Unfit to Fight

The U.S. Navy.

I wish I could say that I'm surprised about any of this, but I'm not. Warships take a lot of TLC to keep in good condition. A decade ago, the Navy went to a concept called "optimal manning", which was a bureaucratic way of saying "not enough sailors to keep the ships up." From what I've read, a Burke class DDG had a complement of 290, yet the Navy sent those ships to see with the the crew size of a Knox class FF (or a Perry class FFG). Those two frigate classes displaced 4,100 tons, but a Burke class DDG displace between 8,300 and 9,500 tons.*

The Burkes are much larger ships. Those who thought that the Navy could send them to sea with the crew size of a smaller ship and not eventually pay a price had to have been drinking the Ft. Fumble Kool-Aid. The practice of not sending enough sailors to ships to properly man the ships was a factor in the grounding of the USS Port Royal.

As the article also noted, the Navy cheaped out on maintenance and now has to make it up (in an era of tightening budgets). You have to wonder what retard genius came up with the idea of "just run it until it breaks" as a way to save on doing preventative maintenance. That defies a couple of centuries worth of experience with mechanical systems. You can't not maintain things, not if you are going to count on them to work when you most need them.

I have to imagine that this is the sort of shit that happens when the black shoes who have real experience with sailing and maintaining ships are either too afraid for their careers to speak the truth or are ordered not to. This smacks of the sort of stupid shit that Rumsfeld would have dreamed up.

The ships don't get maintained, they sail with over-tired and stressed crews. Bad things happen when people are standing watch and they are too exhausted to think. When their tour of duty is up, the good ones, the ones that the Navy wanted to keep, will get out.

Fucking admirals. Not one of them apparently had the integrity to stand up and say "this shit ain't right." And so the men and women on the deckplates have to pay the price.

There are times when maybe it's possible that Stalin did the right thing when he had almost all of the top brass shot.

(H/T via email)
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* Of the 230 or fewer sailors on a Burke-class DDG, that includes those who are away for schooling, on medical leave, those detailed ashore to do security and other shit for the base (gotta support the shore establishment), and those who were sent as "individual augmentees" to Iraq or Afghanistan.