall and it got bolted in to its own 450lbs power supply unit. The heat exchanger was a nightmare plumbing system that required complete disassembly to repair and then to refit several dozen copper pipes with press fittings "just so" so that they were air and liquid tight in order to draw a vacuum to refill it with FC77. My first experience at plumbing. Ugh. "IT" wasn't a thing back then. Would have loved to have IT around, if only to give me Kleenex to wipe away tears. Then mercifully, the ship got me the 12-week school for the whole system. What a relief. Indeed, up return from that school I promoted to Chief and promptly transferred to a Frigate in Hawaii that had an AN/ULQ-6C. 1973-74 still gives me nightmares.
Great story! My grandfather was an RT out of Monterey in WW2 and my dad "worked" on computers at U Edinburgh when he was 14 in around '56 before a degree in Applied Mathematics, a stint at CERN, and , improbably, some time in the Regiment as I learned after his death. Then he went back to programming at IBM and other companies until retirement.
We built our first computer together as a kit in the mid 70s; good times. They're both gone now of course, but reading a biography of Richard Feynman currently ("Genius") and talk of the MIT Rad Lab, Manhattan Project, and physics in the 50's and reminded reminded me of both.
I read "Surely You're Joking, Mr. Feynman" and "Tuva or Bust" and became a great fan of Richard Feynman. Plenty of YouTube videos of Feynman in fine form. The man was brilliant and made it seem so easy. My Uncle Paul was a junior Navy Officer who spent the war working as a minor minion on the Manhattan Project. He had a career at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory thereafter. Me? My last job was an asphalt inspector. Paid very well and was fun work when we weren't paving in the Pensacola summer (April through November).
I've got a copy of "Surely You're Joking, Mr. Feynman" on my bookshelf. It's next to a copy of "Disturbing the Universe" by Freeman Dyson from 1979. Along with another of Dyson's books, "Weapons and Hope" from 1985.
Among many other things, Freeman Dyson did part of the mathematical work needed to represent and interpret the physics being depicted by the Feynmann Diagrams in the late 1940's.
Both books make interesting reading for people who have spent time in the AEC/DOE nuclear weapons complex, before, during, and after the Cold War.
Re: your last job. An honest, and respectful question for you. Every time I drive by a local crew working on paving or underground utilities, it always appears that there is one guy working and three people just looking. Is that a valid assessment of the pointy-end-to-supervisor ratio, or am I seeing something else?
On a typical day on the job, there is a lot for a crew to do. Sometimes, though, there isn't something to do that is really important in each man's area of expertise or job description and the crew will congregate to what seems interesting. Better to have too many men on the job than too few when the crunch comes. Most grown men, like little boys, like to watch heavy equipment move heavy objects and displace huge amounts of dirt. That makes them look idle. Which they are. A supervisor can keep everyone busy all the time but that doesn't make for a happy crew. The balance is to get the job done, keep people happy, not be more of a hard ass than you need to be. It's not a lot different in office work, fast food or even some ship in transit, I think. I was an inspector for asphalt and road building. I supervised no one, had no crew. I just inspected, did QA, made sure things were to spec. Easy job, not having to supervise people. I did make suggestions, sometimes said, "That ain't right...it ain't spec, and you know it." It was then up to them to do it right or either not get paid for it or later to have to re-do it at great expense. Easy job. They really want to get paid. I never worried about idle road workers while on the job. They bid a contract for a fixed amount of money. Then they either turn a profit or they don't. Job idleness self-corrects.
Also, sometimes what you see is a gaggle of people looking at one guy in a hole doing a job but what you aren't privy to is that one person in the group is a supervisor or bigger boss berating them saying. "Lookit that guy...you either bust your ass like him or go home." Or "Lookit that yahoo...he's a moron. Don't be like him." But yeah. I am retired, but it galls me to see taxpayer paid contract workers idle. But that company either turns a profit or it doesn't. No skin off my nose. Road work and asphalt can be grueling. You cannot flog them 8-10 hours a day and retain workers...even if you are a former LPO, LCPO, DIVO or DH and want to. Civilian work ethos was different from what I knew in the Navy. It was a big adjustment for me. But damn...it paid very well. I adjusted.
"You do what you do with the money that you are given." If our navy practiced that principle then not one red penny would be spent on DEI unless ship depot maintenance was fully funded, ships looked in tip-top shape 24-7, ships had enough armaments to perform their mission for more than a couple of days, etc., etc., etc.
But you know they'd likely spend it on paint first and then call it "good". Right? The problem is the people in charge (wrongly) spending the money on what they deem most important. The marching orders come from the top and the music sounds like that which accompanies clowns at a circus exiting the tiny clown car.
Hai, first impression important, very so, Tim. How many times have I seen sailors over the side painting over salt grime before entering port or some Sunday duty section painting the side facing a change of command scheduled for Monday that they just got the word about? Or the crew shifting to Tropical Whites at sea because some Admiral was doing a one-hour visit via helo. Hah. I had a Navy friend who was a prior service U.S. Army Infantryman with 2 tour in Vietnam and a CIB. He said he was at a beleaguered fire base out in the sticks, no showers, no hot food, constant gunfire. Gen. Westmoreland was scheduled in for a quick morale building look-see. When an advance flight of helos came in, the troops were cheering. Cheering until they began to offload garden rakes and were told to spiff up the base pronto. There was no mutiny or fragging, but all the rakes got burned before the raking could begin.
That former Army friend made quite an impression when he came aboard our FFG as a 34 year old Ensign with a pound of chest salad and a CIB. His last tour was as a LCDR in Korea as a Navy liaison at an Army Command. When the Colonel saw his SWO pin and CIB he frocked him to O-5 as the billet was for that paygrade. He retired at 26, all used up. Became a cattleman in Colorado.
I had a CTA1 who earned a CIB in Vietnam, whom my predecessor would not allow to wear said CIB , saying the Navy CAR was "equivalent". Second thing I did after change-of-command was to tell him to put the CIB back on.
My friend (above) was a former CTI1 (Russian/Chinese/German) after his stint with the Army and before OCS. Our Captain, a very good man, told my friend to not wear the CIB as it looked unseemly for a Naval Officer. He started to wear it again after a change of command and never had a further issue with it.
I am curious about his reasoning, and it makes me doubt your characterization of him as "a very good man". I am, perhaps, overly touchy on that subject.
Problems in recent years with rust have been so acute that it's been way beyond cosmetics...
Betting if someone were actually honest about it, there are thousands of critical welds across the fleet that have been so neglected and wasted that they will fail at 50 percent or less of the originally designed shock loads...
Navy men need to treat rust on a ship as if it were a suppurating ass-rash on their own keisters. It looks to me that the men at the deck plates are treating it as if the problem was on some Admiral's bum, a ho-hum approach. Doesn't matter what perspective when rust is gonna bite everyone on the ass sooner or later. Hygiene is some basic stuff. Nothing hard to understand here. Shower, brush your teeth, flea dip your poodle, paint your ship. The basics.
Practice, Practice, Practice... of course the old adage that practice makes perfect is not really valid ... perfect practice makes perfect.
Having 76mm shells detonate after leaving the muzzle must be a thrilling sight from the bridge. Especially at night. I hope they got video...
Seriously, that had to be a known fault up and down the CoC
My thoughts exactly. Hope the ship's laundry was functioning more smoothly.
Just glad they detonated *after* leaving the muzzle.
A couple of thoughts, if I may. First, I would note that “urgency” in a live fire event (especially with incoming rounds zeroed on your position) is a function of distance from the problem. That is, higher echelon concern about my personal inability to return fire seems to drop off with the square of the distance between me and the FO responsible for the click that should have been a bang. Second is a memory that in the immediate, repeat immediate, after match of the Falklands War, we buddied up to our RN brethren to learn what we could from their experience. How closely is the Potomac Fleet following up with the other navies represented in the Red Sea? I would think that our naval attaches could be doing some very valuable work about now. Just my two cents.
Sorry. “after match” should read “aftermath”.
the 3 little dots ... to the lower right allow you to edit
Missed that. Thanks.
On more then one commentary, the lament has been made that "the US Navy no longer has destroyers tenders". Even when the USN had Submarine Tenders, when did even they train to/ execute missions replenishing subs at sea?.
Often times didn't they sit static in places like Holy Loch with safe harbor, in order to forward replenish so as to keep subs forward in operating patrol areas? Rather then subs return to east coast bases.......
Asking as a 28 year Army guy with a lot of Joint time, who was at Holy Loch as a kid because of my old man. But has had to start getting smart on more navy/ maritime stuff recently.
It was never really possible to replenish a submarine at sea. Freeboard is too low, and there would be significant noise and drag penalties from exposed deck equipment.
A tender or repair ship is a strategically mobile repair facility, or one that can be established without the extensive real estate a shore base needs. Often, they'd be station ships, and not move for very long periods of time.
FYI... Link isn't working ... http://kanon-en-radar-werkten-niet-goed-020424.html/
Thanks Sid. Mefixie. https://marineschepen.nl/nieuws/Deens-fregat-werd-aangevallen-in-Rode-Zee-maar-kanon-en-radar-werkten-niet-goed-020424.html
I had the opportunity to tour the Iver Huidtfelt several years ago when she was visiting Baltimore. She’s a good looking ship. Sad to hear about the combat system issues.
The Danish don't mess around.
https://cphpost.dk/2024-04-04/news/defence-minister-fires-chief-of-defence/
Danish Defence Minister fires Chief of Defence
Using Google Translate, apparently the Chief failed to send the details up the civilian chain. https://policywatch.dk/nyheder/christiansborg/article16986836.ece
As it should be.
Sicinnus: That's real, military accountability. Good for the Danes.
Rather than making success in training too easy, I have seen the opposite problem, making success in training impossible. As Coast Guard Liaison Fleet Training Group San Diego for three years, I saw lots of anti-air exercises using 5"/38s with Mk 56 fire control systems. Almost every AAW exercise was a failure using exercise ammunition. When the last few exercises we used service ammunition it was a very different story. We were taking the target, towed by a Learjet, down in the first couple of rounds. Turned out the batteries in the proximity fuses of the exercise ammunition were all way past their service life. The fuses were just not working. Needless to say, this had a serious impact on confidence in the installed systems.
One of the not often stated arguments against more munitions procurement is we'll use too much in practice, causing us to have to buy more ammo.
Make the bean counters and budgeteers do service on the front line.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8xjCX_TXkyU
Served on an OHP Frigate 38 years ago. My fuzzy recollection was that our 76mm OTO Melara had 80 rounds at the ready in the loader and more in the lower magazine (which the Gunner's Mates said "wasn't much"). The gun could fire about 80 rounds a minute. I often thought of the system as weak and Winchesterly. Am not abreast of the technology now, but having read the article, the people factor (good, bad, and ugly) seems to have remained the same. BZ for the front line Danes. BZ for the firings and outrage.
I was informed in another post here the 76 can only fire relatively few rounds before overheating and jamming. Don't know how accurate that is, but that's what I was told.
4 years on that FFG and I'll bet we didn't fire more than 25 rounds (except for that fiasco of an NGFS test off of Luzon. And as I recall, that test gotten written off PDQ.) All of our fire was slow and deliberate.
In theory the Compact could fire 80-round/minute, but in practice the Compact jammed after only 71-rounds were fired continuously causing the gun to overheat jamming a live round in an open breech which hand to be cleared manually by hand! As for the main magazine of the OHP frigate 70-rounds were stored with an additional 6–round within the central screw hoist…
Thanks. The consensus was that it was an anemic gun. But better than a 57mm, I suppose.
We need to use ammunition regularly to make sure it is working.
We need to buy replacements regularly to keep production lines open.
Practices make those things possible.
The Danes have been recycling guns from older ships and ammunition as well.
Not unknown. The UK is moving to 5” because all their 4.5” guns are worn out.
European naval readiness has always been a problem, going back to the middle-Cold War era of the 1960's, One need only read the late Eric Grove's book "Vanguard to Trident," to see the slippage in Royal Navy readiness over time. After the blip of the Falklands war it again went down in number of ships and their readiness. Sal covered a lot of this with expert Jeremy Stohs: https://cdrsalamander.blogspot.com/2018/09/european-naval-power-with-jeremy-stohs.html
It takes 4-5 NATO frigates tied up at the pier to make one NATO frigate "ready" for deployment in terms of crew, weapons, ammunition and repair parts.
In the 1960s, Harold Wilson sacked Lord Mountbatten and that was the beginning of the end of the Royal Navy.
An anecdote and a question:
Re: "There is nothing wrong with getting the most use out of older weapons" - I recall a missile shoot on my frigate where we did some testing, in the course of which we had old SM-1s to get rid of as follow-on missiles. We'd fired the first round and loading the 2nd missile, we fired it to spectacular (so I'm told from the folks on the bridge) results. It left the rail and got about a hundred yards away and then...boom! Lesson to me: old ordnance is untrustworthy.
Now--question: Which of us (US or allied) will lose a ship (or take a big hit) to the pirates first? I think it's inevitable and no way the powers that be are ready for it.
"...no way the powers that be are ready for it. I dunno. Pretty sure TPTB have already formed a committee of PAO's, spinmeisters and expendable SWO's to craft a press release. "Fog of war", "human error", "COVID supply chain crisis", "Trump deregulation", "a Chinese supplier of key components" will satisfy those who get their 30 second soundbite news from MSNBC and CNN. You want to unset the apple cart? Bring torches, pitchforks and plenty of rope.
I recall that USN had fuse problems with our trusty 5"/38. Same result: Shells exploded right after leaving the muzzle. Yes, that got your heart rate up. I also recall that it was a manufacturing issue. Low bidder wins again.
Practice, test, evaluate, practice, test, evaluate...
It's something that people don't think about. That's why the Army in WWII was still using weapons from WWI and why the Marines didn't have the M1 Garand until the middle of their island hopping.
That's why reserve units still use old equipment and arms. Unless there's a reason to have new and improved, nobody sees the need.
That can go back to armies in the past. The European armies didn't change tactics and weapons until Bonaparte conquered half of Europe. The American military forgot about how to fight insurgents until they were forced to adapt in Vietnam.
Tbf, the jarheads didn't trust the Garand until they saw them used in combat. The Rifleman's Creed was originally a sell job for the newfangled semi-automatic rifle.
Fun fact, some Army units has the M1903 as their issue rifle through the end of WWII - not just CONUS ones. Especially in Italy and Burma, the M1903 was in widespread use well into 1944. Some units who came ashore in Normandy had the M1903 as their issue rifle.
M1903A3 was frequently issued to MP's, wiremen and other not-quite rear -area types. It served well and is a very capable bolt-action battle rifle.
The M1 was adopted by the Army in 1936. A bit of a delay in fielding the rifle came from the fact that it was designed around a .276 cartridge but TPTB (1 each Douglas MacArthur, Chief of Staff Army) required it to be chambered for .30-06 because the Army still had LOTS of ammo left over from the Great War.
That, and having to recall the first production run to replace the gas system in 1940.
"...known for years without the necessary sense of urgency to resolve..."
I was hoping sense would kick in before the sense of urgency had to kick in... But alas.
The comment from the radar manufacturer floors me: "does not indicate a problem with the APAR radar." I spent some time in IT, and it always amazed me that when two systems had to link up but didn't, each area said their system worked perfectly. If no one takes responsibility for the interface, it won't work.
Gah! Gave me a flashback, Jim. Force converted to EW1 from RD1 in 1972. Wasn't sent to BEEP School for a 6 week Elex primer. Was sent to 51 weeks of EW"A" School for technology, ops, some other more classified system, passive system receiver and active system deception repeater. Was given a 4 week course (abbreviated from 8) on the AN/ULQ-6B deception repeater and was sent to an Aircraft Carrier to maintain the AN/SLQ-22A(V)1 deception repeater which was a hybrid system cobbled together from 3 different systems. That system was unique to CVA's because of the high power required to be effective because of the huge radar echo from the Carrier that needed to be overcome. There were 3 sets of tech manuals but no blueprints of interconnectivity between the subcomponents. Some of the connecting cables had 120 pins. The pin numbers meant nothing without interconnectivity diagrams...near impossible to troubleshoot and signal trace. Back in 1973 there were no built-in diagnostics. There was a compact (36" square) heat exchanger (chilled water to FC77 fluoro-chloro chemical to PCB laden oil) to keep the $40K TWT cool. That TWT looked like a spark plug but was about 32" tall and it got bolted in to its own 450lbs power supply unit. The heat exchanger was a nightmare plumbing system that required complete disassembly to repair and then to refit several dozen copper pipes with press fittings "just so" so that they were air and liquid tight in order to draw a vacuum to refill it with FC77. My first experience at plumbing. Ugh. "IT" wasn't a thing back then. Would have loved to have IT around, if only to give me Kleenex to wipe away tears. Then mercifully, the ship got me the 12-week school for the whole system. What a relief. Indeed, up return from that school I promoted to Chief and promptly transferred to a Frigate in Hawaii that had an AN/ULQ-6C. 1973-74 still gives me nightmares.
Great story! My grandfather was an RT out of Monterey in WW2 and my dad "worked" on computers at U Edinburgh when he was 14 in around '56 before a degree in Applied Mathematics, a stint at CERN, and , improbably, some time in the Regiment as I learned after his death. Then he went back to programming at IBM and other companies until retirement.
We built our first computer together as a kit in the mid 70s; good times. They're both gone now of course, but reading a biography of Richard Feynman currently ("Genius") and talk of the MIT Rad Lab, Manhattan Project, and physics in the 50's and reminded reminded me of both.
I read "Surely You're Joking, Mr. Feynman" and "Tuva or Bust" and became a great fan of Richard Feynman. Plenty of YouTube videos of Feynman in fine form. The man was brilliant and made it seem so easy. My Uncle Paul was a junior Navy Officer who spent the war working as a minor minion on the Manhattan Project. He had a career at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory thereafter. Me? My last job was an asphalt inspector. Paid very well and was fun work when we weren't paving in the Pensacola summer (April through November).
I've got a copy of "Surely You're Joking, Mr. Feynman" on my bookshelf. It's next to a copy of "Disturbing the Universe" by Freeman Dyson from 1979. Along with another of Dyson's books, "Weapons and Hope" from 1985.
Among many other things, Freeman Dyson did part of the mathematical work needed to represent and interpret the physics being depicted by the Feynmann Diagrams in the late 1940's.
Both books make interesting reading for people who have spent time in the AEC/DOE nuclear weapons complex, before, during, and after the Cold War.
Re: your last job. An honest, and respectful question for you. Every time I drive by a local crew working on paving or underground utilities, it always appears that there is one guy working and three people just looking. Is that a valid assessment of the pointy-end-to-supervisor ratio, or am I seeing something else?
On a typical day on the job, there is a lot for a crew to do. Sometimes, though, there isn't something to do that is really important in each man's area of expertise or job description and the crew will congregate to what seems interesting. Better to have too many men on the job than too few when the crunch comes. Most grown men, like little boys, like to watch heavy equipment move heavy objects and displace huge amounts of dirt. That makes them look idle. Which they are. A supervisor can keep everyone busy all the time but that doesn't make for a happy crew. The balance is to get the job done, keep people happy, not be more of a hard ass than you need to be. It's not a lot different in office work, fast food or even some ship in transit, I think. I was an inspector for asphalt and road building. I supervised no one, had no crew. I just inspected, did QA, made sure things were to spec. Easy job, not having to supervise people. I did make suggestions, sometimes said, "That ain't right...it ain't spec, and you know it." It was then up to them to do it right or either not get paid for it or later to have to re-do it at great expense. Easy job. They really want to get paid. I never worried about idle road workers while on the job. They bid a contract for a fixed amount of money. Then they either turn a profit or they don't. Job idleness self-corrects.
Also, sometimes what you see is a gaggle of people looking at one guy in a hole doing a job but what you aren't privy to is that one person in the group is a supervisor or bigger boss berating them saying. "Lookit that guy...you either bust your ass like him or go home." Or "Lookit that yahoo...he's a moron. Don't be like him." But yeah. I am retired, but it galls me to see taxpayer paid contract workers idle. But that company either turns a profit or it doesn't. No skin off my nose. Road work and asphalt can be grueling. You cannot flog them 8-10 hours a day and retain workers...even if you are a former LPO, LCPO, DIVO or DH and want to. Civilian work ethos was different from what I knew in the Navy. It was a big adjustment for me. But damn...it paid very well. I adjusted.
"You do what you do with the money that you are given." If our navy practiced that principle then not one red penny would be spent on DEI unless ship depot maintenance was fully funded, ships looked in tip-top shape 24-7, ships had enough armaments to perform their mission for more than a couple of days, etc., etc., etc.
But you know they'd likely spend it on paint first and then call it "good". Right? The problem is the people in charge (wrongly) spending the money on what they deem most important. The marching orders come from the top and the music sounds like that which accompanies clowns at a circus exiting the tiny clown car.
Well, first impressions are very important, ne? If it looks good, it must be good.
Hai, first impression important, very so, Tim. How many times have I seen sailors over the side painting over salt grime before entering port or some Sunday duty section painting the side facing a change of command scheduled for Monday that they just got the word about? Or the crew shifting to Tropical Whites at sea because some Admiral was doing a one-hour visit via helo. Hah. I had a Navy friend who was a prior service U.S. Army Infantryman with 2 tour in Vietnam and a CIB. He said he was at a beleaguered fire base out in the sticks, no showers, no hot food, constant gunfire. Gen. Westmoreland was scheduled in for a quick morale building look-see. When an advance flight of helos came in, the troops were cheering. Cheering until they began to offload garden rakes and were told to spiff up the base pronto. There was no mutiny or fragging, but all the rakes got burned before the raking could begin.
That former Army friend made quite an impression when he came aboard our FFG as a 34 year old Ensign with a pound of chest salad and a CIB. His last tour was as a LCDR in Korea as a Navy liaison at an Army Command. When the Colonel saw his SWO pin and CIB he frocked him to O-5 as the billet was for that paygrade. He retired at 26, all used up. Became a cattleman in Colorado.
I had a CTA1 who earned a CIB in Vietnam, whom my predecessor would not allow to wear said CIB , saying the Navy CAR was "equivalent". Second thing I did after change-of-command was to tell him to put the CIB back on.
My friend (above) was a former CTI1 (Russian/Chinese/German) after his stint with the Army and before OCS. Our Captain, a very good man, told my friend to not wear the CIB as it looked unseemly for a Naval Officer. He started to wear it again after a change of command and never had a further issue with it.
"it looked unseemly for a Naval Officer."
I am curious about his reasoning, and it makes me doubt your characterization of him as "a very good man". I am, perhaps, overly touchy on that subject.
Problems in recent years with rust have been so acute that it's been way beyond cosmetics...
Betting if someone were actually honest about it, there are thousands of critical welds across the fleet that have been so neglected and wasted that they will fail at 50 percent or less of the originally designed shock loads...
https://www.navytimes.com/resizer/8Seo07ASqK1MsLG17hYLwYP0L7s=/800x0/filters:format(jpg):quality(70)/cloudfront-us-east-1.images.arcpublishing.com/archetype/DTTWVG754NHB7CZTIXELYFJOX4.jpg
Navy men need to treat rust on a ship as if it were a suppurating ass-rash on their own keisters. It looks to me that the men at the deck plates are treating it as if the problem was on some Admiral's bum, a ho-hum approach. Doesn't matter what perspective when rust is gonna bite everyone on the ass sooner or later. Hygiene is some basic stuff. Nothing hard to understand here. Shower, brush your teeth, flea dip your poodle, paint your ship. The basics.