Posts Tagged ‘navy’

I’m tired of polishing turds in the Navy

Posted: September 23, 2023 by navygrade36bureaucrat in Uncomfortable Truths, war
Tags: , , , ,

When I first joined the Navy, I served onboard the USS HAMPTON, a nuclear fast-attack submarine. You would think that would be super cool. My non-Navy friends were certainly impressed. But the sad reality was that being on a submarine sucked.

I started in the shipyard, which was an absolute hell-hole of a place to work. Our submarine was torn apart, and we had to always be ready for the shipyard workers to stop by to begin working. Instead of scheduling a time, they would often come down early, and if we weren’t ready, would then tell their boss it was our fault they couldn’t work. They did this to score overtime work on the weekends or after hours, while making us stay late. My days started at around 5:30 am and didn’t end until 6 pm. That didn’t include the drive time either.

At least I wasn’t a woman…some of my fellow female officers would get constantly cat-called and risked sexual assault walking into some shipyard environments. We’re talking legitimate, in-your-face sexism, not the made-up stuff of college students at Harvard. On top of that, if you didn’t leave before the sun went down, you risked your car’s windshield getting smashed in. Good-ole’ Portsmouth, Virginia! Thieves would smash in your windshield just for fun and not even steal anything, and the shipyard and Portsmouth police did nothing.

If you wonder why I wasn’t surprised that Sailors committed suicide in Newport News shipyard…well, now you know.

That whole time, I was told to suck it up and make the best of it. The situation is a big, fat turd, and my job was to polish it and make it shine. The smart people above me, the Captains and Admirals of the world, assured me they were doing their best to make it better. I couldn’t possibly question them!

Image generated by Bing AI

So polish I did! And I made it work.

During my flying tour, I spent 10-11 hours in a plane that had no working toilet. They had a toilet, but the Navy wouldn’t send the equipment to pump it out, so we pooped in a bag and pissed in a tall cylinder that we hand-carried out and dumped in the grass. Even the ladies peed in the tall cylinder (and I have no idea how they did it). The Navy HAD pumping equipment, but the powers that be said we didn’t need it, so we never got any. Now, next to us was an Air Force plane that had pumping equipment and didn’t hand carry out their piss in a giant cylinder after every flight. We were flying out of Greece, so it’s not like the plane landed in a hard-to-resupply area.

Polish that turd, I was told, by the supposedly smarter Captains and Admirals. So polish I did!

At a large staff, I put up with a tyrant Captain who seemed to simply enjoy screaming at us over nothing. He played favorites with the staff and pitted people against each other until he was finally fired. You would think that would make it better, but it didn’t, because then I had to help restructure and fix everything he broke.

Polish that turd, I was told, and I did, a bit begrudgingly this time.

Later in my career, I ran a small detachment of Sailors and worked to fix their aging building. The basement ceiling would literally shake when we operated machinery, and the base’s engineering team simply added some scaffolding to hold up the ceiling.

Yup, scaffolding. “It’s a bad situation, that’s the best we can do. You’ll just have to polish that turd.”

Well, I challenged that notion. I worked an engineering study and eventually secured the $6.6 million to fix the building, despite the obstinate objections of the base engineering team. That’s when I realized I’d been polishing turds for no reason. The Navy HAD most of the resources to fix these issues, but they spent them on fancy Admiral events, attended by the smartest Captains, who smoozed up to Senators and Representatives to get their pet projects funded. Whether it was the Littoral Combat Ship, the F-35, or a host of poorly designed boxes whose primary job was to send money into the pockets of Lockheed Martin while claiming Sailors were too stupid to operate them, it was all the same: wasted money that would be better spent elsewhere. This is the same Navy that was happy to use command travel money to pay for travel expenses for Sailors to get an abortion, but couldn’t find the money to fix barracks room issues at the shipyard.

So now I’m at my last command. My hope was to do something useful on my way out the door. Instead I found myself being stuck with all the crappy jobs nobody wants to do, then getting told I’m an idiot by a Captain that definitely acts like he’s smarter than everyone in the room. “You’ll need to polish that turd” he told me the other day.

I didn’t join the Navy to polish turds. I’ve been constantly told to make other, stupid ideas work while the “smart” people get fancy offices and plenty of resources. I’m not alone in this either. All of the officers I looked up to, the one’s I would willingly go into battle with, are all leaving in droves. They tell me they are tired of putting up with mediocre leadership that won’t put in the time to build real solutions, but instead look for “quick wins” (oh how I hate that term!).

Nobody joins the Navy to polish turds. We should stop asking our Sailors to polish poop and actually put resources where they belong.

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.

But nobody was fired…

Posted: August 26, 2023 by navygrade36bureaucrat in Uncomfortable Truths, war
Tags: , , , ,

If you’re not already familiar with it, the US Navy’s Littoral Combat Ship is…a floating pile of garbage.

Not literally…or maybe, littorally? The Littoral Combat Ship was seen as a new, sleek, fast ship to replace the old minesweepers and patrol crafts. It could drive super fast and would be able to change out mission modules, meaning one day it could be oriented towards minesweeping, and the next day it could hunt down submarines. Even better, it would have a small crew, so the Navy would save on manpower.

If that all sounds too good to be true…it was. Many people pointed this out at the time, but were called naysayers for doing so. Yet here we are today watching the Navy retire a Littoral Combat Ship after only five years of service (compared to the 20+ years we get from Destroyers, Cruisers, and basically any other ship).

USS SIOUX CITY, decommissioned after only 5 years.

Crying about this fact gets us nowhere. What I want to do is point out the hypocrisy in the Navy in how it treats it’s flag officers. With the LCS as a raging dumpster fire, at least one of the manufacturers, Austal USA, had the good sense to make its CEO resign. Would the Navy do this? Let’s look at some of the LCS programs past leadership:

  • Rear Admiral John Neagley took over the program around 2016. He apparently wrote many of the requirements for LCS back in the day, so you’d think he could turn it around. Nope! He wasn’t fired either, instead, he retired and now works at ICI Services.
  • In 2012, Rear Admiral John Murdoch said “I am not concerned at all about any of the deficiencies…in terms of my ability to correct them before the ship leaves the Great Lakes,” concerning serious problems onboard USS FORT WORTH while it was in Lake Michigan. The FORT WORTH commissioned in 2012 and was retired in 2022 after only 10 years in service. John Murdoch retired without issue and now works at Lockheed Martin.
  • Rear Admiral Robert Nowakowski took over in 2020, and after two years…the Navy cancelled the anti-submarine mission package on LCS due to overspending. Rear Admiral Nowakowski is still in the Navy and hasn’t had anything negative happen to his career.

So the Navy has a massively failing program that wastes millions of taxpayer dollars on ships that cannot fight or even stay afloat after only a few years. Its leadership gets punished…nope. It’s leaders, because they wear stars on their shoulders, get to retire to fat pensions with no repercussions whatsoever.

None. Zip. Zilch.

Meanwhile, Sailors work themselves to death trying to maintain vessels they can’t get training on and aren’t properly sourced.

These Admirals should be ashamed of themselves and the pain they caused these Sailors, their families and the impact to our Naval Power.

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, because those agencies want you to keep thinking that everything is fine and you should just keep handing over your tax dollars like the good little sheep you are without asking hard questions.

Navy looks to drain reserves to fill gaps

Posted: July 29, 2023 by navygrade36bureaucrat in war
Tags: , , , , ,

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.

Health of the Force Survey 2023…sucks

Posted: July 8, 2023 by navygrade36bureaucrat in Uncomfortable Truths, war
Tags: , , ,

A few years ago, a young lady knocked on my door in Hawaii. She happened to be a volunteer from the Census Bureau, and I spent about 30 minutes answering Census Bureau questions. Unlike most of the other door to door surveys that I promptly ignore, I actually wanted my voice heard by the Census Bureau. About halfway through the survey, I was asked by the surveyor “Do you approve of smoking in the home?”

Me: “Uhm, in my home or other people’s homes?”
Surveyor: “The question doesn’t specify.”
Me: “Well, that’s kind of important. I don’t smoke, and I don’t let people smoke in my home, but I really don’t care if they smoke in their homes.”
Surveyor: “The question only has a Yes or No answers.”
Me: “Then my answer is Yes, I’m OK with smoking in the home.”

Not surprisingly, the overall results showed something like 85% of people disapproved of smoking in the home, which was then used as proof that we should conduct more smoking cessation programs.

I’m willing to bet that more than a few people felt the same way I did but chose “No.” When you design a survey question without allowing for nuance or more than a binary answer, you skew the results. That’s not good from a simple truth perspective, but its really not good if you intend to base financial and policy decisions on the results. With that in mind, flash forward a few years and I receive an email asking me to take the Health of the Force survey for the Navy. I wrote about this survey before and how it showed that the Navy is VERY unhealthy in so many ways, so I was hopeful the survey would dig further to identify the areas where the Navy can improve.

Yeah….not so much. I took screen shots as I completed the survey so you can see just how bad it was.

Let’s start with the question “What factors are or would most likely influence you to get out of the Navy?” That’s a legitimately good question, and you get to select your top five options. Maybe the Navy should put something in the survey about readiness and shipyard issues, given the massive amount of news coverage on ship schedules slipping and Sailors committing suicide in Newport News. Or what about wokeness? Or the COVID “vaccine”? Maybe people are particularly incensed about it, or maybe they aren’t, so listing it as a choice would help shed some light on it.

Nope. All the answers are super generic responses that don’t ask any hard questions. They have responses for “Leadership at current command,” but nothing about shipyards, logistics, medical, or other support services that Sailors constantly complain about.

The best option I had was “Senior Navy leaders.” I selected that, and I expounded in the comments, but again, super generic, and not going to result in anything actionable.

Another set of questions asked about Command leadership, still focused on the local command. They did bring in enlisted leaders, which is good, because in the past they often only focused on the Command Triad (the Commanding Officer, Executive Officer and Command Master Chief). But there are no support questions. Plenty of Sailors are frustrated with Navy’s Mandatory Crappy Internet (NMCI), or the lack of investment in our shore facilities, but neither of those issues are the command’s fault. Those decisions are made by top brass, who are never held accountable for how miserable they make Sailors.

What about “How I feel in the Navy” questions? Again, touchy-feely stuff, but nothing that gets at the hard issues we have going on.

And then the DIE questions. That’s like a full 30% of the survey, but I’ll spare you the agony of reading the questions. All of these ask about sexual harrasment and racism and such, which are important…but aren’t the reasons Sailors commit suicide in their baracks room.

This survey was frustrating. I wrote paragraphs in the free-form section, which I am sure will be promptly ignored by the non-warfighter HR officer bent on using the survey to justify more white supremacy training in the fleet. This survey will provide no useful results and will continue to ignore the actual problems in the fleet. It will be used by the Department of the Navy to justify more money in DIE and other stupid programs when we need more efforts towards fixing ships and training our Sailors to be ready for combat. As a taxpayer, you should be angry over this survey and demand better from your elected representatives.

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.

Older Entries
Newer Entries