The nice feature of this ridiculous story is that no lives were lost. The wonder of course is that any lives were ever even hazarded in such a pointless and stupid total waste of time, money, effort, and ship. Just what part of getting an up close survey of a reef calls for stranding a ship on it? Surely if you want to muck about on a reef you used divers and small boats. You know, the kind of thing you can buy at KMart in Australia. The captain of the poor ship thought snuggling up to a well charted reef in 4 meter ocean swells was a great idea.....
The part that amuses me more than most of the rest is that the ship ran aground, was stranded, burned to a crisp and then sank. You really cannot do much more than that to a ship unless you want to use it again. I'll say it again though, it is far too late now, but when we pick the people to run our Navy and run our ships we really need to stop making anything other than ability a distant last when it comes to measures of performance necessary to take on the job. That kind of thinking applies all the way down to the deck plates and it's not just about this ridiculous accident, it's about all of them over the last 30 years or so.
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| Lovely day for a stranding, fire and gentle fall to the bottom of the sea. |
5 comments:
What do you expect from "diversity hires". The skipper of the lost ship was a lesbian. Given the command not because of ability but because of what it was.
I think it is easy to gauge which way the wind is blowing and make some life decisions at an early point in a career. I think what I've seen so far of Western military forces around the world is not the mere toleration of incompetence but the promotion and widespread acceptance of incompetence as simply the cost of 'doing business.' I think a lot of sober rational people decided awhile ago to leave and have nothing to do with the armed forces anymore and that includes working in their defense industry or shipyards. Looking at the lack of skilled tradesmen to build ships, even government funded ships makes me wonder just how dire management at the USDI is these days.
The non-stop praise in the article for the captain’s actions during the incident with zero interest in the cause of the episode is incongruous. That’s 1 of 9 total vessels - 1 of 5 operational ships - sunk. Oh yeah - and their only salvage ship
It’s the all new, ‘no one is to blame’ craziness returned from the 19th century. It doesn’t bode well. We’ve been down that route now for about 23 years now.
Heh. Praise for her actions, indeed. In the old USN, running a ship aground was effectively a career-ending event. You might stay in, but you'd never make anything of yourself.
Given the current state of affairs, she'll probably be decorated.
--Tennessee Budd
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