Here is one view from a retired soldier who spent and still spends a lot of time in South Korea. There are a few issues regarding the commanding officer’s conduct, as related in this blog post. One choice is to have the port-of-call in Vietnam in March. Another is to send OPSEC information in a non-secure E-mail which itself had 20 or more CC addressees.
Stranger: Unless the interior design of the carrier is radically different from the Vinson, the enlisted crew eat in two messes, one forward and the other aft.
Could the massive flight deck and the hangar deck(s) be more effectively used for social distancing/isolation of those suspected of being infectious, while the carrier was moored?
It you put it that way, concerning the ship in New York, yes.
However, I doubt there is a big negative air pressure section for highly contagious patients. More likely the ship was built with the idea that, when full, almost all would be trauma patients.
I also suspect that the time from the ambulance arriving at the pier until the patient is being cared for means that you wouldn’t want to go there with a medical emergency like a heart attack or stroke, even if you lived right near the pier (and how many New Yorkers do?).
It may make more sense to donate the ship’s protective supplies to New York City land hospitals, and offer the naval staff to pitch in there. Legal? Don’t know, but this is an emergency.
He (the blogger) strikes me as an armchair admiral with no relevant experience calling the shots based on information filtered through the media as if he has a clue. He doesn’t. For one, the CO of a ship for such a high visibility, diplomatically significant port visit is unlikely to have any say over whether or not the port visit happens, or even whether or not people are allowed ashore. Try saying “we’ll pull in, but we won’t allow liberty” and you get a line from above about how important it is to be engaged with the population and be “good ambassadors” to the host nation. The plan for the port visit will have to be submitted to higher echelons well prior for them to approve, and the Captain’s hands will be tied.
The OPSEC line, which the Acting SECNAV himself has used as justification, is likewise a red-herring. It was no secret the ship was in Guam and had Coronavirus on board (there were official Navy press releases to that effect). One doesn’t need to be an intelligence genius to infer that its combat capabilities would be somewhat degraded for some weeks as a result.
And oh by the way, let’s be clear: no one yet knows who leaked the letter from the CO. The Acting Secretary has opined, by way of justification for the firing even absent evidence, that it was “bad enough” that the CO cc’d so many people when he sent it up the chain of command. Another line that he expects us to take at face value, and yet on further consideration just strikes me as a great big “so what?” When communicating with multiple levels of the chain of command, with large staffs and a great many stakeholders at each level, one tends to CC anybody and everybody. That’s normal. Any attempt to justify this relief gives too much credibility to the words of a political appointee who, quite frankly, hasn’t earned it yet. Not with his actions, not even with his words to date.
So far as I can tell, the CO’s gravest sin was making the Navy look bad in an effort to save lives, whether or not he meant to (again, we don’t know who leaked the letter) or had any other choice but to risk further infection and potentially more deaths down the line. Even a dozen deaths among the whole crew (a mere fraction of a percent) would be staggering for a single event in peacetime. By contrast, the Navy’s major scandal of 2017 was the dual collisions of two smaller ships which saw 17 sailors killed between them. Fleet commanders were fired over that.
I was never an Admiral myself, or even a ship’s CO, but I was in the Navy for fourteen years recently and spent four years on aircraft carriers. Doesn’t make what I’m saying right, doesn’t even make what I’m saying fully representative of similarly suited individuals (others with relevant experience), but I dare say it’s not so clean-cut as that blogger, or for that matter the SECNAV, are trying to make it.
The Flight Deck would be of little value without tents or at least canopies. The hangar bay would be awkward and it wouldn’t really alleviate the issue all that much. The enlisted berthings literally stack the sailors 3 high and cram the racks very tight. I figure the TR has 4000 enlisted or so. So the Hanger Bay would barely help.
Berthing This style is what I had on the Ranger (CV-61). We had over 100 sailors.
A Small berthing, only 36 men. Looks even more cramped, but would be quieter at least.
Housing people on the flight deck would also prevent using it as, well, a flight deck. The only way to get a significant quantity of people on or off an aircraft carrier quickly at sea is via flight. I suppose you could transfer people by a tender but then the tender has to dock or transfer people to a third ship.
The hangar bay is full of aircraft and next to the flight deck is probably the most hazardous place on the ship in operation. Basically, there is no way to affect any kind of physical distancing or quarantine with the full crew onboard and the ship conducting normal operations.
Stranger
No, never by air, always by docking or by other boats. Emptying an Aircraft Carrier by air would take forever. I flew off the carrier once and landed on it another time. Copter to fly off and the prop Mail Plane to come aboard. Neither methods moves that many people and obviously the fighter jets are of no value for evacs.
Having never been on an aircraft carrier at sea I’ll take your word for it, but my understanding is that they just don’t do large crew transfers or replacements except at port. Almost of replenishment at sea seems to be done via spanline transfer, and while you can transfer people that way I’d personally rather freeclimb El Capitan.
Stranger
You mean you haven’t?!!
It’s on the list but Alex Honnold beat me to it.
Stranger
Captain Crozier has tested positive.
This is all so fucked up. And Esper says of his firing, “This is how we hold leaders accountable.”
Well, what about accountability at the top? DoD is failing to do very much to protect the American people, we knew that. Now they are failing to protect US service members. How do we hold those leaders accountable?
I believe it was at Hong Kong, we had hundreds of sailors leave at a time via large ferries. Lets say up to 3 per hour, you could empty 75% of the carrier in a surprisingly reasonable amount of time. We had a floating dock tied to the stern and metal stairs to go from the fantail to the dock (platform).
That statistic is meaningless without context.
According to this site: Population Distribution by Age, 71% of Americans are under 55. Doing some quick math:
.4/.71 = .56
.6/.29 = 2.07
2.07/.56 = 3.7
So, Americans 55 and over are 3.7 times as likely to need hospitalization than those under 55.
Your cite also says that 12% of Americans in the ICU are under 45. Getting an estimate of 58% of the population being under 45, we can do some more math:
.12/.58 = .21
.88/.42 = 2.1
2.1/.21 = 10
So Americans 45 and over are 10 times as likely to need the ICU.
Additionally, we know that Covid19 has a greater impact on those with prior health conditions, and in this context, we are talking about Navy personnel aboard a ship. How does the health of a sailor compare to the health of an average American of the same age? I would say that sailors, in general, would be healthier, but that’s based on common sense rather than any hard numbers.
Thanks, What Exit.
But the carrier is already moored, I thought. We saw the captain walking off her.
Here is a picture of sailors cheering on Captain Crozier on his send-off. This is a video. (be warned, it’s a little loud)
Can anyone tell me what’s wrong with this picture?
This post from reddit needs to go here:
https://www.reddit.com/r/politics/comments/fvg6l4/navy_captain_removed_from_carrier_tests_positive/
Fill us in, Monocracy.
That is actually much nicer than I imagined. In the one warship I’ve been in, the bunks were like the photo on this page (which somehow manages to make it look less bleak than it actually was.)
I’d guess he’s talking about the people being jammed together.