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!"
"...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!"" When enough hulls of Western navies have been transferred to Davy Jones' locker, freedom of the seas and the concept of the worlds oceans serving as a global commons for carrying cargo and facilitating trade comes to an end. We regress to the historical norm of contested seas with areas of control measured in terms of cannon fire (or modern equivalent) distances.
And verily it came from the mouth of the kindest......
"The growing dependence upon management systems has been another characteristic which has evolved in the years since World War II. Secretary McNamara, instead of requiring the Navy to build up its in-house technical capability, decreed that it should depend on industry. The Navy could “manage” the projects which it assigned to industry. His successors have followed the same path. I have learned from many years of bitter experience that we cannot depend on industry to develop, maintain, and have available a technical organization capable of handling the design of complex ships and their equipment without the Navy, itself; having a strong technical organization to oversee the work in detail. Management systems are as endemic to the Government as the Black Plague was in Medieval Europe."
Problem with TQL was being based on TQM, it's a manufacturing efficiency system for building widgets. It's not applicable or appropriate for non manufacturing efforts- just like lean 6 sigma.
This is the end result of “run government like a business.” A business’s goal is profit; as a free marketteer profit is great. But let’s be honest, privatization, is a goal of the right wing and the Republicans. Their policy was implemented and the entire naval shipbuilding program was offloaded to private industries and the cannon factories were spiked to prevent the Navy from reopening them.
Government exists on a different plane from business. The U.S. Navy does not exist to generate a profit for shareholders. The purpose of the U.S. Navy is to murder pirates and anyone else the Congress declare to be our enemy.
The fact of the matter is privatization of our shipbuilding, the closing and destruction of our US Naval Shipyards, is why we are where we are. Until we return to building US warships in US Navy yards we will be paying multi-national corporations for overpriced, ineffective, crap.
You can buy weapons from private industry. But it presumes that private industry is already building weapons, or something close akin. Small arms, yes. Light vehicles, definitely. Tanks? Harder, you might want to use private industry as subcontractors. Warships? Far, far harder...and dependent on a steady flow of work to keep the shipyards open.
"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.
"We saw that also in the Just In Time inventory management practices that blew up so horribly in the past couple years"
We were suffering from the beginnings of that even in the early-mid nineties in the fleet.
Later as a civilian ops leader, we developed a very flexible product fulfillment mix for our customers while maintaining no permanent purchasing staff, and our President wanted to implement JIT. I was like "we want to full fill everything, in a week, with no purchasing. No. That means we buy a bunch of stuff we know we could use (and the cheaper and more stable it is, the more we stock in advance) and move on to the next intellectual issue."
Sometimes I lost that argument, and we ended up sitting on a couple hundred thousand in orders for four months waiting for 3000 dollars in parts to come in that we tried to manage supply JIT. Oops.
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."
Well, no wonder we can't build any ships. The FOGO's have the inability to make a rational decision. The Villages is awful. It's like you put Florida in a centrifuge, and poured out all the nastyness in one spot south of Wildwood. (More Duke's Brown Ale and stone crab claws for the normies.)
Igitur qui desiderat pacem, praeparet bellum; qui uictoriam cupit, milites inbuat diligenter; qui secundos optat euentus, dimicet arte, non casu. Nemo prouocare, nemo audet offendere quem intellegit superiorem esse, si pugnet.
They therefore who wishes for peace, prepare for war; He who desires victory must carefully recruit his soldiers. he who wishes to succeed in the second place, must fight by art, not by chance. No one dares to challenge, no one dares to offend someone who understands that he is superior, if he fights
We have a Navy and flag officer cadre that is fully prepared for peace. Our standards for sailor recruits continued to be lowered and we still have a hard time meeting goals. Hoping that we can magically build up a fleet capable of retake west of Wake is the same as relying on chance. And the PLAN is rapidly approaching the point where it is locally superior in their backyard.
Looks to this amateur, that it already is more numerous, newer and operating under air cover. Seems like we are depending on an 80 year old image, cuz our training, warplan, and crews look weak.
They are already locally superior. The PLAN is within sight of their coast while we will be at the end of a 6,000+ mile supply line that is fragile and will be short-lived.
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.
"...it became apparent that US health care was not prepared "
At least partly because for several decades the federal government forced the same "minimal manning" and "just in time" type practices on the medical sector. Empty beds in hospitals were unnecessary costs so they were ruthlessly pruned, leaving no margin for unexpected. "Certificates of need" were required before hospitals were allowed to acquire MRI machines, etc. People were "encouraged" to join HMOs.
3 months after I retired in 1991 after 26 years service, in which I was promised "free healthcare for life" I wasn't so much encouraged to join an HMO (and pay for it) but told to join or find my own healthcare somewhere else. My local Naval Hospital is a shell of its former self. It is little more than an urgent care clinic now for active duty, retirees and dependents. Almost every ailment gets referred out to town. The bigger tragedy, I think, is that the hospital's doctors get no hands on training because all the serious ailments and afflictions get farmed out for civilian care and treatment.
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.
Carl, No push back intended. You have a well thought out comment. Part of the reason we got here is certainly demographics. However, we've become a Navy of "yes-people". ('Woe be it for me to say yes-men, as that isn't woke enough...and me with a daughter, and two son-in-laws in the Navy).
WWII and Korea (and yes, some in Vietnam) were geerations of risk takers to accomplish the mission. What we've evolved to is risk averse, where dissent is bad, and "good enough" isn't...everything has to be so perfect as to deny, degrade and delay readiness. So when the Super Hornet is delayed a decade, or the DDG 1000 triples in cost, those are funds and delays that could go to operations and we will never get them back.
The only way to overcome demographic issues is national service for everyone (man and woman), allowig foreigners to serve (we did it with Philippinos) for citizenship, and automation, which isn't the end all to be all, as we still need Sailors to move stores around, man pumping stations and do other manual labor.
Contractors can do some of the work, but ultimately it is the pride of a crew that is trained and allowed to do its job that makes a successful Navy go.
Well said but not every job is "crew" I have seen it, too often, where a service member driving a desk preparing to retire gets his job civilianized and returns doing that same job with a GS rating. We start civilianizing those jobs ahead of time. During WWII a lot of beginning/basic flight instruction was handled by civilians. We could look at some of military schools were things like basic electronics, foreign language etc. could be civilian taught. A lot of those jobs would be good for veterans. Foreign nationals serving as path to citizenship is a great idea as long as there is no language barrier. IIRC The Austro-Hungarian Army in WWI was such a mixture of nationalities that recruits were just expected to learn 80 basic commands, we certainly don't want that. English proficiency would be a must.
Well said. I tend to focus on warfighting, but totally agree. My last tour was as an NROTC Professor of Naval Science. Had to retire @ 30 yrs. Could have continued to do the job for 15 more yrs or at least 10 as a civilian. Ditto on what you said on flight training.
We are going to be hosed in a China conflict because we've let our merchant marine attrophy, and replaced them with CCP controlled ships. We need to start reassessing these right now. Likewise, your plan to assess military billets (and figuring out where the reserves plug in) needs to be ongoing. My SIL is working moilization issues for the Reserves and right now, it is apples/oranges. Reserves "wait" to be tasked then assess if they can fill it. Should be looking at the "whether" they can fill and "what" billets will be filled immediately. Every delay we have post outbreak is a plus for the bad guys.
Certainly correct on merchant marine. How do we correct it? Tax incentives for American flagged and crewed ships, even bigger incentives for American flagged, crewed and built? Then the Navy ends of fight the Merchant Marine for manpower?
This affects a lot of industry. The same people who are too out of shape to severe in the military probably can cut it in the Merchant Marines, oil rigs, mining cattle ranching etc.
What goes unmentioned is its use as weapon. A large Chinese container or supertanker running aground in the Suez Canal or being scuttled in Panama canal locks or any narrow harbor entrance (Pearl Harbor, Norfolk) could hurt our ability to move forces around at a critical time.
The non-field billets serve as holding points for spare mid-grade officers and NCOs. They used for expansion and casualty replacements and recovery after back to back to back deployments. Without built-in slack extended campaigning becomes that much harder.
We don't have built-in slack , we are deploying ships severely short handed which makes any thought of an extended campaign moot. If there is any slack it already needs to be dipped into. You have ships deploying without those needed Officers NCOs/Petty officers, which affects readiness and safety. Meanwhile MCPOs at some major commands are getting assistant MCPOs -obviously setup to allow somebody to hang out till retirement and avoid another run at sea duty. If we recognize we cannot sustain the size force we desire then we can create slack when we downsize. Even then we should civilianizes some of those billets.
Excellent comment! I think, however, the problem is much more basic. We do not have a fighting culture where the focus is on winning. We have a self interested corporate culture looking to join boards. Ass covering vs. standing on principle.
I have been beating this drum for 20 years. Large orgs like Navies do not change from the inside. Change is forced on them
I agree we have leadership problem. All our problems basically come down to the leadership. They are more worried about future jobs with contractors, think tanks or as an expect with some news network. They are more concerned with being statesmen and statecraft than being warriors and warfare.
Exhibit A: Admiral Roughead’s tour. His leadership was critical in securing investment and support for a dual-block purchase of the littoral combat ship. He advocated buying ten ships of both variants in order to rapidly expand force structure with agile, fast, and flexible platforms more capable and responsive to the threats faced at sea.
After retirement Roughead became a board member of Theranos, a now-defunct privately held health technology company known for its false claims to have devised revolutionary blood tests using very small amounts of blood. He sits on the executive committee of the Maritime Policy & Strategy Research Center (HMS). Roughhead is a distinguished fellow at the Hoover Institution, a conservative think tank and a member of the Board of Managers for the Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory.
Roughead was a politician, not a Sailor. I learned that when he was CO of USS PORT ROYAL. We were only a bump in the road to his Star Pipeline. Talk about fail upwards.
Exhibit B Admiral Greenert Littoral Combat Ship (LCS) as being sufficiently survivable–and easily upgunned where needed–after taking heat from House appropriators
BAE Systems provided the external communications and primary gun systems for the 10 U.S. Navy Independence variant Littoral Combat Ships (LCS)
The board chairman of Arlington-based BAE Systems Inc., Michael Chertoff, a former secretary of Homeland Security, announced on April 19, 2016, that retired Greenert was appointed to the board of directors for BAE Systems for a three-year term.
You have effectively described a disgusting system that does not encourage GOFO'S to dispassionately evaluate platforms, systems or personnel on the basis of war fighting effectiveness, or, contributing to it. No, rather opposite: war fighting effectiveness is relegated to simply one amoung many criteria, the supreme being "How can I ride this project to the boardroom."
wilinak ... you are incorrect in your timeline here. Mark is a personal friend of mine and you are skipping two jobs and some "white space" in his career path between USN and Fincantieri. He is one of the most honest, smart, and honorable people I have had the pleasure of knowing. In addition to the errors in your comments, your assumption about his character could not be more wrong, almost if not at the level of fighting words in a different age.
I invite you to retract your comments and extend an apology to Mark.
I've worked with him as well, and you're right my timeline was not exact, it was not intended to be. However great guy he may be, he still made the jump from a blue suit to CEO of F-MM. I'm sure he means to do well by the Navy, every one does, even Roughead and Greenert.
It ain't rocket science, it's basic ECON 101 supply & demand theory. The demand for recruits exceeds the supply of volunteers; the results are increased price of recruits and shortage of recruits.
1. 70% of the military /draft age population is unfit for service- too fat, too dumb, too criminal etc.. That remaining 30% would also be necessary for essential non-military work requiring fitness and intelligence: oil rigs, mining , farming/ranching, EMS ,Law enforcement, firefighters, doctors etc. your manpower pool is still small. The number of exemptions you will have to grant would hardly make it worth while
2. Few military professionals will tell you they want a draft. It is far easier to lead and train people who are their voluntarily than those forced to be there.
3. Time: Figure at most you get a draftee for 2 years active duty. 24 months. 3 months basic training, 3 months MOS training Infantry, 2 months annual leave. If they commit parenthood during that time to take advantage of the healthcare then what? For the female you have 9 months light duty followed by maternity leave. For a male there is paternity leave. Of course we could always mandate injectable birth control for both but imagine the uproar that would cause. On the plus side you would a have a reserve commitment but does not really work well for jobs requiring unit/crew cohesion without a long lead time to deployment. IIRC some NG reserve units activated for Desert Storm never managed to get it together to leave NTC.
I would like to think we could do it without a draft. Up till WWI the British Empire made do, for the most part, with a small professional Army and a powerful Navy.
"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."
I think there may be a translation issue here. The Norwegian term for combat medic is "sanitetssoldat". In this case, it may be that she was taken below by the first aid party.
An event that inadvertently bolsters the arguments against minimal manning. Whether she just blacked out from panic or was knocked out by the impact, she became ineffective and required manpower to move her to safety.
This is similar during Operation Just Cause-Panama 1989/1990 for the youngsters ( and ye,s I am old). Two truck drivers refused to drive into a combat zone - "They felt it would endanger the lives of the combat soldiers that they were going to transport if they took them into that area," said one official familiar with the investigation."
“What if every truck driver decided that he didn't like the whine of the shells and turned yellow and jumped headlong into a ditch? That cowardly bastard could say to himself, 'Hell, they won't miss me, just one man in thousands.' What if every man said that? Where in the hell would we be then? No, thank God, Americans don't say that. Every man does his job. Every man is important. The ordnance men are needed to supply the guns, the quartermaster is needed to bring up the food and clothes for us because where we are going there isn't a hell of a lot to steal. Every last damn man in the mess hall, even the one who boils the water to keep us from getting the GI shits, has a job to do.”
I was an Army Armor officer, not a Naval type(dad was a Bosun's mate on a CVE in WW2).
But in the Army we normally swapped tank companies with sister infantry units, gaining a rifle company. My point is that we always sent our BEST subunit leader and troops.
Was she our best? Or was this to punch her ticket?
Or was it a timing thing with the detailer, or was she the only one who wanted the job? Some exchange billets are easy to fill with folks clamoring to fill them (I got lucky and did an exchange tour with the RN flying the LNYX helo, deploying on HMS CORNWALL then HMS BOXER. Timing played a part for me, the guy originally promised the job got extended on his current tour by his CO, I met the requirements and was in the window for orders.
yeah, in the Army, the O-6 assignments officer always had a few crappy jobs that he used to offer to Colonels to get them to retire rather than face a RIF board.
- Army Attache to Botswana?
- Liaison to the joint Columbian anti-drug task force (unaccompanied)?
Was she going to be the poster child for the first female in this exchange? Did the powers that be say "lets send a female" and she was available?
I was a grunt Marine by trade and I like to think we always tried to send our best in exchanges with the Royal Marine Commandos and the Netherlands. I wonder if the lowered standards for Marine Infantry Officer training are affecting that.
Previously it was scored as a simple pass or fail, but now the test will no longer be used to weed Marines out. The officers will continue to take a Combat Evaluation Test, but their score will be just one of many components of the course considered for a student’s overall evaluation.
"[The change] was not about lowering attrition, it was about making students more successful to complete the course," Brig. Gen. Bohm added, the newspaper reported.
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.
Bad example. Good Richard was a shipyard issue. Naval ships are particularly vulnerable when in the shipyard. In our nation's history there are instances of good men losing ships in the shipyard.
We used to have salty old bastards who knew exactly how dangerous yard work was; and by their constant attention to detail, kept fires from spreading. When we shuttered the naval shipyards to keep the Navy from building ships, we tossed out generations of shipyard expertise.
This failing, the loss of the Bonhomme Richard is not a sign of poor DC, it is a sign of poor industrial management. Yet another sad side effect of privatization.
According to the Navy Times it was also a crew issue-which is a leadership issue:
“The crew had failed to meet the time standard for applying firefighting agent on the seat of the fire on 14 consecutive occasions leading up to July 12, 2020,” according to the report.
"The ship’s force’s training and readiness was plagued by “a pattern of failed drills, minimal crew participation, an absence of basic knowledge on firefighting in an industrial environment and unfamiliarity on how to integrate supporting civilian firefighters,”
"the ship was lost because the basic fundamentals of shipboard training in damage control, firefighting, electrical isolation, tagging out, and flammable storage were not followed. No ship can survive a major fire if the firefighting equipment is tagged out, the critical space cannot be isolated because electrical cables and hoses are running through it without quick disconnects being installed, and flammable materials are stowed improperly throughout the ship."
Laz, read the damn report. People on the bridge did not known how to operate the plasma screens on the bridge. People cross decked from the cruiser were not qualified for their watch position. Read my posts - before the accident they were bragging that in addition to their work the (undermanned) crews were doing depot level work because the depot was not manned enough to do the work. Also per the Norwegian manning, read the linked article. They were not getting underway enough because they did not have enough people. Stop making excuses.
Not making excuses for the Norwegians, just comparing the manning of the new frigates verses the old as nominally the same. Nominal can also be good or bad depending on actual experience. Agree with your points on training regarding the 2017 collisions. People have to be qualified for watches regardless of what ship they came from in the first place.
My TAR workcenter had 8 active sailors spread across 2 shifts versus my regnav counterpart that had 42 sailors across 3 shifts. Guess what? I still automatically turn the headlights on almost 30 years later.
Our command had multiple personnel suffer from psychological breakdowns multiple off-duty deaths, multiple DUI, and two Chiefs go UA. We mustered maybe 40 people a day when the SELRES weren't there. But, our oh-shit incident rate was equal to a much larger command.
Minimal manning does not work when you have to operate, fix, and maintain. Let alone when you have operate, control damage, and fix what has been damaged in a casualty with fewer crew before anyone is carried to a BDS. (Who's gonna carry them? Or do you let them die at their GQ station?)
I wouldn't put that much stock into Navy DC training. My group has been evaluating first in class ships for the last 15-20 years. We have to go out and train crews before we run drills so they have clue how to respond.
While there was a significant loss of life on FITZ & McCAIN, the damage was not as extensive as what would be expected with an actual weapon. Both ships had enough WT integrity that unless the crew completely hosed it up, they wouldn't have sunk.
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!"
"...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!"" When enough hulls of Western navies have been transferred to Davy Jones' locker, freedom of the seas and the concept of the worlds oceans serving as a global commons for carrying cargo and facilitating trade comes to an end. We regress to the historical norm of contested seas with areas of control measured in terms of cannon fire (or modern equivalent) distances.
It is already over.
By design and plan I think.
From the Book of KOG - August 30, 1974
And verily it came from the mouth of the kindest......
"The growing dependence upon management systems has been another characteristic which has evolved in the years since World War II. Secretary McNamara, instead of requiring the Navy to build up its in-house technical capability, decreed that it should depend on industry. The Navy could “manage” the projects which it assigned to industry. His successors have followed the same path. I have learned from many years of bitter experience that we cannot depend on industry to develop, maintain, and have available a technical organization capable of handling the design of complex ships and their equipment without the Navy, itself; having a strong technical organization to oversee the work in detail. Management systems are as endemic to the Government as the Black Plague was in Medieval Europe."
Problem with TQL was being based on TQM, it's a manufacturing efficiency system for building widgets. It's not applicable or appropriate for non manufacturing efforts- just like lean 6 sigma.
This is the end result of “run government like a business.” A business’s goal is profit; as a free marketteer profit is great. But let’s be honest, privatization, is a goal of the right wing and the Republicans. Their policy was implemented and the entire naval shipbuilding program was offloaded to private industries and the cannon factories were spiked to prevent the Navy from reopening them.
Government exists on a different plane from business. The U.S. Navy does not exist to generate a profit for shareholders. The purpose of the U.S. Navy is to murder pirates and anyone else the Congress declare to be our enemy.
The fact of the matter is privatization of our shipbuilding, the closing and destruction of our US Naval Shipyards, is why we are where we are. Until we return to building US warships in US Navy yards we will be paying multi-national corporations for overpriced, ineffective, crap.
You can buy weapons from private industry. But it presumes that private industry is already building weapons, or something close akin. Small arms, yes. Light vehicles, definitely. Tanks? Harder, you might want to use private industry as subcontractors. Warships? Far, far harder...and dependent on a steady flow of work to keep the shipyards open.
"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.
"We saw that also in the Just In Time inventory management practices that blew up so horribly in the past couple years"
We were suffering from the beginnings of that even in the early-mid nineties in the fleet.
Later as a civilian ops leader, we developed a very flexible product fulfillment mix for our customers while maintaining no permanent purchasing staff, and our President wanted to implement JIT. I was like "we want to full fill everything, in a week, with no purchasing. No. That means we buy a bunch of stuff we know we could use (and the cheaper and more stable it is, the more we stock in advance) and move on to the next intellectual issue."
Sometimes I lost that argument, and we ended up sitting on a couple hundred thousand in orders for four months waiting for 3000 dollars in parts to come in that we tried to manage supply JIT. Oops.
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."
Enough people move there, though. The FOGOs might like it.
Well, no wonder we can't build any ships. The FOGO's have the inability to make a rational decision. The Villages is awful. It's like you put Florida in a centrifuge, and poured out all the nastyness in one spot south of Wildwood. (More Duke's Brown Ale and stone crab claws for the normies.)
Your opinion may change when you are 70 years old and looking for a retirement home.
I’m a Florida man. You’ll have to kill me before I move to that hellpit.
I am not a number. I am a Free Man!
You might be interesed to look up which area in Florida has the highest STD rate :-)
"Si vis pacem, para bellum"
- Vegitius, 450 AD
Igitur qui desiderat pacem, praeparet bellum; qui uictoriam cupit, milites inbuat diligenter; qui secundos optat euentus, dimicet arte, non casu. Nemo prouocare, nemo audet offendere quem intellegit superiorem esse, si pugnet.
They therefore who wishes for peace, prepare for war; He who desires victory must carefully recruit his soldiers. he who wishes to succeed in the second place, must fight by art, not by chance. No one dares to challenge, no one dares to offend someone who understands that he is superior, if he fights
We have a Navy and flag officer cadre that is fully prepared for peace. Our standards for sailor recruits continued to be lowered and we still have a hard time meeting goals. Hoping that we can magically build up a fleet capable of retake west of Wake is the same as relying on chance. And the PLAN is rapidly approaching the point where it is locally superior in their backyard.
Looks to this amateur, that it already is more numerous, newer and operating under air cover. Seems like we are depending on an 80 year old image, cuz our training, warplan, and crews look weak.
convince me otherwise
They are already locally superior. The PLAN is within sight of their coast while we will be at the end of a 6,000+ mile supply line that is fragile and will be short-lived.
Taiwan will be on our snd closer. At least there is that.
?
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.
"...it became apparent that US health care was not prepared "
At least partly because for several decades the federal government forced the same "minimal manning" and "just in time" type practices on the medical sector. Empty beds in hospitals were unnecessary costs so they were ruthlessly pruned, leaving no margin for unexpected. "Certificates of need" were required before hospitals were allowed to acquire MRI machines, etc. People were "encouraged" to join HMOs.
3 months after I retired in 1991 after 26 years service, in which I was promised "free healthcare for life" I wasn't so much encouraged to join an HMO (and pay for it) but told to join or find my own healthcare somewhere else. My local Naval Hospital is a shell of its former self. It is little more than an urgent care clinic now for active duty, retirees and dependents. Almost every ailment gets referred out to town. The bigger tragedy, I think, is that the hospital's doctors get no hands on training because all the serious ailments and afflictions get farmed out for civilian care and treatment.
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.
Thanks
Carl, No push back intended. You have a well thought out comment. Part of the reason we got here is certainly demographics. However, we've become a Navy of "yes-people". ('Woe be it for me to say yes-men, as that isn't woke enough...and me with a daughter, and two son-in-laws in the Navy).
WWII and Korea (and yes, some in Vietnam) were geerations of risk takers to accomplish the mission. What we've evolved to is risk averse, where dissent is bad, and "good enough" isn't...everything has to be so perfect as to deny, degrade and delay readiness. So when the Super Hornet is delayed a decade, or the DDG 1000 triples in cost, those are funds and delays that could go to operations and we will never get them back.
The only way to overcome demographic issues is national service for everyone (man and woman), allowig foreigners to serve (we did it with Philippinos) for citizenship, and automation, which isn't the end all to be all, as we still need Sailors to move stores around, man pumping stations and do other manual labor.
Contractors can do some of the work, but ultimately it is the pride of a crew that is trained and allowed to do its job that makes a successful Navy go.
Be well, sir. Go Navy!
Well said but not every job is "crew" I have seen it, too often, where a service member driving a desk preparing to retire gets his job civilianized and returns doing that same job with a GS rating. We start civilianizing those jobs ahead of time. During WWII a lot of beginning/basic flight instruction was handled by civilians. We could look at some of military schools were things like basic electronics, foreign language etc. could be civilian taught. A lot of those jobs would be good for veterans. Foreign nationals serving as path to citizenship is a great idea as long as there is no language barrier. IIRC The Austro-Hungarian Army in WWI was such a mixture of nationalities that recruits were just expected to learn 80 basic commands, we certainly don't want that. English proficiency would be a must.
Well said. I tend to focus on warfighting, but totally agree. My last tour was as an NROTC Professor of Naval Science. Had to retire @ 30 yrs. Could have continued to do the job for 15 more yrs or at least 10 as a civilian. Ditto on what you said on flight training.
We are going to be hosed in a China conflict because we've let our merchant marine attrophy, and replaced them with CCP controlled ships. We need to start reassessing these right now. Likewise, your plan to assess military billets (and figuring out where the reserves plug in) needs to be ongoing. My SIL is working moilization issues for the Reserves and right now, it is apples/oranges. Reserves "wait" to be tasked then assess if they can fill it. Should be looking at the "whether" they can fill and "what" billets will be filled immediately. Every delay we have post outbreak is a plus for the bad guys.
Certainly correct on merchant marine. How do we correct it? Tax incentives for American flagged and crewed ships, even bigger incentives for American flagged, crewed and built? Then the Navy ends of fight the Merchant Marine for manpower?
This affects a lot of industry. The same people who are too out of shape to severe in the military probably can cut it in the Merchant Marines, oil rigs, mining cattle ranching etc.
What goes unmentioned is its use as weapon. A large Chinese container or supertanker running aground in the Suez Canal or being scuttled in Panama canal locks or any narrow harbor entrance (Pearl Harbor, Norfolk) could hurt our ability to move forces around at a critical time.
*Navy ends up in a fight with Merchant Marine for manpower.
**can't cut it in the Merchant Marines
The non-field billets serve as holding points for spare mid-grade officers and NCOs. They used for expansion and casualty replacements and recovery after back to back to back deployments. Without built-in slack extended campaigning becomes that much harder.
We don't have built-in slack , we are deploying ships severely short handed which makes any thought of an extended campaign moot. If there is any slack it already needs to be dipped into. You have ships deploying without those needed Officers NCOs/Petty officers, which affects readiness and safety. Meanwhile MCPOs at some major commands are getting assistant MCPOs -obviously setup to allow somebody to hang out till retirement and avoid another run at sea duty. If we recognize we cannot sustain the size force we desire then we can create slack when we downsize. Even then we should civilianizes some of those billets.
Excellent comment! I think, however, the problem is much more basic. We do not have a fighting culture where the focus is on winning. We have a self interested corporate culture looking to join boards. Ass covering vs. standing on principle.
I have been beating this drum for 20 years. Large orgs like Navies do not change from the inside. Change is forced on them
I agree we have leadership problem. All our problems basically come down to the leadership. They are more worried about future jobs with contractors, think tanks or as an expect with some news network. They are more concerned with being statesmen and statecraft than being warriors and warfare.
Exhibit A: Admiral Roughead’s tour. His leadership was critical in securing investment and support for a dual-block purchase of the littoral combat ship. He advocated buying ten ships of both variants in order to rapidly expand force structure with agile, fast, and flexible platforms more capable and responsive to the threats faced at sea.
After retirement Roughead became a board member of Theranos, a now-defunct privately held health technology company known for its false claims to have devised revolutionary blood tests using very small amounts of blood. He sits on the executive committee of the Maritime Policy & Strategy Research Center (HMS). Roughhead is a distinguished fellow at the Hoover Institution, a conservative think tank and a member of the Board of Managers for the Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory.
Roughead was a politician, not a Sailor. I learned that when he was CO of USS PORT ROYAL. We were only a bump in the road to his Star Pipeline. Talk about fail upwards.
So, stick to your books,
And never go to sea. . .
Exhibit B Admiral Greenert Littoral Combat Ship (LCS) as being sufficiently survivable–and easily upgunned where needed–after taking heat from House appropriators
BAE Systems provided the external communications and primary gun systems for the 10 U.S. Navy Independence variant Littoral Combat Ships (LCS)
The board chairman of Arlington-based BAE Systems Inc., Michael Chertoff, a former secretary of Homeland Security, announced on April 19, 2016, that retired Greenert was appointed to the board of directors for BAE Systems for a three-year term.
You have effectively described a disgusting system that does not encourage GOFO'S to dispassionately evaluate platforms, systems or personnel on the basis of war fighting effectiveness, or, contributing to it. No, rather opposite: war fighting effectiveness is relegated to simply one amoung many criteria, the supreme being "How can I ride this project to the boardroom."
Exhibit C, CAPT Vandroff, formerly of PMS 501, left NSWC Carderock to become the CEO Fincantieri Marinette Marine. It's not just the FOGOs doing it.
wilinak ... you are incorrect in your timeline here. Mark is a personal friend of mine and you are skipping two jobs and some "white space" in his career path between USN and Fincantieri. He is one of the most honest, smart, and honorable people I have had the pleasure of knowing. In addition to the errors in your comments, your assumption about his character could not be more wrong, almost if not at the level of fighting words in a different age.
I invite you to retract your comments and extend an apology to Mark.
I've worked with him as well, and you're right my timeline was not exact, it was not intended to be. However great guy he may be, he still made the jump from a blue suit to CEO of F-MM. I'm sure he means to do well by the Navy, every one does, even Roughead and Greenert.
It was more than "not exact" - it was deliberately misstated for you to insult a friend and repeated guest here in order to ... so something.
You only partially retracted and did not apologize. As such, you will no longer be allowed to comment here.
It ain't rocket science, it's basic ECON 101 supply & demand theory. The demand for recruits exceeds the supply of volunteers; the results are increased price of recruits and shortage of recruits.
PS
The increased price for recruits is not necessarily financial; lower standards is one price.
I hate to say it, but you missed a likely option (one that I personally am not in favor of).
8. Institute a peacetime draft.
Thought of it but reject it for a few reasons:
1. 70% of the military /draft age population is unfit for service- too fat, too dumb, too criminal etc.. That remaining 30% would also be necessary for essential non-military work requiring fitness and intelligence: oil rigs, mining , farming/ranching, EMS ,Law enforcement, firefighters, doctors etc. your manpower pool is still small. The number of exemptions you will have to grant would hardly make it worth while
2. Few military professionals will tell you they want a draft. It is far easier to lead and train people who are their voluntarily than those forced to be there.
3. Time: Figure at most you get a draftee for 2 years active duty. 24 months. 3 months basic training, 3 months MOS training Infantry, 2 months annual leave. If they commit parenthood during that time to take advantage of the healthcare then what? For the female you have 9 months light duty followed by maternity leave. For a male there is paternity leave. Of course we could always mandate injectable birth control for both but imagine the uproar that would cause. On the plus side you would a have a reserve commitment but does not really work well for jobs requiring unit/crew cohesion without a long lead time to deployment. IIRC some NG reserve units activated for Desert Storm never managed to get it together to leave NTC.
I would like to think we could do it without a draft. Up till WWI the British Empire made do, for the most part, with a small professional Army and a powerful Navy.
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."
"She was shaking violently and was taken down from the bridge by someone in charge of sanitation." - so she was taken out with the garbage?
"She was shaking violently and was taken down from the bridge by someone in charge of sanitation." - so she was taken out with the garbage?
OMG
I think there may be a translation issue here. The Norwegian term for combat medic is "sanitetssoldat". In this case, it may be that she was taken below by the first aid party.
An event that inadvertently bolsters the arguments against minimal manning. Whether she just blacked out from panic or was knocked out by the impact, she became ineffective and required manpower to move her to safety.
HNoMS Helge Ingstad - 5300 ton ship with a notional crew of 120 and "manned" at the 80% for a total of 96 souls. If you are going to take damage, you need warm bodies. Take a look at this DC report from LCS(L)-57 resulting from an attack off of Okinawa. 450 tons, notional crew of 65. CO was LT. H. L. Smith USNR who states in the report that this was the first action seen by 90% of his crew. https://www.history.navy.mil/content/dam/nhhc/research/library/online-reading-room/battle-of-okinawa-1945/action%20report%20uss%20lcs(l)%201945.pdf
A 100% command-at-sea select she is. Our black shoe warriors are PROUD of her admitting she was "overwhelmed" and in shock. Yep, we can depend on her.
Stunning, AND Brave, and possibly not even Trans
This is similar during Operation Just Cause-Panama 1989/1990 for the youngsters ( and ye,s I am old). Two truck drivers refused to drive into a combat zone - "They felt it would endanger the lives of the combat soldiers that they were going to transport if they took them into that area," said one official familiar with the investigation."
https://www.washingtonpost.com/archive/politics/1990/01/20/army-probes-allegations-two-women-refused-to-obey-orders-in-panama/90bc43cb-0a5a-4516-9d95-c537a0649481/
“What if every truck driver decided that he didn't like the whine of the shells and turned yellow and jumped headlong into a ditch? That cowardly bastard could say to himself, 'Hell, they won't miss me, just one man in thousands.' What if every man said that? Where in the hell would we be then? No, thank God, Americans don't say that. Every man does his job. Every man is important. The ordnance men are needed to supply the guns, the quartermaster is needed to bring up the food and clothes for us because where we are going there isn't a hell of a lot to steal. Every last damn man in the mess hall, even the one who boils the water to keep us from getting the GI shits, has a job to do.”
I was an Army Armor officer, not a Naval type(dad was a Bosun's mate on a CVE in WW2).
But in the Army we normally swapped tank companies with sister infantry units, gaining a rifle company. My point is that we always sent our BEST subunit leader and troops.
Was she our best? Or was this to punch her ticket?
Or was it a timing thing with the detailer, or was she the only one who wanted the job? Some exchange billets are easy to fill with folks clamoring to fill them (I got lucky and did an exchange tour with the RN flying the LNYX helo, deploying on HMS CORNWALL then HMS BOXER. Timing played a part for me, the guy originally promised the job got extended on his current tour by his CO, I met the requirements and was in the window for orders.
yeah, in the Army, the O-6 assignments officer always had a few crappy jobs that he used to offer to Colonels to get them to retire rather than face a RIF board.
- Army Attache to Botswana?
- Liaison to the joint Columbian anti-drug task force (unaccompanied)?
but Norway?
Was she going to be the poster child for the first female in this exchange? Did the powers that be say "lets send a female" and she was available?
I was a grunt Marine by trade and I like to think we always tried to send our best in exchanges with the Royal Marine Commandos and the Netherlands. I wonder if the lowered standards for Marine Infantry Officer training are affecting that.
https://www.marinecorpstimes.com/news/your-marine-corps/2018/02/07/passing-combat-endurance-test-is-no-longer-required-for-infantry-officers/
Previously it was scored as a simple pass or fail, but now the test will no longer be used to weed Marines out. The officers will continue to take a Combat Evaluation Test, but their score will be just one of many components of the course considered for a student’s overall evaluation.
https://www.wearethemighty.com/mighty-trending/the-marines-again-lower-requirements-for-infantry-officer-course/
"[The change] was not about lowering attrition, it was about making students more successful to complete the course," Brig. Gen. Bohm added, the newspaper reported.
That's among the more embarrassing things I've read about our beloved Navy recently, but sadly not the most so.
some sim AAR video for context:
https://youtu.be/sXUf6B2wLtw
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.
USS Bonhomme Richard would suggest otherwise.
Bad example. Good Richard was a shipyard issue. Naval ships are particularly vulnerable when in the shipyard. In our nation's history there are instances of good men losing ships in the shipyard.
We used to have salty old bastards who knew exactly how dangerous yard work was; and by their constant attention to detail, kept fires from spreading. When we shuttered the naval shipyards to keep the Navy from building ships, we tossed out generations of shipyard expertise.
This failing, the loss of the Bonhomme Richard is not a sign of poor DC, it is a sign of poor industrial management. Yet another sad side effect of privatization.
According to the Navy Times it was also a crew issue-which is a leadership issue:
“The crew had failed to meet the time standard for applying firefighting agent on the seat of the fire on 14 consecutive occasions leading up to July 12, 2020,” according to the report.
"The ship’s force’s training and readiness was plagued by “a pattern of failed drills, minimal crew participation, an absence of basic knowledge on firefighting in an industrial environment and unfamiliarity on how to integrate supporting civilian firefighters,”
https://www.navytimes.com/news/your-navy/2021/10/19/uss-bonhomme-richard-fire-spread-wildly-due-to-repeated-failures-investigation-finds/
From Proceedings
"the ship was lost because the basic fundamentals of shipboard training in damage control, firefighting, electrical isolation, tagging out, and flammable storage were not followed. No ship can survive a major fire if the firefighting equipment is tagged out, the critical space cannot be isolated because electrical cables and hoses are running through it without quick disconnects being installed, and flammable materials are stowed improperly throughout the ship."
https://www.usni.org/magazines/proceedings/2023/may/let-no-shipboard-fire-go-waste
Laz, read the damn report. People on the bridge did not known how to operate the plasma screens on the bridge. People cross decked from the cruiser were not qualified for their watch position. Read my posts - before the accident they were bragging that in addition to their work the (undermanned) crews were doing depot level work because the depot was not manned enough to do the work. Also per the Norwegian manning, read the linked article. They were not getting underway enough because they did not have enough people. Stop making excuses.
Not making excuses for the Norwegians, just comparing the manning of the new frigates verses the old as nominally the same. Nominal can also be good or bad depending on actual experience. Agree with your points on training regarding the 2017 collisions. People have to be qualified for watches regardless of what ship they came from in the first place.
Laz,
My TAR workcenter had 8 active sailors spread across 2 shifts versus my regnav counterpart that had 42 sailors across 3 shifts. Guess what? I still automatically turn the headlights on almost 30 years later.
Our command had multiple personnel suffer from psychological breakdowns multiple off-duty deaths, multiple DUI, and two Chiefs go UA. We mustered maybe 40 people a day when the SELRES weren't there. But, our oh-shit incident rate was equal to a much larger command.
Minimal manning does not work when you have to operate, fix, and maintain. Let alone when you have operate, control damage, and fix what has been damaged in a casualty with fewer crew before anyone is carried to a BDS. (Who's gonna carry them? Or do you let them die at their GQ station?)
I wouldn't put that much stock into Navy DC training. My group has been evaluating first in class ships for the last 15-20 years. We have to go out and train crews before we run drills so they have clue how to respond.
While there was a significant loss of life on FITZ & McCAIN, the damage was not as extensive as what would be expected with an actual weapon. Both ships had enough WT integrity that unless the crew completely hosed it up, they wouldn't have sunk.
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.