Uniform Disasters, the Sequel

(Original post)

It seems that Service Dress Khaki is going forward.

I would expect that Service Khaki, which is the office-puke analogue to the soon-to-be-abolished Working Khaki, is not long for this world.

The Troll Under the Bridge

If you read my original post about screamer COs, it seems that things have changed:

The commanding officer of the Yokosuka, Japan-based cruiser Cowpens was relieved of duty Wednesday after being punished for “cruelty and maltreatment” during her time in charge, the Navy announced. In an unusual move, she is being permitted to continue on to an assignment in the Pentagon.

Capt. Holly Graf was brought before an admiral’s mast with Rear Adm. Kevin Donegan, the commander of Carrier Strike Group 5, after an inspector general’s investigation found problems with her “temperament and demeanor vis-a-vis her subordinates,” said Cmdr. Jeff Davis, a spokesman for 7th Fleet.

Back in the day, it would have taken something close to actions akin to a wartime atrocity for a CO to have been fired for making life difficult for his subordinates.

More to the point of the current issue, allowing a fired ship's captain to continue onto the next duty station is pretty frakking rare. I saw a few folk relieved for cause, from division officers to commanding officers, and all of them were stashed into no-load jobs while the Navy determined what to do with them. Captain Graf has to have one hell of a rabbi watching out over her, or she has some really special skill set that they need in Ft. Fumble. I'm not assuming that she is getting special treatment because of her gender, but if she is, that would really piss me off. I agree with the writers of the USNI blog, this needs to be explained and fast.

(H/T)

Alcohol

I've written before about the peculiar dry status of Navy ships. This post is about the use of alcohol away from the ships.

Decades ago, it was considered almost an indicator of how good a time a sailor or naval officer had ashore if he came back to the ship knee-knocking,puke-stained drunk.A certain amount of rowdiness was expected from drunken sailors (officers, even if drunk, were expected to maintain some decorum). "He got blasted like a real sailor" was one way to put it. I saw sailors come back so drunk that they were lashed, face-down, into Stokes litters, which were then secured into the overhead near the Quarterdeck, so that the Petty Officer and Messenger of the Watch could keep an eye on them.

The sailor who was the Duty Corpsman in a liberty port could pretty much expect to get no sleep. If the ship was anchored out (using boats to send liberty parties to and from the beach), it would not be unusual to have at least one clown break a limb during a port visit from falling down the accommodation ladder from the main deck to the boat.

Things started to change in the latter half of the 1970s. Drunken sailors ashore in foreign ports-of-call were creating incidents that the State Department was getting tired of having to smooth over. In some ports, the local cops took a very dim view of drunken shenanigans and some sailors would up being extended guests of the local criminal justice systems.

The word went out: Crack down. Ships who had reportable incidents would end up having liberty for sailors and shore leave for officers curtailed. No ship captain wanted to be told by the group commander or the fleet commander that the entire ship was on "cinderella liberty" (everyone had to be back aboard by midnight).

The next crackdown was on drunken driving. But first, a little bit of a discourse on procedure:

Whenever there was a serious accident or death, two parallel investigations were commenced. One was a safety investigation to find out what happened and what could be learned from it. The other was a "JAGMAN" investigation, usually conducted by a line officer and conducted in accordance with the Manual of the Judge Advocate General (hence the name). JAGMAN investigations were more concerned with fixing responsibility so that appropriate disciplinary action could be taken.

The two investigators (or teams) did not talk to each other, though both often reported the results of their investigation to the same convening authority. Theoretically, not cooperating with the safety investigation was a chargeable offense, there was no right to remain silent. (One did have rights when interviewed for the JAGMAN investigation.) In the event of an accident, there were three findings that determined benefits: In the line of duty; not in the line of duty and not due to one's own misconduct; an not in the line of duty, due to one's misconduct.

The fixes were these: First, it was decreed that any Commanding Officer, Executive Officer or Command Master Chief who was charged with DWI would be relieved of their jobs. That effectively meant the end of one's career.

The second "fix" was if someone was injured or killed in a drunk driving accident because that person had been drinking, a finding of "not in the line of duty, due to one's own misconduct" was to be entered. The impact of that was that the Navy could go after the injured sailor to recover the costs of treating him. If the sailor was killed while driving drunk then the finding would mean no survivor's pension from the Navy.

There were also moves to de-emphasize the serving of liquor at Navy clubs, but I don't know how effective those were. Alcohol was a serious profit center for the clubs and no doubt the clubs fought back.

But regardless, the day of heavy intoxication being accepted was drawing to a close.

Water, Water, Everywhere Nor Any Drop to Drink

(Followup to this post from November)

This is a diagram that I found on the Intertubes of a multi-stage distillation unit. The principle is the same for Navy ones.

Seawater comes in (though I don't recall chemicals being added). Note that the incoming seawater is fed through coils of piping inside each of the chambers. The water that had flashed to steam condenses on the outside of the coils and then drips into the collection pans. In so doing, the seawater coming into the distillation unit pick up a little bit of heat. Each successive stage of the unit is at a lower internal pressure, which means steam condenses at a lower temperature, which is also why the seawater/cooling water lines run opposite to the flow of the brine in the condenser.

After picking up some heat in the condensation coils, the seawater coming in is heated to near-boiling. The steam ejector, shown on the upper right corner, is used to draw a partial vacuum in each chamber. As I described in the earlier post, the hot seawater is pumped into the first stage, where some of it flashes to steam. The steam condenses, the condensate is collected, and the now-slightly-briny water goes to the second stage and the third stage. Each successive stage has more of a vacuum, the brine boils at lower and lower temperatures and more fresh water is made.

The output of the ejector is contaminated somewhat with salt, so the steam waste is not recovered. The brine exiting the distillation unit is pumped overboard.

Drugs

It is fair to say that drug use was very common in the Navy in the 1970s. The only way to nail someone for drug use then was to catch them possessing drugs. Normally, that happened when some idiot was smoking grass in a place where the odor was detected.

Ventilation fan rooms were a common place to smoke weed, but some fools did not bother to check to see where the fan output went. One classic case was a sailor who was smoking pot in a fanroom which fed air to the Captain's cabin. One sailor made sure that the fanroom he used exhausted to the outside of the ship; it was his bad luck that the exhaust outlet was over a refueling station and the ship was refueling alongside an AO at the time, bathing the ensign in charge of the refueling station, the BM1 who was really in change, and the twenty or so linehandlers with the sweet smell of pot smoke.

One funny one was when two sailors were smoking pot in the ship's vehicle; the next user was the ship's master-at-arms, who then obtained the permission of the Command Duty Officer to search the two sailors and their lockers. Another one was when two signalmen, one on each ship, made a deal for some hash by using semaphore signals; they didn't know that an officer on one of the ships, who could read semaphore, read the conversation. The purchasing sailor was met at the quarterdeck by the master-at-arms.

Court-martials on smaller ships were a real pain in the ass to conduct. They could only be held in port and they were a major drain on the ship as it took a considerable amount of time to go from beginning to end. As a result, most disciplinary problems were handled at Captain's Mast, otherwise known as Non-Judicial Punishment, or NJP. The most that could be done at Captain's Mast was to reduce a sailor by one paygrade, a maximum fine of half a month's pay for two months, and confinement.

Confinement options ranged from a maximum of three days in the brig on bread and water or thirty days in the brig or 45 days restriction to the ship with 45 days of extra duty. Hardly anyone was sent to the brig for other than the three days of bread and water and that was only done when those in the sailor's chain of command thought that he was still reachable. Otherwise, restriction to the ship was awarded, for that that way, the miscreant was still available for duty. Extra duty often tended to involve chipping paint and painting either the weatherdecks or the bilges in the enginerooms and firerooms.

The problem was that once a sailor decided that he liked to smoke pot, you might end up catching him once or twice a year, if that. The hard-core stoners just put up with the punishment, even if it meant that they were sent for repeated cranking tours, for they had no intention of re-enlisting, they lived on the ship and they simply didn't care.

In the early `80s, it all changed. The Navy instituted mandatory urine testing, which was soon nicknamed Operation Golden Flow. Once a year, everyone in the command was urine-tested, including all of the officers. Every so often, maybe once a month or once a quarter, the XO rolled a ten-sided die; everyone whose social security number ended in that digit was immediately mustered for a random piss test. Those who had security duties or high security clearances were subject to an additional piss test each year. The urine sampling was witnessed in order to combat cheating.

For officers and chief petty officers, failing a piss test was grounds for discharge. Petty officers, non-rated seamen and strikers were on a "two strikes" system. Some sailors appealed the discharge order and they were then brought before an administrative discharge review board made of three officers, normally headed by a lieutenant commander. The command was represented by a junior officer, the only attorney present was provided to the accused. Most of the boards took their duties seriously and some sailors did prevail, but the vast majority had their discharge orders confirmed and they were thrown out.

The result was, over time, drug usage in the Navy was greatly reduced. There were a lot fewer NJPs (and fewer extra-duty men available for dirty jobs).

The Worst Teaching Job in the Surface Navy

That was being an instructor at Department Head School.

Department Head School, in Newport, RI, was a 20 week school for senior lieutenants. It was the only school in the surface navy that was considered to be a permanent change of duty station for the students, which meant that the Navy moved the families. (All other schools were temporary duty; the students stayed in the BOQ and the families stayed home.) Department Head School, formerly known as Destroyer School, was even longer in the 1970s, but then they stopped teaching everyone calculus, Morse code and semaphore signals.

Much of the school was the Tactical Action Officer course, where the students had to learn everything about the US and Soviet navy's warships. You had to know the difference between a Brooke and Garcia FF and a Krivak and a Kashin, as well as all of the weapon systems in both navies. It was important stuff, for as a TAO, you wouldn't have the time to look it up in a book when you got the word that a flock of Badgers were inbound or someone had detected a Vampire. There were lessons in ASW, AAW, ASUW, landing force operations, navigation refreshers and basic engineering concepts.

Once everyone had their orders, the classes would split into job specifics: Operations, Weapons, Steam Engineering, Diesel Engineering and Gas-Turbine Engineering. Most of the steam engineers-to-be also went to Philadelphia for advanced fire-fighting and to the Great Lakes Training Center for "hot-plant" classes (they had working engineering plants in buildings, the engine shafts drove huge water brakes). Diesel and twidget gas-turbine engineers had their own hot plants, though I've forgotten where they were located.

What made the school the worst to teach is no matter what subject the particular class was about, there was almost always one student in the classroom who was certain to know far more about the subject than the instructor. There was always one student who had lived that subject as a division officer for two or three years. And if the instructor was way off base on the material, he or she could expect to get hammered.

One time, a chief petty officer was teaching a class on corrosion control and when he turned to cathodic protection systems, he said the purpose of cathodic protection was "to keep the cathods off the ship." One student warned him that he could expect to see that answer on test papers, but the chief stuck to it. And sure enough, out of the 25 students in the class, 22 gave that answer on the exam. The chief had to give them all credit and the commander who ran the instruction staff had a cow over it.

Water, Water, Every Where Nor Any Drop to Drink

Ships do not carry enough water to sustain all of the ship's requirements until they reach port. Ships distill their fresh water from seawater.

The process is called flash distilling. Seawater is heated to nearly boiling temperatures and pumped into a distillation chamber. The chamber is at a lower pressure than atmospheric pressure. Water boils at a lower temperature when atmospheric pressure is reduced; some of the heated seawater flashes to steam, that steam is collected and condensed into fresh water. The remaining water is pumped to a second distillation chamber, which is of a lower pressure, and more of the water flashes to steam. The water is then pumped to a third and final chamber and the process is repeated. The remaining water, or brine, is now far more salty than seawater; it is pumped back into the sea. The heat of the brine is not wasted. It flows through a heat exchanger to help heat the incoming water.

Once an evaporator was operating, it would not be shut down until the plant was shut down. A typical small steam-powered combatant would make 12,000 gallons of fresh water per evaporator (two evaps per plant). The rule of thumb was that 12,000 gallons per day went to the engineering plant as feed water to make up for steam leaks and for use in steam atomization of the boiler fuel. The other 12,000 gallons per day was supposed to be potable water which was used for "hotel use": Cooking, cleaning, dishwashing, showers, drinking water, bug juice and, of course, coffee.

As each potable water tank was ready to be used, the ship's corpsman had to test the water in the tank. Seawater in a port or near land was considered to be contaminated by sewage and fecal matter. It could be used, in theory, but heavy doses of bad-tasting chemicals were required to ensure the water was healthy. In practice, to avoid having to heavily treat potable water made from contaminated seawater, fresh water from the evaporators was not "cut into" the potable water tanks until the ship was well out to sea. If a ship was anchored out, a freshwater barge would resupply the ship each day.

Each day, as part of the Twelve O' Clock Reports to the Captain, the Engineering Report listed the amount of fresh waster and feed water on hand, both in gallonage and percentage (and also gave the statistics on fuel used, received and on hand). If the percentage of fresh water was too low, then "water hours" would be initiated. The newer and smaller steam ships made more water than they could use; the potable water and feed water tanks were generally topped off by 0200 each day and the evaporators' output would be piped back into the sea until the work day started.

Older ships were perennially on the edge of having to ration water. Engineering plants developed leaks as they aged and even the most energetic maintenance program could not keep a large steam plant in "as new" condition. Over time, sensors and weapons were added to every ship, which resulted in larger crews over time.[1] A ship unlucky enough to carry a destroyer squadron staff or a flag staff had even more people using fresh water.

I knew of one cruiser captain who decided to make Sunday a working day at sea. When the XO told the department heads, the Chief Engineer quickly collected a few weeks' worth of water reports, which showed that the ship began each Monday with 100% fresh water and began each Sunday with 60% fresh water; the fact that nobody was using water to do heavy cleaning or maintenance on any given Sunday allowed the ship to refill the potable water tanks. As the Cheng explained to the Captain, if Sunday was a working day, by the following Friday, the ship would be on water hours and it would take several days to recover.

The Captain cancelled his plans to work the crew that Sunday.

[1]The LAMPS equipped ships were hardest hit, as the LAMPS detachments had thirty people in them. Those ships were designed to operate drones with a much smaller maintenance team. The helicopter itself required frequent showers of fresh water for corrosion control. Chief Engineers were known to regard the LAMPS detachments as water-sucking vermin.

Schnorring

C'mon, folks. The Army people have coughed up nearly $21,000 to Project Valor-IT and the frickin' Jarheads have given nearly $29,000. The Navy team is at least spared the shame of doing worse than those Junior Birdmen pantywaists, but it's close.

Mental Health Fail

The mental health of officers and sailors in the Navy was, obviously, a concern of the Navy. But from the way that the system was set up, you would think quite the opposite was true.

The shining example was the Personnel Reliability Program, or PRP. People in the PRP included anyone whose job had to do with nuclear stuff and, for all I know, intel and crypto folks (but don't quote me on the latter two). If someone was in the PRP,on the left side of the inside of the folders holding their service record and medical records was a large pink sheet with a triangle that proclaimed that particular service member was in the PRP and that any issues pertaining to reliability, etc. were to be reported to that person's commanding officer.

It took no great skill of imagination to realize that the initial result of such a call would be that you'd lose your security clearances and, depending on what you did, your job. You'd be sent to some bullshit medical holding billet while the Navy figured out how best to get rid of you. If you weren't shitcanned outright, you'd have a black mark on your record showing a hint of unreliability, which would be fatal for the career of any officer. Even without being a member of the PRP, most everyone knew that admitting to any mental health problem was a career-killer. Since everyone knew this, there was terrific real-world pressure to keep quiet about any shipmate who was having problems, regardless of what the official policy happened to be about "looking out for your shipmates".

None of that changed the fact that people had a lot of problems. Families broke up under the stress of near constant absences. Relationships broke up, often when a shore-duty puke stepped out with the girlfriend or boyfriend of a deployed sailor.

What happened was a lot of self-medication, 99% of the time with alcohol, sometimes with other drugs, though urinalysis made using anything other than alcohol tricky to do. If someone sought professional help, they went to a shrink on the outside, they used an assumed name and paid cash.[1] But it was rare, indeed, for someone to cough up the cash to get help, so help usually came from a can of Bud or a bottle of Jack Black.

All this came to mind when I read the coverage about the shooting at Ft. Hood a few days ago. It is pretty obvious to me, at least, why, if anyone noticed that the shooter was becoming unstable, nobody said anything about it.

[1]There was a story of someone who was so pissed off at their commanding officer that they went to a civilian shrink, used the CO's name, and confessed to all sort of unsavory and illegal things, culminating with a discussion of who he was going to kill. As the story goes, the shrink called the cops, the cops called the base cops and the CO had a very unpleasant time until they showed the shrink the CO's photo and the shrink said it wasn't him. But that's probably not really true.

Stupid Engineering Tricks

Engineers had a series of checklists and diagrams that made up the two parts of the book on running a steam plant. The procedures for normal operation made up the Engineering Operational Sequencing System, or EOSS. The emergency procedures made up the Engineering Casualty Control System, or ECCS, and they were practiced by a set of exercises known as the Basic Engineering Casualty Control Exercises, or BECCEs.

BECCEs often involved wrapping up the engineering plant, which was no big deal in a twin-screw ship, as you practiced on one plant and steamed the other. On single-screw ships, it was a big deal, as doing boiler drills meant the ship went "hot, dark and quiet" at different times during the drills. For that reason, the XOs wanted BECCEs to be done on the midwatch, so that the flickering of power "wouldn't upset the ship's routine."

Engineers hated midwatch BECCEs. The engineering training team, which ran the BECCEs, had to be off-watch in order to run them. Both the officers and the sailors on the training team could count on maybe getting three hours of sleep on a BECCE night. Worse, to my mind, was the message that midwatch BECCEs sent to the engineers, which was "your drills are not as important as anyone else's". Operations and Weapons drills were run during the day; the only routinely run engineering drill that was run during the day was a main-space fire drill, as that drill took the ship to GQ.

I did see one time when a ship I was on ran BECCEs after lunch. The engineers were awed, even flattered, that their drills were being run during the working day. It was a simple thing, but it made a huge impact on their morale. The XO, though, was ripshit about the disruption to the work day of having the power go on and off as generators were taken offline and brought online.

The dumbest thing that the surface navy did to the engineers, though, was the "outchop OPPE", the "Operational Power Plant Examination" that was held as the ships steamed back from the Mediterranean for home. OPPE (the West Coast pukes called them OPRES, with the R for "readiness") were the major engineering inspection. Everything was examined, from training records and administrative records to normal steaming and casualty control drills. That meant that the engineers had to be be at their best as everyone else was mentally gearing up for coming home. Worse, the frigates who had towed array sonars almost always had their arrays out underway; they were reluctant to do full BECCEs because of the risk of damage from stopping while having an array out and the captains did not want to take the time to recover the array before the BECCEs and then deploy it afterwards.

To cut to the chase: On that series of outchop OPPEs, every twin-screw ship passed their OPPE. Every single-screw ship failed. From what I heard, life on those ships that failed was not much fun for the next few months.

No other major inspection was done in the Navy that way. Only the engineers had to spend their deployed time training and preparing for a major inspection. This sent a message to the engineers that their time, their work was not as valued as the other departments, that their training and readiness was less important to the Navy, so let's just work the engineers harder on deployment so as to not take any time when the ships were home.

The message was received loud and clear.

Lack of Sleep

I generally try to stay away from current affairs in this blog and stick to the old days of the steam Navy, but not for this post.

There is an article in Navy Times concerning the lean manning of ships and the effect of lack of sleep on the crews. And it's not just ships that are feeling the pinch.

This may be a concern because of fewer sailors, but as a matter of fact, in the ranks of watchstanders, this has always been a serious problem for officers. It was routine to stand 3-section underway watches, which means that you are on watch for roughly eight hours a day and then, in the off-time, you have to do your job. One day out of three you get the luxury of coming off watch at midnight and then being able to sleep until 0600, when you then have to get up, grab a quick shower, and go on watch at 0700. When you stand a forenoon watch (on deck at 0345), you were previously on watch until 2000 the evening before. The midshitter is the cruelest watch; you go on at 2345 and you're there until roughly 0400. You are damned fortunate if you can get two hours of sleep on either side.

All that is if there is nothing else going on. You might have a night refueling, which calls you to a refueling station. I know of one OOD who damn near ran a ship around on Sardinia because of exhaustion; that particular OOD was on refueling station from 2100 to 0130 (the ship was in waiting station for hours because the ship ahead of her had a fouled rig or something and could not disconnect) and then stood the rev watch from 0345 to 0700. The OOD was dog tired and could not think at a much higher level than "fire bad, tree pretty". That was, by far, not the only example I can think of. I've seen some hairy-ass shit happen because sailors and officers were overtired.

I knew of one refueling ship over 20 years ago (an AOR, I think) whose captain refused to obey an order to take her to sea because the ship was so undermanned in boiler techs. It was the talk of the waterfront for awhile, the captain probably killed his career, but everyone knew that he had made the right call.

The problem is only going to be exacerbated on the new littoral combat ships, which are supposed to be operated with a very small crew. That means that it will be operated with a very tired crew that will make mistakes. That also means that the ships will wind up looking as rusty as a Russian Navy destroyer; First Division on a 1052 had about 20+ sailors to do topside maintenance and that would be half the crew of a LCS. Computerization is nice, but computers can't chip paint, swab decks or paint shit. And unless the ships have halon fire-suppression everywhere ("evacuate the compartment, shut the doors/hatches and pump in halon"), I do not see how a ship with 40 people will be able to fight a serious fire.

I suspect that the Navy is asking for some serious problems beyond the grounding of the USS Port Royal.

Schnorring

Look, I know that hard times have arrived. The economists, at least some of them, say that this recession is over.

I am not seeing it. I don't know too many people who are. I see empty stores. I drove past a small strip-mall yesterday that was completed last year and has no tenants. I know another one that is a year old and is 25% occupied, a third that is two years old and is 50% occupied.

Most people don't realize that a lot of commercial real estate loans are done on a far shorter term than residential loans, unless the SBA is involved or the loan is bond-financed through a local industrial development agency. Five year balloon loans are very common. Which means that, if you do the math, that a lot of commercial loans taken out during the recent boom are soon to become due on places that cannot now meet the loan-to-value criteria of banks. Which means a wave of commercial defaults and foreclosures. So times may be getting harder.

I don't know. But what I do know is that there are a lot of men and women who stepped up and went to war when this nation asked them to. There are ones who have been badly hurt and for some, technology may offer some relief. GPSs for those with short-term memory problems who tend to get lost. Voice-operated computers for those who cannot work a keyboard. We can all help for that.

So please, if you can throw a few bucks to Project Valour-IT, click in the center of the thermometer to the left (at the top of the left-hand column) and give a little to help those who gave a lot.

AAW Part V- the Weapons, Chapter 2

(Part IV)

(N.B. I am not considering 5" and 76mm guns in this discussion. Nothing has fundamentally changed there since the development of the VT fuze) during the Second World War.

Very short range defense against incoming missiles, or "point defense", was initially a crash program within the Navy, which became very interested in point defense in 1967, following the sinking of an Israeli destroyer after it was hit by a number of Styx missiles.

The first system was pretty slapdash, but it worked. It was the "Basic Point Defense Missile System" or BPDMS. It was a system that would have made McGyver proud and it was developed and implemented at near-record speed for a non-hot war procurement situation.

BPDMS took eight Sparrow missiles, straight from the stocks for F-4s, and put them in a trainable box launcher.[1] It took two of the nose radars from an F-4 and mounted them on a separate hand-slewed mount. There was a little CRT in the mount with an eyepiece so the operator could press his face to it (avoiding showing light at night and keeping rain off it). When it was turned on, the operator would be told, by sound-powered telephone, where the target was. He would slew his radar rig to that and elevate it as necessary. The missile box would automatically train and elevate to follow the radar director. The operator would both acquire the target and fire at it.

The disadvantages were obvious. BPDMS relied on a man, standing outdoors, to work it. At night, in the rain, in the cold, whatever the weather, somebody had to be at the director in order for it to function.

NATO Sea Sparrow got rid of the human-operated director;

NATO Sea Sparrow also began the process of "navalizing" the Sparrow missile to make it better suited for shipboard requirements. BPDMS,as I mentioned, had taken the issue Sparrow as used by fighters. That was fine for a crash program, but it was not optimal, so a naval variant was developed.

NATO Sea Sparrow, however, was not suitable for ships much smaller than a destroyer (though BPDMS had been installed on frigates). The Phalanx Close-in Weapon System, CIWS, was developed for smaller ships, though it has been installed on everything up through aircraft carriers. The idea of CIWS[2] was to have a system that could be welded to the deck in short order, if necessary, with only lines run to it to provide for electricity and command capabilities.

CIWS can be fully autonomous, though it can also accept designation from CIC. CIWS has its own tracking and acquisition radars in the white dome. The gun is a 20mm gatling gun which when loaded for wartime, fires sub-caliber (saboted) depleted uranium projectiles which are supposed to smash into an oncoming cruise missile and cause it to blow up.[3] CIWS was often referred to as "R2D2".

CIWS worked. Some navies went for a larger gun, such as Goalkeeper, but the larger systems require penetrating the deck to mount part of the works below the deck, which limits where the mounts can be placed.

The last line of AAW defense is, of course, damage control.

[1] You may see references that say that BPDMS used a modified ASROC box launcher. Those reference are full of shit. The BPDMS launcher box system was a lot smaller than ASROC.
[2] CIWS is also a generic term for any close-in defense system.
[3] There is a potentially serious problem with this idea. A CIWS kill will take place between 300 and 500 yards. Eastern-bloc antiship missiles were designed to disable large ships and it is highly likely that they use some type of shaped-charge. Detonating one a few hundred yards from a destroyer might still sink it. Even if the thing blows up omnidirectionally, the shrapnel has a good chance of fucking up the ship's radars.

Victory at Sea

The music, in MP3 format, from the 1952 TV series. If you have never seen the series, it is worth trying to track down a copy of the DVD set. (I found mine in the $5 bin at Wally-World.)

Or you can watch them here.

Lunchtime

This past weekend, I had lunch with a friend who lives in a smallish city. That city has a Navy-Marine Corps reserve center. We went to a Chinese buffet and sat in a booth. Sitting in the next booth behind me were two naval officers; from their ranks and age, I guessed that they were both mustangs.

An elderly man walked by their booth. He appeared to be old enough to have been in either the Second World or Korean Wars and asked: "How's the navy?"

"The Navy's doing fine," was the reply.

"I was in for four years," the old man said. "I hated it."

AAW Part IV- the Weapons, Chapter 1

Parts 1, 2, and 3)

Air defense weaponry fell into five basic categories: Airborne interceptors, long-range missiles, medium-range missiles, short-range missiles, and point defense. Let's consider each in turn.

Airborne interceptors were basically the Combat Air Patrol, launched from the carrier. CAP could be airborne, or ready on deck in various alert states. Ready 5 would have the aircrew sitting in the aircraft, hooked up to the catapult and with the engines turning. In Ready 15, the engines were shut down. Ready 30 would have the crew outside of the aircraft and the aircraft near the catapult. Ready 45 and Ready 60 would have the crew in the ready room below decks.[1]

The king of the airborne interceptors was the F-14 Tomcat. The Tomcat carried a powerful radar system, the AWG-9, and the Phoenix missile.

The Phoenix was a serious long-range AAW weapon. Given that the F-14 might have been flying a few hundred miles from the carrier battlegroup and then that the Phoenix itself had a range of something on the order of a hundred miles or so, the F-14/Phoenix weapon system had the capability to engage Soviet Naval Aviation cruise-missile shooters before they reached firing range.

Phoenix's main limitation was that it was not a dogfighting missile, it was a missile that made the F-14 into a flying guided-missile ship. Phoenix was designed for a general hot war, where the only aircraft in the sky would be Ours, Theirs, and Civilians Stupid Enough to Fly Through a War Zone.[2] It was not designed for a limited-war environment where the rules of engagement required visual target identification. Phoenix could only be carried by F-14s, so once the F-14s were retired, so was the Phoenix missile.[3]

Talos was the first long-range shipboard AAW missile.


Talos was a monster in its size. The missile itself was not a rocket, it was powered by a ramjet. It was akin to firing an unmanned aircraft at a target, as the missile weighed something like 7,000lbs and was 35 feet long (give or take). Originally, Talos had a range of 50 nautical miles, the later versions doubled that. The warhead was either continuous rod or nuclear. Talos was so huge that ships carried them both ready to use and, to save space, more missiles were unmated, with the booster, the sustainer and the warheads all separated.

Only one ship, the USS Long Beach, was purpose-built to fire Talos; it was also the only one to shoot them during wartime at a live target (two North Vietnamese MiGs). All the other Talos shooters were rebuilt heavy-gun cruisers from World War II. They were ugly ships; the missiles came out from the deckhouse onto a launcher sited where the first 8" gun turret had been. The missile radars were where the superfiring gun turret had been.

Talos was retired around 1980 as were all of the Talos shooters except Long Beach. She was converted to fire Terriers. The Talos missiles left in inventory were converted into flying targets and all were eventually used up for that duty.

Terrier started out as a medium-range missile, with a maximum range of 20nm. It was, like Talos, a two-stage weapon, but the second stage was powered by a rocket motor. Terrier was also a large weapon, but nowhere near as large as Talos. It was employed by DLGs, which, in 1975, were redesignated as either DDGs or CGs. The warhead was either continuous rod or nuclear, though unlike Talos, the weapons were carried assembled.


To save space, though, the fins were not added to the missiles until they were on the rail in the missile house behind the launcher.

Tartar was a short-range single-stage rocket, basically the front half of a Terrier. It was fired from Adams class DDGs, Brooke class FFGs, and Perry Class FFGs.

Some Knox class FFs had two Tartars in their ASROC launcher box. Tartar had a range of 10nm or so and only had a continuous rod warhead.

Talos, Terrier and Tarter were sometimes referred to as "the T-birds". All functioned about the same way: They rode a beam towards the target and then homed in from the radar reflections as the ship's missile illumination radar shined on the target ("semi-active homing"). They were always "tail-chasing" the target; they were flying towards where the target just had been. Range against a crossing-target was piss-poor. Worse, the ships could only have as many missiles in flight as they had radars.

Terrier was replaced by the SM-1/2ER missiles, Tartar by the SM-1/2MR missiles, though the ships that used them were still referred to as "Terrier ships" or "Tartar ships". The Standard missiles did away with beam-riding, instead steering the missiles towards their target by a datalink that could predict an intercept position and fly the missiles there, using semi-active homing for terminal guidance. That, along with better rocket motors and more powerful boosters for the ER series greatly increased the range of the missiles. The datalink system also permitted the ships to have many missiles in flight at one time per fire-control radar system. The latest models of SM-2MR have a range almost the same as the later models of Talos, while the SM-2ER can fly even further.[4]

There was concern that at some firing angles, the SM-2ER booster could erode the ship's deck, but I do not know if it was ever addressed. During the late 1980s and early 1990s, the steam-powered Terrier ships were given a "New Threat Upgrade" to their missile systems in overhauls that cost over $50 million each to permit them to employ the then-latest variants of SM-2ER. Unfortunately, the Cold War ended soon after the NTU upgrades were put in service and the steam-powered Terrier ships were almost immediately retired.

All of the steam-powered Terrier and Tartar ships have since been scrapped or sunk. The fucking Navy couldn't be bothered to save a single one as a museum ship to the Cold War.[5]

[1] All this is from old memory, so if I'm wrong, meh.
[2] The latter two groups you could shoot at.
[3] During the reign of the Shah, Iran purchased F-14s and Phoenix missiles. They may still have some missiles left.
[4] SM-3ER is designed for ballistic missile defense. This is why.
[5] The Adams-class DDGs were also all scrapped or sunk. Only the German Navy, which had three built here (and customized to their own needs), saved one. The Navy saved numerous ships from WW2, but only the USS Barry and the USS Nautilus, which is historic in its own right as the world's first nuclear sub, were spared.

Wisdom Teeth

Bubblehead has a post on wisdom teeth.

I was on a ship when I went into the naval base dental clinic for my yearly dental exam. The Navy, in its infinite wisdom, only had people come in annually. If you have ever gone a year without having your teeth cleaned, I don't recommend that you do. Back in the days before the water-jet descalers, plaque build-up had to be removed by scraping. A lot of of plaque builds up in a year and the process of removing it was not a lot of fun.

So anyway, there I was, lying flat on my back in the dental chair, when the dentist (a captain) told me (a lieutenant), that I needed to have my two wisdom teeth removed. Having long gotten past the point where staff-puke rank impressed me, I asked why that was so. He said: "Some day they'll bother you." I shot back with: "Some day my back will bother me, too, you want to remove that, sir?"

He ordered me to make an appointment to "come back in two weeks and have those wisdom teeth out." So I did, though, for some reason, it slipped my mind that my ship was deploying in ten days. Sure enough, about a month into the cruise, the XO got a nasty letter from the dental clinic that I had missed an appointment. And sure enough, by the time the ship had returned to home port, the matter had been forgotten.

I got out of the Navy with my wisdom teeth intact.

Six years later, I had to have them pulled for about $150. So being a stubborn jackass cost me real cash money.

The 3M System and PMS

No, this had nothing to do with the scotch tape people. In the Navy, the 3M system was the "Maintenance and Material Management System". The 3 M system was made of various subsystems, which included supply management, maintenance management and maintenance tasks.

PMS was the Planned Maintenance Subsystem. The maintenance tasks were called "PMS checks". The scheduling is probably all done on computers now, but it was done by hand back in my day.

Each division on a ship was broken down into work centers, usually on the basis of spaces. Boiler Division on a frigate would have one work center, two on a destroyer or cruiser. A-gang may have two or three. AS Division could have two or as many as six work centers. R Division had the most, as each repair locker was a work center and each divisional DCPO was a separate work center. Each work center had a "leading petty officer" in charge, though the LPO could be a chief in a larger work center.

PMS checks were maintenance procedures for specific pieces of equipment ranging from the very small to the very large. PMS checks were done by reference to the PMS card for the check. Each card listed the number of sailors required to do the check, specific supervision, if required, the tools required, the consumables required and the estimated time to perform the check. The cards were like recipe cards; they set forth each step of the check.

PMS checks were designated in each work center by a letter and number. The letter designated how often the check was to be performed and the number was a series number within each work center. The letters were D (daily), W, M, Q, A, and R (other requirement). The first monthly check in work center WS01 was M-1, then M-2, M-3, and so on.

In each department office was the quarterly PMS scheduling board for the work centers, by week. This listed every PMS check for the quarter that had a less-than-weekly periodicity. This PMS schedule was kept on paper, in pencil. The schedule was signed by the division officer and approved by the department head. Each work center had a laminated weekly schedule that showed each day and what checks were scheduled. The weekly and daily checks were often printed on the schedule before lamination. The LPO would write in the monthly, etc. with a grease pencil. This schedule was signed by the LPO and approved by the division officer.

The LPO assigned sailors to do the PMS checks. If a PMS check was done on the day it was scheduled for, it was crossed out on the schedule. If not, it was circled and rescheduled, with an arrow connecting the original date and the rescheduled one. This was also done on the quarterly PMS schedule. At the end of each quarter, the quarterly PMS schedules were reviewed by the XO and the Captain. Any division that was found to be less than diligent about completing its PMS checks would receive extra scrutiny. So a wise division officer kept a sharp eye on the completion rate and a good department head did likewise.

PMS performance was also spot-checked. Each week, the division officers had to do spot-checks on PMS checks, though it was left to their discretion whether to watch a check being performed or to go back later and see if the check was done. The sailors doing the check had to show that they had the required tools and supplies. The procedures for the checks were verified and, if for some reason, a check should be performed differently than the way specified, a report was supposed to be submitted up the chair of command to the Naval Sea Systems Command for review of the procedure.

The results of the spot-check had to be submitted. Some commands were better than others in enforcing the spot checks. The department heads were supposed to do one spot check per division per week. The CO and the XO were supposed to do a weekly spot check as well.

PMS was easy to gun-deck (ie, fake) if the spot-checks were not done. Smart officers knew the value of PMS checks and made sure they were performed.

Uniform Disasters; Followup

(Original post)

If this article is to be believed, the new Battle Dress Oceanic Navy Work Uniforms are not very popular with the sailors.

I still think they look silly.

Also, I was near a navy base several weeks ago. I saw a couple of young squids wearing the new summer uniform of a black pisscutter, a khaki shirt and black trousers. They looked like knock-off jarheads.

The new uniforms are just dumb.

The Fourth

The Declaration of Independence and a comment. The link at the top of the Declaration will take you to the NPR recitation of its text.

I hope you have a happy Fourth. Don't blow yer fingers off.