The results of sequestration continue to bite the Navy in the ass…
The U.S. Navy’s cruiser modernization program has been disorganized in its planning and troubled in its execution, service leaders have told Defense News.
<snip>
Seven cruisers were put into a particular variation of the modernization program as part of plans to extend the life of the Ticonderoga-class guided-missile cruisers: They’d undergo an initial maintenance availability to modernize areas like the galley; go into a reduced operating status with a skeleton crew of about 35 sailors watching over the ship pierside for several years; go into a one-year availability to prepare for dry docking; and then conduct an “extended dry-docking selected restricted availability” where the bulk of the work would be done.
The first cruiser, Gettysburg, is nearing the end of that process and will go to sea this year, after its 2014 entrance into the service life-extension effort.
Full article, HERE from Defense News.
Note that it has taken EIGHT years to do one ship… The one year avail is now in year THREE, because of the amount of work needed, and lack of planning for systemic integration of the upgrades… Sigh…
What isn’t mentioned is the whole sequestration, “Well, we don’t need cruisers anymore, so we can park them…oh wait, we DO need them. But we can reduce manning to get more maintenance done in port.” Which didn’t happen. What happened was the Navy got behind on basic maintenance due to lack of personnel and reduced budgets, which also impacted the ship availabilities to do upgrades, because operational ‘needs’ kept the ships running ragged.
This not only applied to maintenance, but to crew training… Grrr…
When you look back at the accidents that the Navy has had, most, if not all, can be directly attributed to lack of training in basic functions, like seamanship, ASW, damage control, and upkeep on the ships themselves. When you add in the different modification cycles the ships were on, it became a confusing mess…
And the consolidation/merging of rates into ‘new’ rating pools also caused problems with manning. One example was signalman, sailors who specialized in visual communications, such as flag semaphore, visual morse code, and flag hoist signaling being combined with quartermasters, who specialized in navigation and operations on the bridge and CIC. Now the QM rate has to do ALL of those things. But the senior people who got merged DIDN’T KNOW HOW TO DO THE OTHER RATE’S JOBS! But they got orders without regard to the actual job they were being ordered into…
There are plenty of other horror stories of merged ratings and the problems ships, subs, and air units had as result of all this.
And now we’re in a situation where we need ALL of those ships and subs at sea, and airplanes in the air as a deterrent.
But it’s not going to happen thanks to sequestration and mismanagement at the highest levels.
“mismanagement at the highest levels”
Malfeasance.
But Hey! “Peace in our time” from the Lightbringer.
CDR Salamandar has covered this quite well beginning eons ago.
All part of the lefts plan…..the left has worked VERY hard since Obozo the SCOAMF took office to totally gut our military and render it impotent. And they have succeeded in a big way. Now that the Military is a joke both China and Russia are flexing.
I remember going aboard the USS long Beach when my father was stationed in her. Everybody I talked to was proud of her. They considered her the jewel of the fleet.
A few years later my wife is talking about her ex’s worse duty station. The USS long Beach.
According to him the ship was a floating hell.
Now he was surface nuc engine room and dad was an officer. And wife’s ex seemed to move from hell hole to hell hole but the entire altitude in the navy seemed to have changed.
I’m skeptical that sequestration was the problem. I can’t imagine that the military couldn’t have found budget cuts that didn’t involve maintenance and training. Anyone else remember use it or lose it budgeting? No reason that the military couldn’t scale back by the % asked, just like every other department in government was required to do. I would have liked to have seen much deeper cuts in other areas not defense related but I never felt that the sequestration plan was particularly onerous.
Lack of leadership however. How about the money spent on free dresses for military personnel and training about how to treat trannies when they showed up at roll call in their spike heels and rainbow hair colors? Diversity, equity, inclusion training? Billions in lost equipment in Afghanistan and Iraq? The lists continue.
Heresolong _ I believe the Navy spends more
On VIAGRA – Then the less than 1% of transgender ( learn to say it correctly )
Shipmates.
Those Sailors who use term ” trannie ”
Have never Met One or Even got to know
That person / shipmate
Yes we have been serving Underground for many years :p
People like you are not real
Shipmates ⚓
Holly, they’re trannies, and in a proper Navy, they’d be discharged. They are a threat to military order and discipline, and to unit cohesion.
I’m quite certain that I served with homosexuals. They’ve been in every military, and about every group of humans, longer than we have memories. I have no problem with someone’s sexuality so long as they don’t push it in my face and demand not my tolerance or acceptance, but my approval.
I’m sure that means I want to ‘keep them in a closet’. No, but I don’t want them walking into my home and demanding preference, either.
BTW, my best find when I was a teenager is now a M2F transgender ( I term I dislike, as gender applies to words, not people), and we have no problems. If I visit ‘Sera’ in ‘her’ home, the rules are the rules of that house; I sort of expect to see a dress or skirt. If my friend comes to visit me in my home, he comes as Edmund.
No. Just no.
Insanity must not be accepted, much less encouraged.
Men in dresses are deluded men, not women.
If you want to tolerate sodomite behavior, I can’t stop you. The rest of us have had enough of being forced to accept it.
We’ve also put critically needed funds into boondoggles like the Zoomie and the LCS.
But never fear, racial equity training proceeds unimpeded.
Come on! You know how this works. Somebody at some milpers desk got a Legion of Merit and their promotion to one or two star out of this.
Can you imagine if they had ran WWII like this? We’d either still be fighting or speaking German/Japanese.
Landlubber that I am, I think I know the meaning of an “Irish Pennant”. Is that the new Navy flag?
Apologies in advance; this will be a bit lengthy, but I hope not too much so.
I sailed–well, steamed–aboard CV 67 as ship’s company, and CV 59 as SeaOpDet. Carriers then (1988-92 was my time) would come back in from a +/- 6-month cruise & go to the shipyard; they’d spend 4 to 6 months being repaired & doing ‘minor’ refurbishments, so far as ‘minor’ goes on a 90,000-ton warship. SLEPs were a lot more rare, maybe a couple during a carrier’s entire life, and we kept oil-burning carriers running for a looong time. A SLEP (that’s Service Life Extension Program) was figured to take between 14 & 28 months, according to the Nav. Remember–14 to 28 months: a bit over a year to two-and-a-third. This is what it involved:
“The carriers had their boilers and turbines heavily serviced. Some turbines were re-bladed, boilers rebuilt, lots of steam pipes replaced. The 1200psi have been described to me a few times as a royal pain. New catapults on many of the ships, all the food service equipment replaced, new condensers, aircraft maintenance upgraded with lots of new machinery. Electronics were upgraded. The Mk23 TAS and NATO Sea Sparrow in place of BPDMS Sea Sparrow or Terrier. Phalanx was on some ships already but the guns were repositioned and additional guns added. Some sponsons were removed or replaced. Some ships had to have more extensive modernizations than others. Lots and lots of repairs. I believe a few of the ships had lots of the hull plating replaced. Lots and lots of paint.”
Quote by ‘Seasick’ on a USN forum I was reading.
35 sailors watching over a cruiser pierside for years? That cruiser would have been better served to have been put in mothballs (but that would have been more expensive). So, the Perfumed Princes of the Pentagon decided that the Little Crappy Ships were more important, and the Ticonderoga class would be ‘defunded’.
Can we get rid of some admirals, please? Not all of them, I still hope there’s a few that are competent officers, just the bottom 80%.
“Can we get rid of some admirals, please? Not all of them, I still hope there’s a few that are competent officers, just the bottom 80%.” The danger in that is who decides the bottom 80% ? During Obamas sequestration it was the political shit weasels that decided who was a good officer. I personally watched the officers who were Competent and lead by example get their pink slip while the political ring knockers were rubber stamped based on the training they got as part of the acadmy. I would gladly take a former cav scout mustang over a west pointer who never saw combat but looks great in uniform because he was able to go to air assault, airborne sapper and ranger schools before going to his first posting in a supply or admin unit. Competency was not how decisions were made, it was polotical and social class disguised under what schools you went to. That and a new review system that made it possible to give OER and NCOERs on a bi monthly basis if command wanted to play games with the rater while simultaneously saying that if you were rateing 4 people you must give a 1 of them a 4/4. The bad apples did their best to toss out the good ones.
Okay, so I was being too optimistic. Had a long talk with my sister about it. She was a navy corpsman, got out and got her RN, went AF and made it to O5 before retirement. She deployed to the sandbox a few times, went out on choppers to ensure care was being done right, didn’t play the political game.
She said that you could still make it to O5 and possibly O6 on competence, but no one made it past O6 without being a politician. As a mustang, O5 was the limit for her.
All- Thanks for the comments and yes, a ship/sub/squadron could go from very good to very bad in a short period of time…
Hereso- I sat in enough meetings in both C7F and C3F and saw how badly the maintenance and training side were being treated at the 2-3 star level, all in the guise of meeting OPTEMPO/PERSTEMPO BS, and the lack of $$$ to do the required upkeeps/upgrades. And yes, sequestration had a good sized part in that. When a ship couldn’t be brought back to the states for refit/upgrade because there was “not enough bunker fuel” in the pool to get it home, so keep in out here and keep pushing her.
Hey Old NFO;
Face it, Maintenance ain’t sexy and it don’t get the votes from the folks back home, neither does training unless it is the new buzzword stuff that makes congress open the pursestrings. It sucks and I blame the leadership that are more interested in their careers than the people and the responsibility under their command to get everything ready in case the balloon goes up, it is more “cover my ass” than doing what is right. and this is a total change from the service of old.