when your offense is down, that's one thing. but when your defense is down too...
Posted on 04/26/2008 12:04:38 AM PDT by GATOR NAVY
NORFOLK
The Navy will review maintenance and training across the surface fleet after a recent inspection found the Norfolk-based destroyer Stout unfit for sustained combat, a top admiral said Friday.
Three months after the ship returned from a deployment to the Horn of Africa, inspectors found inoperable missile and close-in weapon systems, an unsafe flight deck and widespread corrosion.
Rear Adm. Kevin Quinn, commander of the naval surface force, said the surface fleet will investigate whether the problems are widespread across all ship classes or limited to individual ships.
A second ship, the Hawaii-based cruiser Chosin, also failed inspection.
Jan van Tol, a retired Navy captain, said he was struck by the scope of the problems found on both ships. He said he came away from the reports wondering if "we've started to lose the ability to collectively assess ourselves."
(Excerpt) Read more at hamptonroads.com ...
Glad I'm not there to join in the fun.
B-chan
Former MM3
USS ENTERPRISE (CVN-65)
GONAVY
How in HELL does something like this happen?
1. Mission takes priority over maintenance, security, training, and everything else.
2. Ships spare parts and maintenance funded at 65% of the requirement vice the 90% of requirements used to fund naval aviation spares and maintenance.
3. Do more with less continues to be a successful strategy for promotion PROVIDED you are not in command when the INSURV team arrives.
4. Yard periods cancelled and deferred to save funding and enable very short turnarounds between longer and longer deployments.
The United States continues to have the world’s finest military manned by the greatest Soldiers, Sailors, Airmen, Marines, and Coast Guardsmen the world has ever known.
However, our acquisition and budgeting systems REFUSE to acknowledge the TRUE costs of the complex weapon systems we field. (You can take the published cost and multiply by 3 to get in the neighborhood of the initial acquisition cost, which will be well less than 40% of the total cost to operate and maintain after fielding).
EVERYTIME the military has attempted to measure the total cost of ownership, or true operating costs, with accurate metrics and a verifiable methodology the leadership has blanched and lost its nerve. Not because there were too many significant figures in the answer, but because there were too many commas.
I make no excuses for the Commanding Officers of the USS STOUT or USS CHOSIN, it s*cks to be them. But those who sit in judgement know full well that “there are those that have and those that will.”
The finest mentor I ever had in the Navy told me they “give you your first command and see how lucky you are!”
Looks to me like the Captain and his senior officers and enlisted were afraid of hurting the crew's feelings.
Familiarity breeds contempt. See it every day with the youngsters escaping from public high schools. Full of self-esteem without the basic wherewithals, expecting to start at the top without being able to spell or explain TANSTAAFL.
Here's a link to their home page.
What, the Navy ran out of paint? Oh, the world is coming to an end! We are all doomed.
Cutting funding to the bone and not investing in people usually leads to physical deterioration in the fleet. Now we’re seeing it.
Yep. Hardly a week goes by that I don't meet some youngster that is essentially functionally illiterate.
Recently, I visited a friend who has a 17 year old about to "graduate" from publik skool. The kid had a friend over and they were playing video games on a computer. I started talking to them about what they were going to do after publik skool and about computers and such. Being that I'm an Electrical Engineer, I was curious as to how much he really knew. Occasionally, you do actually run into a bright kid, but I was amazed when one of the boys claimed he was some sort of computer genius simply because he could kill more bad guys on whatever game they were playing. I asked them both if either could write code or troubleshoot software or hardware issues. Both were clueless as to how hardware and software interact and neither had any idea what I was talking about. Some genius.....and not a good sign at all for the future, IMHO......
when your offense is down, that's one thing. but when your defense is down too...
My CO would have had every swinging dick E-5 and below broken into tiger teams and manning the needle guns for those 3 months.
We earned the name “Banana Boat” not just because of our name, USS Deyo, but because of our love of yellow zinc chromate.
One more.
Was the CO, XO, AND Sqd CO of either ship ever ranked by political corruptness (er, correctness), or by poetical competence?
Because Iraq is sucking up every available dollar and maintenance budgets have been slashed. Same thing happened during Vietnam.
The Arleigh Burke DDG’s have steel superstructures. Previous ships like OHP FFG’s, Spruance DD’s, and Ticonderoga CG’s all have aluminum superstructures.
I think that adding steel to the more recent Burke DDG was in response to what the Navy learned from the Exocet attack on the Stark, an OHP FFG.
Reads like a command/unit culture thing, ie, leadership.
The other flaws spotted included missing safety gear, a broken close-in weapons system, widespread lube leaks and corrosion.
The ship had returned from a successful deployment to the Horn of Africa in December, and the strike group had no complaints about the ship's performance, he said.
By successful, they must mean it bobbed on the water without sinking. Thank God it wasn’t called upon to perform its designated functions. With the Aegis weapons system hobbled, a broken close-in weapons system, what did they expect to do if they encountered the enemy, have all hands shout BOO and hope it would scare them away?
I agree. This problem is more about the ship's attitude than anything else.
Lack of spare parts and decreased budgets may be partly to blame for inoperable combat systems and other more expensive to maintain equipment.
But it does not take much money or parts to grind away rust and throw down a little paint.
I would question the ship's level of pride.
From the article:
The ships’ material condition was not due to lack of funds, Lewis said.
“We are 100 percent funded to our requirement for maintenance,” he said.
bttt
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