Warning notice! Unhinged rant follows.
Profanity alert!
I’ve watched the uproar concerning the decision by outgoing SECNAV Winter to give an award with some interest. The flurry of activity on the blogosphere and on e-mail lists has been interesting to say the least.
Why Winter felt compelled to give an award to a man who is a lightning rod for negativity is totally beyond me. How many ships are built in Johnstown, PA anyway?
Oh wait, Secretary Winter did a fine job of screwing up Navy Shipbuilding all by himself.
This is just the last in a long line of boneheaded Navy decisions, but it is just the kind of fluff issue that dickheads like this guy can sink their teeth into. And in so doing accomplish about as much as the tea party idiots are doing in their respective communities.
In other words, nothing.
You want to get mad at the Navy about something? I’ll give you something a lot more important to get mad at the Navy about.
Rather than sign a petition to get the Navy to withdraw an award it was within its right to do ( whether it was smart to do or not is not the issue) I’d rather sign a petition advocating criminal negligence charges for Donald Rumsfeld, Secretary Winter, “CNO for life” Admiral Vern Clark, and a whole host of lesser criminals. They are the ones who made Navy shipbuilding and aircraft procurement the train wreck that it is today.
Want to get mad about something? Get mad about the fact that we spending billions on the Little Crappy Ship and it can’t do a damn thing. Or that we are building a DDG that’s is the size of a WWII cruiser-while our NATO allies and our Korean and Japanese allies are building very nice designs that we could build under license for half the money. Get mad that the wings are falling off your P-3 fleet, because the Navy could not or would not make a decision to field a replacement when it could have 8 years ago. Same fact is true for ( Fill in the name of every Naval Aircraft except the F-18). Or how we retired perfectly good Spruance Destroyers and Oliver Hazard Perry FFG’s and did not build more Arleigh Burke class ships-the most successful ship design we have had in years. Get mad that the Navy-not the administration-is slow rolling procurement of the advanced Hawkeye so it can continue to pour money down the other aforementioned sinkholes.
Get mad about how the Navy has given itself over to the “Diversity Bullies” and that the words “best qualified” have become just a meaningless platitude. Get mad about the fact that the Navy-my Navy that I loved even if I did not always like it-has more admirals than it does ships right now. That in spite of losing almost 70,000 Sailors in the last 9 years, NOT ONE FLAG OFFICER BILLET has been lost. Get really angry that there are more Sailors ashore in CENTCOM than are afloat-a lot of whom are doing jobs they were never trained for. This while Navy at sea time and personnel operations tempo is the worst it has been in many years. There are ships making 9 month turnarounds between cruises. For AEGIS BMD ships it is the norm now-not the exception.
Get white hot angry over flag officers who blindly accept lies, statements they know to be lies, so they could help out another flag officer create a billet for himself-at the expense of requiring 200 personnel to move 800 miles. As a result of that one decision the Navy incurred a bill of over 2 million extra dollars a year in increased expenses for that one little group of personnel.
Get really angry over the fact that the Navy-my Navy-destroyed its overseas maintenance capability with the stroke of a pen, all so it could create a new stateside bureaucracy-and is now realizing that it has made a big mistake.
There’s a lot more on the list. If you want to be mad at your Navy, there are a lot better reasons than giving an award to John Murtha.
I had to get that off my chest.
Sheesh Skippy,
You’re not even over there again for FE! I’m rejoicing in missing my first FE over the last 7 years and will never go again. You rage against piddly little $2million staff expenses but what about paying for repairs to another damned idiot SSN that has collided with a blue force ship? That’s going to hurt. What about Port Royal deciding that the most important aspect of a small boat transfer was to find a reef upon which she could gut herself? That’s gonna leave a mark in the old wallet.
The biggest problem with what you hate and despise is that the navy doesn’t really have a mission anymore. LCS were a crappy idea from the git go and that’s more because those who wanted them failed to realize a fundamental difference between the USN and all those corvette navies in Europe. The Europeans can build corvettes and very nice ones because they never deploy them, they never do anything with them, they do not patrol the 5 oceans of the world with them on 7 month deployments. In other words, they’re like building a post office. They’re certifiably harmless.
America, with what it feels, feels are global commitments, needs to build ships capable of executing our national policy anywhere in the world on a moments notice. You can’t do that when you’re so busy casting around for a tanker to drag these short legged ships off on their 7 month deployments since they were not conceived to deploy as integral parts of the strike and expeditionary groups.
Your words about the admirals and shipbuilding are interesting. Look at the underlying structure of the world. The USN has cleverly divorced its uniformed officers from the onerous responsibility for building ships and set up a marvelous Rube Goldberg that sheds accountability for ship construction so widely that no officer could possibly be held accountable for failure. As we fail more and more in this shipbuilding morass we need more and more admirals to shoulder the lack of blame by spreading it more widely.
The vast clouds of P3s required to meet perceived WARTIME requirements against the USSR were obviously excess to the needs against a Russian navy that deploys, on average, 1 submarine a year. The current state of affairs is clearly one that can be laid at the feet of those desperate to find some continuing raison d’etre. They found it, they exploited it and they can f$*k off now by claiming that they deserve to spend the bulk of their time flying their wings off in pursuit of non-existent submarine threats…..oooooohhhhhh China~ I’m really scared. The UK gave them the only that you cared about and if they want Korea or Vietnam or Cambodia (and why would anybody want any of that lot) they can have them. Goes in spades for Spratley and paracells. The only for sure that we can say as Americans is that we have no skin in that game. If Taiwan or the PI want to fight for that crap, let them BUY themselves a navy and air force capable of doing it. The Chinese got Hong Kong. Game over. It does make one wonder if the Chonger and his parent didn’t deliberately wreck Manchukuo or North Korea in a prescient effort to stave off occupation/liberation by Red China. Who wants to liberate an inconsequential shithole? What’s in it for them? At least we can say about liberating Iraq that it is practically afloat on oil, a vital national resource. If the Chinese decided to do for Japan, I would offer to hold their coat. The Japanese are a nasty piece of work and always have been.
I’m not familiar with the destroyed overseas maintenance capability that we used to have that are now gone. I got the best and least expensive services ever in Saudi and Bahraini shipyards. I daresay that shipyards in the middle east will reap a few pence from the latest shiphandling idiocy. I thought that Congress had passed a law decades ago that limited American warships overseas maintenance to “voyage repairs” or essential maintenance. The AD were retired a very long time ago. The only aircraft needing repairs overseas that I recall was a sort of P3 in China. 🙂