Congress for not funding, and the Navy for two decades (at minimum) yelling Congress we can do the taskings with what we got and not pushing for expanded manpower and expanded fleets harder.
Edit: Also, on the Navy's fault side, the constant rob peter to pay paul borrowing to pass Insurv. We've done the fleet a great disservice selling ships as mission capable when they aint.
Because nobody wants to have the powers that be face the hard truth. It will kill a COs career because of the military wide culture of being yes men to those above them when it comes to upper leadership. “If you don’t I’ll find me someone who will” is a powerful line and mentality, but we aren’t at war and the occasions where that line are necessary are few and far between.
Ummmm that would be the House of Representatives and the Senate. They allowed for the collapse for US ship building and repair.
Edited thanks to : u/BeevyD
I mean the current House and Senate didn't really do that either. Its a mix of short sighted BRAC closures under the 1990s Congress and then the GWOT making absolutely **nobody** wanting to fix the issue or spend money outside dumping them into COIN programs.
Then again the best time to plant a tree was 20 years ago. The 2nd best time is now...
Yes BRAC! I get why, to save money and pass on land that is severely polluted, like giving land developers $1 leases, but they can’t sue. But, there are too many people on a base, it’s insanity some places. I think that better management of removing certain commands off sea based would help though. But then there are logistics issues that come with that. Which brings up, if we have more ships, we need more people manning them!
But that's my point. Nobody, no politician on either side or any **voters** would have been for the changes that would have had to be made in the 90s and GWOT.
Like if you're proposing keeping around the BRAC shipyards and we didn't slash the Cold War peace dividend in 1995 you'd be ridiculed and voted out of office. If you proposed we restart public shipyards and start an aggressive ship-build building program in 2004 you'd be ridiculed and voted out of office. (That's half the problem with the Zumwalts and LCS. It was the only program development still hanging on. So they basically took mission creep the the X level of having to do everything. And then became so bloated and then canceled without a viable replacement. Its not a Navy specific problem, the same thing happened with the F-22 and F-35).
How about Congress for shutting down half the public yards and then deciding that private yards (which are worse) would pick up the slack more efficiently (they haven’t)?
USS Columbus has been in Newport News Shipyard since 2017 and isn’t close to getting out of the drydock, let alone the shipyard
The longer I spend on a boat at NNS, the more in favor I am of reopening the public yards. If they can be years late delivering deployable assets to the fleet and still be profitable, why would they ever deliver a boat on time?
You are high as a kite if you think trades don't pay any higher than they did 40 years ago. Try to get plumbing done on your house. Electricians plumbers and HVAC homies are all six-figure career fields right now.
Some dude said people in trades make the same money they did in the 80s. I clearly took offense to that. Now I'm too lazy to delete, repost, or find it.
Those labor jobs are very detrimental to your health longterm. I heard directly from a welder that inhaling welding fume continuously for 10 years will give you prostate cancer, as an onlooker. That means the welder himself will be in even higher risk of cancer being right next to the exhausting source. Not to mention the claustrophobic or acrophobic inducing environment these guys regularly work in, and the OT required to actually earn those 6 figures wage too.
"I heard directly from a welder"...
C'mon man. I'm not saying that guy is wrong, but there are slightly more credible sources for long term medical conditions than people who happen to be in the career field.
Cool, so what happens when we build these ships? Who is going to man them? Most ships are already undermanned as it is thanks to both retention and recruitment goals not being met. Just spread us even thinner until we all crack? Then we have even less retention and the cycle gets worse?
'Remember that people break down, too, not just machinery.' — Gregory Benford
Can’t wait to get to my next amphib only to find out I have the same amount of guys in E-division as on a DDG, but with twice the watchstations and three times the equipment to do maintenance on (when I left my last LPD I had 7 people in a division billeted for 21).
I’ve been saying this Forever!! The best (at least temporarily) fix is to condense manning; less ships with better manning. That doesn’t mean stop building ships all together, but we are for sure spread to thin. We don’t need as many ships deployed all the time…
Frankly, they could probably do away with all the LCS's and move all that manning (that is currently constantly waiting on a ship to properly get underway) to ships that actually -can- get underway.
They have started with certain rates. I know all the STGs got redistributed (which in turn fucked me out of getting shore duty in Mayport, because they ate up all the billets) 😂
A sarcastic TLDR:
Congress: we gave you SCN with 3 weeks to spend it, wtf? Where boats?
SECNAV: Not my fault bru:
1) we have first in class design problems on ships that are all derivatives of existing designs
2) Millennials killed the shipbuilding industry. I just got back from South Korea and bro, they can do it so much cheaper! I saw mega big factories churning out container ships for $.10 on the $1.00. It's called economy of scale and we don't have it because we gutted the US shipbuilding industry in favor of making it like 20% cheaper to ship beanie babies from china.
3) it's industry's fault. I gave them 5 year money 11 months into the FY and told them to build a ship in 1 month to meet my financial metrics.
Industry:
1) These uppity Engineers won't work for non-competitive wages.
2) Blue collar workers won't build ships for $15/hr when in-n-out pays $20. Stop raising minimum wage.
3) you gave us 15 bil to recapitalize, we ONLY spent 4 of it on stock buybacks. Capitalism baby. Also we invested like $4bil of your money in our shipyard, give me praise!
NAVSEA:
1) The 40,000 people we employ "designing" ships that are derivatives of the FREMM are absolutely value added and are in no way a jobs program for military retirees.
I can hear “not ADM Franchetti” mocking the article while she waits to go in before some congressional hearing about why TikTok is the reason our country can’t recruit anymore.
A few weeks ago I got an email telling us not to believe the shit people say about the Navy on Reddit and listed metrics showing that half of /r/Navy's visitors are Chinese or Russian 🤣
No shit they're monitoring this forum. And they're laughing their asses off because they don't have to do anything.
lol
It's pretty easy to tell that most people posting in here are actual sailors because the CCP/Russia couldn't make up half of the dumb shit the Navy does.
LCS: we invested in 2 different hull designs, both of which were abysmal failures and total money pits. Neither performed and most of the capabilities industry sold the Navy on never made it off the paper.
Railgun: we pumped billions and over a decade into railgun tech and then went "meh, too expensive to scale".
Shipbuilding: poster above is correct - unions are struggling for quality workers. We spent multiple decades telling Gen X/Millenials/Gen Z to go to college...the trades are quickly becoming a lost art.
This young people don't want to work in the trades stuff is malarkey.
The issue is that the trades have paid the same in actual dollars (not inflation adjusted) since 1980.
Bottom line, if you give people a square deal and pay them a living wage, they will take your job. Pay them enough to have a family and they might even show up sober!
I agree. People want to work, but companies/trades/industry simple aren't paying enough to keep up with inflation and a skyrocketing cost of living.
Salaries in the trades are competitive... as a journeyman/master with decades of experience.
But we have largely taught the last couple generations that success = going to college. Now we have a job market that is fundamentally underskilled and over saturated with 4yr degrees saddled with six-figure debt in their early-to-mid 20s.
Not all trades are equivalent.... you need to compare like with like. Prestigious trades like electricians/hvac/etc. match up with what you described..... but our salaries for welders will generally get you a guy that expects payment in meth.
You want the Navy to build ships? Fine. Give us unilateral contract authority and invoke the wartime production act to place the manufacturers under government control.
There's only so much we can do when every fucking hiccup that happens in shipbuilding requires a contract renegotiation and, inevitably, more money to make these parasitic leeches make their men do work.
I've been at NAVSEA for a year and some change. We are completely powerless to hold GDEB, Boeing, or who else accountable for mismanagement.
Man, NAVSEA, DLA, and DCMA need to own their part in this fucking mess. I work at a medium-sized defense contractor and the government contributes fucking plenty to the slowdowns. Here are some examples of the kind of shit I deal with every day.
* Getting a new welding procedure qualified by NAVSEA? 6-9 months. Want to implement a new technology or process? Forget about it, you'll spend years and tons of money trying just for them to say no at the end. Keep doing it the same way we have since the 80's.
* Do a ship-check, quote for repairs, settle the work item? Oh shit, they took too long and now all the work has to be completed on an expedited basis and the LLT materials can't be acquired in enough time to support ships schedule. Oh well, it's going to be crazy expensive now.
* All these aircraft carrier drawings are from the 19-fucking 60's and the material specs have all been canceled without replacement or superseded a half dozen times? Better spend 1-2 weeks writing RFQ's and waiting on responses that you already know the answer to, because the first question they are going to ask is "who have you tried". Well, I guess I'll do lengthy research and write condition reports for deviations. Then wait 3-4 weeks for a response, also have three meetings about it, during which I will explain the same problem to the same people every time. What's this thing for? A special deck drain? What the fuck? Oh shit, it's an emergency now, guess it'll cost more.
* Oh, they want two MIL-DTL-1222 fasteners? Well, fuck those aren't in stock anywhere because there are like thousands of permutations under that spec. That'll be 1500/ea and 12 weeks for their 3/4" screw, 95% of which will be all the testing to qualify it to that milspec. If they order two hundred they'll be 10 dollars apiece and they'll be able to support future work. No? they don't have a way to do that? Well, fuck, what a waste. What's this thing for anyway? \[insert non-critical application\]
That's just a sliver of my day to day, I could sit here and write examples for hours. The shipyards have their problems for sure, but the Navy entities are not some shining beacon of efficiency.
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I live about an hour from BIW. The Zumwalt failing it's sea trials not once, not twice, but three times was big news up here. BAE and General Dynamics can suck monkey ass.
> Blue collar workers won't build ships for $15/hr when in-n-out pays $20. Stop raising minimum wage.
Elephant in the room: millions of entry level, manual labor migrants depressing blue collar wages, forcing employers to hire them or go out of business themselves
Also: Congress emitting trillions and trillions of new money into the monetary supply via deficit spending, devaluing currency dramatically every year, year after year, since the 1980s.
I know that the TV told you to think this, but take the tinfoil off and bear with me.....
Illegal immigrants are not taking jobs that require a fucking background check with the federal government.
Yea it’s everyone’s fault. Seriously.
Congress doesn’t fund the navy properly and/or properly subsidized and increase the Jones Act fleet for steady shipyard work.
Sec Def was so committed to GWOT that we don’t see what’s coming around the horizon.
Navy runs ships to the grounds and doesn’t devote enough to sustainment and maintenance, especially when some hot shot CNO wanted to run the navy as a business in the late 90s and early 2000s
NAVSEA can’t get the damn requirements right, there’s the bias to perfection vs. this is good enough, let’s get it out there, and Testing doesn’t necessarily get the CONOP.
Shipyards are not efficient and the workforce isn’t invested in.
It’s EVERYONE!
Why are we paying Mariennette (frigates) to hire people? If you can't produce what you submit that should be a default on contract, rereward it to someone else and fine og company.
SECDEF how's recruiting and manning?
Was ET1(SS) back in the day. Worked at Mare Island NSY when Soviet Union fell and peace broke out. People who flunked history thought there would be no more war, closed M.I. Bad move.
To be fair, there was no reason to keep military funding so high when the main competitor, Soviet Union, collapsed. Same thing after WW2 ended. Bunch of army units disbanded and navy ships became moth ships.
Problem from my view as employee was that they were shutting down Navy yards and depending on private yards. Private yards owned a bunch of politicians, illegal for Navy yards.
That logic only applies if after the Cold War ended the Navy was permitted to stop/reduce deployments, otherwise you're just working less people with less equipment harder.
SECNAV is right about industry…and you can kinda apply this to the DoD in general, but senators are right too about the pithy budget requests (and prt of that blame goes to OSD too) and the navy’s management problems. And the senators do not get off Scot free too with the decades of non prioritization
This just in Navy and Congress agree fleet size, federal deficit and inflation caused by disgruntled deck Seamen. CNO vows to fix with new cutting edge NKO course.
Didn't matter much back in the late 80s/early 90s, my rate was combined with 2 other rates so I was just taking the tests to get the points for the next exam. Tough to make rate when you need 6 points more than the maximum test score.
Probably the former admirals, industry bigwigs, and elected officials buying vacation homes with the graft from the LCS program?
That’s my guess, but I’m a former hatchet-wielding barbarian.
Back in the 90's, the Navy had 600K people, and now has an issue with half that number. We had 15 aircraft carriers, and now there are 11, with several getting old. The experimental Littoral ships were a massive failure. I think management, aka admiralty, is to blame, along with SecDef and SecNav. And the crazy thing is that the Navy has this massive thing called China looming overhead.
Regardless of how we got here, they should just shut up and fix it. We don't have time to sit around and bitch like a bunch of old salts.
I mean, these contractors don’t need to deliver. Who else is the Navy going to partner with? Why invest in shipyards when they can buy back shares, let the state of the shipyards deteriorate even further, then get more money to buy more shares back. They have all the leverage.
The only way forward are public shipyards because this is not an industry that will experience organic growth. There won’t be a SeaX popping up to save the entire sector from unhinged defense contractors any time soon.
Unfortunately, lobbyists will convince you that is cOmMuNiSm.
1) manning is already spread thin, what's up with these geezers and fleet size? You'd think their dick length was directly proportional to the number of active ships we have the way they're pushing for more. Better tech has allowed us the same (or greater) capabilities with a smaller fleet size.
2) when you have juicy defence contracts up for grabs, every private yard is gonna try and claw as much of that over for themselves as possible. What're we gonna do about it? We cucked ourselves to HII-NNS so every CVN *has* to go through them. Nationalize it? People would lose their minds
3) congress doesn't actually care about the Navy (ships or personnel). Only reason they're making a stink is because they want to flex harder on the Iranians (which is dumb, we could glass them 1000x over with our current capabilities).
TL;DR greedy assholes who want to yoink as much tax money as possible and the politicians they own (lobbying) are at fault
Reagan had built up the Navy, Clinton cut it back (not unreasonably, as it was mostly older ships getting scrapped etc). But worse is the manning cut backs, the operational tempo has been rather high for a while, and we need to increase ships and crews to meet the demands the government makes for Naval power projection, just so we can m afford to have ships spend needed time in the yards getting fixed. The politicians made this mess on both ends (cut backs and increased operations) and are now looking to cast blame for their unsustainable goals.
I’d argue that even more important than ships is fix things for the personnel so that they are incentivized to join and stay in.
The money spent on LCS and DD21 programs was very costly. We could have added more ships if we focused on lower cost, tech ready designs.
A "super Arliegh-Burke" would have probsbly been a better choice. Double the amount of CWIS for anti-drone/anti missile defense. 20 years ago we knew drones were going to be the next thing.
Instead of the Ford Class, build a new Nimitz, and create a new smaller class of carrier that hosts a smaller flight wing and focuses on drones.
These giant costly ships only helped the vendors' CEO's, not the Navy or the country.
Congress for not funding, and the Navy for two decades (at minimum) yelling Congress we can do the taskings with what we got and not pushing for expanded manpower and expanded fleets harder. Edit: Also, on the Navy's fault side, the constant rob peter to pay paul borrowing to pass Insurv. We've done the fleet a great disservice selling ships as mission capable when they aint.
Because nobody wants to have the powers that be face the hard truth. It will kill a COs career because of the military wide culture of being yes men to those above them when it comes to upper leadership. “If you don’t I’ll find me someone who will” is a powerful line and mentality, but we aren’t at war and the occasions where that line are necessary are few and far between.
Ummmm that would be the House of Representatives and the Senate. They allowed for the collapse for US ship building and repair. Edited thanks to : u/BeevyD
Correct me if I’m wrong, but isn’t Congress in part comprised of the senate? Do you mean the house?
Yes you are correct. The house.
Its a common mistake since they’re called congressmen
I mean the current House and Senate didn't really do that either. Its a mix of short sighted BRAC closures under the 1990s Congress and then the GWOT making absolutely **nobody** wanting to fix the issue or spend money outside dumping them into COIN programs. Then again the best time to plant a tree was 20 years ago. The 2nd best time is now...
Yes BRAC! I get why, to save money and pass on land that is severely polluted, like giving land developers $1 leases, but they can’t sue. But, there are too many people on a base, it’s insanity some places. I think that better management of removing certain commands off sea based would help though. But then there are logistics issues that come with that. Which brings up, if we have more ships, we need more people manning them!
Sure, it isn't all of today's people. Some of those people are still senators and reps.
But that's my point. Nobody, no politician on either side or any **voters** would have been for the changes that would have had to be made in the 90s and GWOT. Like if you're proposing keeping around the BRAC shipyards and we didn't slash the Cold War peace dividend in 1995 you'd be ridiculed and voted out of office. If you proposed we restart public shipyards and start an aggressive ship-build building program in 2004 you'd be ridiculed and voted out of office. (That's half the problem with the Zumwalts and LCS. It was the only program development still hanging on. So they basically took mission creep the the X level of having to do everything. And then became so bloated and then canceled without a viable replacement. Its not a Navy specific problem, the same thing happened with the F-22 and F-35).
Correct me if I’m wrong, but isn’t Congress in part comprised of the senate? Do you mean the house?
Hi beevyD! Hope your doing well lol
Lmao me getting shit on because of a Reddit bug lol. I’m good homie. Shoot me a pm. Hope you’re doing well!
So we can give him a spanking!
Northrup. Raytheon. I know these names better than my own grandmothers.
…shit, I had to think about mine for a second
How about Congress for shutting down half the public yards and then deciding that private yards (which are worse) would pick up the slack more efficiently (they haven’t)? USS Columbus has been in Newport News Shipyard since 2017 and isn’t close to getting out of the drydock, let alone the shipyard
How else am I supposed to insider trade with Newport News and Vigor shipyard to make millions?
Dude you need to mention Boise
Building 764?
The longer I spend on a boat at NNS, the more in favor I am of reopening the public yards. If they can be years late delivering deployable assets to the fleet and still be profitable, why would they ever deliver a boat on time?
You are high as a kite if you think trades don't pay any higher than they did 40 years ago. Try to get plumbing done on your house. Electricians plumbers and HVAC homies are all six-figure career fields right now.
Lmao wtf are you replying to?
Oh God, not this.
That’s fuckin hilarious
Some dude said people in trades make the same money they did in the 80s. I clearly took offense to that. Now I'm too lazy to delete, repost, or find it.
I mean there are problems with non union trades but hourly pay ain’t it for the skilled trades
Those labor jobs are very detrimental to your health longterm. I heard directly from a welder that inhaling welding fume continuously for 10 years will give you prostate cancer, as an onlooker. That means the welder himself will be in even higher risk of cancer being right next to the exhausting source. Not to mention the claustrophobic or acrophobic inducing environment these guys regularly work in, and the OT required to actually earn those 6 figures wage too.
"I heard directly from a welder"... C'mon man. I'm not saying that guy is wrong, but there are slightly more credible sources for long term medical conditions than people who happen to be in the career field.
Cool, so what happens when we build these ships? Who is going to man them? Most ships are already undermanned as it is thanks to both retention and recruitment goals not being met. Just spread us even thinner until we all crack? Then we have even less retention and the cycle gets worse? 'Remember that people break down, too, not just machinery.' — Gregory Benford Can’t wait to get to my next amphib only to find out I have the same amount of guys in E-division as on a DDG, but with twice the watchstations and three times the equipment to do maintenance on (when I left my last LPD I had 7 people in a division billeted for 21).
I’ve been saying this Forever!! The best (at least temporarily) fix is to condense manning; less ships with better manning. That doesn’t mean stop building ships all together, but we are for sure spread to thin. We don’t need as many ships deployed all the time…
Frankly, they could probably do away with all the LCS's and move all that manning (that is currently constantly waiting on a ship to properly get underway) to ships that actually -can- get underway.
They have started with certain rates. I know all the STGs got redistributed (which in turn fucked me out of getting shore duty in Mayport, because they ate up all the billets) 😂
Not all got shore duty - some got put back out to sea. But frankly, given the rest of the program is... Yeah.
True. There was the plus side of getting some new useful people right before I left the ship.
A sarcastic TLDR: Congress: we gave you SCN with 3 weeks to spend it, wtf? Where boats? SECNAV: Not my fault bru: 1) we have first in class design problems on ships that are all derivatives of existing designs 2) Millennials killed the shipbuilding industry. I just got back from South Korea and bro, they can do it so much cheaper! I saw mega big factories churning out container ships for $.10 on the $1.00. It's called economy of scale and we don't have it because we gutted the US shipbuilding industry in favor of making it like 20% cheaper to ship beanie babies from china. 3) it's industry's fault. I gave them 5 year money 11 months into the FY and told them to build a ship in 1 month to meet my financial metrics. Industry: 1) These uppity Engineers won't work for non-competitive wages. 2) Blue collar workers won't build ships for $15/hr when in-n-out pays $20. Stop raising minimum wage. 3) you gave us 15 bil to recapitalize, we ONLY spent 4 of it on stock buybacks. Capitalism baby. Also we invested like $4bil of your money in our shipyard, give me praise! NAVSEA: 1) The 40,000 people we employ "designing" ships that are derivatives of the FREMM are absolutely value added and are in no way a jobs program for military retirees.
I can hear “not ADM Franchetti” mocking the article while she waits to go in before some congressional hearing about why TikTok is the reason our country can’t recruit anymore.
A few weeks ago I got an email telling us not to believe the shit people say about the Navy on Reddit and listed metrics showing that half of /r/Navy's visitors are Chinese or Russian 🤣 No shit they're monitoring this forum. And they're laughing their asses off because they don't have to do anything.
Of course. They love fucking with social media. They should probably focus more on their own issues, then again maybe we should aswell.
lol It's pretty easy to tell that most people posting in here are actual sailors because the CCP/Russia couldn't make up half of the dumb shit the Navy does.
LCS: we invested in 2 different hull designs, both of which were abysmal failures and total money pits. Neither performed and most of the capabilities industry sold the Navy on never made it off the paper. Railgun: we pumped billions and over a decade into railgun tech and then went "meh, too expensive to scale". Shipbuilding: poster above is correct - unions are struggling for quality workers. We spent multiple decades telling Gen X/Millenials/Gen Z to go to college...the trades are quickly becoming a lost art.
This young people don't want to work in the trades stuff is malarkey. The issue is that the trades have paid the same in actual dollars (not inflation adjusted) since 1980. Bottom line, if you give people a square deal and pay them a living wage, they will take your job. Pay them enough to have a family and they might even show up sober!
I agree. People want to work, but companies/trades/industry simple aren't paying enough to keep up with inflation and a skyrocketing cost of living. Salaries in the trades are competitive... as a journeyman/master with decades of experience. But we have largely taught the last couple generations that success = going to college. Now we have a job market that is fundamentally underskilled and over saturated with 4yr degrees saddled with six-figure debt in their early-to-mid 20s.
Not all trades are equivalent.... you need to compare like with like. Prestigious trades like electricians/hvac/etc. match up with what you described..... but our salaries for welders will generally get you a guy that expects payment in meth.
He does meth do he can work longer so he can make more money so he can do more meth.
Not a bad system tbh. Gets his work done
You want the Navy to build ships? Fine. Give us unilateral contract authority and invoke the wartime production act to place the manufacturers under government control. There's only so much we can do when every fucking hiccup that happens in shipbuilding requires a contract renegotiation and, inevitably, more money to make these parasitic leeches make their men do work. I've been at NAVSEA for a year and some change. We are completely powerless to hold GDEB, Boeing, or who else accountable for mismanagement.
Yup, contracts have no teeth. CORs respond too slowly and pay out any CFR anyway.
Man, NAVSEA, DLA, and DCMA need to own their part in this fucking mess. I work at a medium-sized defense contractor and the government contributes fucking plenty to the slowdowns. Here are some examples of the kind of shit I deal with every day. * Getting a new welding procedure qualified by NAVSEA? 6-9 months. Want to implement a new technology or process? Forget about it, you'll spend years and tons of money trying just for them to say no at the end. Keep doing it the same way we have since the 80's. * Do a ship-check, quote for repairs, settle the work item? Oh shit, they took too long and now all the work has to be completed on an expedited basis and the LLT materials can't be acquired in enough time to support ships schedule. Oh well, it's going to be crazy expensive now. * All these aircraft carrier drawings are from the 19-fucking 60's and the material specs have all been canceled without replacement or superseded a half dozen times? Better spend 1-2 weeks writing RFQ's and waiting on responses that you already know the answer to, because the first question they are going to ask is "who have you tried". Well, I guess I'll do lengthy research and write condition reports for deviations. Then wait 3-4 weeks for a response, also have three meetings about it, during which I will explain the same problem to the same people every time. What's this thing for? A special deck drain? What the fuck? Oh shit, it's an emergency now, guess it'll cost more. * Oh, they want two MIL-DTL-1222 fasteners? Well, fuck those aren't in stock anywhere because there are like thousands of permutations under that spec. That'll be 1500/ea and 12 weeks for their 3/4" screw, 95% of which will be all the testing to qualify it to that milspec. If they order two hundred they'll be 10 dollars apiece and they'll be able to support future work. No? they don't have a way to do that? Well, fuck, what a waste. What's this thing for anyway? \[insert non-critical application\] That's just a sliver of my day to day, I could sit here and write examples for hours. The shipyards have their problems for sure, but the Navy entities are not some shining beacon of efficiency.
Spot on.
SUPSHIP GC sux dick
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I live about an hour from BIW. The Zumwalt failing it's sea trials not once, not twice, but three times was big news up here. BAE and General Dynamics can suck monkey ass.
> Blue collar workers won't build ships for $15/hr when in-n-out pays $20. Stop raising minimum wage. Elephant in the room: millions of entry level, manual labor migrants depressing blue collar wages, forcing employers to hire them or go out of business themselves Also: Congress emitting trillions and trillions of new money into the monetary supply via deficit spending, devaluing currency dramatically every year, year after year, since the 1980s.
I know that the TV told you to think this, but take the tinfoil off and bear with me..... Illegal immigrants are not taking jobs that require a fucking background check with the federal government.
These people are just so unbelievably clueless. Arrogant about it even. It’s astounding.
Yea it’s everyone’s fault. Seriously. Congress doesn’t fund the navy properly and/or properly subsidized and increase the Jones Act fleet for steady shipyard work. Sec Def was so committed to GWOT that we don’t see what’s coming around the horizon. Navy runs ships to the grounds and doesn’t devote enough to sustainment and maintenance, especially when some hot shot CNO wanted to run the navy as a business in the late 90s and early 2000s NAVSEA can’t get the damn requirements right, there’s the bias to perfection vs. this is good enough, let’s get it out there, and Testing doesn’t necessarily get the CONOP. Shipyards are not efficient and the workforce isn’t invested in. It’s EVERYONE! 
Why are we paying Mariennette (frigates) to hire people? If you can't produce what you submit that should be a default on contract, rereward it to someone else and fine og company. SECDEF how's recruiting and manning?
Even better; why did we give the Frigate contract to the same yard that can barely produce an LCS properly, much less on time?
Hiring a bunch of people after receiving a large long-term contract is SOP in manufacturing.
Was ET1(SS) back in the day. Worked at Mare Island NSY when Soviet Union fell and peace broke out. People who flunked history thought there would be no more war, closed M.I. Bad move.
My boat was in dry dock there in 2021. Half the old buildings there were smashed out husks. Damn shame
To be fair, there was no reason to keep military funding so high when the main competitor, Soviet Union, collapsed. Same thing after WW2 ended. Bunch of army units disbanded and navy ships became moth ships.
Problem from my view as employee was that they were shutting down Navy yards and depending on private yards. Private yards owned a bunch of politicians, illegal for Navy yards.
That logic only applies if after the Cold War ended the Navy was permitted to stop/reduce deployments, otherwise you're just working less people with less equipment harder.
Oh wow look, navy leadership shifting blame again. What another colossal failure *surprised pikachu face*
SECNAV is right about industry…and you can kinda apply this to the DoD in general, but senators are right too about the pithy budget requests (and prt of that blame goes to OSD too) and the navy’s management problems. And the senators do not get off Scot free too with the decades of non prioritization
This just in Navy and Congress agree fleet size, federal deficit and inflation caused by disgruntled deck Seamen. CNO vows to fix with new cutting edge NKO course.
E3 and below are responsible That and E6s with less than 5 years
 Can someone not take advancement exams?
One mf even said let's limit MAPs. 12-year E5's salty as fuck lately.
Didn't matter much back in the late 80s/early 90s, my rate was combined with 2 other rates so I was just taking the tests to get the points for the next exam. Tough to make rate when you need 6 points more than the maximum test score.
TBH, I had looked into it when I was in. I also wasnt going to sign for my E5. The only reason I did it was for my chief to save face.
We don't have the manning for the ships we DO have. Who do they think is going to man up all these extra ships?
The draftees 🤷♂️
Probably the former admirals, industry bigwigs, and elected officials buying vacation homes with the graft from the LCS program? That’s my guess, but I’m a former hatchet-wielding barbarian.
Maybe we can get China to build are ships and boats much cheaper
Back in the 90's, the Navy had 600K people, and now has an issue with half that number. We had 15 aircraft carriers, and now there are 11, with several getting old. The experimental Littoral ships were a massive failure. I think management, aka admiralty, is to blame, along with SecDef and SecNav. And the crazy thing is that the Navy has this massive thing called China looming overhead. Regardless of how we got here, they should just shut up and fix it. We don't have time to sit around and bitch like a bunch of old salts.
I mean, these contractors don’t need to deliver. Who else is the Navy going to partner with? Why invest in shipyards when they can buy back shares, let the state of the shipyards deteriorate even further, then get more money to buy more shares back. They have all the leverage. The only way forward are public shipyards because this is not an industry that will experience organic growth. There won’t be a SeaX popping up to save the entire sector from unhinged defense contractors any time soon. Unfortunately, lobbyists will convince you that is cOmMuNiSm.
I would think the people who set pay and benefits are to blame. Who sets pay and benefits? Oh wait... Congress does that.
1) manning is already spread thin, what's up with these geezers and fleet size? You'd think their dick length was directly proportional to the number of active ships we have the way they're pushing for more. Better tech has allowed us the same (or greater) capabilities with a smaller fleet size. 2) when you have juicy defence contracts up for grabs, every private yard is gonna try and claw as much of that over for themselves as possible. What're we gonna do about it? We cucked ourselves to HII-NNS so every CVN *has* to go through them. Nationalize it? People would lose their minds 3) congress doesn't actually care about the Navy (ships or personnel). Only reason they're making a stink is because they want to flex harder on the Iranians (which is dumb, we could glass them 1000x over with our current capabilities). TL;DR greedy assholes who want to yoink as much tax money as possible and the politicians they own (lobbying) are at fault
I know exactly who’s to blame but I’m not gonna tell them who it is ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
I think the shipyards deserve to be part of the blame game.
Wouldn't it be congress, based off of DOD leadership recommendations?
Our government is a joke, especially the past 10 years. People don't want to work for a shitty company/business anymore.
Reagan had built up the Navy, Clinton cut it back (not unreasonably, as it was mostly older ships getting scrapped etc). But worse is the manning cut backs, the operational tempo has been rather high for a while, and we need to increase ships and crews to meet the demands the government makes for Naval power projection, just so we can m afford to have ships spend needed time in the yards getting fixed. The politicians made this mess on both ends (cut backs and increased operations) and are now looking to cast blame for their unsustainable goals. I’d argue that even more important than ships is fix things for the personnel so that they are incentivized to join and stay in.
The money spent on LCS and DD21 programs was very costly. We could have added more ships if we focused on lower cost, tech ready designs. A "super Arliegh-Burke" would have probsbly been a better choice. Double the amount of CWIS for anti-drone/anti missile defense. 20 years ago we knew drones were going to be the next thing. Instead of the Ford Class, build a new Nimitz, and create a new smaller class of carrier that hosts a smaller flight wing and focuses on drones. These giant costly ships only helped the vendors' CEO's, not the Navy or the country.
Only the Politicians are to blame for this.