big kahuna wrote:
RangerGress wrote:
len wrote:
http://www.cnn.com/2017/09/11/politics/navy-ships-training-expired/index.html. Ships involved in collisions had lengthy lists of failing to fulfill key training requirements. McCain blames it on taking the low hanging fruit in budget cuts Don't underestimate just how ridiculous military bureaucracy can be. Formal training reports are usually complete happy horseshit. Among a million other difficulties in trying to evaluate whether or not a group of folks know what they're doing, the military is obsessed by "process". So even tho your group might get the task done just fine, the fact that PVT Smith didn't have his helmet strap cinched tight and count down from 5 to 1 per the manual, could be enough to flunk your group.
Apparently, the retired Navy Captain (O6) interviewed in this piece is very unsparing as to what went on:
“What gave out was leadership. The admirals did not put their careers on the line and object about anything. They rolled over to save themselves.” Plus: “If you put the emphasis on social issues, you get a social force. If you put it on operational issues, you get an operational force. . . . The mistakes made were all simple things: basic ship handling, navigation and seamanship stuff. Destroyers do not get run down by merchants; they are faster and much more maneuverable. No, they were not hacked; they were not run down on purpose. They just were asleep at the wheel.”
The Real Reason the US Navy Keeps Hitting Merchant Vessels - In MilitaryI don't know anything about what happened in this specific event, nor do I know much about the climate aboard ships these days, or the McCain in particular. For all I know, the officers aboard the McCain might have been complete pieces of crap. That said, I'm sympathetic towards the officers and NCOs. With few exceptions, all the officers and NCOs I ever met tried pretty damned hard to do well. But they did so inside a system that tried very hard to defeat them at every turn. I spent a long time in the Marines and the Army, but the amount of really good training that I rec'd wasn't that much. I tried my ass off to put together "really good" training for my guys, but it was so goddamned hard to beat "the system" so I could do what I wanted that my successes were pretty damned rare. The military requires that the leaders do so much complete BS that it can consume their every waking hour. Year after year I worked 18hr days and I can't really say that I accomplished that much.
The military is 2nd only to the government as the biggest bureaucracy around. Bureaucracies are not good at getting anything useful done. Mostly they just suck the enthusiasm and moxie out of their members. Maybe the Navy keep running into other ships because what senior leaders want is pretty briefs re. the success of their elaborate processes, vs. hard chargers knowing what they are doing.
In my experience, In the military, the only training that is important is training that is easily rendered into a formal published standard, success easily measureable, and the results easily placed into a bullet comment. If the training and skills don't meet that criteria, then they don't matter. Try, for example, to measure a person's grasp of topographic lines, the key to genuinely being able to navigate thru terrain. Can't easily measure that, so it's long lost as a training objective. The ability to measure and report drives training.
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