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This is an ongoing issue with the US Navy, and mirrors similar post hoc justifications from organizations that use political[1] justifications to rationalize s

by 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.
  - mgarfias 4y ago
    TFA points out it’s going to prestige projects.
    - euroderf 4y ago
      And the money for prestige projects is being siphoned off for the F-35 ?
      - mgarfias 4y ago
        Don’t forget padded contractor invoices.
      - mardifoufs 4y ago
        Which would actually be a very good thing, considering the f-35 is probably the best military asset of the US right now.
- Spooky23 4y ago
  Believe your lyin’ eyes this time. Pictures of rusty underway US Navy warships is evidence. Another evidence point is the poisoning of Hawaii’s water supply with tens of thousands of gallons of jet fuel when a maintenance worker bumped into a cob-job PVC pipe in a tunnel. Thousands of people poisoned and I imagine leaky jet fuel tanks aren’t t great for fleet readiness. The commander who oversaw that disaster was promoted.
  - mlindner 4y ago
    Ships get rusty all the time. In fact they get that way every deployment.
  - themitigating 4y ago
    That's not evidence that money for maintenance has been redirected. Prove the money was redirected and that the new funding amount for maintenance is insufficient that it caused the rust you specified, and that the rust levels are greater than other time periods. You want to me to look at a photo of rust and get mad and then believe you about funding?
    - Spooky23 4y ago
      Sure, let me whip out the 4000 page defense authorization act for the last decade. There’s a wide variety of material available from GAO regarding the many issues that the Navy has with maintenance. Feel free to read it.
- falcolas 4y ago
  Would such rust be tolerated if the funds for maintenance were available? Based off what (admittedly little) I know of the military from family members, no. They are generally proud of the aircraft/vessels they serve on, and rust appearing on the deck would be there only because they didn't have the time to remove it (other maintenance) and the funds to re-cover the exposed metal.
  - lazide 4y ago
    That depends on the ships Captain and officers onboard, frankly. If those officers didn’t care, or said they cared but didn’t prioritize the work, instead having everyone run around like crazy doing other things, that’s how you get this. The captains have enough leeway, they can get the deck stripped and repainted if they prioritized it. Of course, their commanders provide the environment that allows or requires them to do other things instead. Probably too many other ‘must do’s’ and other problems.
  - feyes 4y ago
    Speaking from experience on surface ships, no. If the command gives a rip about its reputation then these things will be addressed first. Everything from swabbing and sweeping decks, high dusting, polishing fittings, etc. It will look immaculate. Only on deployment do these appearance priorities start to drop due to operational concerns or tempo. But the surface Navy is not a good community and is filled with self-interested officers that are more concerned about progressing their careers than training their people or maintaining their gear. It's why the collisions happened and it's why people died because of those. The Navy has a huge culture problem in the surface community and until someone with the authority to address it decides to, things won't get better. It's a big factor that led me to leave the Navy and go onto other things. I'd constantly be trying to do something a different way that I could prove was more effective and be told not to do it. Anyways that's my two cents on the topic.
- hguant 4y ago
  So you're changing the goalposts here and asking for defense of a statement the post doesn't make. The statement was that "the US surface Navy has...been deferring maintenance," not that it was cutting the budget for maintenance. There is no smoking gun of "aha! you cut funds for needed repairs!" here - just a series of operational and organizational priorities that have resulted in ships being at sea for longer and longer deployments, and resources allocated to prestige projects like carriers, instead of resolving the less sexy issue of manpower, and lack of "work horse" destroyers in the fleet. ProPublica has a good piece going into some of the details of this if you'd like to know more, specifically as it regards the 7th Fleet. https://features.propublica.org/navy-accidents/us-navy-crashes-japan-cause-mccain/ https://features.propublica.org/navy-accidents/us-navy-crash...
  - themitigating 4y ago
    "just a series of operational and organizational priorities that have resulted in ships being at sea for longer and longer deployments, and resources allocated to prestige projects like carriers, instead of resolving the less sexy issue of manpower, and lack of "work horse" destroyers in the fleet." I'll assume that's a reasonable take but the person I replied to went for an overly simplistic "government bad" line hence the style of my life
chromatin 4y ago
[flagged]
- lazide 4y ago
  Exists everywhere all the time. :s
- 33955985 4y ago
  The United States was never an empire. In fact the US rejected that ambition at the end of WWII, when the world laid in ruin. Occupation of foreign countries has always been tenuous. What we’re seeing with the Navy is the result of a US disinterested in flexing any sort of naval muscle for but its most strategic allies in the traditional realms like securing shipping lanes. “Hallmarks of a dying empire” implies, somehow, a loss in territory or capability. Neither is true for the US. There just simply isn’t a compelling reason to maintain the same level of naval readiness that they had in the last.
  - 4RealFreedom 4y ago
    I think there's more to a 'dying empire' than losing territory or capability. The US is more politically polarized today, the National Debt is at 31 T, we're currently in a recession with no signs of easing, and China is making waves around the world - the culmination is daunting. I worry for the future.
    - mlindner 4y ago
      China is facing a debt crisis that makes the US debt look like nothing along with a very rapidly aging population, one of the fastest aging in the world, despite not having reached the level of development of similarly aged populations. China's population likely has already started to decline. We don't need to worry about China, they'll handle ending themselves themselves.
      - 4RealFreedom 4y ago
        I really hope so. They've been making inroads throughout the world. If there's one thing I've learned it's never underestimate the CCP.
verelo 4y ago
The reality is the next war won’t be won by sea. In fact, even the last war wasn’t won by sea. Air is the battle ground, we should be diverting funds from sea to air and it’s very possible accepting a little rust is a deliberate choice.
- toomuchtodo 4y ago
  Is there a global map or similar resource available showing where the US can’t force project without a surface navy? On air refueling, long range munitions, and one of the ~750 foreign soil US military bases (across 80 countries) gets the DoD a long way I’d imagine. Trade proximity for speed and force out of reach of an adversary. Use carriers for humanitarian efforts and soft power project in competition with Belt and Road (China).
- seneca 4y ago
  Aircraft carriers are an important component of moving air power.
- PheonixPharts 4y ago
  That’s akin to claiming we no longer need cargo ships because we have planes that can do overnight delivery. Air power is great but incredibly dependent on logistics. The navy is and always has been essential to protecting trade and maintaining global supply lines So long as the sea remains the dominant method of transporting resources around the globe, sea power will remain essential.
  - verelo 4y ago
    Yeah i guess the comment wasn’t well formed enough, i wasn’t suggesting sea plays no part, sea likely won’t be the main battleground, but it of course will be part of supply lines and protecting supply lines. I felt that some diversion of value to allow for bolstering another might be a reasonable trade off. Anyway, i really don’t care all that much but sorry for triggering so many folk!
- weego 4y ago
  You think it's air? It's economic, it's political and social influence, it's positioning yourself as the root in supply chains. All of the USs classic enemies are playing asymmetric war against you for a while now.
cpursley 4y ago
I'm no Navy expert but the carriers seem extremely vulnerable to anti-shipping missiles - especially of the hypersonic variety. In a hot war with a capable near-peer, the carriers will be sunk right away (possibility every single one of them). Seems like the focus should be on the stealthy underwater stuff that can pop up and deliver payloads like missiles and drones but what do I know.
- scarmig 4y ago
  Key phrase here is kill chain. Finding a moving carrier on the open ocean is hard, even with modern satellite technology. And getting a missile launched from hundreds or thousands of miles away to hit it once you do know its position (10 minutes ago) is harder. Not to say that's impossible, just that it's currently an unsolved problem.
  - callesgg 4y ago
    Doubt that it is hard. A carrier must send out an emense amount of RF. There are satellites that have large antennas (probably when deployed bigger than football fields. “Think something like a large net made of thin wires”) listening in to the things that happen here down on the ground.
    - dmix 4y ago
      If you read the investigative story [1] about how Russia's missile team's operate it explains they have to program their missiles with USB thumbdrives, targeting data comes from a small team in Moscow, then it gets sent to remote airbases/submarines, and targeting information is often 24hrs old by the time the missile is in flight. It's much harder than it sounds. A ballistic hypersonic missile isn't like a TV-guided cruise missile that can track a moving target or a HARM that will seek out RF signatures. You'd basically have to wait until the carrier is parked somewhere for an expended period (multiple hours at a minimum), otherwise you'll waste a $100M hypersonic missile. [1] https://theins.ru/en/politics/256339 https://theins.ru/en/politics/256339
    - snowwrestler 4y ago
dragonwriter 4y ago
> 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. Its more accurate, I think, to say they’ve been doing it because political leadership and/or senior military leadership trying to anticipate rather than advise, is working to reduce the visible financial impact of optempo.
candiddevmike 4y ago
Fascinating that this same scenario seems to happen in corporate america, too.
- assbuttbuttass 4y ago
  This is what happens when you "run government like a business"
  - dmix 4y ago
    That sounds like an over simplification to the point of being meaningless.
    - acdha 4y ago
      I think it’s worth reconsider that because we have seen many examples of the same thinking throughout our society. The underlying problem is the same - hyper focus on short-term cost reduction even when it entails significant long term costs - but it doesn’t manifest identically in every sector. Once you see it however, you can recognize that pattern pushed by the same unaccountable consultants everywhere.
      - lamontcg 4y ago
        And we've got more and more outright corruption creeping in, at all levels.
      - dmix 4y ago
        > hyper focus on short-term cost reduction even when it entails significant long term costs That is exclusive to a small amount of public companies without a stable business model. So a tiny percent. That has little to do with "acting like a private business" in a competitive market. At least when you compare it to how 95%+ of business operate. Ask yourself, why would a healthy business sacrifice long term value for short term stock price gains? I highly doubt the answer is "that's what the free market demands". No serious bank or investor would touch a business otherwise if that was a rational incentive (besides ponzi schemers). Even among public companies (which is itself a small percentage of all businesses) that is rarely the modus operandi. It's just a meme that comes out via the inverse of survivorship bias...aka news stories of obvious failures. The only ones that could stick with pro-short-term-investor anti-consumer tactics like that around are monopolies and/or mega corporations friendly with government.
ren_engineer 4y ago
it's only going to get worse, the military is desperate for recruits and lowering standards to unprecedented levels. We're going to see Project 100,000/McNamara's morons 2.0 we've already lost a $2 billion ship because the crew wasn't capable of following their proper firefighting procedure, in addition to the numerous crashes due to poor training and lack of sleep for crew https://www.military.com/daily-news/2022/12/05/navy-accept-recruits-lowest-test-scores-recruiting-goal-grows.html https://www.military.com/daily-news/2022/12/05/navy-accept-r... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_100,000 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_100,000 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/USS_Bonhomme_Richard_(LHD-6) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/USS_Bonhomme_Richard_(LHD-6)
- dmix 4y ago
  With Russia letting 50yr+ olds join I wonder what's more preferable. Older experienced but out-of-shape guys coming out of retirement or recruiting younger people but with lower mental and medical score testing?
  - chinabot 4y ago
    All the politicians and desktop generals should be added to the crew lists the day war breaks out, that should solve a few problems.
- fbdab103 4y ago
  With no disrespect to anyone involved, can someone explain to me what the navy crew are doing that leaves them sleep-deprived leading to these incidents? From my comfy armchair, for a peacetime navy ship cruising around, there is "nothing" to do, but keep the lights running. Routine maintenance, monitor foreign ships, etc. I would expect boredom to be a more significant problem than overwork. Clearly, I am missing something.
  - QuarterReptile 4y ago
    >With no disrespect to anyone involved, can someone explain to me what the navy crew are doing Probably not, but maybe it's possible to give a taste. My perspective is all submarines, which is certainly different. Maybe read this and assume that the superficial details are the only exaggerated parts: https://subpargroup.substack.com/ https://subpargroup.substack.com/ Your core 'job' underway is being 'on watch': think tollbooth operator, maybe. You show up to work 45 minutes early so you can talk to everyone at work and learn everything that's abnormal or broken from the night before. Then for 8 hours a day, you're a tollbooth operator. When you finish up with that, you step next door to have dinner. Then, half the booth operators go to run street sweepers for an hour (again, this is after the toll booth shift) while the other half go to consolidate all the handwritten toll records made during the shift. On a simple day, that's 30 minutes, but it could be 3 hours if some of the numbers don't add up. Now you're ten hours in, and that's not too bad if all you had to do is collect tolls. But good luck with that. Because you're also the guy who keeps all the lifting gates in good repair, or the guy who maintains the internet infrastructure or cooling or lighting to the tollbooths. And some jerk crashed through one of the gates last shift, breaking the arm off. In case that wasn't bad enough, the arms for your tollbooth were last produced in East Germany in 1987, and now you've been coasting on the fumes of that stockpile for 30-some years. The other toll plazas in your consortium probably have some, but they'll all lie and say they don't because their lives become more inconvenient in every way if you take their spare parts. But you have to find a way to make one shake out anyway. Don't sleep until you know how. You can send three emails per day to figure out how to fix it. By the way, you have to go take your monthly tollbooth operator knowledge test. And be up one hour early to practice putting out tollbooth fires tomorrow morning. Finally, the tollbooth consortium also operates ICBM silos, and you have to be ready at a moment's notice to remember how to do that. Also, the guy who keeps the internet running is home for 3 weeks with his new baby, so you'll have to fix that too before you can email people about those toll gate arms. All the people who failed in the past at what you're trying to fix are hanging out in a lounge playing Xbox and mostly getting paid the same as you.
mlindner 4y ago
I'm not sure why so many are replying to this so I'll hijack the top comment. To talk some sense into people. The crew isn't a navy crew. The uniforms shown are not navy uniforms. In fact this is likely some kind of repair crew of some sort. Secondly, this ship is in port, with the anti-skid coating on the deck apparently not visible meaning that this ship is already a non-operational ship.
- dmix 4y ago
  How do you explain this picture then? https://twitter.com/manimota/status/1131343812025081856 https://twitter.com/manimota/status/1131343812025081856 This is definitely not in port or under repair. It's embarrassing.
  - birdyrooster 4y ago
    That’s not deck rust so it’s not relevant.
  - mlindner 4y ago
    When you've been at sea for months that's what happens.
    - dmix 4y ago
      So ships who've been "months at sea" also suddenly get pressed back into naval games with foreign countries before going to port? This only supports the idea that the tempo is so high the crews have little time for basic repairs and maintenance.
  - rocket_surgeron 4y ago
    >How do you explain this picture then? The optempo of US Navy vessels is inconceivable to foreign navies. Practically every second of every day while underway the ship is expected to be operational and a ship's itinerary is pre-determined down to the minute. Delays are not tolerated. The fleet keeps getting smaller but the workload remains the same. The Navy is burning out its personnel and equipment trying to keep up. The records for both longest deployment (215 days) and longest time at sea with no port calls (208 days) were both broken in 2020. From 2017: > The Navy has doubled its number of forward deployed naval forces ships operating out of Japan since 2006 – a bump from 20 to 40 ships – but those ships do not follow the Optimized Fleet Response Plan readiness generation model that includes dedicated time for ship maintenance and crew training ahead of rotational deployments. https://news.usni.org/2017/09/20/cno-richardson-high-optempo-can-culture-culminated-pervasive-expired-certifications-forward-deployed-surface-forces https://news.usni.org/2017/09/20/cno-richardson-high-optempo... The problem has only gotten worse since then. The Navy used to heave to and have a day or two to clean up before entering port but they don't do that anymore. Those days cannot be wasted on cleaning. As for the picture, if you told me that there were individual members of the US Navy crew that had more time at sea than the entire combined crew of the Polish ship, I would not dismiss that comment immediately as being implausible. Online busybodies, like those commenting on the tweet you linked to, will bitch and moan about the navy going soft but they would crumble into dust under the pressures the Navy is operating under today. The worst are the old-ass "CoLd WaRrIoRs" who spent 20 years in the navy doing a 3-month med cruise every year who got less time at sea than the 19-year old deck seaman on the rusty ship in that photo got before they pinned on E-3. They would have gone AWOL if forced to go 200 days without touching dry land.
treetoppin 4y ago
At the end of the day, the only things that matter are those that you let influence your operational tempo. Unfortunately, a wartime organization that is able to accept a certain level of fatalities in a combat situation has trouble adapting the mentality of "the mission must get done" to a non-wartime footing. Because of the lower stakes for surface vessels, there is a higher chance that the time allocated to maintenance (whether thats fixing running rust, overhauling a piece of equipment, or ensuring crew are trained) is whatever is left in the schedule after their operational needs have been met. Unless a skipper is willing to bet their career on saying "I wont sail until these repairs are done, operational schedule be damned", its not going to change. At the end of the day, someone needs to be willing to say no, and deleverage the commitments. All the services are seeing the "do less with more attitude" creep into senior leadership's thinking, and its causing both human and material assets to be depleted. Its no wonder theres a human resources shortfall - the value proposition is just not what it used to be, and the level of burnout of sailors has only increased.
SentientAtom 4y ago
Reminds me of the scene in Idiocracy where the main character visits the hospital and the nurse mixes up the oral and anal probes.

by hguant 4y ago

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.
- mgarfias 4y ago
  TFA points out it’s going to prestige projects.
  - euroderf 4y ago
    And the money for prestige projects is being siphoned off for the F-35 ?
    - mgarfias 4y ago
      Don’t forget padded contractor invoices.
    - mardifoufs 4y ago
      Which would actually be a very good thing, considering the f-35 is probably the best military asset of the US right now.
Spooky23 4y ago
Believe your lyin’ eyes this time. Pictures of rusty underway US Navy warships is evidence. Another evidence point is the poisoning of Hawaii’s water supply with tens of thousands of gallons of jet fuel when a maintenance worker bumped into a cob-job PVC pipe in a tunnel. Thousands of people poisoned and I imagine leaky jet fuel tanks aren’t t great for fleet readiness. The commander who oversaw that disaster was promoted.
- mlindner 4y ago
  Ships get rusty all the time. In fact they get that way every deployment.
- themitigating 4y ago
  That's not evidence that money for maintenance has been redirected. Prove the money was redirected and that the new funding amount for maintenance is insufficient that it caused the rust you specified, and that the rust levels are greater than other time periods. You want to me to look at a photo of rust and get mad and then believe you about funding?
  - Spooky23 4y ago
    Sure, let me whip out the 4000 page defense authorization act for the last decade. There’s a wide variety of material available from GAO regarding the many issues that the Navy has with maintenance. Feel free to read it.
falcolas 4y ago
Would such rust be tolerated if the funds for maintenance were available? Based off what (admittedly little) I know of the military from family members, no. They are generally proud of the aircraft/vessels they serve on, and rust appearing on the deck would be there only because they didn't have the time to remove it (other maintenance) and the funds to re-cover the exposed metal.
- lazide 4y ago
  That depends on the ships Captain and officers onboard, frankly. If those officers didn’t care, or said they cared but didn’t prioritize the work, instead having everyone run around like crazy doing other things, that’s how you get this. The captains have enough leeway, they can get the deck stripped and repainted if they prioritized it. Of course, their commanders provide the environment that allows or requires them to do other things instead. Probably too many other ‘must do’s’ and other problems.
- feyes 4y ago
  Speaking from experience on surface ships, no. If the command gives a rip about its reputation then these things will be addressed first. Everything from swabbing and sweeping decks, high dusting, polishing fittings, etc. It will look immaculate. Only on deployment do these appearance priorities start to drop due to operational concerns or tempo. But the surface Navy is not a good community and is filled with self-interested officers that are more concerned about progressing their careers than training their people or maintaining their gear. It's why the collisions happened and it's why people died because of those. The Navy has a huge culture problem in the surface community and until someone with the authority to address it decides to, things won't get better. It's a big factor that led me to leave the Navy and go onto other things. I'd constantly be trying to do something a different way that I could prove was more effective and be told not to do it. Anyways that's my two cents on the topic.
hguant 4y ago
So you're changing the goalposts here and asking for defense of a statement the post doesn't make. The statement was that "the US surface Navy has...been deferring maintenance," not that it was cutting the budget for maintenance. There is no smoking gun of "aha! you cut funds for needed repairs!" here - just a series of operational and organizational priorities that have resulted in ships being at sea for longer and longer deployments, and resources allocated to prestige projects like carriers, instead of resolving the less sexy issue of manpower, and lack of "work horse" destroyers in the fleet. ProPublica has a good piece going into some of the details of this if you'd like to know more, specifically as it regards the 7th Fleet. https://features.propublica.org/navy-accidents/us-navy-crashes-japan-cause-mccain/ https://features.propublica.org/navy-accidents/us-navy-crash...
- themitigating 4y ago
  "just a series of operational and organizational priorities that have resulted in ships being at sea for longer and longer deployments, and resources allocated to prestige projects like carriers, instead of resolving the less sexy issue of manpower, and lack of "work horse" destroyers in the fleet." I'll assume that's a reasonable take but the person I replied to went for an overly simplistic "government bad" line hence the style of my life

chromatin 4y ago

[flagged]

lazide 4y ago
Exists everywhere all the time. :s
33955985 4y ago
The United States was never an empire. In fact the US rejected that ambition at the end of WWII, when the world laid in ruin. Occupation of foreign countries has always been tenuous. What we’re seeing with the Navy is the result of a US disinterested in flexing any sort of naval muscle for but its most strategic allies in the traditional realms like securing shipping lanes. “Hallmarks of a dying empire” implies, somehow, a loss in territory or capability. Neither is true for the US. There just simply isn’t a compelling reason to maintain the same level of naval readiness that they had in the last.
- 4RealFreedom 4y ago
  I think there's more to a 'dying empire' than losing territory or capability. The US is more politically polarized today, the National Debt is at 31 T, we're currently in a recession with no signs of easing, and China is making waves around the world - the culmination is daunting. I worry for the future.
  - mlindner 4y ago
    China is facing a debt crisis that makes the US debt look like nothing along with a very rapidly aging population, one of the fastest aging in the world, despite not having reached the level of development of similarly aged populations. China's population likely has already started to decline. We don't need to worry about China, they'll handle ending themselves themselves.
    - 4RealFreedom 4y ago
      I really hope so. They've been making inroads throughout the world. If there's one thing I've learned it's never underestimate the CCP.

verelo 4y ago

The reality is the next war won’t be won by sea. In fact, even the last war wasn’t won by sea. Air is the battle ground, we should be diverting funds from sea to air and it’s very possible accepting a little rust is a deliberate choice.

toomuchtodo 4y ago
Is there a global map or similar resource available showing where the US can’t force project without a surface navy? On air refueling, long range munitions, and one of the ~750 foreign soil US military bases (across 80 countries) gets the DoD a long way I’d imagine. Trade proximity for speed and force out of reach of an adversary. Use carriers for humanitarian efforts and soft power project in competition with Belt and Road (China).
seneca 4y ago
Aircraft carriers are an important component of moving air power.
PheonixPharts 4y ago
That’s akin to claiming we no longer need cargo ships because we have planes that can do overnight delivery. Air power is great but incredibly dependent on logistics. The navy is and always has been essential to protecting trade and maintaining global supply lines So long as the sea remains the dominant method of transporting resources around the globe, sea power will remain essential.
- verelo 4y ago
  Yeah i guess the comment wasn’t well formed enough, i wasn’t suggesting sea plays no part, sea likely won’t be the main battleground, but it of course will be part of supply lines and protecting supply lines. I felt that some diversion of value to allow for bolstering another might be a reasonable trade off. Anyway, i really don’t care all that much but sorry for triggering so many folk!
weego 4y ago
You think it's air? It's economic, it's political and social influence, it's positioning yourself as the root in supply chains. All of the USs classic enemies are playing asymmetric war against you for a while now.

cpursley 4y ago

I'm no Navy expert but the carriers seem extremely vulnerable to anti-shipping missiles - especially of the hypersonic variety. In a hot war with a capable near-peer, the carriers will be sunk right away (possibility every single one of them). Seems like the focus should be on the stealthy underwater stuff that can pop up and deliver payloads like missiles and drones but what do I know.

scarmig 4y ago
Key phrase here is kill chain. Finding a moving carrier on the open ocean is hard, even with modern satellite technology. And getting a missile launched from hundreds or thousands of miles away to hit it once you do know its position (10 minutes ago) is harder. Not to say that's impossible, just that it's currently an unsolved problem.
- callesgg 4y ago
  Doubt that it is hard. A carrier must send out an emense amount of RF. There are satellites that have large antennas (probably when deployed bigger than football fields. “Think something like a large net made of thin wires”) listening in to the things that happen here down on the ground.
  - dmix 4y ago
    If you read the investigative story [1] about how Russia's missile team's operate it explains they have to program their missiles with USB thumbdrives, targeting data comes from a small team in Moscow, then it gets sent to remote airbases/submarines, and targeting information is often 24hrs old by the time the missile is in flight. It's much harder than it sounds. A ballistic hypersonic missile isn't like a TV-guided cruise missile that can track a moving target or a HARM that will seek out RF signatures. You'd basically have to wait until the carrier is parked somewhere for an expended period (multiple hours at a minimum), otherwise you'll waste a $100M hypersonic missile. [1] https://theins.ru/en/politics/256339 https://theins.ru/en/politics/256339
  - snowwrestler 4y ago

dragonwriter 4y ago

> 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. Its more accurate, I think, to say they’ve been doing it because political leadership and/or senior military leadership trying to anticipate rather than advise, is working to reduce the visible financial impact of optempo.

candiddevmike 4y ago

Fascinating that this same scenario seems to happen in corporate america, too.

assbuttbuttass 4y ago
This is what happens when you "run government like a business"
- dmix 4y ago
  That sounds like an over simplification to the point of being meaningless.
  - acdha 4y ago
    I think it’s worth reconsider that because we have seen many examples of the same thinking throughout our society. The underlying problem is the same - hyper focus on short-term cost reduction even when it entails significant long term costs - but it doesn’t manifest identically in every sector. Once you see it however, you can recognize that pattern pushed by the same unaccountable consultants everywhere.
    - lamontcg 4y ago
      And we've got more and more outright corruption creeping in, at all levels.
    - dmix 4y ago
      > hyper focus on short-term cost reduction even when it entails significant long term costs That is exclusive to a small amount of public companies without a stable business model. So a tiny percent. That has little to do with "acting like a private business" in a competitive market. At least when you compare it to how 95%+ of business operate. Ask yourself, why would a healthy business sacrifice long term value for short term stock price gains? I highly doubt the answer is "that's what the free market demands". No serious bank or investor would touch a business otherwise if that was a rational incentive (besides ponzi schemers). Even among public companies (which is itself a small percentage of all businesses) that is rarely the modus operandi. It's just a meme that comes out via the inverse of survivorship bias...aka news stories of obvious failures. The only ones that could stick with pro-short-term-investor anti-consumer tactics like that around are monopolies and/or mega corporations friendly with government.

ren_engineer 4y ago

it's only going to get worse, the military is desperate for recruits and lowering standards to unprecedented levels. We're going to see Project 100,000/McNamara's morons 2.0 we've already lost a $2 billion ship because the crew wasn't capable of following their proper firefighting procedure, in addition to the numerous crashes due to poor training and lack of sleep for crew https://www.military.com/daily-news/2022/12/05/navy-accept-recruits-lowest-test-scores-recruiting-goal-grows.html https://www.military.com/daily-news/2022/12/05/navy-accept-r... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_100,000 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_100,000 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/USS_Bonhomme_Richard_(LHD-6) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/USS_Bonhomme_Richard_(LHD-6)

dmix 4y ago
With Russia letting 50yr+ olds join I wonder what's more preferable. Older experienced but out-of-shape guys coming out of retirement or recruiting younger people but with lower mental and medical score testing?
- chinabot 4y ago
  All the politicians and desktop generals should be added to the crew lists the day war breaks out, that should solve a few problems.
fbdab103 4y ago
With no disrespect to anyone involved, can someone explain to me what the navy crew are doing that leaves them sleep-deprived leading to these incidents? From my comfy armchair, for a peacetime navy ship cruising around, there is "nothing" to do, but keep the lights running. Routine maintenance, monitor foreign ships, etc. I would expect boredom to be a more significant problem than overwork. Clearly, I am missing something.
- QuarterReptile 4y ago
  >With no disrespect to anyone involved, can someone explain to me what the navy crew are doing Probably not, but maybe it's possible to give a taste. My perspective is all submarines, which is certainly different. Maybe read this and assume that the superficial details are the only exaggerated parts: https://subpargroup.substack.com/ https://subpargroup.substack.com/ Your core 'job' underway is being 'on watch': think tollbooth operator, maybe. You show up to work 45 minutes early so you can talk to everyone at work and learn everything that's abnormal or broken from the night before. Then for 8 hours a day, you're a tollbooth operator. When you finish up with that, you step next door to have dinner. Then, half the booth operators go to run street sweepers for an hour (again, this is after the toll booth shift) while the other half go to consolidate all the handwritten toll records made during the shift. On a simple day, that's 30 minutes, but it could be 3 hours if some of the numbers don't add up. Now you're ten hours in, and that's not too bad if all you had to do is collect tolls. But good luck with that. Because you're also the guy who keeps all the lifting gates in good repair, or the guy who maintains the internet infrastructure or cooling or lighting to the tollbooths. And some jerk crashed through one of the gates last shift, breaking the arm off. In case that wasn't bad enough, the arms for your tollbooth were last produced in East Germany in 1987, and now you've been coasting on the fumes of that stockpile for 30-some years. The other toll plazas in your consortium probably have some, but they'll all lie and say they don't because their lives become more inconvenient in every way if you take their spare parts. But you have to find a way to make one shake out anyway. Don't sleep until you know how. You can send three emails per day to figure out how to fix it. By the way, you have to go take your monthly tollbooth operator knowledge test. And be up one hour early to practice putting out tollbooth fires tomorrow morning. Finally, the tollbooth consortium also operates ICBM silos, and you have to be ready at a moment's notice to remember how to do that. Also, the guy who keeps the internet running is home for 3 weeks with his new baby, so you'll have to fix that too before you can email people about those toll gate arms. All the people who failed in the past at what you're trying to fix are hanging out in a lounge playing Xbox and mostly getting paid the same as you.

mlindner 4y ago

I'm not sure why so many are replying to this so I'll hijack the top comment. To talk some sense into people. The crew isn't a navy crew. The uniforms shown are not navy uniforms. In fact this is likely some kind of repair crew of some sort. Secondly, this ship is in port, with the anti-skid coating on the deck apparently not visible meaning that this ship is already a non-operational ship.

dmix 4y ago
How do you explain this picture then? https://twitter.com/manimota/status/1131343812025081856 https://twitter.com/manimota/status/1131343812025081856 This is definitely not in port or under repair. It's embarrassing.
- birdyrooster 4y ago
  That’s not deck rust so it’s not relevant.
- mlindner 4y ago
  When you've been at sea for months that's what happens.
  - dmix 4y ago
    So ships who've been "months at sea" also suddenly get pressed back into naval games with foreign countries before going to port? This only supports the idea that the tempo is so high the crews have little time for basic repairs and maintenance.
- rocket_surgeron 4y ago
  >How do you explain this picture then? The optempo of US Navy vessels is inconceivable to foreign navies. Practically every second of every day while underway the ship is expected to be operational and a ship's itinerary is pre-determined down to the minute. Delays are not tolerated. The fleet keeps getting smaller but the workload remains the same. The Navy is burning out its personnel and equipment trying to keep up. The records for both longest deployment (215 days) and longest time at sea with no port calls (208 days) were both broken in 2020. From 2017: > The Navy has doubled its number of forward deployed naval forces ships operating out of Japan since 2006 – a bump from 20 to 40 ships – but those ships do not follow the Optimized Fleet Response Plan readiness generation model that includes dedicated time for ship maintenance and crew training ahead of rotational deployments. https://news.usni.org/2017/09/20/cno-richardson-high-optempo-can-culture-culminated-pervasive-expired-certifications-forward-deployed-surface-forces https://news.usni.org/2017/09/20/cno-richardson-high-optempo... The problem has only gotten worse since then. The Navy used to heave to and have a day or two to clean up before entering port but they don't do that anymore. Those days cannot be wasted on cleaning. As for the picture, if you told me that there were individual members of the US Navy crew that had more time at sea than the entire combined crew of the Polish ship, I would not dismiss that comment immediately as being implausible. Online busybodies, like those commenting on the tweet you linked to, will bitch and moan about the navy going soft but they would crumble into dust under the pressures the Navy is operating under today. The worst are the old-ass "CoLd WaRrIoRs" who spent 20 years in the navy doing a 3-month med cruise every year who got less time at sea than the 19-year old deck seaman on the rusty ship in that photo got before they pinned on E-3. They would have gone AWOL if forced to go 200 days without touching dry land.

treetoppin 4y ago

At the end of the day, the only things that matter are those that you let influence your operational tempo. Unfortunately, a wartime organization that is able to accept a certain level of fatalities in a combat situation has trouble adapting the mentality of "the mission must get done" to a non-wartime footing. Because of the lower stakes for surface vessels, there is a higher chance that the time allocated to maintenance (whether thats fixing running rust, overhauling a piece of equipment, or ensuring crew are trained) is whatever is left in the schedule after their operational needs have been met. Unless a skipper is willing to bet their career on saying "I wont sail until these repairs are done, operational schedule be damned", its not going to change. At the end of the day, someone needs to be willing to say no, and deleverage the commitments. All the services are seeing the "do less with more attitude" creep into senior leadership's thinking, and its causing both human and material assets to be depleted. Its no wonder theres a human resources shortfall - the value proposition is just not what it used to be, and the level of burnout of sailors has only increased.

SentientAtom 4y ago

Reminds me of the scene in Idiocracy where the main character visits the hospital and the nurse mixes up the oral and anal probes.