Posts Tagged ‘navy’

Style vs Substance in the Navy

Posted: April 13, 2024 by navygrade36bureaucrat in Blame Biden Administration
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When I reported to my first submarine, the torpedo division was responsible for the maintenance of all the small arms onboard. Despite having grown up in a hunting and shooting family, they took me to the range to show me how to shoot both pistols and shotguns in their style, since they needed small arms qualified people to stand watch. A few years later on shore detail, a group of us would regularly visit the nearby rifle range on “Warrior Wednesday” to keep our shooting skills sharp.

Since then it’s become harder and harder to find ranges where you can practice shooting, and there is less “gun culture” in the military now then even 5 to 10 years ago. That’s why this headline didn’t surprise me one bit:

My torpedomen would have never let me do this, at least not without cracking a joke at my expense. There’s even a rumor that the shell casings are photoshopped in, although at a minimum the scope and handguard are mounted incorrectly, plus he’s holding the weapon really high, like uncomfortably high, in his shoulder. Plus, why is there a hand on his shoulder? I don’t normally touch people that are firing automatic weapons.

Sadly, here’s the bigger problem: he’s probably my age. The folks like me that grew up with guns, love our country and care about being technically competent at their jobs have been run out of the Navy, replaced by those that care about climbing a corporate ladder and looking good. This picture captures this beautifully. We see a Navy DDG Commanding Officer, someone who should be technically savvy and have our respect, firing a weapon in what should be an awesome picture, but the minute we look deeper we see someone who has no clue about weapons posing for a cool photo, likely to move on to something else a few seconds later. Those that can do are replaced by those that look good doing and toe the party line.

The next time the DoD cries about money, remember this and start demanding that our Admirals get replaced by real warfighters.

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.

A Navy desperate to keep…everybody!

Posted: January 6, 2024 by navygrade36bureaucrat in Afghanistan war, Blame Biden Administration, opinion/news
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Over the holiday period I didn’t bother checking the latest NAVADMINs, because spending time with my family was for more important. So when I looked this week, I saw I missed a doozy: the Navy’s message concerning retention boards.

In December the Navy announces its promotion boards, which are in January (for Captains), Feb-March (for Commanders), and April-May (for Lieutenant Commanders). Some years ago the Navy began convening the retention board immediately after these boards to decide the fates of anyone not selected for promotion. The overarching policy of retention boards is a direct measure of the health of the service, and well, the Naval Service is not healthy.

Take a look at NAVADMIN 291/23. I’ll break it down below:

Paragraph 2 states that any Captain (O-6) that has certain AQDs (basically, special training or expertise in a specific area) that relate to Acquistion can stay until 33 years of service. Normally Captains have to retire at 30 years of service. This isn’t a huge surprise, the Navy is in dire need of Acquisition Workforce personnel, so it’ll keep anyone that it can.

LCDRs (O-4s) that twice failed to select for CDR (O-5) will simply be kept until 20 years, when they can retire. They won’t even be considered for retention…it’s assumed. In the past the retention board could be used to shape manpower by removing the bottom performing LCDRs. That is not happening at all now, essentially if you have a pulse and made O-4, you can stay till 20 years.

Let’s say you’re a LCDR that is a flight instructor, chaplain, cyber warfare engineer, foreign area officer, information professional, maritime space officer, medical corps, nurse corps or supply corps. What if you want to stay past 20 years? Well, you can!

URL 1310 aviators with primary AQDs of DIP or DA5/DA7/DB2/DB5/DB6/DD1/DH3/DL3/DS2 (TACAIR), CWE, FAO, IP, and SC officers selected for continuation will be continued for a period of 3 years to 23 YOAS.  CHC, MSO, MC, and NC officers selected for continuation will be continued until the last day of the month in which the officer 
completes 24 YOAS.

That right there is a bad sign. That means we are significantly short in all those areas, and we’re willing to keep people for an additional 3-4 years to cover the gaps.

What about Lieutenants (O-3s)? Typically LTs that are passed over twice for O-4 are sent home at the end of the next fiscal year. The only LTs I’ve seen the Navy hold onto are people that were prior enlisted and needed another year to reach mandatory officer retirement criteria. But now: 

Lieutenant (LT)  Aerospace Engineering Duty Officer (AEDO), CHC, CWE, Cryptologic Warfare (CW), Dental Corps (DC), FAO, Intelligence Officer (INTEL), IP, Judge Advocate General's Corps (JAGC), MC, Medical Service Corps (MSC), MSO, NC, and SC will follow the below as applicable:
    a.  2XFOS LTs covered in paragraph 4 with less than 18 YOAS and selected 
for continuation will be continued for a period of three years, but not 
beyond retirement eligibility at 20 YOAS.

FOS stands for “Failure of Selection.”

So now LTs can stay for 20 years until they can retire. I never thought I’d see that, but here we are. Granted, it’s not every officer, but it won’t surprise me if the retention board eligibility expands to include more officer specialties.

I want to remind everyone that this crisis was generated 100% by our own government:

  • We changed the retirement system way back in 2016-2018, which was the number one thing that kept good people in past 5-10 years of service. I predicted this would end badly, by the way.
  • Then we started losing wars, specifically Afghanistan. We drew out of Afghanistan in a horrible way, so everyone that lost limbs or part of their sanity fighting in that war felt betrayed. This in turn made them tell their kids to never join the military.
  • Oh, and we stayed around in Syria so more of our people could die needlessly. Because nothing says we love our Special Forces more than allowing them to die needlessly in a crappy country where we don’t have an exit strategy.
  • THEN, we kicked people out over the COVID vaccine. Instead of handling that crisis with care, we booted people with general discharges. But don’t worry, we’ll invite them back, I’m sure they’ll come in droves!
  • THEN, the Navy played politics and openly told Congress to go f*#! themselves and used OPTAR money to pay for abortion.

NOW, we are SHOCKED! SHOCKED! that we are in a huge recruiting. crisis. I made a prediction back in February that the Navy would use its “BINGO card” to keep people in:

  1. Not kicking people out for physical fitness test failures
  2. Waiving darn near everything, from age to non-violent felonies
  3. Asking people to pretty-please stay around a few more years
  4. Opening OCS and other admissions
  5. Raising bonuses
  6. Make life better for officers
  7. Reduce opportunities to leave early
  8. Op-Hold people

The Navy has in fact done all the things in bold. The only missing one is making life better. Maybe that’s a draw, since if you wanted free time and per diem off to go murder your unborn baby, you can now get it. The only prediction that hasn’t held was that the Navy would remove marijuana from its drug test, although it was totally an option in Congress.

My prediction for 2024: it only gets worse!

  • We’ll relax rules on marijuana, opioids and other drugs
  • Mental health rules will relax
  • Bonuses will be handed out just to get on the bus
  • We’ll create some new ribbon candy to congratulate people on passing boot camp
  • We’ll see Navy advertisements EVERYWHERE, especially on Reddit, YouTube, Amazon Prime and other streaming platforms

None of it will work. When we spend more time focused on renaming the John C Stennis aircraft carrier, continue to allow flag officers to violate rules and get away with it (remember, you can sexually assault people and not go to jail, so long as you’re a 3-star in the Air Force), and continue to allow a broke acquisition system to churn out expensive weapons, we can’t recruit the best people. The best men and women want to join the Navy to fight for their country, with people and leaders they trust and on equipment that works. They want people held accountable for their actions, and they want others to hold them accountable because that’s how they become better.

We’re doing all the wrong things, and I expect 2024 to be another terrible year for military manning.

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 Navy finally embraced warfighting

Posted: December 9, 2023 by navygrade36bureaucrat in war
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Well, at least a little anyway.

For the longest time multiple people have raised the alarm about the Chinese Navy developing more ships, more capabilities and especially more missiles. The worry has been the US Navy would get “out-sticked,” as in the range of Chinese missiles would be so great they could hit US ships before those ships could even fire back.

This was true over the past decades because the Navy primarily used the Harpoon anti-ship missile, which has an effective range of 75 miles, and has been in service since 1977. Meanwhile, the Chinese Navy rolled out a nearly matching missile, the C-705, in 2006, and kept rolling out missiles, from the YJ-12 and YJ-18 to now the YJ-21, which claims to be a hypersonic, sea-borne anti-ship missile. During this time, the US sat on its hands and did almost nothing to increase the range of our missiles.

This was made worse by the fact we already HAD a long range missile. The Tomahawk, normally considered a land-strike missile, had a maritime strike version known as the TASM as early as 1990, yet they were all scrapped after the first Gulf War. The TASM had an effective range of around 900 miles, making it far superior to the Harpoon in all things but speed.

Range makes a big difference…if I can shoot first and force an enemy to maneuver to avoid getting hit, I get to call the shots and drive any engagement. While Chinese missiles aren’t known for their quality (just ask the Indonesians, who watched two failed C705 launches from his vessels in 2016), having multiple missiles hurtling towards, even if they aren’t the greatest quality, still puts you in a reactive mode.

Thankfully, this story has a better ending than most. In 2020 the Navy asked Raytheon to re-develop the maritime strike tomahawk. Not surprisingly, since this had been done once before, it rolled out quickly in 2021, and made front page news today.

This proves a much bigger point though: decline is a choice. We never had to give up long range missiles. Even if we would have kept them in low production, we could have easily updated the design over the 90s and 2000s to keep a competitive edge over any adversary. Instead, we pissed away our advantage for years and are now playing catch up. We chose to decline, but thankfully we’re slowly choosing to do otherwise.

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 Navy…always ready with misinformation!

Posted: September 30, 2023 by navygrade36bureaucrat in Uncomfortable Truths, war
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There was a time I truly believed that the Admirals in the Navy cared about Sailors and were smart enough to run the Navy efficiently and effectively. Early in my career I worked in an Admiral’s office, for a person who I grew to admire and felt could effectively fight our adversaries and win.

Nowadays, I can’t find a single Admiral that I would want to follow into battle. None. I’ve seen firsthand how our current Admirals obsess over minute details on PowerPoints that don’t matter, refuse to hold civilian employees accountable, and grossly abuse the military justice system. These so-called leaders got away with this gross mismanagement by running the infrastructure built up by previous generations into the ground. Well, that infrastructure is finally crumbling, with Navy buildings and ships rusting and rotting away, and the young people that once manned those buildings and ships leaving in droves. The Navy will miss its recruiting goals by 7,000, and you would think that would cause Navy leadership to think about all the surveys in the past that pointed to straightforward ways to improve the Navy.

Let’s be honest, you, dear reader, already know what’s coming next:

According to Franchetti, it will take “years” for the Navy to recover from these promotion delays, which have resulted in acting commanders leading Naval Surface Forces, Naval Air Forces, the U.S. Naval Academy, among other commands.

“As we look right now, our Navy is facing challenges all around the globe, threats from our adversaries,” she said. “We want to have the right people with the right level of experience in those positions. And as we continue to not have the confirmed people that we’ve nominated with that experience, we’re going to continue to see an erosion of readiness.”

It’s going to take “years” to recover from promotion delays? You mean delaying promotions of all the people that screwed up the Navy so far? That caused us to decommission ships from 2016? That broke our shipyards and crews? That continue to IA Sailors even today, so that they don’t get a shore duty break from arduous sea duty?

Never mind that the SOLE REASON for the hold on nominations was the DoD pushing commands to spend travel money (your taxpayer dollars) on abortion. ADM Franchetti fails to address that issue, and instead makes blatantly false statements about the effects of delaying promotions.

Which, BTW, aren’t delayed. The Senate could proceed and vote on each one individually, but that would open these people up to questioning about their past records…something most of them don’t want to do. Pesky Senators might ask “Hey Admiral, why did you run our shipyard into the ground?” or “Why did you make openly racist statements in the name of DEI policy?” These questions are pertinent, relevant, and totally undesired by today’s Admirals.

If you can, please write to your elected federal officials and tell them you aren’t happy with how the existing Defense Department Generals and Admirals ran our military, and ask them to do a bit of house cleaning. The media spins these stories totally one-sided. Much of the mediocrity in today’s military leadership cuts across party lines, so its an issue that both Republican and Democrat Senators and Representatives need to solve. Unless you write, and write a lot, its going to be swept under the rug.

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. According to those agencies, everything is fine, and the Defense Department is doing a great job! Nothing to see here, move along now peasant!

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