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.