Seen on the street in Kyiv.

Words of Advice:

"If Something Seems To Be Too Good To Be True, It's Best To Shoot It, Just In Case." -- Fiona Glenanne

“The Mob takes the Fifth. If you’re innocent, why are you taking the Fifth Amendment?” -- The TOFF *

"Foreign Relations Boil Down to Two Things: Talking With People or Killing Them." -- Unknown

“Speed is a poor substitute for accuracy.” -- Real, no-shit, fortune from a fortune cookie

"If you believe that you are talking to G-d, you can justify anything.” — my Dad

"Colt .45s; putting bad guys in the ground since 1873." -- Unknown

"Stay Strapped or Get Clapped." -- probably not Mr. Rogers

"The Dildo of Karma rarely comes lubed." -- Unknown

"Eck!" -- George the Cat

* "TOFF" = Treasonous Orange Fat Fuck, A/K/A Dolt-45,
A/K/A Commandante (or Cadet) Bone Spurs,
A/K/A El Caudillo de Mar-a-Lago, A/K/A the Asset., A/K/A P01135809

Friday, August 25, 2017

Something is Wrong With Our Bloody Ships

Part two: Not only poor training, but shitty maintenance. Other than the COs not willing to say "no can do, boss", the responsibility for badly maintained ships goes a lot higher.

Sounds as though maintenance issues are worse than they were in the 1970s. Things were not good then, when ships posted security watches to keep sailors from other ships from stealing parts.

There was a thing called an "Operational Power Plant Examination" or OPPE. OPPE came about because, as lore had it, the engineering readiness of ships during the Vietnam War was pretty poor. The same reasons for that are being uttered now: High operational tempo, inability to have ships remain in port long enough to do more than patch up problesm and yadda yadda yadda.

Same shit, different war. And there were warnings, oh yes, there were.

5 comments:

CenterPuke88 said...

Oh the whole, color me completely unsurprised. The FAA decided that redundancy was not so necessary when they switched telecom providers. So we get left with facilities on ATC Alert for loss of communications, and not ATC Zero only because the few old fashioned phone lines work, even if we don't have easy ways to use them. Airway Facilities used to be able to respond to issues immediately, now it's wait till tomorrow morning or Monday morning when we can get someone out there. Maintainence has moved to using predictive failure models in some cases, and we find the models aren't always that accurate...

Some story, different verse, We're buying shiny, new shit while cheating out on training those using it and not supporting the old shit properly either. There's the bean counter mindset that 100 F-22's can replace 300 F-15's, easily, because the F-22 is 300% better.. OK, but perhaps the F-22 can make maybe only 150-200% of the kills per sortie, so you have to fly more sorties to kill the same number of enemies, and you also have only half the pilots you had before. The results, tired pilots and overworked planes, followed by loss of aircraft to maintainence oversights/fudges and tired personnel.

3383 said...

Was OPPE inspired by ORSE? It sounds similar, although ORSE probably looks at more safety and recordkeeping.

Borepatch said...

I have thought for a long time that if Congress (*both* parties) wanted to cut the military budget then they needed to accept a reduced mission. Looks like we're there, having got there the hard way.

But there's another Blue Ribbon panel investigating, so we can sleep easy. /sarc

Oh, and nice use of the quote in the post title. Actually very appropriate - the battlecruisers blew up because of failures in training and bad operational tempo.

Comrade Misfit said...

3383, it probably was.

A hint that things were bad came when the Navy began to classify INSURV reports.

BadTux said...

Poor maintenance also leads to poor training, since sailors who are busy fixing things that should have been fixed before they left dock are sailors who are not training. And of course poor training leads to poor maintenance, since sailors who are poorly trained don't know how to properly maintain their vessel. Talk about an incestuous relationship! Now, add in the fact that now those sailors are all exhausted because they're doing not only their duty items, but also fixing shit too... they aren't going to be worth a damn standing watch. They're going to be basically standing against walls because that's the only thing keeping them from falling down.

and let's say that a major maintenance event happens and the watch all runs to fix it because the ship is dead in the water. Who's watching for oncoming tankers or container ships? Nobody. Not that it matters too much, if the ship is dead in the water, because they can't do anything about the oncoming tanker anyhow... but if someone was on watch they could have at least hit the collision alarm and got those sailors out of their berths below decks, and maybe some of them would have lived.