Your comment on “short term gain on my watch that will create long term existential problems on some other poor bastard’s watch a few PCS cycles down the road long after I’m driving around The Villages in my pimped out golf cart” is another aspect of GOFO’s not being willing to tell upper, upper management that their services cannot possibly fulfill the nation’s no-fooling wartime requirements.
My brother was a business marketing professor before he retired. He laughed when the Navy adopted Total Quality Leadership or "TQL". He said "You're 3 business fads behind!"
I was a Commander when TQL hit then Optimum Manning. Tried to engage every Flag I knew about what a dumb idea each was...not that TQL was wrong, but trying to create warriors by council was the wrong way to do it. Likewise, the LCS was just too short handed to do anything, even if the platforms were decent (they weren't and aren't).
The Navy is ripe with failed programs now. The Firescout unmanned helo failed the first half of its Opeval...a month or so later...declared operational...and now is out of the fleet except for one squadron that flies it on the West Coast (and fails most of the time).
F-35? A great airplane that cannot be supported by the supply system, so operations suffer.
WHO has been held accountable for these failures? NOBODY that's who. Admirals and Commodores have no problem with relief of command of CDR's and CAPT's, yet have no such accountability themselves.
Right now there is no accountability for program managers who fail, no accountability for Flag Officers who fail, and the Fleet gets bombarded with Woke ideology and time sumps that detract from warfighting.
Somehow, methinks that the PLA-N has very few seminars on trangender ID's and pronouns and when we get our butts kicked, it will be the end of the American empire, all because we continue blindly down this path and not one Flag has the guts to say "ENOUGH!"
"In the 1990s, the armed forces were required to change the intake of conscripted crews. Basic education in the Navy (GUS scheme) had dramatic consequences for the frigate weapon's operability. I led the investigation that revealed the downward trend. At the time, the navy's leadership succeeded in convincing strategic leadership that the decision had to be reversed before it was too late." Gone are the days where you could expect a Chief and a couple of 1st & 2nd classes with the proper tools to make just about any repairs to the equipment they are responsible for. Modern Navy training seems to be more about ditching the classrooms, hands-on labs, and prototypes and sending sailors to sea with a training app on their phone. A generation of this an no one has the skill sets to do much of anything, with the greater loss being that of the institutional memory that, at one time, such skills and experience were normal and expected.
"It was an absolute minimum crew that could only work if all the prerequisites were met."
That's the real weakness of the "efficiency cult." We saw that also in the Just In Time inventory management practices that blew up so horribly in the past couple years; that it really doesn't take much to bring the whole thing to a screeching halt. And, as with bringing anything to a screeching halt, you burn up parts and components which cannot be readily replaced.
But even worse within that efficiency cult is that the practitioners are not allowed to assume error. It's all-in on everything working right all the time, because anything else (a) is unacceptable performance (sniff, sniff), and (b) to open the door to any allowance for error is to open the door to every and any imponderable - which wholly destroys all of the meticulously spelled out analyses and planning. Oh, you can allow a fudge factor - 10% is typical - to cover the non-specifics, but error itself in not contemplated.
Your idea that there is no punishment for bad decisions was belied by the notion that the consequences for the decider will be come to fruition, "long after I’m driving around The Villages in my pimped out golf cart." There could be no worse fate than to be consigned to The Villages for the rest of your days.
The Villages is modeled after The Village in the TV show "The Prisoner," where Number Six is confined. They have the same construction style, and the same music everywhere. Unlike The Village, The Villages is in an inhospitable climate. It's a drained swamp, miles from salt water, baking in the subtropical sun.
Being forced to live in The Villages seems like a proper punishment for a Cheng who gundecked the oil changes of the plant under his control. The place is nauseating. "Be seeing you."
Slightly off topic but I can tell you that as a physician I can attest that hospital administrators leaned out staff and supply purchases while paying themselves million + dollar salaries to make sure that DEI and non-mission critical fripperies such as annual 5 K runs were well funded and attended. When COVID hit it became apparent that US health care was not prepared at all for this disaster with the results we have all seen.
You predict war with China, our naval forces will lose both people and ships, the US loses control of the sea lanes and we degenerate into cross-domain guerilla war. The US population will notice that they aren't getting cheap stuff at Walmart anymore. With rising costs we will have recession and job loss. When they take out the US will China notice that other places won't pay as much as we can or do they hope to sell stuff to Russia? Or maybe they plan to add the US as another province?
I know this will receive some push back but I think we have reached a can have vs a liked to have situation particularly with regards to our population as well as our manufacturing base- or lack there of.
You have to make some hard choices and investments.
1. Worst choice: You can lower standards, which just ends up filling body bags: create cannon fodder - McNamara's Project 100,000, AKA McNamara's Morons.
2. Partial solution, you run a pre-boot camp a fat camp for the overweight and remedial education to make up for public education's shortcomings. Or you make boot camp longer to try and accomplish the same thing. This can bump your number up a little.
3.. You look at every billet and ask: Does this need a person in uniform or can it be filled by a civilian contractor? In Marine/Army lingo is that person issued 782 gear/TA-50? If not can we civilianized the job?
4. We look at what we can successfully man and adjust our size according. 355 ships may be pie in sky wishful thinking if we cannot even adequately crew 290 ships. Is 200 more realistic?
4 (a) With go with more numerous smaller ships ie. USS Americas instead of Nimitz. Using tender based upgraded/upgunned versions of the cyclone class to handle anti-piracy and run around the rocks and shoals of the South China Sea, Solomon Islands, the Caribbean etc. Adding diesel /AIP subs to our force.
4(b) Technology, automation, USV, UUV, UAV
5. Recruiting, Sell the Navy as a military organization not IBM with uniforms and weekends off with drag queen shows., a marketing plan that is not working now. Of course that means acting like a military organization and giving up the drag shows, I&E etc. Even dare I say it - not family friendly (another pie in the sky dream)
6. Concurrent with recruiting increase benefits,. Go back to an old version of the GI bill-4 years honorable service gets you 4 years at any college/trade school (public or private) that receives Federal money. 6 years gets you 6 years of education. No matching contribution required by service member. We control cost by dictating price to the college/trade school - It is what we will pay not what they will charge. They accept or stop getting federal money. Colleges face declining enrollment so they should not put up much of a fight.
7. Retention - Back to the old retirement system. Ditch the blended system. Add a 15 year tier to it.
15 years in a lot of military occupation is hard the body mentally as well as physically.
"When the frigate KNM Helge Ingstad collided with the tanker Sola TS in Hjeltefjorden on 8 November 2018, there was an American exchange officer on the bridge. She had the role of watch commander in training that night. On Monday, she testified before the Hordaland district court.
[She] was sent down into the officer's mess shortly after the collision.
- I think I "blacked out". I was in shock. There were ten thousand things happening at the same time, while time passed extremely slowly, she said.
In questioning, she had explained that she had "become too overwhelmed and was of no help to anyone". She was shaking violently and was taken down from the bridge by someone in charge of sanitation.
- It's not the reaction you hope you'll have in a moment like that, but that's what happened. That is an accurate description of how I reacted."
Ship control is an officer issue with enlisted folks in support. Both Oslo and Nansen frigates nominally rated at 120 officers and crew. Norwegian ships do not appear to have the same OPTEMPO as do the tired DDG crews of 7th Fleet. All that said, training rather than funding or crew size is likely more the direct cause of the Ingstad collision rather than lack of enlisted crew. The reports back on the 2017 US DDG collisions suggested appallingly-bad communication between the bridge and CIC to the point where combat had no idea that a collision was imminent. Minimum manning certainly had an impact on poor maintenance on US ships, notably topside where it has resulted in the rust that Sal regularly chronicles. So yes, minimum manning has been a challenge and a contributor to poor readiness, probably in multiple navies, but i am not sure it plays a direct role in collisions. Ingstad's holing seems to have crossed multiple watertight boundaries to the point where she was likely going to sink regardless of DC efforts. The survival of Fitzgerald and McCain does suggest that DC training remains something that the USN surface fleet does right despite the personnel losses that occurred.
As a dumb ole whitehat a general rule o' thumb was it always best to assume a 25% turnover in your workcenter per annum. Running 32 people @ 80% means you might have 24 trained people versus 30 trained people at 100%. A few extra bodies in a workcenter makes a huge difference in the ability to train the new bodies and fix things.
Reverting back to the old number of Chief billets and returning to the emphasis on technical leadership and workcenter management functions would also help.
The late Professor Harold Rood of Claremont McKenna college opined that times of peace are actually interregnums in which our enemies prepare for the next war.
Winston Churchill spoke of a ten year hiatus after a war in which spending for the military can be diverted to various welfare programs. Britain stretched the ten years to the point that Chamberlain had to appease Hitler to buy time for a woefully unprepared British military.
Only by virtue of institutional inertia, were we able take 30 years to squander Reagan's legacy, down to the very weapons bought on his watch, with little apparent adverse effects. But those malign effects were there all along. No domestic lead smelting capabilities. No domestic ability to make baseline pharmaceuticals such as, oh, penicillin. A badly depleted, more accurately exported to China, industrial base. As we're finding out with trying to keep up with the consumption of artillery shells by the Ukrainian army.
Biden, Putin, Xi. In these perilous times, this is what constitutes leadership.
I only hope that the fact that Putin started his war when he did will give us the timely warning to reform an economy that had the capability, as in WW II, to produce the armaments that we will need in the coming years. Our foolishness has squandered the awe needed to make deterrence work. We're probably going to have to regain that the hard way, paid in blood. It's going to be a near run thing.
Looking at this from my experience with LCS as a reservist from 2016 to 2021 (with 9 months on a voluntary mob outside of the community). It's been a horribly implemented idea. Active duty sailors have an extensive pipeline that doesn't count to the whole time called "Train to Qualify". Basically, qualify ashore for their jobs. If they are in an awaiting class up status, for whatever reason, they get sent TAD to a ship in port. Once the training is complete, the sea duty timer starts, and it goes normal including off crew periods. One sailor said he took the orders because it was him not being in Norfolk.
Oh, and unlike on a SSBN, there's no expectation of supporting the opposite crew in port. That having been my active duty rating. A few more duty day bodies and a paint team would work wonders.
The equipment process never struck me as fully developed, either. Lots of time waiting for parts, or contractors, and the lack of development on the modules struck me as fundamentally inefficient.
Now, let's talk Reserve side of the house! I took the billet because it was local and let me work in rate. My total LCS specific training amounted to four days for Maintenance Craftsman and LCS specific terminology. Theoretically, we were supposed to have funding for in-rate schools, but that was not always available. And when our AT's were security force (Squadron-run SRF-B), there was little demand to get those in-rate schools. During that time, I had five different sets of IDT orders, covering three different billets. The first change was throwing us all into a blender and siting billets without regard to location. The second was a local assignment, the third an extension, and the second, a transfer to another command because of a reorg that "streamlined" the structure. The prior plan was to have HQ, and six detachments, the change was to have four, and mine was cut. Not much for ship support NEC's I felt.
Enough of a rant, I'm sorry to take your time and bandwidth, especially our gracious host. I'm closing in on twenty years, and want to be happy with my career no matter where it ends.
Your comment on “short term gain on my watch that will create long term existential problems on some other poor bastard’s watch a few PCS cycles down the road long after I’m driving around The Villages in my pimped out golf cart” is another aspect of GOFO’s not being willing to tell upper, upper management that their services cannot possibly fulfill the nation’s no-fooling wartime requirements.
My brother was a business marketing professor before he retired. He laughed when the Navy adopted Total Quality Leadership or "TQL". He said "You're 3 business fads behind!"
I was a Commander when TQL hit then Optimum Manning. Tried to engage every Flag I knew about what a dumb idea each was...not that TQL was wrong, but trying to create warriors by council was the wrong way to do it. Likewise, the LCS was just too short handed to do anything, even if the platforms were decent (they weren't and aren't).
The Navy is ripe with failed programs now. The Firescout unmanned helo failed the first half of its Opeval...a month or so later...declared operational...and now is out of the fleet except for one squadron that flies it on the West Coast (and fails most of the time).
F-35? A great airplane that cannot be supported by the supply system, so operations suffer.
WHO has been held accountable for these failures? NOBODY that's who. Admirals and Commodores have no problem with relief of command of CDR's and CAPT's, yet have no such accountability themselves.
Right now there is no accountability for program managers who fail, no accountability for Flag Officers who fail, and the Fleet gets bombarded with Woke ideology and time sumps that detract from warfighting.
Somehow, methinks that the PLA-N has very few seminars on trangender ID's and pronouns and when we get our butts kicked, it will be the end of the American empire, all because we continue blindly down this path and not one Flag has the guts to say "ENOUGH!"
"In the 1990s, the armed forces were required to change the intake of conscripted crews. Basic education in the Navy (GUS scheme) had dramatic consequences for the frigate weapon's operability. I led the investigation that revealed the downward trend. At the time, the navy's leadership succeeded in convincing strategic leadership that the decision had to be reversed before it was too late." Gone are the days where you could expect a Chief and a couple of 1st & 2nd classes with the proper tools to make just about any repairs to the equipment they are responsible for. Modern Navy training seems to be more about ditching the classrooms, hands-on labs, and prototypes and sending sailors to sea with a training app on their phone. A generation of this an no one has the skill sets to do much of anything, with the greater loss being that of the institutional memory that, at one time, such skills and experience were normal and expected.
"It was an absolute minimum crew that could only work if all the prerequisites were met."
That's the real weakness of the "efficiency cult." We saw that also in the Just In Time inventory management practices that blew up so horribly in the past couple years; that it really doesn't take much to bring the whole thing to a screeching halt. And, as with bringing anything to a screeching halt, you burn up parts and components which cannot be readily replaced.
But even worse within that efficiency cult is that the practitioners are not allowed to assume error. It's all-in on everything working right all the time, because anything else (a) is unacceptable performance (sniff, sniff), and (b) to open the door to any allowance for error is to open the door to every and any imponderable - which wholly destroys all of the meticulously spelled out analyses and planning. Oh, you can allow a fudge factor - 10% is typical - to cover the non-specifics, but error itself in not contemplated.
Your idea that there is no punishment for bad decisions was belied by the notion that the consequences for the decider will be come to fruition, "long after I’m driving around The Villages in my pimped out golf cart." There could be no worse fate than to be consigned to The Villages for the rest of your days.
The Villages is modeled after The Village in the TV show "The Prisoner," where Number Six is confined. They have the same construction style, and the same music everywhere. Unlike The Village, The Villages is in an inhospitable climate. It's a drained swamp, miles from salt water, baking in the subtropical sun.
Being forced to live in The Villages seems like a proper punishment for a Cheng who gundecked the oil changes of the plant under his control. The place is nauseating. "Be seeing you."
"Si vis pacem, para bellum"
- Vegitius, 450 AD
Slightly off topic but I can tell you that as a physician I can attest that hospital administrators leaned out staff and supply purchases while paying themselves million + dollar salaries to make sure that DEI and non-mission critical fripperies such as annual 5 K runs were well funded and attended. When COVID hit it became apparent that US health care was not prepared at all for this disaster with the results we have all seen.
You predict war with China, our naval forces will lose both people and ships, the US loses control of the sea lanes and we degenerate into cross-domain guerilla war. The US population will notice that they aren't getting cheap stuff at Walmart anymore. With rising costs we will have recession and job loss. When they take out the US will China notice that other places won't pay as much as we can or do they hope to sell stuff to Russia? Or maybe they plan to add the US as another province?
Sal, do you have ANY happy news?
I know this will receive some push back but I think we have reached a can have vs a liked to have situation particularly with regards to our population as well as our manufacturing base- or lack there of.
At some point you have to deal with population demographics, even if you optimize for war. Can we with our aging population of 50% over age 40 and "With US population growth at its lowest in over eighty years and seventy percent of Americans of draft age—both women and men— deemed “unfit” for military service" have the size military we desire? (https://gjia.georgetown.edu/2021/04/08/the-recent-push-to-expand-the-draft-to-include-women-and-why-it-still-faces-an-uphill-climb/)
You have to make some hard choices and investments.
1. Worst choice: You can lower standards, which just ends up filling body bags: create cannon fodder - McNamara's Project 100,000, AKA McNamara's Morons.
2. Partial solution, you run a pre-boot camp a fat camp for the overweight and remedial education to make up for public education's shortcomings. Or you make boot camp longer to try and accomplish the same thing. This can bump your number up a little.
3.. You look at every billet and ask: Does this need a person in uniform or can it be filled by a civilian contractor? In Marine/Army lingo is that person issued 782 gear/TA-50? If not can we civilianized the job?
4. We look at what we can successfully man and adjust our size according. 355 ships may be pie in sky wishful thinking if we cannot even adequately crew 290 ships. Is 200 more realistic?
4 (a) With go with more numerous smaller ships ie. USS Americas instead of Nimitz. Using tender based upgraded/upgunned versions of the cyclone class to handle anti-piracy and run around the rocks and shoals of the South China Sea, Solomon Islands, the Caribbean etc. Adding diesel /AIP subs to our force.
4(b) Technology, automation, USV, UUV, UAV
5. Recruiting, Sell the Navy as a military organization not IBM with uniforms and weekends off with drag queen shows., a marketing plan that is not working now. Of course that means acting like a military organization and giving up the drag shows, I&E etc. Even dare I say it - not family friendly (another pie in the sky dream)
6. Concurrent with recruiting increase benefits,. Go back to an old version of the GI bill-4 years honorable service gets you 4 years at any college/trade school (public or private) that receives Federal money. 6 years gets you 6 years of education. No matching contribution required by service member. We control cost by dictating price to the college/trade school - It is what we will pay not what they will charge. They accept or stop getting federal money. Colleges face declining enrollment so they should not put up much of a fight.
7. Retention - Back to the old retirement system. Ditch the blended system. Add a 15 year tier to it.
15 years in a lot of military occupation is hard the body mentally as well as physically.
A related article about the USN Exchange Officer aboard the Ingstad, from the Norwegian newspaper linked above...
https://forsvaretsforum.no/forlis-fregatt-helge-ingstad/amerikansk-offiser-ble-beordret-bort-fra-broen-etter-ulykken/307371
"When the frigate KNM Helge Ingstad collided with the tanker Sola TS in Hjeltefjorden on 8 November 2018, there was an American exchange officer on the bridge. She had the role of watch commander in training that night. On Monday, she testified before the Hordaland district court.
[She] was sent down into the officer's mess shortly after the collision.
- I think I "blacked out". I was in shock. There were ten thousand things happening at the same time, while time passed extremely slowly, she said.
In questioning, she had explained that she had "become too overwhelmed and was of no help to anyone". She was shaking violently and was taken down from the bridge by someone in charge of sanitation.
- It's not the reaction you hope you'll have in a moment like that, but that's what happened. That is an accurate description of how I reacted."
Ship control is an officer issue with enlisted folks in support. Both Oslo and Nansen frigates nominally rated at 120 officers and crew. Norwegian ships do not appear to have the same OPTEMPO as do the tired DDG crews of 7th Fleet. All that said, training rather than funding or crew size is likely more the direct cause of the Ingstad collision rather than lack of enlisted crew. The reports back on the 2017 US DDG collisions suggested appallingly-bad communication between the bridge and CIC to the point where combat had no idea that a collision was imminent. Minimum manning certainly had an impact on poor maintenance on US ships, notably topside where it has resulted in the rust that Sal regularly chronicles. So yes, minimum manning has been a challenge and a contributor to poor readiness, probably in multiple navies, but i am not sure it plays a direct role in collisions. Ingstad's holing seems to have crossed multiple watertight boundaries to the point where she was likely going to sink regardless of DC efforts. The survival of Fitzgerald and McCain does suggest that DC training remains something that the USN surface fleet does right despite the personnel losses that occurred.
Aye company mate. 100% on board with you and CDR Salamander.
At least the Norskies didn't buy Little Coffin Ships, a ship designed to kill it's own crew.
As a dumb ole whitehat a general rule o' thumb was it always best to assume a 25% turnover in your workcenter per annum. Running 32 people @ 80% means you might have 24 trained people versus 30 trained people at 100%. A few extra bodies in a workcenter makes a huge difference in the ability to train the new bodies and fix things.
Reverting back to the old number of Chief billets and returning to the emphasis on technical leadership and workcenter management functions would also help.
The late Professor Harold Rood of Claremont McKenna college opined that times of peace are actually interregnums in which our enemies prepare for the next war.
Winston Churchill spoke of a ten year hiatus after a war in which spending for the military can be diverted to various welfare programs. Britain stretched the ten years to the point that Chamberlain had to appease Hitler to buy time for a woefully unprepared British military.
Only by virtue of institutional inertia, were we able take 30 years to squander Reagan's legacy, down to the very weapons bought on his watch, with little apparent adverse effects. But those malign effects were there all along. No domestic lead smelting capabilities. No domestic ability to make baseline pharmaceuticals such as, oh, penicillin. A badly depleted, more accurately exported to China, industrial base. As we're finding out with trying to keep up with the consumption of artillery shells by the Ukrainian army.
Biden, Putin, Xi. In these perilous times, this is what constitutes leadership.
I only hope that the fact that Putin started his war when he did will give us the timely warning to reform an economy that had the capability, as in WW II, to produce the armaments that we will need in the coming years. Our foolishness has squandered the awe needed to make deterrence work. We're probably going to have to regain that the hard way, paid in blood. It's going to be a near run thing.
Looking at this from my experience with LCS as a reservist from 2016 to 2021 (with 9 months on a voluntary mob outside of the community). It's been a horribly implemented idea. Active duty sailors have an extensive pipeline that doesn't count to the whole time called "Train to Qualify". Basically, qualify ashore for their jobs. If they are in an awaiting class up status, for whatever reason, they get sent TAD to a ship in port. Once the training is complete, the sea duty timer starts, and it goes normal including off crew periods. One sailor said he took the orders because it was him not being in Norfolk.
Oh, and unlike on a SSBN, there's no expectation of supporting the opposite crew in port. That having been my active duty rating. A few more duty day bodies and a paint team would work wonders.
The equipment process never struck me as fully developed, either. Lots of time waiting for parts, or contractors, and the lack of development on the modules struck me as fundamentally inefficient.
Now, let's talk Reserve side of the house! I took the billet because it was local and let me work in rate. My total LCS specific training amounted to four days for Maintenance Craftsman and LCS specific terminology. Theoretically, we were supposed to have funding for in-rate schools, but that was not always available. And when our AT's were security force (Squadron-run SRF-B), there was little demand to get those in-rate schools. During that time, I had five different sets of IDT orders, covering three different billets. The first change was throwing us all into a blender and siting billets without regard to location. The second was a local assignment, the third an extension, and the second, a transfer to another command because of a reorg that "streamlined" the structure. The prior plan was to have HQ, and six detachments, the change was to have four, and mine was cut. Not much for ship support NEC's I felt.
Enough of a rant, I'm sorry to take your time and bandwidth, especially our gracious host. I'm closing in on twenty years, and want to be happy with my career no matter where it ends.