Posts Tagged ‘Navy Grade 36’

First Fleet? How about funding what you have?

Posted: November 21, 2020 by ng36b in war
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You know, these big ships break more when you can’t fix them right the first time.

Navy. We’ve been cool for a number of years now. We’ve endured lots of changes, everything from new uniforms to physical readiness exams to more uniforms. I’m sure yet more uniform changes are on the horizon. But we’ve gotta talk about this thing called expanding the bureaucracy.

‘Cause I gotta tell you, its not good.

We got issues, Navy. The shipyards can’t seem to ever fix a ship in time. Yeah, like 75% of the maintenance projects are overbudget and late! If Navy shipyards were a grocery store, it would be like ordering grocery delivery for Thanksgiving, but the delivery guy rolls up in a scooter to dump off bologna sandwiches at the end of your driveway instead of a turkey and stuffing on your porch.

Its not just shipyards. We’ve got a lot of bureaucracy. At the top, we’ve got more admirals than ships. Sure, we have to put someone in charge of important things like motorcycle safety, but come on man. More admirals than ships? Even when we count submarines? That seems a bit much.

So given those two really basic problems, why on earth would we want to build yet another numbered fleet? Are we lacking in 3-star admirals (hint: we’re not!)? Does a new fleet give us more capability?

No and no. Right now, we can’t man, train and equip the Navy we have. Ships are only manned to 92%. That sounds good, right? Its not. On a 4,000 Sailor crew of a carrier, that means we’re short 320 people. That’s almost a destroyer’s worth of people, which means we’re leaving lots of positions open. And shore commands? You’re doing well if you reach 85%.

Our response to get ships to sea seems to be to constantly take some “slackers” from shore duty, because heaven forbid we give people a break. Ships are constantly using ashore manpower “volunteers” to fill gaps. That works in the short term, but long term we simply aren’t bringing in enough people.

Even when we do, we give them no incentives to stay. I’ve had three crappy bosses in my short career, two of which were fired. I had people dress me down in public because it “suited them,” even when it was over minor offenses. If you’re not in the military, that sort of behavior makes HR scream. In the Navy, its just Tuesday, and you’re expected to simply take it. So guess what happens when we ask Sailors to reenlist, most of whom have nice job prospects in the civilian world that don’t involve getting screamed at over minor things or signing Page 13s that limit your right to eat in a restaurant? They don’t sign, and we resort to canceling failing PRT scores to try and keep enough people in.

So, while I applaud SECNAV’s efforts to find new niches for the Navy, I’d rather we get what we have to being well again. Get our manning to nearly 100%. Make the shipyards not suck again. Fill the billets we have now before we consider adding more. But please, don’t start up a new fleet until that part is done.

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. Obviously.

Body cams for voting officials

Posted: November 14, 2020 by ng36b in crime
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Granted, your average voting official doesn’t look as good as this dude, but he’s also wearing a camera that is NDAA-approved, without parts made in China

Technology was supposed to make our lives easier and safer, yet as we speak, we’re watching massive voter fraud on a scale not seen since the Soviet Union. It’s impossible to “trust the process” when voting machines magically gltich change votes from one candidate to another and vote counting happens at night without oversight. When the dust settles from this election, there is going to be a lack of trust on all sides for the process.

We need a way to start re-establishing that trust, and I think a smart move would be body cameras for voting officials. When body cameras first started appearing for police officers, there were mixed reviews and a lot of apprehension, but ultimately it was a good thing. My Cub Scout Pack visited the nearby police station, where one of the officers showed us her body camera system. I asked for her opinion, and she said she preferred them, because when people treated her poorly, spit at her and clawed at her face, it was captured on camera for a judge. Without body cameras, we wouldn’t be able to expose when police behave poorly, which helps weed out or correct poor performing officers and improves police performance overall.

So, why not for voting officials? Body cameras are significantly harder to change data. Police systems have encryption and protections to tag data if someone attempts to alter it. Time stamps would make it obvious if votes were counted after hours. Analytics on the camera system can identify and flag behaviors that would be suspicious.

Do we really want this again?

Instead of having officials board up windows, count in the night and treat voting like they’re some sort of mafia organization, let’s bring some transparency to the process with proven technology. If its good enough for the police, it should be good enough for voting officials.

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.

Did “Never Trumpers” have an effect on the election?

Posted: November 7, 2020 by ng36b in blogs, elections
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As the election counting, and soon to be recounting, rages on, there are plenty of people that tell me they just “couldn’t vote for Trump,” even though in theory they are conservatives. Personally, I vote based on what a candidate says they support, or has demonstrated they support, for policies that I care about, ranging from foreign policy and gun control to right to life and taxes, and then on a scale of how much I care about each. For example, I care more about foreign policy and abortion than taxes because I’m directly affected by foreign policy and I’ve seen first hand how pervasive abortion theory is in hospitals, but I’m not making enough money to care if the tax rate jumps significantly.

I also know that while I’m a policy voter, many people have an emotional connection to voting, and they have to “like” the candidate they are voting for. We can discuss whether that makes sense in another article, but we should recognize that candidate likeability does matter to many people. It’s likely what got Bill Clinton elected. But is likeability enough that it mattered to Trump’s election?

Although the data isn’t complete yet, I pulled Reuters election data and used Wikipedia for 2016 election data to try and answer the question: Did people not vote for Trump that would have voted for another Republican Presidential candidate that was more likeable? I sampled data by looking at states that had Senate races. My theory was that if someone was a “Never Trumper,” they would likely still vote for the Senate Republican in their state. I also looked at Libertarian votes to see if they made a difference. The states I ended up picking were Arizona, Michigan, North Carolina, New Mexico, Alabama, Georgia, Minnesota and Colorado, in what I think is a pretty decent spread.

First, was their a surge in Libertarian votes? Not at all.

Just looking at raw numbers, Libertarian votes went down, in many cases drastically. 2016 was a banner year for Libertarian and Green Party vote, but this year they just did not have the turnout, despite running Jo Jorgenson, a very likeable candidate.

Second, was there a noticeable Never Trump vote? I calculated the difference between Presidential votes and Senate votes between parties and then compared them. The numbers aren’t 100% aligned. I calculated a scaling factor to multiply the Senate votes by to balance numbers. Then I took the difference from Senate Republicans vs Trump votes to see if there were “Never Trumper” votes. If there were, I then calculated if the difference mattered.

The results are interesting. In Arizona and Alabama, the number was negative, meaning Trump had more votes than the Senate Republican. In the 6 states where there was Never Trump votes, only one, Georgia, would have mattered.

While not 100% scientific, we can reach a few conclusions:

  1. The Never Trump vote is real, but not everywhere.
  2. Where there is a Never Trump vote, it mostly doesn’t always matter, even in swing states.
  3. Libertarian vote didn’t appreciably go up this year.

For Republicans, this is good and bad news. It means that the Never Trump faction isn’t nearly as big as the media might make it out to be. Better still, when people had a choice between a more likeable candidate (Jo Jorgensen), they actively chose not to vote for her, far more than the 2016 election would have indicated.

The bad news is that Biden wins in key states can’t be attributed to candidate hatred. Democrats ran a relatively weak, bland candidate, and he is either coming out on top or close to it. That means that overall people are looking favorably on Democrat candidates. Whether its the biased news media, demographics, vote rigging or policies, Republicans are not in a good spot, because short of major changes, they don’t have a chance at capturing the Presidency in the future.

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.

More of the past?

Posted: October 31, 2020 by ng36b in blogs, elections, politics, Uncomfortable Truths
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A few years ago I was a Cubmaster for my son’s Cub Scout Pack. As the Cubmaster, I controlled our schedule of events, including what big events we held once a month at our Pack Meetings. One month my Den Leaders (adult leaders for Scout groups at different ages) agreed to the theme of “Emergency Preparation.” We divided the Scouts into stations. At one station, the Scouts learned basic first aid from one of the parents that was a nurse. At another, an energetic Den Leader taught the Scouts how to build a stretcher, and the Scouts raced with their Den Leaders in their makeshift stretcher. But the best station, by far, was the fire fighting. We had a legitimate fire fighter chief as a Den Leader, and he brought out a fire fighting propane tank and fire extinguishers, and taught our Scouts how to properly put out fires.

It was awesome, and let me tell you, the Scouts putting out real propane-fueled fires was the talk of the small town for almost two weeks, beating out even the common subjects of Minecraft and Pokemon-Go. I still have the coolest night-time photos of 7 year old boys putting out propane fires with a fire extinguisher.

Not everyone was impressed. That same night the church we were borrowing had choir practice, and the older church ladies had to park twenty feet farther than their normal parking spot because of our setup. The next day, I got word that the church was not happy and was sending a nasty email to our council. Thinking quickly, I posted the most awesome pictures of those events on Facebook and tagged the church in the post. It went viral, with almost 3000 views in a town that only had 5000 people, many of them members of the same church. I reaped my success, with no email to council and a mild rebuke to me from the church, which I settled with an apology and promise to do better in the future.

Our Scouting program that year did all sorts of awesome stuff, and the Scouts couldn’t keep quiet with their friends. Yet the nasty comments from the church ladies still bothered me. Later I realized that some people just never wanted change. It didn’t matter that Scouts were learning skills, or that the church got a positive nod because of their support. Nope, the fact that someone had to park a mere twenty feet away meant the whole thing was rubbish.

We’re seeing that with government. When we decide to move EUCOM headquarters out of Germany and into Poland, instead of discussion about keeping Russia at bay, we hear about the economic impact to regions in Germany. When we continue to have shipyard issues and can’t build or fix the majority of Navy ships on time or within budget, we don’t ask “Who should be fired,” but instead just suck up the cost and move on. Government is happy to repeat the past, no matter how out of date it is, because its the easy button approach.

But as time and technology march on, government wants to do more of the same. We want to use the same crappy setup for acquiring weapons that continues to not work. While Amazon has been drone delivering for years, we’re just now figuring out that’s a good idea. And if you’ve ever logged into a Navy personnel website, it looks like a 5 year old built it.

If you haven’t already, you’re going to vote on Tuesday. You’ll pick from a variety of candidates, and not just in the Presidential election. I implore you to look at their actual voting records and accomplishments. Plenty of people from all parties are all talk and no action. They are content to ride the government wave of mediocrity, never being held to account for so much money and time spent with so little to show for it. If you want more of the same, more ineffective government that you pay so much for, then voting for these people is easy.

If you instead want effective use of your tax dollars, vote differently. Government isn’t inherently evil, but it can be inclined into a passive nature that turns a blind eye to scandal, fraud and abuse. Voting in people that challenge this nature and demand government be better is what brings real change. These people are often the quiet leaders, spending the hours reading the fine print and rewriting it to make more sense. They aren’t always eloquent, but they are effective.

If you want effective government, you vote for these people. They aren’t the ones whining about walking the extra twenty feet.

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.

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