The GAO reports that undermanning of ships is a major cause of problems with morale, training, and readiness. The GAO reports that the Navy’s “optimal manning” program under-states the amount of work needed to keep a ship operational and does not include the resources needed to properly train new sailors. You can’t send a new sailor on a snipe hunt to find some propeller fluid, incidentally forcing him to go to most of the ship’s departments as the NCO’s send him onward and onward. You don’t have the luxury of mentoring a newbie until he’s fully trained. There just isn’t enough personnel on board to do that. The Navy’s smaller combatants weren’t extravagantly manned even before “Optimal Manning”, and a 6% cut over the already-too-lean manning means that you have a lot of tired, delirious, undertrained sailors.
And tired, delirious, undertrained sailors make mistakes that can cost lives, like the U.S.S. John McCain colliding with a commercial tanker near the Strait of Malacca, or the other incidents that have happened recently.
This isn’t Trump’s fault. This started under Donald Rumsfeld as part of his plan to buy F-35 fighters for the Navy by sprinkling magic technology fairy dust on the ships so they wouldn’t need as many sailors to sail them, thus freeing up money to buy the Gold-Plated Flying Turkey that will be twice the price of the carrier it’s sitting on by the time it’s actually deployed to carriers. Thing is, the magic technology fairy dust didn’t actually reduce manning requirements. Sure, it reduced the need to send sailors to turn off steam pipe valves and shit like that, since that got automated, but there’s a shit-ton of work on a ship that can’t be done by a PC in a closet. Like if one of those valves breaks down, that PC can’t fix it. Some sailor’s going to have to fix it. Assuming that a sailor with sufficient skills is onboard. If not, then someone is going to have to go to the PC in the closet and watch the Navy equivalent of a YouTube video instructing him how to fix it, and then half-ass it trying to figure it out for the first time, where if he’d been trained, it would take literally minutes rather than hours to fix the problem that has the rudder not steering and thus has the ship going in circles in the middle of a busy shipping lane.
That is, by substituting technology for trained sailors, everything takes longer. So yeah, the technology saved time on *some* things, but causes *more* time to be taken on *other* things. For a net wash as far as manning requirements go.
Now, this is a separate thing from the undermanning that was “fixed” during the Obama years. That undermanning was where the Navy didn’t even have enough sailors to meet “optimal” manning. What the GAO is saying is that even the “optimal” manning isn’t enough, because it doesn’t leave enough sailors to handle unexpected events like that valve blowing out and causing the ship to lose steering.
And Cheeto Mussolini wants us to have 12 aircraft carrier task forces? Fuck, we don’t even have enough sailors for the current ones, where the hell would we get the sailors for more of’em?! Not to mention we just don’t have the facilities to build two aircraft carriers in parallel anymore, unless we wanted to build some diesel-powered ones again… a possibility, I suppose, we don’t need a nuclear carrier forward-based in Japan, the Kitty Hawk, an oil burner, did a fine job there for many years, but the chances of the Navy agreeing to have a couple of oil-burning aircraft carriers again is sorta none to none. But hey, reality and the Orange Racist Russian Stooge never have met, right?
– Badtux the Military Penguin
There was a discussion on Balloon Juice about how the two recent destroyer collisions might have been because their GPS systems were spoofed. That’s what supposedly allowed Iran to bring down a big-arse U.S. drone about six years ago, sending GPS signals that made the machine think it was flying when it was actually bellying into the ground. I didn’t follow the links on BJ, but one of them purported to be about an incident in the Black Sea where a whole bunch of ships thought they were located in a local Russian airport, according to their GPS machines.
Your recounting of short-staffing on ships is as likely an explanation as any, though. I should not be surprised that the neocons would figure out a way to screw workers in the military, just like they do everywhere else. I had naively thought that since the war budget was so big, it would be paying for lots of people in uniform. No, it’s going to the people who build flying toilets like the F-35.
On a related note, do you ever read the “War is Boring” website? Lots of good (and essentially ANTI-war) articles there. One, titled “How NOT to Build an Aircraft Carrier” looks at the colossal screw-ups with the new Ford-class carriers. Basically, the launch catapult and landing arrester systems are based on unproven, electronics-based ideas. Magnetic impulses to hurl the planes off the deck, for example. The shit don’t work, and if it breaks, it’s so kludgy that one part can’t be fixed without turning the whole damn thing off. Which is not what you want if you’re in combat. It actually gives support to an offhand remark Preznit Twitwit made about how “we’re going to go back to using STEAM catapults in our carriers.” Except that would require redesigning the entire ships, which ain’t gonna happen. Plus, being a dickhead with the attention span of a flea, the Orange Idiot probably never followed through on his blurt.
I reckon that the crooked military company that got the contract to provide these unproven (and cost-overrunning) systems bribed the right people. If or when there is another war, a lot of men will die because of this bullshit. Perhaps the United States will be defeated militarily, maybe resulting in the crack-up of the country as a going concern. But why should the crooked bastards at General Atomics give a shit? They’ll have had a few years livin’ large on government contracts. What’s happening NOW is all that matters, not the fate of thousands of sailors or the future of a country. Amerika is doomed…
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My understanding is that the EMALS vs steam is a little more complex than that, Bukko. The electromagnetic system IS troublsome…but so is the older steam system. And hard to maintain. And, apparently, REALLY hard on the airframes (which ties into this whole “cost saving” thing – if you don’t want to pay for more sailors then obviously you don’t want to pay for new a/c that your old catapult system is forcing on you by wearing out the old ones…)
Apparently the USN has been trying to design a replacement for the steam system for a long time. So I get the sense that it’s not as simple as “steam is better”. It seems to be more the case of “the replacement for the steam catapult system is like a shit-ton of other major U.S. procurement; overdesigned, overcomplicated, fiddly and hard to make work consistently, and hella expensive, so a boon to the designer, supplier, and contractor”.
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Yeah, no, destroyers don’t rely on GPS to prevent collisions. They have radar and a watch to prevent collisions. They also have a radar-based anti-collision system that they may turn off in busy shipping lanes because it’d be always alarming, and rely on humans to steer them out of the way of oncoming container ships and oil tankers. No GPS involved.
Once upon a time, the Navy wouldn’t have issued a contract for something like EMALS until they’d seen an actual proof of concept launch an airplane. I mean, we’re not talking about rocket science here, we’re not talking about something that should cost a bajillion kazillion dollars to build, we’re talking about a fucking rail gun. Something we’ve known how to build for half a century. Give the contractors bidding on it a fixed budget to build the prototype, then buy the one that works the best. But the days when the Navy operated like that are long gone. For one thing, we no longer have the industrial base for that kind of thing, the number of contractors left capable of building large industrial artifacts can be listed on the fingers of one hand.
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I’ve been out of the loop for a while now so I’m not sure how true this still is, but the story during my last days in the service was that the “industrial” part of the “military-industrial-congressional-complex” had gamed the procurement system by:
1) “Streamlining” the major contractor fauna so that there is only one in every field. So instead of having Vought and Douglass and Grumman competing for fighter contracts McDonnell-Douglass is the only option. Instead of GMC and FMC and General Dynamics competing for tanks GD is the only option. So not even one hand…more like one finger.
2) But then “broadcasting” the contracting firms all over the country, so that instead of Boeing having one big plant in Seattle it has a couple of plants and a hundred sub- and sub-sub-contractors supplying bits and pieces scattered in very Congressional district it can find. So that if some ambitious SecDef tries to kill a program he finds that he’s got 100 Representatives all pounding his desk because their constituents are going to Lose Their Jobs!!!
The Army rumor mill had it that this wasn’t the work of the Invisible Hand but collusion amongst the contractors to figure out ways to wring bucks out of the taxpayers. I dunno if I’m that cynical, but I’m cynical enough that I wouldn’t be at all surprised…
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It is worse than that. At the same time Rumsfeld began “optimal manning”, he also closed the Surface Warfare Officers Basic School. So new ensigns had no training before they were to report aboard their ships.
My experience was that a SWOS Basic grad on on operational ship should expect to qualify as a SWO in 12-14 months. I gather that 18 months or more is now the norm. SWO Basic grads understood basic engineering concepts and had enough training on maintenance management and personnel paperwork to at least minimally function as division officers. Not any more.
SWOAS Basic was begun after the Navy asked junior officers what training they needed to do their jobs more effectively. It was cut when Rummy asked civilian consultants how to save money.
The sad thing is that nobody could either see this tranwreck coming or had the balls to speak out.
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Yeah, I was going to get into the weeds on some of that, but the post was already too goddamn long. That was another one of those Magic Technology Fairy Dust bullshit things. So all that specialized training was gonna get replaced by computerized training apps that are basically the military equivalent of YouTube videos? And this was all going to get done in the officer’s copious spare time? Uhm, no. That’s a half-ass way of doing things and what officer has the spare time to spend watching basically military YouTube videos of how to run a ship?!
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CNO’s going to bring in “industry experts” to fix things. Yeah, that’ll work really well.
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SNRK. It’s the “industry experts” who broke shit to begin with. This has been as much a fiasco as when McNamara decided to do away with half-size boots in the Army because they were “wasteful”.
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As a GI in the earthpig infantry (and then mortars and FA) I was lucky; once you’d washed your TA-50 and run a swab down the barrel you were pretty much done with maintenance. Ships? What a fucking nightmare. The little housekeeping chores on a seagoing vessel are endless. Chip paint. Sand. Paint. Repeat. The problem with the PCs aren’t just repairs but the simple, everyday handwork required to keep a ship from falling apart.
And now our boy Drumpf wants to put more war on the nation’s credit card, pitching another couple of brigades into the Afghan tarbaby. Raise taxes? Heaven forbid! Just borrow some more funds from the O&A and maintenance accounts at the Pentagon. Civilians will never notice…unlike if their tax bill goes up.
Christ, the stupid is so concentrated it burns…
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The electromagnetic is gong ahead, despite Donnie’s comments, because it is flexible enough to launch and recover everything from a light drone to a fully loaded strike aircraft or COD. Drones and steam weren’t playing well together.
Current GPS spoofing is locational, not directive, You can convince a system it is somewhere else, not so much directing it to maneuver.
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One problem is that the steam catapult and the rail gun are basically incompatible with each other. The steam catapult requires lots of steam (doh). The rail gun requires lots of electricity (doh). So either you have big boilers, or you have big generators. You can’t have both, there’s not sufficient space for that in the basic ship-plan. You can’t build a ship with steam catapults and then retrofit it with the electromagnetic ones. There’s just not enough electrical generator capacity to do that if you built the ship with steam generators instead.
So I think we’re going to be doing the rail gun. Now, the arresting gear, on the other hand… the old hydraulic system worked fine. It needed manually adjusting between landing types, but that could be automated without changing the design appreciably. We have options on the arresting gear. On the rail gun… not so muchh.
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[…] up about collision between a USN destroyer and an oil tanker near Singapore. One addresses the undermanning of Navy ships, a legacy of President George the Worst; the other argues persuasively against the theory that, in […]
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