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US navy released worst rust photo to date

135 points by quantified 4y ago

h2odragon 4y ago
Its as if someone believes we no longer need the Navy. Wonder if that's true?
- bdcrazy 4y ago
  Quantity has a quality all of its own when low cost and low tech munitions can overwhelm and out compete high cost high tech war machines. Also, wars with fewer to no human casualties could be fantastic for the defense industries world wide. The drones take out the other drones and all it takes is getting the government to pay contractors to build them, whether they are effective or not.
  - pmontra 4y ago
    Where do you launch those drones from? Continental USA are far away from everything.
  - owenmarshall 4y ago
    Problem is, the incentives seem hopelessly misaligned to let that happen. The military-industrial complex seems perfectly designed to go after very large and expensive projects. They’re great for creating jobs, keeping the politicians happy. Shareholders love it. And the military is far from innocent: I’ve heard that a common sentiment held by career officers is that you want to always attach yourself to the new, big project, as that’s how you advance up the ranks. Commanding a drone squad doesn’t make you a general.
- arghandugh 4y ago
  The foundation of American air power? Seriously?
- exabrial 4y ago
  It is keeping Putin from nuking Ukraine right now. Aegis ensures his first strike will not be completely successful, while Ohio/Virginia ensure that the counter punch would be so painful it’s not worth starting the fight. Force projection is incredibly important, as long as we keep our leaders in check.
- deleted 4y ago
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- bfgoodrich 4y ago
  [dead]
- anon84873628 4y ago
  Well, I don't see how that could be true. The article suggests it is a bias from top command and recent history in the Middle East. Because a strong navy is crucial to US interest. A staggering amount of the world's petroleum products flow through the Straight of Hormuz. Likewise, the majority of China's energy imports and manufactured exports flow through the tiny Straight of Malacca (or else around the countless other islands of Indonesia). If the straight is blocked, they have about 90 days of fuel reserves before rationing begins. That's why China needs force projection in the South China Sea if they want any hope for a Taiwan invasion to be successful. More generally, US protection of international shipping is supposedly the basis for the petrodollar system. When it comes to Russia, defending the GIUK gap is also crucial...
  - euroderf 4y ago
    They've got the Silk Road Initiative going, but it seems teat it could not even begin to replace sea traffic in a crunch.
    - anon84873628 4y ago
      Indeed. The silk road and new pipelines to Central Asian oilfields are crucial for China to diversify its energy sources, given the naval realities in the Pacific. So the western province of Xinjiang has become crucial... and hence the Uyghur genocide :-( The CCP, from its perspective, can't risk having a potentially rebellious ethnic group in such a critical region.
maxerickson 4y ago
Poking around I see that the Navy is constantly trying to improve their paint/coatings systems. Is there any chance that these issues are not fleet wide? Like, did they figure out a coating system that works better and are deferring maintenance more on ships that are going to get it soon? Probably not of course.
- implements 4y ago
  > The Navy fights incidental rust at sea by scraping it off and then painting over it with Ameron PSX-700. Look up the price of Ameron PSX-700 and you get a feel for why fighting rust is so expensive: the paint costs $250 a gallon. More in-depth work is done at shipyards. Seems like nothing can survive being pressure washed by seawater for several months.
whoiscroberts 4y ago
I find it hard to believe that rust control isn’t mostly a labor problem, the navy has virtually unlimited low cost labor. Instead of posing for that photo every sailor in that photo should have been maintaining the ship, even the officers.
- CameronNemo 4y ago
  I don't understand why they even need naval officers to do it... Hire some contract workers twice a year to scrub or paint or whatever it takes. Why does someone have to enlist in order to clean a boat?
  - mauvehaus 4y ago
    Because doing your own basic maintenance is an outstanding way to identify issues that you might miss otherwise? As an example, I swap my own winter and summer tires (mounted on separate sets for wheels; I have my limits) because it gives me a twice yearly opportunity to asses the condition of the brakes and suspension components while I'm mucking around with the wheels off. Keeping your finger on the pulse of a machine by looking after it means you spot problems before they become disasters and inform how you operate it to make the most of its capabilities and avoid its weaknesses. Capt. Malcolm Reynolds: Love. You can learn all the math in the 'Verse, but you take a boat in the air that you don't love, she'll shake you off just as sure as the turning of the worlds. Love keeps her in the air when she oughta fall down, tells you she's hurtin' 'fore she keens. Makes her a home.
  - JoeyBananas 4y ago
    They do extensively employ civillian "yard birds" to do maintenance. In WWII era, they had minority sailors and conscripts on government payroll to do chipping and painting. Since then, they have been steadily outsourcing an increasing amount of this work to civillian contractors.
- Scaevolus 4y ago
  The navy has done some absurd scheduling and cost cutting measures, to the point that most officers are running on 4-5 hours of sleep a day. Nobody's at their best.
foobarian 4y ago
For once an article where the 'rust' is not about a programming language! :-)
- wankle 4y ago
  As a software engineer, I agree it's refreshing, oddly satisfying even. Several years ago it was split between the LISP/Haskell cadre, these days it's Rustaceans who try to convince the world Rust is the new programming religion. I just like a good language as a tool, like Java. As a former Navy sailor, enlisted, I find the photo shocking and terribly disconcerting. It feels like very recent years have seen Military moral lowered to a dangerous level with the constant political correctness brow beating.
  - foreverCarlos 4y ago
    Is it similar across all military branches or does Navy get special attention?
    - CapricornNoble 4y ago
      There's a ton of prior-Army Youtubers complaining about the same trends in their branch. Even the Marine Corps is getting the infection lately; a Gunnery Sergeant I worked with who used to be a very successful recruiter talks about it often, and how it is impacting motivation for the young first-timers. But also many mid-career officers (my peer group) and Staff NCOs are getting out as they can see which way the wind is blowing and don't want to be a part of it.
      - grogenaut 4y ago
        How much of it is what your friend is ostensibly saying and how much of it is just the ever existent complaint about the laziness of the youth (lets face it you also sucked as a teen) meeting with the inflexibility of the aging? Aka the source of strife between generations since time immemorial?
hguant 4y ago
This is an ongoing issue with the US Navy, and mirrors similar post hoc justifications from organizations that use political[1] justifications to rationalize slipping standards - NASA changing their go/no-go criteria in order to achieve a Shuttle launch cadence that upper management had promised comes to mind. The simple truth of the matter is that the US surface Navy has, for the last 20 some years, been deferring maintenance and training of its core assets in order to fund prestige projects like the super carriers. 7th fleet is particularly egregious on this front, but this comes down to a resource allocation issue. Congress and the admiralty have shrunk the surface Navy, and forced the existing fleet to "do more with less." What this means is a higher operational tempo, with no down time, no repair schedule, and no training. In the investigation into the most recent destroyer crash, the board found that the bridge crew hadn't been trained on the basics of navigation, but rather on the basics of how to operate the computer system that navigated for them. Additionally, because of man power constraints, where junior officers would once spend the first few months of their career shadowing a senior officer, now they're thrown into command of a watch with no physical training, just a stack of DVDs they're supposed to go through before deployments. It's an embarrassment, but it's an embarrassment of command, not to the sailors who are trying to make do with no time to do their jobs. [1] whenever money and mission are involved, so is politics
- themitigating 4y ago
  Do you have evidence the money for maintenance has been redirected?
  - sn_master 4y ago
    Such evidence if existed wouldn't be allowed to be publicly shared without clearance first.
  - derefr 4y ago
    The Defense budget hasn’t decreased; and that money’s gotta be going somewhere.
    - 4y ago
tyronehed 4y ago
[dead]
kimburgess 4y ago
Leaving aside the obvious "this wasn't the rust article I was expecting to see on HN quips"... as someone who's lived on a steel boat, maintenance is one of those things that's tolerable if you stay on top of it, but insufferable once you let it lapse. For such high value assets, I'm honestly surprised to see that level of neglect. Particularly from a country whose national identity seems so intertwined with it's military.
- deleted 4y ago
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cs702 4y ago
[flagged]
- cj 4y ago
  This definition of news is very bad. There are people out there who simply want to be informed about what’s happening in the world even if it’s not a victim/villain story.
- thatguy0900 4y ago
  I don't think this is a very good quote, there is always two sides to things. The US navy might not want you to see this, but Russia and China probably would. Anyway, the article specifically says this is an issue with the navy misallocating maintenence funds, so I doubt it's a navy peice.
- deleted 4y ago
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- theCrowing 4y ago
  You hit a new high score on how often someone can quote the same thing over and over again in a year.
rcarr 4y ago
This is very bad. I feel like the military is meant to strive for the very highest standards possible because they are ultimately responsible for the most ethically challenging job: determining whether or not to kill people. If you're going to justify that position then you need to be maintaining the highest possible standards as an organisation. The military will always house rotten apples because it's ultimately an organisation made up of flawed humans. But you would expect for them to be dealt with accordingly. But for something like this to be allowed to get to the state it has means that leadership is turning a blind eye. And if leadership is turning a blind eye to this then what else are they turning a blind eye to?
- sizzzzlerz 4y ago
  Absolutely. There is a whole chain of command that exists to operate these ships. I can't imagine that every link in that chain is corrupt and is willing to hide these kind of problems. If they are corrupt from bottom to top, our navy is simply the americanized version of putin's military.
  - the_only_law 4y ago
    Seeing my father at the end of his military career and some of my brothers at the beginning of theirs, I’m convinced at this point much of military is a messy bureaucracy no better or worse than the DMV or any other government agencies people can’t stand.
- solardev 4y ago
  That seems like a flawed assumption. Has our military ever really stopped a battle or war because they thought it might be unethical? Do they ever even pause to ask that question? Does any military?
  - HL33tibCe7 4y ago
    At the battle or war level, I don’t know. Someone else might be able to come up with an example. But militaries do make smaller-scale ethical decisions all the time, e.g: “do we attack this compound that could contain civilians”.
c7b 4y ago
> The Navy may claim that rust doesn’t affect the operational readiness of the fleet Shouldn't that matter much more than prestige? How much punch you can pack in the field, how safe it is for your troops,... not how it looks or feels. Camouflage was once seen as not suitable for the morale of troops who were used to Napoleon-era bright colorful uniforms, now it's perfectly common.
- tomatotomato37 4y ago
  This is a peacetime fleet though, which should have the spare resources needed to maintain aesthetic concerns. The lack of such is a warning sign that it may not have the spare capacity necessary for sustaining the much elevated manpower and resource requirements of active combat.
  - drewcoo 4y ago
    > This is a peacetime fleet though Is it? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_armed_conflicts_involving_the_United_States#21st-century https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_armed_conflicts_involv...
- kneebonian 4y ago
  How about the brown M&M argument, if they are neglecting these basic tasks and responsibilities what other duties are they shirking. And for the record I don't buy for a second it won't effect the operational readiness of the fleet.
  - mbg721 4y ago
    Yeah, there's no inherent value to canaries in coal mines, but if you see a dead one, you run.
  - c7b 4y ago
    There's a finite time budget, and the question is what tasks they allocate it to. I don't suspect them of slacking, so if anything, I'd expect the time spent on other tasks to decrease the more time they put into polishing their decks.
sizzzzlerz 4y ago
In the 19th century, warships spent many hours maintaining the rigging for their sails as well as the readiness of the wooden decks. Obviously, if the ship couldn't deploy their sails in either battle or storm conditions, it stood a fair chance of being lost. As a result, sailors were constantly going up and down the ropes, brushing tar on them to waterproof and protect the ropes from fraying. Decks were sanded to maintain a rough surface that the mostly-barefoot sailors could maintain contact when the decks were wet or bloody. In the day of billion dollar vessels, as a taxpayer, I would sort of demand that the navy do more so that the lifetime of these very expensive ships can be as long as possible. If they're going to constantly go back to congress for more ship money, they must demonstrate they can maintain the ones they already have.
- solardev 4y ago
  Don't things become obsolete pretty quickly these days? Why spend tax money maintaining old equipment superceded by ever evolving arms races? Seems like maybe cutting our losses and decommissioning old stuff when they're no longer useful would be a better use of communal funds.
  - CapricornNoble 4y ago
    Judging by the picture, she's definitely an Arleigh Burke DDG. Someone in the Twitter comments says she's a Flight II, so as far as Major Surface Combatants go, this should still be a pretty useful warship. US naval shipbuilding is such a mess, and we're already behind the power curve against the Chinese naval buildup. We really can't afford to toss our DDGs until we at LEAST start cranking out FFG(X)/ Constellation-class Frigates like WW2 Liberty ships. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Constellation-class_frigate https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Constellation-class_frigate
  - black6 4y ago
    The last straw for my cousin, and why he left the Navy, was when he took a bew submarine on her maiden voyage, then immediately had to turn around and put her in dry dock for a retrofit because it was built on a decades-old contract and most of the systems were obsolete as they were installed. But the contract "couldn't" be changed, and more money was paid out to the war profiteers to do what should have been done in th3 first place.
javajosh 4y ago
This falls squarely in the "concerning but I can literally do nothing about it" category for me. What am I going to do, pick the next President based on their attitude about ship maintenance? Even if I was in the Navy, what could I do? I can only guess at what is causing this gross negligence. The fear is that bubbles of incompetence (incompetent people giving each other high-fives about how awesome they are) have grown large enough to start causing real physical and visible damage. Not sure if that's the case, though. Although I'm not buying the "rust has no operational impact" argument - as a sailor, you keep things neat and clean and tidy so that if something goes wrong it sticks out like a sore thumb. You want to catch problems early, and cleanliness helps. (Cleaning also has an inspection component that helps).
- deleted 4y ago
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- bityard 4y ago
  > What am I going to do, pick the next President based on their attitude about ship maintenance? I mean, you could. I stopped paying attention to politics when it became obvious that the two-party system is killing actual democracy. But... If a candidate said they were going to prioritize rebuilding our failing infrastructure, to include roads, bridges, power generation and transmission, communications, and defense assets, they would certainly have my attention.
  - hotpotamus 4y ago
    > If a candidate said they were going to prioritize rebuilding our failing infrastructure, to include roads, bridges, power generation and transmission, communications, and defense assets If they didn't follow it up with, "and your share of the bill will be...", then I'd be pretty skeptical. Stuff costs money and you can't cut taxes and expect the government to perform all that it did before you cut them. Of course, I might be the only person in America to vote for a politician who would actually say that.
JoeyBananas 4y ago
I'm not willing to accept this moral panic at face value. The appearance by itself doesn't matter except for on the parade grounds and in boot camp. Better indicators of systemic issues would be the frequency of leaks, annual costs of maintenance, numbers of ships, etc. Give me something more convincing than 1 photo of a rusty deck.
- jakear 4y ago
  US Navy has (in part) lost ability to put out fires on its ships. It used to be that Damage Control was the pride of a crew. https://www.cnn.com/2022/07/15/politics/navy-uss-bonhomme-richard-punishments/index.html https://www.cnn.com/2022/07/15/politics/navy-uss-bonhomme-ri...
- ren_engineer 4y ago
  I'd say the fact the people in the Navy saw nothing wrong with this photo and posted it to Facebook is a signal of a deep issue. Their decision making is so bad they didn't even realize the optics of this photo. And if you can't keep your ships in good shape during peace time, what's going to happen if we actually get into a real war? the only way you could justify it was that maybe they knew people would get upset and it might bring some public attention on leadership to fix things?
resuresu 4y ago
[flagged]
- mbg721 4y ago
  There are plenty of domestic interests looting us too, I don't think foreign relations are a primary motivator.
- dragonwriter 4y ago
  > America is being gutted and looted by foreign interests. To the extent America is being “gutted and looted”, its by domestic capitalists rather than foreign interests.
fnordpiglet 4y ago
[flagged]
- the_only_law 4y ago
  Even more tiring are people who use boring puns to launch an irrelevant soapbox.
rich_sasha 4y ago
Maybe a silly question, but is superficial rust an indication of deeper issues?
- joenathanone 4y ago
  The longer it remains the less 'superficial' it becomes.
- mlindner 4y ago
  No it's not, especially when it's in for repair as this ship appears to be.
- CapricornNoble 4y ago
  Well, military media has spent the past 20 years laughing at the sorry state of the Russian Navy, being broken-down rust-buckets. Some of the analysis/conclusions about the Moskva sinking kinda confirm their problems: abysmal maintenance wasn't only surface-deep. She likely had major self-defense systems that were degraded, inoperable, or manned by unskilled sailors. The US keeps decent equipment readiness largely by throwing a fortune at contractors for maintenance, but overworked and poorly-trained Sailors at sea should be a major red flag (as if the numerous accidents in 7th Fleet wasn't sufficient wake-up call).
- niffydroid 4y ago
  Yes, if they're not protecting the outside then what are they not doing on the inside
leeoniya 4y ago
honestly, i was expecting much worse from reading the title; this looks mostly cosmetic. some inpainting should fix this nicely :)
melony 4y ago
The C is rough. Rust Evangelism Strikeforce assemble!
- CapricornNoble 4y ago
  Blue Water Navies: When "Writing It In Rust" Goes Wrong.
asddubs 4y ago
hmm, who cares? it's just a little bit of surface rust
avidphantasm 4y ago
Or perhaps it is a feint meant to give the false impression of lack of readiness?
Animats 4y ago
I wonder how well this new marine rust remover works.[1] I've used chelating agents such as Evapo-Rust for rust removal, and this seems to be in the same family. It converts rust to an inert powder, but doesn't react with steel. [1] https://www.ferryl.com/products/ferryl-ferrycid-rustremover/ https://www.ferryl.com/products/ferryl-ferrycid-rustremover/
lowbloodsugar 4y ago
US Navy switches unit test runner from “abort on failing test” to “ignore failing tests” because it’s only one test that is failing and that test is for cosmetic feature.
mlindner 4y ago
Several people in the twitter threads have commented that the "crew" on deck and the fact that the non-skid has been scrapped off means this ship is actually in harbor for maintenance. So yes if you scrape off the rust protection, I'd expect it to rust.
my_city 4y ago
The whole US army deserves to be turned into rust.
grogenaut 4y ago
TL;DR really no idea what if this is the state of the navy and it's bad, or this ship just went into dock with deferred maintenance, or is actively being retrofitted. But can't really take some photos out of context and angry folks gut reactions on the internet as actual data. More Details: (caveat, I'm not former military so if I get terms wrong, forgive me) I looked through the last month of photos on the navy facebook page which is where this photo is supposedly from. All of them have clean decks. They have a mix of at attention and dress uniforms for ceremonies and many many more photos of sailors in a relaxed or work situations in non-dress uniforms... https://www.facebook.com/photo/?fbid=535384871959649&set=pcb.535384971959639 https://www.facebook.com/photo/?fbid=535384871959649&set=pcb... is one. The article links to a dude's tweet who does not source the image... but a google reverse search finds it from https://www.facebook.com/USS.Hopper/ https://www.facebook.com/USS.Hopper/... The dude's twitter's slogan is "Views my own, but really should be yours" draw your own conclusions. Here's the photo source, https://www.facebook.com/USS.Hopper/photos/pcb.6120716927952780/6120712801286526/ https://www.facebook.com/USS.Hopper/photos/pcb.6120716927952..., looks like a promotion ceremony for the younger man in white dress according to the caption and photos, the rest of the folks look to be friends or folks who were around. Looking around more, mostly the deck is rusty and other surfaces look clean tho there are a few spots below the radar built into the side of the tower (I'm not navy so don't know terms, don't shoot me) https://www.facebook.com/USS.Hopper/photos/pcb.6120716927952780/6120713137953159 https://www.facebook.com/USS.Hopper/photos/pcb.6120716927952.... Here's a photo of the ship in good form https://www.marinevesseltraffic.com/image-resize?url=Images/Navy/Ships/USS%20Hopper%20(DDG-70).jpg&w=1176&h=667.2 https://www.marinevesseltraffic.com/image-resize?url=Images/... you can tell from comparing photos and by the folks in white that they have peeled the grey paint off the deck and it has rusted underneath, or it peeled itself and wasn't repainted. The ship is currently in port in perl harbor according to https://www.marinevesseltraffic.com/vessels/USS-Hopper-(DDG-70)/CURRENT-POSITION/1/367197000 https://www.marinevesseltraffic.com/vessels/USS-Hopper-(DDG-... The comments don't help, it's just all "not in my navy" or "I'll state my theory as fact" style facebook comments from people uninvolved with the ship (they mostly look 40+ from the comments). So again not much detail.
pvaldes 4y ago
To be fair, deck's photo looks more like sand than rust. The trace like pattern does not have much sense for rust, but will be easily created with muddy sand.
diogenescynic 4y ago
Late stage empire collapse.
barbazoo 4y ago
> even the top Admirals find it hard to ignore the fact that the men and women who serve on the front lines are America’s most valuable asset. So, will America’s best and brightest be motivated to join a Navy that’s overworked and underappreciated by Pentagon brass? It's almost funny to imagine what kind of war fantasy bubble those people exist in. Not going into the "best and brightest" which is just an insult to people doing much more meaningful work, maybe the history of politically motivated never ending or unsuccessful wars has anything to do with the "best and brightest" not wanting to sign up to be cannon fodder.
ppg677 4y ago
I sent this article to a US Navy captain I know. He scoffed at it and said it was complete BS. The name of the supposed rusty ship is nowhere to be found in the article or Twitter post (or replies).
readthenotes1 4y ago
I thought mixing Rust with C was supposed to be safe?

135 points by quantified 4y ago

h2odragon 4y ago

Its as if someone believes we no longer need the Navy. Wonder if that's true?

bdcrazy 4y ago
Quantity has a quality all of its own when low cost and low tech munitions can overwhelm and out compete high cost high tech war machines. Also, wars with fewer to no human casualties could be fantastic for the defense industries world wide. The drones take out the other drones and all it takes is getting the government to pay contractors to build them, whether they are effective or not.
- pmontra 4y ago
  Where do you launch those drones from? Continental USA are far away from everything.
- owenmarshall 4y ago
  Problem is, the incentives seem hopelessly misaligned to let that happen. The military-industrial complex seems perfectly designed to go after very large and expensive projects. They’re great for creating jobs, keeping the politicians happy. Shareholders love it. And the military is far from innocent: I’ve heard that a common sentiment held by career officers is that you want to always attach yourself to the new, big project, as that’s how you advance up the ranks. Commanding a drone squad doesn’t make you a general.
arghandugh 4y ago
The foundation of American air power? Seriously?
exabrial 4y ago
It is keeping Putin from nuking Ukraine right now. Aegis ensures his first strike will not be completely successful, while Ohio/Virginia ensure that the counter punch would be so painful it’s not worth starting the fight. Force projection is incredibly important, as long as we keep our leaders in check.
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
bfgoodrich 4y ago
[dead]
anon84873628 4y ago
Well, I don't see how that could be true. The article suggests it is a bias from top command and recent history in the Middle East. Because a strong navy is crucial to US interest. A staggering amount of the world's petroleum products flow through the Straight of Hormuz. Likewise, the majority of China's energy imports and manufactured exports flow through the tiny Straight of Malacca (or else around the countless other islands of Indonesia). If the straight is blocked, they have about 90 days of fuel reserves before rationing begins. That's why China needs force projection in the South China Sea if they want any hope for a Taiwan invasion to be successful. More generally, US protection of international shipping is supposedly the basis for the petrodollar system. When it comes to Russia, defending the GIUK gap is also crucial...
- euroderf 4y ago
  They've got the Silk Road Initiative going, but it seems teat it could not even begin to replace sea traffic in a crunch.
  - anon84873628 4y ago
    Indeed. The silk road and new pipelines to Central Asian oilfields are crucial for China to diversify its energy sources, given the naval realities in the Pacific. So the western province of Xinjiang has become crucial... and hence the Uyghur genocide :-( The CCP, from its perspective, can't risk having a potentially rebellious ethnic group in such a critical region.

maxerickson 4y ago

Poking around I see that the Navy is constantly trying to improve their paint/coatings systems. Is there any chance that these issues are not fleet wide? Like, did they figure out a coating system that works better and are deferring maintenance more on ships that are going to get it soon? Probably not of course.

implements 4y ago
> The Navy fights incidental rust at sea by scraping it off and then painting over it with Ameron PSX-700. Look up the price of Ameron PSX-700 and you get a feel for why fighting rust is so expensive: the paint costs $250 a gallon. More in-depth work is done at shipyards. Seems like nothing can survive being pressure washed by seawater for several months.

whoiscroberts 4y ago

I find it hard to believe that rust control isn’t mostly a labor problem, the navy has virtually unlimited low cost labor. Instead of posing for that photo every sailor in that photo should have been maintaining the ship, even the officers.

CameronNemo 4y ago
I don't understand why they even need naval officers to do it... Hire some contract workers twice a year to scrub or paint or whatever it takes. Why does someone have to enlist in order to clean a boat?
- mauvehaus 4y ago
  Because doing your own basic maintenance is an outstanding way to identify issues that you might miss otherwise? As an example, I swap my own winter and summer tires (mounted on separate sets for wheels; I have my limits) because it gives me a twice yearly opportunity to asses the condition of the brakes and suspension components while I'm mucking around with the wheels off. Keeping your finger on the pulse of a machine by looking after it means you spot problems before they become disasters and inform how you operate it to make the most of its capabilities and avoid its weaknesses. Capt. Malcolm Reynolds: Love. You can learn all the math in the 'Verse, but you take a boat in the air that you don't love, she'll shake you off just as sure as the turning of the worlds. Love keeps her in the air when she oughta fall down, tells you she's hurtin' 'fore she keens. Makes her a home.
- JoeyBananas 4y ago
  They do extensively employ civillian "yard birds" to do maintenance. In WWII era, they had minority sailors and conscripts on government payroll to do chipping and painting. Since then, they have been steadily outsourcing an increasing amount of this work to civillian contractors.
Scaevolus 4y ago
The navy has done some absurd scheduling and cost cutting measures, to the point that most officers are running on 4-5 hours of sleep a day. Nobody's at their best.

foobarian 4y ago

For once an article where the 'rust' is not about a programming language! :-)

wankle 4y ago
As a software engineer, I agree it's refreshing, oddly satisfying even. Several years ago it was split between the LISP/Haskell cadre, these days it's Rustaceans who try to convince the world Rust is the new programming religion. I just like a good language as a tool, like Java. As a former Navy sailor, enlisted, I find the photo shocking and terribly disconcerting. It feels like very recent years have seen Military moral lowered to a dangerous level with the constant political correctness brow beating.
- foreverCarlos 4y ago
  Is it similar across all military branches or does Navy get special attention?
  - CapricornNoble 4y ago
    There's a ton of prior-Army Youtubers complaining about the same trends in their branch. Even the Marine Corps is getting the infection lately; a Gunnery Sergeant I worked with who used to be a very successful recruiter talks about it often, and how it is impacting motivation for the young first-timers. But also many mid-career officers (my peer group) and Staff NCOs are getting out as they can see which way the wind is blowing and don't want to be a part of it.
    - grogenaut 4y ago
      How much of it is what your friend is ostensibly saying and how much of it is just the ever existent complaint about the laziness of the youth (lets face it you also sucked as a teen) meeting with the inflexibility of the aging? Aka the source of strife between generations since time immemorial?

hguant 4y ago

This is an ongoing issue with the US Navy, and mirrors similar post hoc justifications from organizations that use political[1] justifications to rationalize slipping standards - NASA changing their go/no-go criteria in order to achieve a Shuttle launch cadence that upper management had promised comes to mind. The simple truth of the matter is that the US surface Navy has, for the last 20 some years, been deferring maintenance and training of its core assets in order to fund prestige projects like the super carriers. 7th fleet is particularly egregious on this front, but this comes down to a resource allocation issue. Congress and the admiralty have shrunk the surface Navy, and forced the existing fleet to "do more with less." What this means is a higher operational tempo, with no down time, no repair schedule, and no training. In the investigation into the most recent destroyer crash, the board found that the bridge crew hadn't been trained on the basics of navigation, but rather on the basics of how to operate the computer system that navigated for them. Additionally, because of man power constraints, where junior officers would once spend the first few months of their career shadowing a senior officer, now they're thrown into command of a watch with no physical training, just a stack of DVDs they're supposed to go through before deployments. It's an embarrassment, but it's an embarrassment of command, not to the sailors who are trying to make do with no time to do their jobs. [1] whenever money and mission are involved, so is politics

themitigating 4y ago
Do you have evidence the money for maintenance has been redirected?
- sn_master 4y ago
  Such evidence if existed wouldn't be allowed to be publicly shared without clearance first.
- derefr 4y ago
  The Defense budget hasn’t decreased; and that money’s gotta be going somewhere.
  - 4y ago

tyronehed 4y ago

[dead]

kimburgess 4y ago

Leaving aside the obvious "this wasn't the rust article I was expecting to see on HN quips"... as someone who's lived on a steel boat, maintenance is one of those things that's tolerable if you stay on top of it, but insufferable once you let it lapse. For such high value assets, I'm honestly surprised to see that level of neglect. Particularly from a country whose national identity seems so intertwined with it's military.

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cs702 4y ago

[flagged]

cj 4y ago
This definition of news is very bad. There are people out there who simply want to be informed about what’s happening in the world even if it’s not a victim/villain story.
thatguy0900 4y ago
I don't think this is a very good quote, there is always two sides to things. The US navy might not want you to see this, but Russia and China probably would. Anyway, the article specifically says this is an issue with the navy misallocating maintenence funds, so I doubt it's a navy peice.
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theCrowing 4y ago
You hit a new high score on how often someone can quote the same thing over and over again in a year.

rcarr 4y ago

This is very bad. I feel like the military is meant to strive for the very highest standards possible because they are ultimately responsible for the most ethically challenging job: determining whether or not to kill people. If you're going to justify that position then you need to be maintaining the highest possible standards as an organisation. The military will always house rotten apples because it's ultimately an organisation made up of flawed humans. But you would expect for them to be dealt with accordingly. But for something like this to be allowed to get to the state it has means that leadership is turning a blind eye. And if leadership is turning a blind eye to this then what else are they turning a blind eye to?

sizzzzlerz 4y ago
Absolutely. There is a whole chain of command that exists to operate these ships. I can't imagine that every link in that chain is corrupt and is willing to hide these kind of problems. If they are corrupt from bottom to top, our navy is simply the americanized version of putin's military.
- the_only_law 4y ago
  Seeing my father at the end of his military career and some of my brothers at the beginning of theirs, I’m convinced at this point much of military is a messy bureaucracy no better or worse than the DMV or any other government agencies people can’t stand.
solardev 4y ago
That seems like a flawed assumption. Has our military ever really stopped a battle or war because they thought it might be unethical? Do they ever even pause to ask that question? Does any military?
- HL33tibCe7 4y ago
  At the battle or war level, I don’t know. Someone else might be able to come up with an example. But militaries do make smaller-scale ethical decisions all the time, e.g: “do we attack this compound that could contain civilians”.

c7b 4y ago

> The Navy may claim that rust doesn’t affect the operational readiness of the fleet Shouldn't that matter much more than prestige? How much punch you can pack in the field, how safe it is for your troops,... not how it looks or feels. Camouflage was once seen as not suitable for the morale of troops who were used to Napoleon-era bright colorful uniforms, now it's perfectly common.

tomatotomato37 4y ago
This is a peacetime fleet though, which should have the spare resources needed to maintain aesthetic concerns. The lack of such is a warning sign that it may not have the spare capacity necessary for sustaining the much elevated manpower and resource requirements of active combat.
- drewcoo 4y ago
  > This is a peacetime fleet though Is it? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_armed_conflicts_involving_the_United_States#21st-century https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_armed_conflicts_involv...
kneebonian 4y ago
How about the brown M&M argument, if they are neglecting these basic tasks and responsibilities what other duties are they shirking. And for the record I don't buy for a second it won't effect the operational readiness of the fleet.
- mbg721 4y ago
  Yeah, there's no inherent value to canaries in coal mines, but if you see a dead one, you run.
- c7b 4y ago
  There's a finite time budget, and the question is what tasks they allocate it to. I don't suspect them of slacking, so if anything, I'd expect the time spent on other tasks to decrease the more time they put into polishing their decks.

sizzzzlerz 4y ago

In the 19th century, warships spent many hours maintaining the rigging for their sails as well as the readiness of the wooden decks. Obviously, if the ship couldn't deploy their sails in either battle or storm conditions, it stood a fair chance of being lost. As a result, sailors were constantly going up and down the ropes, brushing tar on them to waterproof and protect the ropes from fraying. Decks were sanded to maintain a rough surface that the mostly-barefoot sailors could maintain contact when the decks were wet or bloody. In the day of billion dollar vessels, as a taxpayer, I would sort of demand that the navy do more so that the lifetime of these very expensive ships can be as long as possible. If they're going to constantly go back to congress for more ship money, they must demonstrate they can maintain the ones they already have.

solardev 4y ago
Don't things become obsolete pretty quickly these days? Why spend tax money maintaining old equipment superceded by ever evolving arms races? Seems like maybe cutting our losses and decommissioning old stuff when they're no longer useful would be a better use of communal funds.
- CapricornNoble 4y ago
  Judging by the picture, she's definitely an Arleigh Burke DDG. Someone in the Twitter comments says she's a Flight II, so as far as Major Surface Combatants go, this should still be a pretty useful warship. US naval shipbuilding is such a mess, and we're already behind the power curve against the Chinese naval buildup. We really can't afford to toss our DDGs until we at LEAST start cranking out FFG(X)/ Constellation-class Frigates like WW2 Liberty ships. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Constellation-class_frigate https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Constellation-class_frigate
- black6 4y ago
  The last straw for my cousin, and why he left the Navy, was when he took a bew submarine on her maiden voyage, then immediately had to turn around and put her in dry dock for a retrofit because it was built on a decades-old contract and most of the systems were obsolete as they were installed. But the contract "couldn't" be changed, and more money was paid out to the war profiteers to do what should have been done in th3 first place.

javajosh 4y ago

This falls squarely in the "concerning but I can literally do nothing about it" category for me. What am I going to do, pick the next President based on their attitude about ship maintenance? Even if I was in the Navy, what could I do? I can only guess at what is causing this gross negligence. The fear is that bubbles of incompetence (incompetent people giving each other high-fives about how awesome they are) have grown large enough to start causing real physical and visible damage. Not sure if that's the case, though. Although I'm not buying the "rust has no operational impact" argument - as a sailor, you keep things neat and clean and tidy so that if something goes wrong it sticks out like a sore thumb. You want to catch problems early, and cleanliness helps. (Cleaning also has an inspection component that helps).

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bityard 4y ago
> What am I going to do, pick the next President based on their attitude about ship maintenance? I mean, you could. I stopped paying attention to politics when it became obvious that the two-party system is killing actual democracy. But... If a candidate said they were going to prioritize rebuilding our failing infrastructure, to include roads, bridges, power generation and transmission, communications, and defense assets, they would certainly have my attention.
- hotpotamus 4y ago
  > If a candidate said they were going to prioritize rebuilding our failing infrastructure, to include roads, bridges, power generation and transmission, communications, and defense assets If they didn't follow it up with, "and your share of the bill will be...", then I'd be pretty skeptical. Stuff costs money and you can't cut taxes and expect the government to perform all that it did before you cut them. Of course, I might be the only person in America to vote for a politician who would actually say that.

JoeyBananas 4y ago

I'm not willing to accept this moral panic at face value. The appearance by itself doesn't matter except for on the parade grounds and in boot camp. Better indicators of systemic issues would be the frequency of leaks, annual costs of maintenance, numbers of ships, etc. Give me something more convincing than 1 photo of a rusty deck.

jakear 4y ago
US Navy has (in part) lost ability to put out fires on its ships. It used to be that Damage Control was the pride of a crew. https://www.cnn.com/2022/07/15/politics/navy-uss-bonhomme-richard-punishments/index.html https://www.cnn.com/2022/07/15/politics/navy-uss-bonhomme-ri...
ren_engineer 4y ago
I'd say the fact the people in the Navy saw nothing wrong with this photo and posted it to Facebook is a signal of a deep issue. Their decision making is so bad they didn't even realize the optics of this photo. And if you can't keep your ships in good shape during peace time, what's going to happen if we actually get into a real war? the only way you could justify it was that maybe they knew people would get upset and it might bring some public attention on leadership to fix things?

resuresu 4y ago

[flagged]

mbg721 4y ago
There are plenty of domestic interests looting us too, I don't think foreign relations are a primary motivator.
dragonwriter 4y ago
> America is being gutted and looted by foreign interests. To the extent America is being “gutted and looted”, its by domestic capitalists rather than foreign interests.

fnordpiglet 4y ago

[flagged]

the_only_law 4y ago
Even more tiring are people who use boring puns to launch an irrelevant soapbox.

rich_sasha 4y ago

Maybe a silly question, but is superficial rust an indication of deeper issues?

joenathanone 4y ago
The longer it remains the less 'superficial' it becomes.
mlindner 4y ago
No it's not, especially when it's in for repair as this ship appears to be.
CapricornNoble 4y ago
Well, military media has spent the past 20 years laughing at the sorry state of the Russian Navy, being broken-down rust-buckets. Some of the analysis/conclusions about the Moskva sinking kinda confirm their problems: abysmal maintenance wasn't only surface-deep. She likely had major self-defense systems that were degraded, inoperable, or manned by unskilled sailors. The US keeps decent equipment readiness largely by throwing a fortune at contractors for maintenance, but overworked and poorly-trained Sailors at sea should be a major red flag (as if the numerous accidents in 7th Fleet wasn't sufficient wake-up call).
niffydroid 4y ago
Yes, if they're not protecting the outside then what are they not doing on the inside

leeoniya 4y ago

honestly, i was expecting much worse from reading the title; this looks mostly cosmetic. some inpainting should fix this nicely :)

melony 4y ago

The C is rough. Rust Evangelism Strikeforce assemble!

CapricornNoble 4y ago
Blue Water Navies: When "Writing It In Rust" Goes Wrong.

asddubs 4y ago

hmm, who cares? it's just a little bit of surface rust

avidphantasm 4y ago

Or perhaps it is a feint meant to give the false impression of lack of readiness?

Animats 4y ago

I wonder how well this new marine rust remover works.[1] I've used chelating agents such as Evapo-Rust for rust removal, and this seems to be in the same family. It converts rust to an inert powder, but doesn't react with steel. [1] https://www.ferryl.com/products/ferryl-ferrycid-rustremover/ https://www.ferryl.com/products/ferryl-ferrycid-rustremover/

lowbloodsugar 4y ago

US Navy switches unit test runner from “abort on failing test” to “ignore failing tests” because it’s only one test that is failing and that test is for cosmetic feature.

mlindner 4y ago

Several people in the twitter threads have commented that the "crew" on deck and the fact that the non-skid has been scrapped off means this ship is actually in harbor for maintenance. So yes if you scrape off the rust protection, I'd expect it to rust.

my_city 4y ago

The whole US army deserves to be turned into rust.

grogenaut 4y ago

TL;DR really no idea what if this is the state of the navy and it's bad, or this ship just went into dock with deferred maintenance, or is actively being retrofitted. But can't really take some photos out of context and angry folks gut reactions on the internet as actual data. More Details: (caveat, I'm not former military so if I get terms wrong, forgive me) I looked through the last month of photos on the navy facebook page which is where this photo is supposedly from. All of them have clean decks. They have a mix of at attention and dress uniforms for ceremonies and many many more photos of sailors in a relaxed or work situations in non-dress uniforms... https://www.facebook.com/photo/?fbid=535384871959649&set=pcb.535384971959639 https://www.facebook.com/photo/?fbid=535384871959649&set=pcb... is one. The article links to a dude's tweet who does not source the image... but a google reverse search finds it from https://www.facebook.com/USS.Hopper/ https://www.facebook.com/USS.Hopper/... The dude's twitter's slogan is "Views my own, but really should be yours" draw your own conclusions. Here's the photo source, https://www.facebook.com/USS.Hopper/photos/pcb.6120716927952780/6120712801286526/ https://www.facebook.com/USS.Hopper/photos/pcb.6120716927952..., looks like a promotion ceremony for the younger man in white dress according to the caption and photos, the rest of the folks look to be friends or folks who were around. Looking around more, mostly the deck is rusty and other surfaces look clean tho there are a few spots below the radar built into the side of the tower (I'm not navy so don't know terms, don't shoot me) https://www.facebook.com/USS.Hopper/photos/pcb.6120716927952780/6120713137953159 https://www.facebook.com/USS.Hopper/photos/pcb.6120716927952.... Here's a photo of the ship in good form https://www.marinevesseltraffic.com/image-resize?url=Images/Navy/Ships/USS%20Hopper%20(DDG-70).jpg&w=1176&h=667.2 https://www.marinevesseltraffic.com/image-resize?url=Images/... you can tell from comparing photos and by the folks in white that they have peeled the grey paint off the deck and it has rusted underneath, or it peeled itself and wasn't repainted. The ship is currently in port in perl harbor according to https://www.marinevesseltraffic.com/vessels/USS-Hopper-(DDG-70)/CURRENT-POSITION/1/367197000 https://www.marinevesseltraffic.com/vessels/USS-Hopper-(DDG-... The comments don't help, it's just all "not in my navy" or "I'll state my theory as fact" style facebook comments from people uninvolved with the ship (they mostly look 40+ from the comments). So again not much detail.

pvaldes 4y ago

To be fair, deck's photo looks more like sand than rust. The trace like pattern does not have much sense for rust, but will be easily created with muddy sand.

diogenescynic 4y ago

Late stage empire collapse.

barbazoo 4y ago

> even the top Admirals find it hard to ignore the fact that the men and women who serve on the front lines are America’s most valuable asset. So, will America’s best and brightest be motivated to join a Navy that’s overworked and underappreciated by Pentagon brass? It's almost funny to imagine what kind of war fantasy bubble those people exist in. Not going into the "best and brightest" which is just an insult to people doing much more meaningful work, maybe the history of politically motivated never ending or unsuccessful wars has anything to do with the "best and brightest" not wanting to sign up to be cannon fodder.

ppg677 4y ago

I sent this article to a US Navy captain I know. He scoffed at it and said it was complete BS. The name of the supposed rusty ship is nowhere to be found in the article or Twitter post (or replies).

readthenotes1 4y ago

I thought mixing Rust with C was supposed to be safe?