INTERFERENCE WITH THE SAILOR MIND

I was stationed on a destroyer in San Diego and Seattle for a time back in the mid-80s and the powers that be detected a problem with the phone bill of said ship. It was wopping to start out and grew exponentially worse when the ship relocated from San Diego to spend 9 months in Todd Shipyard as the very last USN ship repair contract they would ever have. They went out of business soon after we left and for the most excellent of reasons. Yep, they sucked at ship repair, cost containment, quality assurance, productivity and in fact just about every single metric for performance. But this isn't about those losers. Nope, it's about the wileyest of the wiley, the American sailor.

As I said, the Supply Officer and XO were frustrated that people were using the ships 5 working phone lines to call home. Home was located all across the United States since some talked to their folks and some to the wives and others to whoever lived at home. They finally came up with a surefire way to stop those rascals and they put those little phone dial locks on the dials of the telephones and only the department heads had a key to unlock them and so knew that all the calls were logged and for official business.

Back then Radio Shack was a going concern and it sold a handy little tone dialer that worked just phone on rotary phones. One picked up the handset, input the desired phone number into the tone generator that you bought at Radio Shack for $10.00 and then held it up to the mouthpiece and pushed the button unleashing the tones which worked their way through the phone system to the appropriate exchange and connected you with the number you dialed. No need at all to unlock the lock on the dial. It took them until the bills came due at the end of the next billing period to realize that they'd been had. The PTB locked up the offices with the phones in them after working hours after that. Not much of a hardship to the officers in those offices since the ship was otherwise without heat and nobody stayed onboard a second longer than necessary after the end of the day.

I sure hope that the Sailors out there in the Fleet today are the same kind of people but I tend to suspect it has gone downhill ever since kids who grew up with electronic devices welded to their fingers since they were toddlers are for the most part unlearned about things like that and our Navy has adopted an old old strategy that states that "unless it is specifically authorized, it is forbidden" and we've had a full generation of that kind of thinking. It has led to numerous collisions, groundings, fires, irrepairable combining reduction gear casualties which have led to the complete destruction of a number of practically brand new-but useless warships.

One of the sadder signs of the decay of the sailor mind is reflected in the tiny number that applied for waivers from the covid vaccine. In my time in we knew that we were usually an afterthough to anybody above the rank of LCDR but we did have some faith in the docs on the ships. Old sailors that worked hard and played hard were not ever going to be afraid of some stupid virus that 99.871 people who caught it, survived. OTGH, we are talking about the Chiefs with red crows on their dress blues and men who had contracted 13 venereal diseases in 6 years. Seriously, guys who weren't afraid of anything.

I'll ask the question I know nobody is asking. How are we going to get those guys back? The Navy killed Basic Electricity and Electronics school while I was still on active duty and it was quickly reflected in the decreased capability of our technicians. That led to a new maintenance philosophy which simply decided component repair was no longer desirable and so went to modular repairs. One took the lowest replaceable unit out and replaced with a brand new one and the old one was scrapped or sent off to the maintenance depots for repairs. Then the Navy scrapped all the maintenance depots and decided that the ships would get their maintenance in more frequent restricted availabilities and shipyard maintenance and the costs climbed and the time spent in the shipyards at the mercy of the yards got longer and longer and soon ships were missing deadlines to deploy and other ships were surged on back to back deployments while we fixed the ones that were supposed to go out to sea. We've been doing that for about 20 years now and if you look at our Navy you can see it's maintenance philosophy simply by looking at the ships themsselves.

Back in 1986 the circuit cards in the Mk91 Fire Control System cost about $14,000 each. There were a lot of them. I'm sure they cost a great deal more now. In fact I'm almost certain that some are being cross decked to deploying ships to ensure that they have a working NATO Sea Sparrow Fire Control System. Hell, we were doing that back in 1987. We were doing it earlier with the Phalanx Close in Weapon System. On my first ship we were happy if the side of the ship facing Iran had a working CIWS even if it meant the 'disengaged side' was out of commission. If we made repeated transits of the Strait of Hormuz we took the working parts needed off the other side of the ship and walked them 60 feet to the other CIWS to make it work.

I wonder though. How long can we keep abanding $180 billion dollars worth of weaponry in places like Iraq and Afghanistan, and shipping $800 million worth of modern weaponry to places like Ukraine before our military simply collapses?