NOTING THE COST

 It really does look like the lunatics running the world are intent on reducing the cost of sweeping away all of the old and bringing in the new. Very little of true value and worth exists right now and thus it can be replaced with something new and different for a fraction of the cost of building, maintaining and operating the old stuff. Of course this applies only to insanity that is government and Publicly funded stuff. It's different for people with real and meaningful bottom lines. 

To get some idea of the scale of this consider: Microsoft is swinging a deal that will see 3 Mile Island nuclear reactors come back online solely in order to supply microsoft with power it needs to run data centers. The cost of nuclear power has we've been told, grown too hideously expensive for you and me but microsoft alone can afford to overcome the nuclear regulatory state (without bribes, naturally) and bring back online an OLD NUCLEAR POWER STATION. We the public ordered them shut down in the name of foolish economy and toooooooooo dangerousssssss!

I dare say nobody there even breathed the words, "build a new one." No no.

I recall the days of old when I was but the Engineer on an old ship of ones. Warships have back up capabilities and have redundancies at the start because long experience of naval war has shown that taken into battle many things that are necessary will be killed and destroyed outright while yet the battle must go on. Nevertheles, at height of the Cold War, we had a ship's company that presented me with just a single Sonar Technician, a single Interior Communications Electrician, a single Electronics Technician, a single Hull Technician, a single Air Conditioning and Refrigeration Technician, a single Signalman, a single, well you get the point. That ship got underway around 3 days/week. We were a test platform for this newfangled Global Positioning System. Yep, we were the one and only.

Every time one of the one's decided to go on leave, it reduced the ability of the ship to absorb damage in that area down to zero. Fry a synchro-converter that converted the gyro inputs with the radar bearing information and you would instantly step down from true bearing navigation to relative bearing navigation. Yeah, it's almost the same thing but a pain in the ass when you're navigating a ship channel after dark when coming back into port and both the radar and the gyros still work. However without those particular techs it's very difficult to troubleshoot and repair either system. One can only imagine the hysteria of some of the later ship's CO's if both gyros or the single radar stopped working and we had to do it using just magnetic bearings. Nobody practices that anymore.

I suspect modern ships just self-adhere to the pier when they no longer have the critical skills required to go to sea. For us back then this was not an option. To be honest, how much trouble could you get into just off the coast of San Diego? We would sometimes get underway on one engine, one shaft but, and here's the rub, worst case we'd have to drop the anchor and spend awhile troubleshooting or putting back together things that had been taken apart for maintenance before being rudely interrupted with an order to make space for some other ships at our pier. We learned from that and decided to keep and use a little pier that no other ships could use. It also cut our time at Sea and Anchor Detail by about an hour each way and when you get underway at 0630 and come back into port sometimes at 0430 it matters a lot.

Seriously though, how does the United States Navy get from an oceans spanning fleet of hundreds of ships down to one single solitary oiler to service the Battle Groups in the IO? JUST HTF did that happen?

The lunatics running this place have serially broken and destroyed a near monolithic system of infrastructure and men that could wage war 24/7 across and around the world and now it cannot support a single Battle Group much less 3 or 5 deployed in support of military operations in the Middle East. Do you remember that we used to have 5 Battle Groups operating simultaneously in that area during contingency operations just 20 years ago? Where did all of that go?

Yes I know. It was all discarded one piece at a time by morons that didn't care or know any better who had reached the point where they thought, just one would be enough. Well yeah, I spent some time in that Navy and while I made it look easy I was also extremely fortunate enough to have the best and best qualified young sailors of their generation working with me. They were all smart, motivated and well disciplined. 

How did a USNS oiler run aground off the coast of Oman? I could see it off the coast of Qatar or UAE but it takes a special kind of stupid to run aground off Oman. One assumes from experience that it was taken on food and stores in someplace like Fujairah and somehow 90 giant tankers and cargo ships head into and out of that port every week without incident unless they run afoul of the Iranians. So, just how did our one and only IO oiler run aground? Well, it immediately calls to mind the serial incompetence we have grown to expect from our Navy but which was kind of unexpected from our contract Military Sealift Command sailors. With no exceptions, I found them to be solid professionals. I wonder what changed?