Back to the USN.
Yesterday evening the Wall Street Journal posted this story about the readiness of the USN,
Investigators Repeatedly Warned Navy Ahead of Deadly Collisions - WSJ. The WSJ is behind a pay wall so people might not be able to read the report.
Congress and military officers have been warning about the operation temp and training issues and the GAO has issued three reports over the last few years on the subject.
Three reports in the past two years by the Government Accountability Office, an independent watchdog agency, spell out endemic problems. They found through interviews and Navy studies that U.S. sailors overseas often arrive to their assigned ships without adequate skills and experience. They end up on duty for an average of 108 hours a week, instead of the Navy-standard of 80 hours, the reports found.
Experienced sailors routinely provide on-the-job training for less experienced sailors, so the time doing this must come out of sleep, personal time, or other allotted work time, according to a May 2017 GAO report.
This is what I have been reading for years and I think it is to blame for the USN accidents that have been happening.
The USN has been following the business worlds mantra of Doing More With Less which means less gets done, and if there is not a change in the organization, things that are important simply do not get done. One ends up prioritizing what has to be done, but if there are five things to do, but one can only do three, that means two things are not done no matter their importance. Dong More With Less really should be called Doing More With Less While Leadership Thinks Things Are OK.
To make it worse, the USN has taken the stupid ranking system that Welsh was using at GE where officers are ranked for performance. If there are 10 officers on a ship, the CO will rank them from 1 to 10 with 1 being the highest. Now all 10 officers might be really good, but the ranking system forces the CO to list the officers from bad to great even if there are no bad officers. The officers at the bottom are in trouble though they might be good officers. I have lived with this sort of stupidity for decades and have seen how destructive it is for an organization. At first, this process works to get rid of the deadwood, but eventually there is no deadwood, and the organization starts loosing very valuable people who simply cannot be replaced.
The USN is operating with less than half the ships but at the same tempo, if not higher, than when the Navy had 600 ships. I have heard "leadership" say that the quality of our ships allows the USN to operate with less ships which is just bovine scat. You can not have one ship in two places.
Then the navy is forcing sailor to work 15 hour days vs 12 and I think 12 is nuts. I think this is part of the Do More With Less non sense. The leadership sets the schedule with not enough people and resources to really accomplish the mission but the crew gets it done. The crew knows that things did not work well but they got er' done anyway. The leadership says, well that worked, lets see if we can do it again. The crew pulls it off but the ship and crew readiness is slowly degrading over time. Then the leadership says Do More with Less yet again. And the crew pulls it off but at a cost the leadership does not see. This continues until the breakages and failures eventually get to a point that the leadership finally notices. I have watched this at work for years and I think the USN is now getting to the same point.
The problems have been notably acute overseas. A September 2016 GAO report concluded that while the Navy fleet has decreased by 18% since 1998, it still has maintained 100 ships overseas during that time.
鼎onsequently, each ship is being deployed more to maintain the same level of presence, according to the report, which also noted that maintenance has been reduced, deferred or eliminated.
A May 2015 report comparing U.S-based Navy units to foreign-based U.S. counterparts found that U.S.-based cruisers and destroyers spend 41% of their time in training missions and 22% deployed. Their Japan-based counterparts, by comparison, spent 67% of their timeé*�bout three times as much妖eployed during approximately the same period.
U.S. sailors based in Japan had no time dedicated to training, relying instead on training on the margins while under way at sea, according to Navy officials interviewed for the report.
The U.S. Seventh Fleet, based out of Yokosuka, Japan, is among the most adversely affected by a shortage of personnel and the increasing demands for deployments.
USN ships are running aground, hitting seamounts, colliding with other vessels, getting hit by other vessels, etc, not because of hacking, but simply because the ships are not being maintained as they should be and the crews are untrained and TIRED.
Later,
Dan
