I started out by saying expected to resign yes I said that. But I did move onto. It is an either or situation. Either do this or that will happen. That is not two separate thoughts or rambling. And yes I did give an example of a bad posting. I am sorry but I could not remember the exact example that was given to us in our Naval science classes. But it was in a cold one or two man station. Sorry that confused you.
Yes he was going to retire and now he is retiring early that is why I stated this is an bad example to prove me right or wrong. Or to prove your point. The Admiral is not facing a court martial. The Navy is allowing him to retire early.
The Navy can refuse to accept an resignation for reason.
Do you really think that an officer who has been relieved of command still has a career in the services. That they will continue to be promoted?
Yeah, 10 Sailors dead and another 10 or so will leave promising careers and have to live with the knowledge for the rest of their lives that their actions killed their shipmates.
““We ask the sailors to do an awful lot … and perhaps we’ve asked them to do too much,” Vice Chief of Naval Operations Adm. William Moran told the House armed services committee at a hearing last week on the collisions.”
These destroyers have 10 times or more the number of sailors of a commercial ship yet it’s still not enough to properly steer the destroyer?
If you design a process that has too many cooks spoiling the broth, especially in real time, and as a separate matter make people work 20 hour days for months on end, don’t be too surprised if a woolly team of exhausted guys drop the ball.
This is conjecture on my part; we’ll see what the Navy eventually deigns to tell us is the problem.
I toured an Arleigh Burke-class destroyer at Long Beach during Fleet Week. I asked if training had been stepped up after the accidents. “We can’t talk about that.”
If you knew anything about the navy, you would know that they don’t have nearly enough personnel on board their ships.
I base this on a documentary I saw, called “Battleship.” Poor Rihanna had to do navigation, weapons control, small boat exercises, and who knows what else, all in the same day. And they were so short of officers that Taylor Kitsch, who wasn’t even in the Navy six months earlier, had to assume command.
It is a matter of experience, and training.
On a merchant ship the senior watch office is going to be a 3rd mate. At the very least he has had either 3 years experience as an unlicensed deck crew member. Then he had to take and pass the thirds test. Or he attended a maritime academy for 3 or 4 years. This would be for a green 3rd. If the 2nd, 1st, or master was on the bridge then the experience is in the years of sea duty.
I graduated from a maritime academy as a 3rd Assistant Engineer. Not a mate. I also received a US Navel Commission as a line officer. Two or Three classes in navigation. During my 1st reserve duty I ended as the Junior Officer of The Deck on several watches. A junior officer may only serve 3 to 6 years and not all of that will be sea duty.
I was enlisted, so we had an enlistment, whereas officers had a contract. Same thing though, in that you had to sign for x amount of years. It’s not like you can stay in indefinitely for either so, even if they ask you to resign and don’t, eventually you’ll run out of time.
For enlisted, starting in the early 2000’s, they implemented some new requirements to re-up as it used to be you could retire as an E5 after 20 years but they changed it. To go past 8 years you had to be an E5 and to go past 12 years you had to be an E6. I’m sure it’s the same thing for officers where if one is not prior-enlisted, you have to hit a certain rank before being allowed to continue. I’ve never heard of an O4 retiring either, so, I assume they move them out. I wouldn’t be surprised if it’s something like O3 by 8 years, O4 by twelve, O6 by 20.
Another thing they changed in the early 2000s was training. I was lucky to have been the last or one of the last waves of Sailors to get classroom based training. After that they moved it all to self-paced PPTs/training apps with 20 times to take the test at the end. I remember going around the room in my shop and completing the requisite training which would have taken 4 hours each, for 8 people, in 45 minutes. Why? I could take the test repeatedly and it was the same questions over and over, from the years prior. In the classroom training that was not the case, you could take the test three times, if you failed the third you were help back to retake the last module. You could take the module three times, if you did not pass you were dropped from your training and you were then to seek out a new rate.
So, in place of that classroom training and lab practicals was that PPT stuff and then they were sent to the ship and were to on the job train (OJT) them. So, in addition to having a 24 hour duty day every 6 days, getting to the ship by 7 and maybe leaving by 3, handling everything we had to do, we were to somehow train the new guys who had not had a chance to get over their own learning curves. Dude, it was rough. There just wasn’t time. And some of the equipment has a learning curve to itself as you simply have to experience the failures and faults to know.
What we have here is over a decade of walking the line on self-paced training and reduced manning which has now led to loss of life. And the people who made this decision were officers and more than likely will retire with ~$8k-10k/month retirement pay.
Wow. That’s a first, I think. An airman* who doesn’t know what a PPT is. I always thought the Air Force had the DoD monopoly on Powerpoint Ranger AFSC/MOS, but it’s refreshing to see someone who was sufficiently out there on the pointy end of the spear to not have to deal too much with desk driving and command briefs and such.
Retired USAF computer programmer/systems manager speaking. I wound up with more experience in Powerpoint than any programming language or design toolset. :mad:
*clarification: “airman” in this context is comparable to “soldier” or “sailor”, denoting service served in rather than rank. In spite of the fact that the Air Force has four enlisted ranks which are called “Airman” of some type.
PowerPoint hadn’t been invented when I left USAF. We still lived on 35mm slides for official training materials and viewgraphs for *ad hoc *presentations.
I was thinking maybe the poster had mis-typed “PTT” which stands for part-task trainer and would be unfamiliar to most readers. A PTT is a device that replicates some subset of a complicated machine’s function. Although nowadays most PTTs are interactive software apps on PCs.
At least at my employer, as mandated by FAA, most group training is done off Powerpoints augmented with vids and personal instruction by the instructor. Any self-paced training cannot be a PPT.
Instead it has to be some kind of special software-driven show that ensures you can’t jump around, skip ahead, etc. You have to sit through the entire mandated 30 minutes or whatever of computerized voice-over, regardless of how little content is packed into those 30 minutes. Clicking “next” every 2 minutes to hold your attention. Yeah right. Then answer the few multiple choice gimmes scattered between the voiceover vignettes.
If I was tasked to design a system to do anti-training and anti-motivation it’d look a lot like this. One weeps for the future.
It’s pretty sad to discover how badly the training standards have slipped.
There was a time when the US Navy was the most highly trained and professional in the world.
Now our ships can’t even avoid collisions with commercial tankers. That’s embarrassing.
My dad was so proud of his Navy service. He started in the reserves in 1947. He finally got into the Navy a couple years later and trained as a radioman. He switched to the Air Force after I was born, a decade later. He wanted to be home with his family.
But it was the Navy service he talked about the most.
Yes, PPT = PowerPoint. And, we had the two types of training. One where you download the materials (which was largely PPTs and PDFs) and took a multiple choice test. The other one that was an app in the browser, probably Flash based as I don’t quite remember. That one you couldn’t beast through and had to wait for the timer in order to get to the next slide.
But yes, they canned the classroom and instructor training to save costs.
I know my post was a long time ago in a long thread but these collisions have been happening all along. See the link from my post early in the thread. The press is just covering it more closely right now and then it will fade away again from public awareness.
Surface ships have a lot less manpower than they had a decade ago. At one point, manpower in the military was considered virtually free. Now manpower and associated manpower costs are a huge cost driver, and there’s a concerted effort to reduce manpower costs. Surface ships have taken a hit in manpower and it’s showing.
Yes destroyers have many times the number of people than commercial ships. And they have much, much more to do. More equipment, more redundancy to take care of, not to mention the entire war fighting suite. Manning is apples and oranges between warships and merchant ships.
Also, I didn’t address it at the time, but PastTense’s logic is backwards. If you have “10 times or more the number of sailors”, training isn’t easier. It’s harder, because you need “10 times or more” the training resources, “10 times or more” training paperwork, “10 times or more” ongoing certification and qualification work, etc. So the argument fails on its own internal inconsistency, let alone the merits of comparing merchant marine and warfleet operations.
DoD has come to the realization that they’re actually a pension plan with a few guns left laying around. And that’s before hardly any of the Gulf War etc crowd is old enough to retire & start drawing their lifetime benefits.
Figuring out how to get all the jobs done with a bunch less people is real, *real *important to DoD.