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.
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Friday, August 25, 2017
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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...
ReplyDeleteSome 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.
Was OPPE inspired by ORSE? It sounds similar, although ORSE probably looks at more safety and recordkeeping.
ReplyDeleteI 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.
ReplyDeleteBut 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.
3383, it probably was.
ReplyDeleteA hint that things were bad came when the Navy began to classify INSURV reports.
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.
ReplyDeleteand 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.