Far East Cynic

Missing a golden opportunity-Navy Style.

To prove once and for all-that overseas basing does not require building an exchange, a commissary and a clinic.

SINGAPORE — The Singapore military has agreed in-principle to allow the U.S. Navy to deploy up to four littoral combat ships to the city-state on a rotational basis.

The announcement came Saturday after a meeting between Singapore’s Defense Minister Ng En Hen and U.S. Defense Secretary Leon Panetta at the Shangri-La Dialogue, a meeting of regional defense leaders here.

Sounds great doesn't it? But leave it to good old mother Navy to fuck up a good deal:

The LCS will not be based or homeported in Singapore and U.S. crews will live on board the ships for the duration of their deployment, the joint statement said.

 

Note to Sailors on those LCS's-find your counterparts on the other crew, make a written agreement-and then go find a Singapore real estate agent and find a small clean apartment that can be rented to foreigners. Take turns living in it when you re in port-and durng the leave rotations, find a nice, shapely, Filipina girl friend   maid to keep it clean and have a great time………Oh right-you will have to be back aboard every night at midnight,  so you can get breathalyzed. Never mind.

Seriously-the Navy is blowing a good opportunity here to bolster retention, make Sailors happy,  and build inroads in a strategically located nation. And they would not have to build one extra building of infrastructure. Quality apartments already exist, plenty of shopping, good medical care, high quality international schools-all it would take is for you fucking skinflints in Big Navy to pay a lot of COLA , school tuition and OHA. How hard is that? It is still cheaper than exchanges, commissaries, GS's, and DODDS teachers.

Sounds like the watch word of the LCS program-missed opportunities. AGAIN.

  1. oh yes what does this remind me of………….Japan? Why I don't know. Could have rented a girl for less than the taxi fare for raping and killing her in the words of the GOFO running the hq there at the time.

  2. Skippy, you are wasting your time.  That is just the way the Navy wants it.  Keep them on the ship, and make them have a chit if they want to stay overnigth off the ship.  That way, there is less of a chance for liberty incidents, and we don't have a strong enough of a hand in Singapore to impose our morality and force them to close Orchard Towers.  Because that place is visited by other foreigners and not just the USN like the Honch is in Yokosuka.
    So keeping in good standing with the "Uber liberals" and woman's movement in the US, it's ok to show pictures of military members breast feeding, but not ok to show military members choosing a brast to feed from.

  3. Don't even get me started on the breast feeding thing. Besides the fact that its a double standard-what shocks me most are the damn men who are actually defending the idea that its ok to do it uniform.
    But yet-if you wanted to walk into a strip bar in uniform to suck on some titties-that would be wrong.

  4. Curtis, Macke was not incorrect, just ill timed. Which is not surprising for him. ( He was CCG4 a long time ago when we did work ups).

    Not sure what this has do with homeporting LCS's though.

  5. I cannot argue with you on this topic. That remark of his was unbelievably stupid and ill timed. No I was going to the underlying gestalt of the decision by the crazies to just go ahead and implement General Order No. 1 worldwide.
     
    Sorry, nothing to do with LCS. Just the basing strategy for bringing them in, not allowing them to be FDNF and screwing them to pieces on the whole bupers front. No per diem for you losers. no housing allowances, no wives or family. just what we did to the army in SKorea. When I posted it I had just gone to Lederer and "All the Ships At Sea" for a Joe Fyffe piece from just after the war which still resonates with me 50 years later to send to a friend who had never heard of "All the ships at sea".
    One of my last fights was with an idiot pair of admirals who decided they could gain by pulling the FDNF guys back to conus and then continue to deploy them like FDNF, minus all the perks and shit. not on my watch.