Archive for July 29, 2023

Navy looks to drain reserves to fill gaps

Posted: July 29, 2023 by navygrade36bureaucrat in war
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Your lawn requires maintenance. If you don’t put time and effort into filling your lawn with nice grass, it will eventually fill up with undesirable weeds. Nature abhors a vacuum, so its going to fill the lawn if you don’t. Similarly, the Navy is going to fill its manpower requirements one way or another. Between draining its DEP rolls, slow-rolling retirements, suspending body fat and physical fitness failures, and even suspending high year tenure, you’d think for just a minute that it all might work, that this nibbling around the edges of the problem (instead of addressing it directly) would bring in enough recruits.

Nope.

The Navy, still circling the drain, has now decided to start draining the reserves. Reservists are folks who typically served an initial enlistment and then decided to leave the military but retain a connection to the service. They muster one weekend a month and typically serve a two-week period during the year on active duty. In return they remain eligible for health care and get a cut-down retirement. It’s not a bad gig, but in the past most reservists were barely meeting standards and were thought of as a “break glass in case of emergency” manpower solution. The terrorist attacks on 9-11 changed that and resulted in a bit of a change so that reservists were more available for extended deployments.

Not surprisingly, the Navy is making it easier to tap into reserves and making it harder for people to fail out of the reserves. Let’s look at the following NAVADMINs:

NAVADMIN 158/23: POLICY FOR ACTIVATION AND EMPLOYMENT OF RESERVE COMPONENT FORCES IN FY24 AND BEYOND

NAVADMIN 160/23: SELECTED RESERVE ADVANCEMENT TO WARFIGHTING POSITIONS PROGRAM PHASE I

NAVADMIN 167/23: SEPTEMBER 2023 (CYCLE 260) ACTIVE-DUTY AND TRAINING AND ADMINISTRATION OF THE RESERVE (TAR) E-4 THROUGH E-6 ADVANCEMENT AND MODIFICATION TO SELECTED RESERVE E-4 ADVANCEMENT ANNOUNCEMENT (CYCLE 113)

NAVADMIN 158 references the a memo that basically says Navy Individual Augmentees (IAs) are eating the force alive, and lays out a plan to have Navy Reservists fill more of these billets, even if they are involuntarily activated…meaning they get told “Drop your civilian job and take this crappy military job.”

I am NOT a fan of IAs. These were initially brought out during the invasion of Afghanistan because the Army was short people, and the Navy said “We can send some people to Afghanistan to fill slots!” Seems like a good idea, until 20 years later we were STILL filling IAs. Meanwhile, Navy manpower went missing at key places like shipyards, support facilities and the like, so our Navy platforms suffered, our shore facilities rotted, and Sailor morale went into the toilet. Somehow in 20 years the Army couldn’t staff its own war? Color me skeptical…

So even after we lost Afghanistan, we’re STILL using IAs…and why this is true still boggles my mind. Naturally, it kills morale to go to one job then get yanked to go to another, especially one shore duty when you were promised some time with your family. So instead of killing active duty Sailors morale, we’ll kill Reservist Sailor morale.

NAVADMIN 160 tells us that if you’re an E-4 or E-5, you can take a Selected Reserve (SELRES) job one paygrade above, and after completion you get a permanent paygrade bump. Not bad, you might think. But lets be honest…why would a Sailor not make the next rank? Perhaps he just had bad timing. But more often, he or she was probably not all that great of a Sailor. So now, performance be damned, you get promoted if you take the right job.

NAVADMIN 167 basically makes it even easier to promote. If you’re an E-3 wanting to make E-4, all requirements have been removed, so long as your Commanding Officer says OK, you’ll make rank. High year tenure (where you get booted from the military if you haven’t made a certain rank by a certain number of years in the military) is suspended through 2024…and my guess is they’ll suspend it again. This NAVADMIN is basically making it easier than ever to stay in the Navy no matter how dumb or bad at your job you are.

The sad part is…this won’t work. The Navy continues to not address the morale issues brought on by a restrictive COVID-19 “vaccine” requirement, white supremacist training and the inability to do basic things like fix ships, have decent berthing and fight naval wars. Even Navy veterans like myself are telling our kids not to join. Until the Navy addresses the fundamental issues at hand, these short-sighted efforts will fail.

This post represents the views of the author and not those of the Department of Defense, Department of the Navy, or any other government agency.

The #Unexpectedly Chronicles: You Never Hear This Discussed When Sportwriters Decry the Oakland A’s Pending Move

Posted: July 29, 2023 by datechguy in baseball, crime, Sports
Tags: , , , , , ,

The subject of the Oakland A’s pending move to Las Vegas has been the subject of an awful lot of chest thumping by sportwriters all over the place who loudly denounce the very thought of the 29-76 A’s abandoning the City of Oakland, as they abandoned the city of Kansas City in 1968 and the City of Philadelphia in 1955.

The is all kind of talk about “loyalty” and the legacy of the great A’s teams of the 70’s and the Bash Brothers of the 80’s but there is a subject concerning the preference of Las Vegas over Oakland that has not come up in the context of the move by any sportswriter I’ve read nor any sportscaster I’ve seen or heard.

However it’s a subject that any resident of Oakland knows is one of the top concerns of the city, in fact it’s such a concern that the NAACP of Oakland has decided to state it publicly:

Some key quotes:

Oddly enough what the local chapter of the NAACP decry and the residents of the city know the national media which decries the inability of the A’s to draw fans doesn’t have a word to say, blaming the owner instead.

The subject of crime in the city, crime so bad that it’s expedient to pull a major league team, albeit one of the worst teams you will ever see, and move to a city so renowned for it’s criminal past that it hosts the mob museum is an odd omission, until you remember that there is a national election coming up and the issue of crime, particularly in cities run by the left (The last Republican mayor of Oakland was elected in 1961) and when it comes to media, no media is more consistently left than sports media, particularly on the national level.

So while the discussion of the move of the A’s continues over the next couple of years, you can bet your bottom dollar that the subject of crime in the city will continue to be ignored by those in media, at least until after the election.

Unexpectedly of course.