Article

2020-02-05 Government

Years of Warnings, Then Death and Disaster - How the Navy Failed it's Sailors

[Features] When Vice Adm. Joseph Aucoin was elevated to lead the vaunted 7th Fleet in 2015, he expected it to be the pinnacle of his nearly four-decade Navy career. The fleet was the largest and most powerful in the world, and its role as one of America’s great protectors had new urgency. China was expanding into disputed waters. And Kim Jong-un was testing ballistic missiles in North Korea.

Aucoin was bred on such challenges. As a Navy aviator, he’d led the "Black Aces," a squadron of F-14 Tomcats that in the late 1990s bombed targets in Kosovo.

But what he found with the 7th Fleet alarmed and angered him.

The fleet was short of sailors, and those it had were often poorly trained and worked to exhaustion. Its warships were falling apart, and a bruising, ceaseless pace of operations meant there was little chance to get necessary repairs done. The very top of the Navy was consumed with buying new, more sophisticated ships, even as its sailors struggled to master and hold together those they had. The Pentagon, half a world away, was signing off on requests for ships to carry out more and more missions.

The risks were obvious, and Aucoin repeatedly warned his superiors about them. During video conferences, he detailed his fleet’s pressing needs and the hazards of not addressing them. He compiled data showing that the unrelenting demands on his ships and sailors were unsustainable. He pleaded with his bosses to acknowledge the vulnerability of the 7th Fleet.

Posted by Besoeker 2020-02-05 10:10|| || Front Page|| [13 views ] Top

#1 In the early 2000s, the Navy embarked on a quest for so-called efficiencies. Vern Clark, the Navy’s top military officer during much of the Bush era, brought an MBA to the job and pitched his cuts to the force using the jargon of corporate downsizing. Smaller crews were “optimal” crews. Relying on new technologies to do the work sailors once did was described as “capital-for-labor substitutions.”

Promising a “workforce for the 21st century,” Clark’s team tried out new training and staffing ideas, including a decision that officers no longer needed to attend months of classroom training to learn the intricacies of operating billion-dollar warships. Instead, aspiring Surface Warfare Officers, charged with everything from driving ships to launching missiles, could learn mostly at sea with the help of packets of CDs. The program was widely derided by sailors as “SWOS in a Box.”

The efficiencies even included eliminating a requirement for ship captains to post lookouts on both sides of ships, a cut that would later prove crucial when the Fitzgerald’s crew failed to see a fast-closing cargo ship until it was too late.

Posted by Frank G 2020-02-05 10:32|| 2020-02-05 10:32|| Front Page Top

#2 Warships are often "overmanned" because they expect to take casualties. Some of the equipment is "redundant" because they expect to take battle damage.
You might be able to eliminate some of the "excess" and redundancies IF you expect that you will never go into combat.
On the other hand, eliminating lookouts is just effing stupid. Yes, 99.99& of the time, the lookout will see nothing. However, the 0.01% can literally be the difference between life and death.

Posted by Rambler in Virginia 2020-02-05 10:50|| 2020-02-05 10:50|| Front Page Top

#3 Let's hope JIT Kaizen etc for .Mil isnt here...

Totally wrong for that sector.

Maybe for R+D but not field.

Posted by Bright Pebbles 2020-02-05 11:34|| 2020-02-05 11:34|| Front Page Top

#4 US Navy is developing LASERS for submarines that could 'disable drones and blow up small boats'

Posted by Skidmark 2020-02-05 13:34|| 2020-02-05 13:34|| Front Page Top

#5 Urban Outfitters' 'vintage' US Navy coveralls draw online outrage

Posted by Skidmark 2020-02-05 14:01|| 2020-02-05 14:01|| Front Page Top

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