STANDING INTO DANGER

 I was surprised that the Navy had relieved another Commanding Officer and surprised that this was an officer who has been in command for 5 months prior to deploying and then up until his relief operating in the Middle East. It seems that the 'loss of confidence' in the captain's ability to command had something more to do with a massive failure inside the Navy. Not really a surprise these days. This article at Business Insider describes the Captain's problem was with the steering gear on his ship. This in particular caught my eye:

18 incidents of steering gear failure is not just extremely unlikely, it is ridiculous. The article also stated that the technicians who were looking into the steering gear failure could not get underway on the ship when it left Bahrain. I have no idea how that works but I know that the Engineering System that I was heir to would not have hesitated to put techreps on a warship underway. 

No, when you trouble shoot a system as uncomplex as a steering system and you cannot isolate the failure because it is intermittent or transient or just comes and goes then there is something going on that has nothing to do with the steering gear motors, the hydraulics, the rams, the rudders, the switches that permit shifting steering engine from port to starboard on command from either the bridge or from after steering. All of those can be checked and verified so the problem is almost certainly of human origin.

Knowing how bad things are there are a couple of possibilities. The first is simple sabotage by a crewman who is lashing out at the Navy or persons on the ship. The second possibility is that the fools at NAVSEA allowed for the steering gear system to come under software control and that the software has been corrupted. 

When we had systems that 'energized' themselves and dumped fire fighting twin agents into the helicopter hanger repeatedly it was instantly obvious that someone was activating the fire control system from one of the control stations. Those out of the way places are only manned or occupied when conducting flight operations so they're wide open to saboteurs.

In other words, another Bonhomme Richard case but this time when the ship is deployed. It's the main reason I was happy to leave behind those that announced that they'd be damned if they were deploying or going overseas. It's why as an Engineer I knew and understood why the Chief Engineer wasn't going to permit snipes that had been to Captain's Mast for drugs coming out of Karachi to stand watches in the engine rooms. You can do catastrophic damage by intent or simply by allowing a system to go outside parameters and fail. None of us wanted to experience a Boiler Water Out of Sight High Casualty by learning of it when droplets of moisture hit turbine blades spinning at 25,000 rpm a foot away from us.

The Armed Forces have really gotten themselves into a cleft stick and as far as I can tell there is no way out. They have lowered the standards for recruits in every category and cannot be surprised as they find that this has a dramatic effect on operations and readiness. I don't know how many sailors they're cross-decking to keep the deployed ships operational but I'm willing to bet it's a lot. When we swept mines in the Red Sea we got augmented with about 70 men to fill all the vacant billets. They mostly came from sister ships homeported in Norfolk and were essentially volunteers. None of the guys working for me were unhappy to be there and a few said they preferred it to being in the Yards in Norfolk.

The last 10 years I was on active duty I remember an explosion in the number of senior officers attending special schools and courses to get an MBA type document and how they started talking about business enterprises and stakeholders and started in on making efficiencies and smarter with fewer and I just laughed and shook my head. Once you get down to standing port and starboard watches there is no more fat on the bone and you have to be able to count 100% on 100% of the men standing watches because there is no one to pick up the slack or backstop them. I suspect the Navy reached that point about 10 years ago and it's been getting uglier and uglier for the operating forces since 2010 and the end of Cost of War $ and the purse strings in Congress closing on everything defense related except DIE and equity related crap.

Too bad.