Target: Babies in Open. Fire For Effect.

Officer-in-Charge

2012-02-06T17:30:00.000-05:00

Officer-in-charge (OIC) was a position held by an officer (duh) who was in command of either a shore facility or a project management office. The insignia was a little gold wreath pin with a gold trident on it.

There were pretty much two flavors of OICs. First were really hard chargers. It was sort of permissible to goof off a little on shore duty and do things like get to know one's kids or maybe earn a masters degree. The others were officers who had, somewhere along the line, screwed up a little. For them, having shore-based command time could repair earlier damage and get them back on the career track. So they would be on what was known as a "get well" tour.

A pretty common job for a get-well tour was to be the OIC of a NavFac, or SOSUS station. SOSUS stations were pretty close to being considered operational commands. For obvious reasons, they were considered to be critical national security assets. Unfortunately, some of the OICs were as clueless as the male junior officer fuckups who had been sent to the NavFacs.

Some of the NavFacs had their own housing. This was common in places where renting a house for a family might be prohibitive, especially in areas where there was a large summer community and renting a house for an entire year was difficult.[1]

At one NavFac, a new OIC had taken command. For reasons lost to time, he took a distinct dislike to one of the male officers. That officer and his family lived next door to the OIC. The OIC ordered LT Fuckup to move to another house. Fuckup challenged the OIC's power to make him move and declared that there was no way in Hell that OIC could force him to undertake the effort of moving from one house to another, just because the OIC didn't want to see him outside, playing with his kids.

Turned out that there were rules on when a move from one unit of base housing to another could be made and Fuckup was right. The XO talked to Fuckup and asked him what it would take to get him to agree to the move, since the XO was damn well sick and tired to hearing the OIC bitch every day about having to live next to Fuckup.

Fuckup's terms were that he and his family would not be inconvenienced. Professional movers would have to be brought in to pack everything up and unpack everything. Fuckup correctly guessed that such a move would cost a couple of thousand dollars and that the OIC would have to pay for it out of his discretionary fund.

And so it came to pass. Movers came in, they packed up everything and loaded it all onto a moving van. Fuckup asked why were they using a van when he was moving three or four doors down, why not just put the crap on handcarts and roll it into the new house? The movers told Fuckup that they had to take the truck to a set of truck scales so they could determine the weight of his effects, so they'd know what to charge the navy for this little evolution. As far as the movers were concerned, it was as much work to move Fuckup's family down the street as it would have been to move them across the country. The only difference to them was the mileage.[2]

By then, Fuckup was sort of throwing a block party. He, along with several others and their beers, immediately climbed into the moving van for the ride to and from the truck scales. Because Fuckup was going to make sure that the OIC's funds took as big a hit as possible.[3]

Supposedly the OIC was aghast at how much the move cost. Which, much to the XO's displeasure, gave the OIC something else to whine about on a daily basis.
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[1] Naval Station Newport, RI had a fair-sized family housing area that was allowed to fall into disrepair following the removal of Newport's active duty warships in 1973. In the late `80s, those houses were refurbished and reopened.
[2] 300 feet, as opposed to 3,000 miles.
[3] Someone later pointed out to Fuckup that he could have borrowed a few cast-iron engine blocks. As it was, two or three roll-aways full of tools somehow showed up in his garage the night before the move.

SOPA Strike

2012-01-18T07:04:00.000-05:00

This blog is on strike in support of the movement to stop SOPA and PIPA.

Lousy Places to Be Stationed

2011-12-19T15:42:00.003-05:00

The shorter term, of course, was "Shithole."[1]

First, there were two types of permanent duty: Accompanied and unaccompanied. The difference was whether the military would move your family and all of your shit there. For unaccompanied tours, the answer was "no". Unaccompanied tours of duty lasted generally one year. For an accompanied tour, the answer was "yes". The shortest accompanied tour was a department head on a warship, that was an eighteen month tour. Most tours were longer and, depending on what the job was, it could be three years or longer.

By now, you should be getting the picture that a "permanent move" meant no such thing to a military family.

In the Navy, there were a couple of places that were known service-wide to be shitholes. They were Naval Air Station Adak and Naval Station Bahrain.[2] Adak was accompanied duty, Bahrain was unaccompanied duty.

Bahrain was, before the Iraq War, primarily a shithole for surface sailors. Bahrain was the location of the Commander-in-Chief,[3] Middle East Forces, which was a Navy afloat command. That meant that traditionally, the admiral in command had to have a flagship.[4] That ship was the USS La Salle, a former LPD. To say that it was ghastly hot in Bahrain, especially in the summer, is sort of like saying that dry ice is kind of chilly. Even with painting the hull of the ship white and installing a large air-conditioning plant, life on that ship was reportedly not fun, especially in the engineering spaces.

Bahrain, at least back in the day, was not exactly known as a fun liberty port, being possibly a bit more relaxed than Saudi Arabia, but not by much.

The USS La Salle did not exactly get the cream of the crop. A common deal in the Navy was to re-enlist for a set of orders. Or, if your enlistment was up and the Navy wanted to send you where you didn't want to go, you refused to re-enlist, at first. As it came time to leave your command, you'd be transferred for a few days to the Navy Retention Barge, where career counselors would work on you to get you to re-enlist and they'd work on BuPers to get you a better assignment.

So sailors who had orders to the La Salle would work the system to get out of them and, if they were Petty Officer A.J. Squared-Away, they often got out of them. But if they were a lifer first class petty officer with 16-18 years in who was never going to make chief, they went to the La Salle. As far as BuPers was concerned, those guys weren't going to get out to avoid the tour and, if they did and went into the Reserves, the Navy would not have to pay them retirement until they turned 62. So despite what the CO of the La Salle and even the 5th Fleet CinC wanted, the La Salle was populated with sailors whose personnel records were populated with marginal evaluations.

For aviators and certain other specialties, the shithole was NAS Adak. Adak was in the Aleutian Chain off Alaska. While you couldn't see Russia from there[5], it was close enough. Adak wasn't known for being exceptionally snowy or colder than, say, upstate New York, but what Adak had was ferocious winds. 110 mph winds or stronger in the winter were not unusual, with milder winds of 50 mph or better in the summer. Adak had all of the amenities, including a college, fast food and a good hospital, but what truly made Adak a shithole was its location.

The only airline service to Adak was out of Anchorage. The length of the flight was equivalent to flying from New York to New Orleans. Not a lot of people wanted to go to Adak for fun, so the commercial flights were expensive. It was possible to get a "space available" flight off the island, riding on a standby-basis aboard a military passenger or cargo aircraft heading to Anchorage or CONUS, but the rule for traveling Space-A on leave was that before you could go, you had to show that you had the funds to buy your own tickets back.

That was prohibitively expensive, especially for families. So taking leave in Adak meant going off base, renting a room, and drinking heavily. The Navy wanted sailors to take leave,[6] for leave was a way to regain one's equilibrium and recharge. But until the Navy changed the rules for Space-A travel[7], a known tactic was to show up at Adak with a negative leave balance at the maximum (thirty days) and then take three years to build up to the maximum positive balance (sixty days). But three years of duty with only two or three days off at a time meant for seriously cranky people, so the Navy discouraged that practice.

When the Cold War ended, so did the need for NAS Adak and it was largely abandoned. Bahrain is still an active naval facility, although it does not currently seem to have an assigned flagship, as the Fifth Fleet command has been effectively absorbed into Centcom.
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[1] The title difference is due to a need to be family-friendly, as least in the title of my posts.
[2] NAF Diego Garcia was also known to be a shithole, but I never knew of anyone who had been stationed there. I did know people who had been stationed in Bahrain and Adak.
[3] This was before a certain former president became unsecure when anyone else had the title of "CinC".
[4] This is why the sloop-of war USS Constellation served as the Atlantic Fleet flagship during the Second World War.
[5] You could from Little Diomede, which was too small for military uses.
[6] Leave was earned at a rate of thirty days per year of active duty.
[7] They eventually did, but only for Adak.

Seventy Years Ago

2011-12-07T08:21:00.000-05:00

By this time (8 EST), America had been at war for several hours.

Long Time Away

2011-12-06T08:00:00.001-05:00

A seven week exercise turned into a seven month deployment for the crew of HMS Ocean.

(Cross-posted from EBM)

Happy Thanksgiving!

2011-11-24T09:05:00.002-05:00

I hope you have a good Thanksgiving, Gentle Readers.

(Post from last year)

Oops!

2011-11-18T10:05:00.001-05:00

One of the target drills practiced with the 5" naval rifles found on most of the tin-can Navy was an anti-surface target shoot. Basically, an ocean-going tug would tow a target sled; the warship participating would lock its fire-control radar onto the target sled and shoot it with BL&P[1] rounds.[2]. A spotter on the tug would watch for the splashes and impacts of the rounds on the sled and grade the ship on its accuracy of fire.

The target sled was tracked by radar in Gun Plot, where a fire controlman (FC) would designate the radar blip of the target to the gunfire control computer. The gunfire control computer took in the ship's course and speed, the target's course and speed, as well as the wind and other factors to generate a firing solution. It was normally an easy exercise, it was a full-up test of the gunfire system. A failure usually meant that something was broken or out of calibration. A failed exercise was usually followed by a CASREP.

The Spruance class introduced a more-computerized fire-control system, the Mk-86, that was designed to have a faster reaction time against small, fast-moving patrol boats. So in the late `70s, one of the then-new Spruance-class destroyers was taking part in an anti-surface gunfire exercise. The target sled was deployed and the range was clear.

The ship opened fire on the target. The Mk-86 tracked the target, tracked up the tow line, and fired on the tug. Accounts differ on the number of times that the tug was hit before the ship was able to cease fire, but it was apparently more than once. The word was that one 5" round went into the Goat Locker.[3] Nobody was injured by the shelling.

The immediate fix was to double the length of the towline anytime that a Mk-86 equipped ship was to shoot at a towed target. The other fix was to require that the ships also optically track targets in gunfire exercises.[4] Depending on who you talked to, the story I heard was that the coaxial TV camera for the gunfire radar was either out of commission or not installed at the time of the incident.[5]

Lore has it that the tug was unofficially awarded a Purple Heart by the destroyer's captain.
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[1]BL&P stood for "blind, loaded and plugged". BL&P projectiles had no fuzing and they were loaded with an inert material to make them weigh as much as war rounds. The projectiles were painted blue and they weighed over fifty pounds.
[2] 5" guns used "semi-fixed" ammunition. "Semi-fixed" meant that what appeared to be the cartridge case was the powder casing, the projectile was loaded separately. The powder case also weighed over fifty pounds. The other types of ammunition were "fixed" (like small arms ammunition) and "bag" (the powder was in silk bags), used in battleships and pre-war cruisers.
[3] A/k/a the Chief Petty Officers' Quarters.
[4] This was SOP in the earlier Mk68 GFCS, as the gunfire director itself was manned.
[5] I'll go with "not installed."

CHT

2011-10-26T19:30:00.000-04:00

Ships routinely discharged their wastes overboard. By that, I mean that if you flushed a toilet, what you flushed went through the sewage lines and out a discharge set just above the waterline. For all I know, it may still be that way.

But when people began to become concerned about pollution, attention inevitably turned to the Navy's ships, which were sitting at anchor or tied up to the pier and discharging raw sewage into the harbors and coastal waterways. That had to stop. The first thing that happened was that the piers were outfitted with sewage lines. The ships were re-piped so that instead of simply discharging sewage over the side, ships in port would pump their waste to the pier lines. This was not so simple, as the pier discharge lines were higher up than the overboard discharge ports, so that sewage pumps had to be fitted to some ships.

Then came the issue of transiting coastal waters. Ships were fitted with tanks, called CHT tanks. CHT stood for, depending on whom you asked "collection, holding and transfer" or "contaminated holding and treatment". The tanks were sized to hold several hours worth of waste. The hammer for making sure that the tanks were used was that the captains and chief engineers could be held personally responsible by the Coast Guard for any discharge of untreated wastes.[1] And some poor saps did have to pay the fines.[2]

After a ship cleared coastal waters, the sewage drains would be aligned to go back overboard and the CHT tanks were flushed out and pumped out. The navigator was responsible for determining when the ship was far enough out to sea.[3] Of course, it wasn't the navigator who had to pay the fine if the word to cut the sanitary drains overboard was given too early.

When the Navy began to send ships on goodwill cruises along the Great Lakes, some people noticed at first that it was almost always the same ships that were sent. That was because those ships had to have greatly increased CHT capacity in order to hold their wastes for the time it took to steam from one port to another.[4]

The sewage system and the CHT tanks were maintained by the HTs, which earned them the nickname "shitter techs". The CHT pumps could be a nightmare and if they failed, then raw sewage backed up into the shower drains in the heads that were on the low points of the system. And that would make the XO very, very cranky.
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[1] The fines were about $25,000 per incident.
[2] Paying them off at $250 a month for a hundred months sort of put a crimp in one's cash flow.
[3] A by-product of the requirement to not pump wastes overboard in port was that the age-old practice of using anchorages in home port came to an end.
[4] They also needed permission from the Canadian government, as the Great lakes were demilitarized under the Rush-Bagot Treaty of 1818.

What Is an "Aircraft"?

2011-09-21T19:49:00.000-04:00

If you are familiar with firearms, you know that there is a part that has a serial number. That part is normally the "frame" or the "receiver". You can replace every other part and it is still, by law, the same weapon. You may go to a match and see a tricked-out .45 race gun that started life as an off-the-shelf Government Model, but by law, it's still the same gun.

With airplanes, the "this is the airplane" part is the data plate. It is normally a piece of sheet metal, stamped with the maker's information. This is one from a Lockheed Vega.

You may, on occasion, have gone to an air show and seen airplanes from the early days of aviation. There, you might have sen a 1923 This or a 1934 That. It might be touted as a "restored original". What you probably don't know is the original parts may be a very small percentage of the airplane you saw and it is possible that the only original part was the data plate.

This is no shit:

Back in the 1950s and 1960s, flying naval aviation jets was a far more hazardous line of work than it is today. It was not unheard of for an fighter jet squadron to deploy for six months on a carrier and suffer a 20-25% attrition rate. In plain English, that meant that a quarter of the squadron's pilots were either seriously injured or killed. And this, mind you, was in peacetime.

Which meant that the Navy needed to buy lots of replacement airplanes. But money for replacement airplanes was difficult to come by; especially during the time that the spending on the Strategic Air Command consumed two-thirds of the military budget. Congress closely scrutinized the amount of money spent on new airplanes.

But Congress paid less attention to the repair budgets. So what some bright soul thought of was to take the data plates from the wrecked airplanes and send them to the manufacturers for "depot-level repairs".

Which meant that the manufacturers would build a new airplane on their production line, affix the old data plate to the new airplane and Voilà! The old airplane was "repaired" and returned to service.

Thirty Days Hath September

2011-09-11T15:10:00.004-04:00

In my last post, I alluded to the fact that after the 1970s oil shocks, that Navy ships were limited to a transit speed of sixteen knots, absent operational urgencies.[1] Let me follow up on that a little.

You might have heard of the tragedy of the USS Indianapolis. That ship was torpedoed and sunk, very late in the war, by a Japanese submarine.[2] Because of a comedy of errors on behalf of a lot of officers, nobody realized that the ship was lost for four days. In that time, over half of the men who survived the sinking died from exposure or shark bite.

Out of that tragedy, the Navy developed the Movement Reporting System, or MOVREP. A MOVREP was a sailing plan, similar to an aircraft flight plan in concept. A MOVREP set out the time a ship was leaving port, the time it was going to arrive in port (or on station), the times the ship was to pass by certain positions (latitude and longitude) and the course and speed between positions. In essence, the position points were dictated by the need to change course and since a great-circle sailing plan had a lot of course changes, MOVREPs could be rather detailed. Ships were allowed to deviate a certain distance off the course line and there was a time window for the position points (plus or minus four hours, if I remember correctly).

The idea was that if a ship went out of contact, at least the Navy would know where to go looking for her.

This is no shit:

There was a ship that was supposed to go from a port visit in one nation to a port visit in another nation. Pursuant to the fleet commander's scheduling order, the ship was to get underway at 1200 local time on September 28th and arrive at 1000 local time on October 2nd. A few days before, the Navigator[3] and his Chief Quartermaster plotted out the courses and distances necessary to go from Port A to Port B. When they did that, the Navigator saw that they would have to transit at a speed of about 24 knots.

That was a puzzle, for the Navigator knew of no reason why they had to go so fast. The Navigator then added in twenty-four hours to the transit time and bingo: That resulted in a sixteen knot transit speed. It was clear to him, at least, that somebody in the Fleet staff had forgotten that September has only thirty days.

He drafted his MOVREP and took it to the Captain. In the "remarks" line, he had something snarky like "transit speed would be 16 knots if September had 31 days." The Captain read it over; he told the Navigator that there were no points awarded for being right if it embarrassed the staff of a three-star admiral. The Captain struck the remarks line, replaced it with "none" and had it sent out.[4]

_______________________________________
[1] This applied to nuclear-powered ships as well as oil-burning ships. The thinking was limiting the transit speeds of nucs would prolong the time between nuclear refuelings.
[2] W. Graham Claytor received the Medal of Honor for his rescue efforts.
[3] This was in the days before the XO was required to be the Navigator. After that time, the junior officer who actually did the work was designated the "Navigator's Assistant" or the "Navigation Officer" or something like that there.
[4] The ship sailed four hours before the MOVREP departure time and arrived four hours after the arrival time in order to save some fuel.

Twenty Knot Tommy

2011-09-05T09:24:00.003-04:00

Back in the 1970s, after the Vietnam War was finished, the Navy regarded shore duty as a sort of paid vacation. The idea was something along the lines of since sailors spent a lot of time away from home when they were on sea duty, when they were on shore duty, they should work regular hours. It was highly frowned upon to require sailors on shore duty to work outside of normal hours.[1] It took damn near an act of Congress (or a C/M-4 CASREP) in order to get the shore establishment to work overtime.[2]

"20 Knot Tommy" was the skipper of a tin can that was homeported in Charleston, SC.[3] He got that nickname because his preferred speed during sea and anchor detail was 20 knots. The Charleston Naval Station was several miles up the Cooper River. A lot of recreational boaters[4] could be found in the Cooper River. The Coast Guard asked the Navy to limit the speed of its ships when they were transiting the Cooper River. That cut no ice with 20 Knot Tommy. The Coast Guard would complain to the Navy, the commander of the naval base would send a letter to 20 Knot Tommy, who would ignore the letter.[5]

This is no shit: 20 Knot Tommy and his ship were returning to port after a series of exercises. From the time the last exercise ended, a normal transit[6] would bring 20 Knot Tommy and his ship to the Cooper River sea buoy[7] at 0530 on Saturday.

The ship sent the normal logistics requirement message to NAVSTA Charleston, which said that the ship would require two tugs, linehandlers and the usual services early on Saturday morning. NAVSTA Charleston replied that the ship was to remain at sea until no earlier than 0900 on Monday.

Tommy was not going to keep his ship and his crew at sea for two extra days to accommodate the shore establishment. At 0600 on Saturday, his ship was sitting in the Cooper River off the naval base. Tommy got on the radio, called the naval base and asked for the tugs. The duty officer told him to go back out to sea and come back on Monday.

20 Knot Tommy wasn't having any of that. So he anchored his tin can right in the middle of the Cooper River, just offshore of the Bachelor Officers' Quarters (BOQ). What Tommy knew was that a number of senior officers had left their families in the DC area and those officers lived in the senior officers' section of the BOQ. Those rooms faced the river.

Tommy's next move was to hold early reveille on those officers. He did that by having the ship's whistle sound long (and very loud) blasts at short intervals.

One of those senor officers was the commander of one of the two destroyer squadrons in Charleston. He was Tommy's boss. Within 15 minutes, the Commodore was on the radio and the conversation went something like this:

"Good morning, Thomas. You're back early, I see."
"Yessir. Request permission to enter port."
"Permission granted. The tugs will be out to you shortly."

And they were. Someone on the Bridge spotted the smoke from two tugs as the duty crews started the tugs' diesels. The tugs got underway, Tommy ordered the anchor raised, and his ship was brought alongside the pier. Other ships at the pier sent over linehandlers to help moor the ship and a crane was waiting to lift a brow.

20 Knot Tommy was the hero of the waterfront for the next week or so.

But I imagine that his career went nowhere. For you didn't buck Big Navy and survive.
______________________
[1] 0730-1600.
[2] The sailors on ships used to say that their main mission was to support the shore establishment.
[3] By "tin can", I mean a warship other than a cruiser or a minesweeper.
[4] Also known as "bubbas with boats".
[5] Supposedly he said that sailing in and out at 20 knots effectively halved the time his crew had to stand at Sea and Anchor Detail and if that made the Coasties unhappy, fuck `em.
[6] Warships were limited to a transit speed of 16 knots, unless authorized to go faster.
[7] The "sea buoy" is the last buoy in a marked channel before the open sea.

Career Choices

2011-08-29T21:15:00.000-04:00

"Give Me Operations" by Oscar Brand.

(The annotator has it wrong, he sang "rockets, radar and AB" (afterburner).

Fairchild jet fighters were indeed ground-loving whores. The joke used to be that if they built a runway that went around the world, Fairchild would build a jet fighter that would use every inch of it.

Albert Brown, R.I.P.

2011-08-16T07:00:00.000-04:00

He was the oldest survivor of the Bataan Death March. Born in Nebraska, he was Buffalo Bill Cody's godson and Henry Fonda's cousin. He was 36 when the Death March occurred.

USS Monitor

2011-08-08T19:40:00.000-04:00

This is the inside of the turret (inverted):

A lot of details about the Monitor's design are in this article in the NY Times.

This is what I found fascinating: The War Department in 1861 opened a public competition to design a new class of warships. The designs had to be submitted in a month. They built the ship in four months. From one end to the other, it was a ship with new technologies and it was in combat a month after that.

The closest thing that I've heard to that was the first class of LSTs, which went from the beginning of design at BuShips to sea trials in less than a year. Over a thousand were built during the war. One of them is still working for a living.

Scenes From Wardrooms

2011-08-02T21:15:00.001-04:00

All places and names have been changed to protect the guilty.

In port, San Diego, Sunday morning: A number of officers are having breakfast. Between the oncoming and offgoing duty sections, plus the handful of junior officers who live aboard the ship, maybe a third of the officers are there.

A young female officer walks through the wardroom. She is wearing a rather short skirt and a low-cut shiny top. She has on flats and is carrying a pair of spike-heeled sandals.

The Ops Boss looks at her and says: “That’s a pretty risque outfit to wear to church, Cindy.”

The Weapons Officer doesn’t even glance up from his plate of eggs. “She’s just returned aboard, Ops,” he says, and adds, sotto voce, “you fucking moron.”

Port visit, Haifa, Israel: It is Saturday night and officers are gathering in the wardroom to go out for a steak and some nightclubbing.

The Weapons Officer is waxing ecstatically: “Man, this is one friendly town. The women are fantastic. Anybody can get laid in this place.”

The Chief Engineer is skeptical. “Even the EWO?* I got a hundred bucks, says that you can’t get him laid, not without hiring a hooker.”

Weaps: “Hell, I’ll take that bet.” Other officers offer up bets, as well, and soon there is about $500 riding on whether the Weapons Officer can get the EWO laid.

Then the EWO, who knows nothing about this, walks into the wardroom. He is wearing plaid trousers and a striped shirt. He is the poster child for bad taste. The Weapons Officer takes one look at him and yells: “The bet is off!”

In port, Norfolk, VA: The admiral commanding Surflant** pays a visit to a destroyer tender to talk to a few commanders of repair activities. After the conference, the admiral meets with the officers of the tender for a little morale-boosting. During the meeting, the admiral says something along the lines of: “Earlier this year, I went to Charleston and Mayport. The piers on those waterfronts are so clean that you could eat off them, but the piers in Norfolk are shithouses. We need to do better here in Norfolk.”

That pronouncement is met with an audible snort from the tender’s Repair Officer. The Captain doesn’t let it pass: “Commander, you have something to add?”

The Repair Officer*** says: “Yes, sir. Is the Admiral referring to his visit to Mayport in April?”

The admiral said that he was.

“I was stationed there,” the Repair Officer said. “They shut down the fucking waterfront for three days prior to the Admiral’s visit just to clean up all of the crap. They washed the piers, removed all of the stuff from the piers and even painted the guard shacks.

“But if the Admiral were to hop on a plane and go down there right now, unannounced, I guarantee he won’t see anything different in either Mayport or Charleston than what he sees right here, right now, in Norfolk.”
______________________
* Electronic Warfare Officer.
** "Surflant", or Commander, Surface Forces Atlantic, was the "type commander". His job was to ensure that the ships were ready.
*** He was actually a lieutenant commander limited duty officer who, if my recollection is accurate, was about fifteen days away from retiring.

What Happens When the Air Force Mistakes a Third Class Petty Officer for a Bird Colonel?

2011-07-20T19:06:00.000-04:00

All sorts of hilarity ensues.

(H/T)

The Fourth

2011-07-04T08:32:00.001-04:00

235 years ago text at the link.

Aquaflage

2011-06-30T20:53:00.002-04:00

Last weekend, I was in the same restaurant where this scene took place. Also there were three men in aquaflage.

They looked stupid in that uniform. They looked like mall ninjas.

I know that I may sound like a broken record on this topic.* But I remain unshaken in my opinion that the aquaflage uniform is one of the dumbest looking uniforms around.** I predict that neither aquaflage or the new enlisted service uniform will be around by the end of this decade. And those clowns that recommended adopting them will luckily escape the flogging that they so richly deserve.

It could be worse, I suppose. At least the Navy didn't adopt the "Working Uniform; ~~Blockbuster~~ Best Buy" that the Air Force has adopted:

It definitely could be worse.

________________________
* It's my blog.
** The new enlisted service uniform with the black pisscutter cover is almost as bad.

The Return of DASH?

2011-05-25T11:08:00.000-04:00

I wrote briefly about DASH (Drone Anti-Submarine Helicopter) in this post.

DASH was a failure for several reasons. It was too cheaply-made, with multiple sources of single-point failure which would result in the loss of the drone. Because of DASH's small size and the fact that no transponders were installed, they had a propensity to disappear from radar and once that happened, they were effectively lost. There was also no feedback from the drones to the ships; so the controllers had no idea what a drone might be doing at any given moment.

35 years after DASH was canceled, the Navy began trying again to operate drone helicopters rom ships, though not for ASW. But that'll probably come to pass in the not-so distant future.

CASREP

2011-05-20T11:57:00.006-04:00

A "CASREP" was a "casualty report." CASREPs were not sent out for people being hurt, but for equipment damage/failure.[1] There were two categories: Combat systems readiness (C) and engineering (mobility) (M) readiness.

C1 and M1 meant that the ship could sail and fight. A 2 level meant that there were minor, but serious degradations. A 3 level meant that there were damn serious degradations. A 4 level meant, in common parlance, that the ship was broke-dick and wasn't going anywhere.

Actually, it wasn't that clear-cut. While a M4 CASREP meant "we ain't getting underway, or if we are at sea, send the tugs", a ship might possibly sail with a C4 CASREP. The combat systems CASREPS were by warfare area, so for ASW, the ship might be completely dead, but it could still shoot its guns or fire missiles.[2] If part of the mission was armed diplomacy ("showing the Flag"), then it didn't matter if the Tartar launcher was broken.[3]

CASREPs were sent by teletype radio message. The effect could be like kicking over an anthill, often as the shore establishment scurried around to fix the things that they should have fixed anyway. A simple lack of repair parts could trigger a CASREP, which was really embarrassing to the supply pukes if that part was supposed to be in ship's stock.

CASREPs could also request technical support. This was common in serious leaks in the main steam piping, as repairs required highly certified welders and X-ray quality control examination of the welds. Usually the staff pukes confined their assistance to expediting parts and technicians and refrained from offering their idea of helpful (and unsolicited) advice, but not always.

If a part was needed and not available, the supply system would sometimes send the "next higher assembly". I once saw an entire antenna assembly delivered for a SPS-49 because the radar repair guys needed one part from it.[4]

The more twisted mess was when the supply system's records indicated that there was no part available. Sometimes the divisional supply petty officer would go over to the supply center and do a physical stock check. That could be embarrassing for the supply pukes if they really did have the parts.

This is no shit: There once was a minesweeper in drydock that needed a new dunce cap. The supply system said that there was not one available and that one would have to be manufactured. So one day, one of the more worthless division officers went to check out with the XO and go home (this was around 1300). The XO felt like screwing with that junior officer, so he told him that he could leave after he drove over to the supply center and got a new dunce cap.

This kid was dumb enough that he had no clue what the proper procedure was to go get parts from the supply center.[5] What he did do was to drive his car to the base supply center and drive around until he saw where those parts were kept. He asked the grizzled chief there if they had any dunce caps for that class of MSO. The chief said: "Yeah, I got them, how many you want, sir?" The kid signed where the chief told him to sign, the chief had a couple of guys put the dunce cap in the kid's car (they weren't that big) and the kid was soon back at the ship, showing the dunce cap to the stunned XO.

The supply system was also good at losing parts. I knew of one double-ended cruiser which had one of the motors in its aft launcher burn out. They CASREP'd the launcher and a new motor was sent. It disappeared en route. The supply system said that it had been delivered, the ship denied receiving it. Now this was no tiny motor, it was a big-ass 440 volt motor with a fair amount of horsepower. A second motor was sent and installed. Six months later, the first motor mysteriously appeared on the pier alongside the ship. There was no tracking paperwork, nobody knew who delivered it or where it came from. It was just there.

CASREPs could be (and often were) amended. A CASREP level might be reduced if the ship's force was able to jury-rig a partial repair. When the casualty was fixed, a CASCAN (casualty cancellation) was sent out.
____________________________
[1] I believe that the CO of an AO or AOR did once send out a CASREP for undermanning.
[2] And maybe the Soviets didn't know that the best ASW ship in WestPac had all of the ASW capability of the Staten Island Ferry.
[3] My recollection is that the USS Compte de Grasse was sent on a "show the Flag" cruise to France soon after she was commissioned, interrupting the ship's training at Gitmo.
[4] The techs just cannibalized the part from the antenna on the pier, took the broken part off the installed antenna, installed the new part and it worked. they then put the bad part into the antenna on the pier, marked the thing as "unserviceable" and sent it back. The supply pukes ashore were not amused and complained. The ship had, by then, cleared the CASREP and nobody gave a damn.
[5] Fill out a Form 1250, have the XO sign it, take it to the ship's supply department, where they would then type out a Form 1348 and take that to the Supply Center. Doing this when the ship was in-port could alleviate the need for a CASREP. If they would give you the part. Sometimes they wouldn't.

Brown Shoes, Brown Pants?

2011-05-16T20:27:00.002-04:00

The SH's in the ship's laundry had better have some pre-treatment stuff to use on that pilot's skivvies (and flight suit):

In the part of the video with cross-hairs, being in the center of the screen is to be on line-up and on the glide slope. That jet got pretty low close in, much lower and that guy would have smeared his jet all over the stern. It looks as though he attempted to abort at the last second or so (or got a wave-off) and then snatched the number 1 wire in flight, but what the hell, I was a black shoe, so what do I know about such things.

And Then There Was One

2011-05-05T19:30:00.001-04:00

Claude Stanley Choules, the last known combat veteran of World War I, died on Thursday in a nursing home in Western Australia. He was 110.

There is one known veteran left alive: Florence Green. She was in the Women's RAF.

Flight Deck Fire

2011-04-16T09:02:00.003-04:00

First, watch the video on Defense Tech.

I'm not going to address the reliability issue of the F/A-18s. That's outside my wheelhouse.

Note that the fire crews don't approach the burning jet from the rear. That's probably because there must have been at least 30 knots of relative wind over the flight deck, which might have increased if the Captain or OOD ordered up more speed to keep the flames blowing away from the flight crew. Spraying foam onto a fire is rather difficult if the wind is blowing in one's face.

You can also see that burning JP-5 dripped down into the catapult shuttle track.

The fire never reached the forward end of the jet, so the crew stayed with it. A flight-deck ejection might throw the crew over the side, which has its own risks.

Good work by the flight deck fire crews. That's what they practice for and it paid off.

(H/T)

The Convincer

2011-04-12T12:53:00.001-04:00

Ships were supposed to have safety-themed events from time to time. The Damage Control Assistant on one ship, who had the collateral job of Assistant Safety Officer*, arranged for a program of traffic safety. One of his ideas was a hot-dog cookout on the pier, offering free hot dogs and soda.

The catch was that anyone who wanted the free food had to first take a ride in the Convincer. In case you didn't click the link, the Convincer is a gizmo that you ride in; the seat slides down some guides and then slams into some bumpers to give you an idea what a low-speed crash feels like (and why you should wear your seat belt).

The Chief Engineer thought it was a good idea if he rode it first. After being slammed to a stop, the CHENG had a revelation and an idea. The revelation is that the shoulder strap for a seat belt naturally goes over the collar points of a uniform shirt. If you were wearing a shirt that had what the Navy calls "collar devices" (rank insignia), the impact drove the collar device into your collar bone and it hurt.

The idea was to combine the Convincer with a demonstration of why it was a good idea to get a car seat for kids. He told the DCA to have someone get two 5-lb bags of flour or sugar from the cooks, to put them into a plastic bag and to wrap them up with duct tape to make a simulated baby. You'd ride the Convincer, hold onto the "baby" and see the "baby" go flying out of your arms when you jolted to a stop.

That turned out to be a great idea, for it developed into an informal competition to see who could hold onto the "baby". Hardly anyone could.

So the XO came down to make an appearance and ride the Convincer. He got in and strapped in. The CHENG and the DCA were watching. The DCA asked the CHENG if maybe he should tell the XO to put his collar over the shoulder belt. The CHENG smiled and said: "Nah."

The XO rode the Convincer, it slammed to a stop. He said: "Kee-rist, that hurt." afterwards and rubbed his collarbone. But he didn't drop the "baby"; it spun out of his arms and he was able to catch it.

Oh, and when the Captain rode the Convincer, the XO didn't tell him about the shoulder belt.
__________________________________
*That was true for all ships. The DCA had the collateral duty of serving as the Assistant Safety Officer, the Chief Engineer was the Safety Officer. They did those jobs in their copious spare time.

1911

2011-03-29T11:12:00.000-04:00

A century ago today, the U.S. Army officially adopted the M1911.

As I've written elsewhere, both the .45 ACP cartridge and the M1911 set the gold standard for self-defense handguns.

Attention to Colors

2011-03-03T18:05:00.004-05:00

I've mentioned before that I was on shore duty at a facility in the DC metro area for a spell. A large number of people worked there, the vast majority were civilians. The commander of the facility was a captain in some engineering career path. The facility also had about a dozen or so naval officers of varying designators; the idea was explained to me that we all brought real-world fleet experience to the job the facility did.

We were sort of dispersed around the various departments and, brother, most of the civilians that we worked for were scared of us. For instance, my boss had at least three people in his hierarchy between himself and the facility commander, maybe four. He knew, as did all of the other bosses who had naval officers detailed to work for them, that in the "blue suit" chain of command, we all reported directly to the facility commander. It griped the living shit out of my boss that he couldn't make an appointment directly with the facility commander, but I could.

He really hated that once a month, there was a "military lunch" in the executive dining room at the cafeteria, where all of the blue-suiters had lunch with the base CO. When I realized that seriously gnawed on his liver, I made a point of telling him when the lunches were scheduled and reminding him on that day that I'd be gone for an hour or so.

We all stood a 24 hour watch as the Command Duty Officer. We didn't have to sleep at the facility, but we had to be available by phone or pager the entire time. (I think in a 30 month period of time, I had to go in maybe four times.) Turnover was at 0745 and at 0800, the ongoing and offgoing CDO stood in front of the administration building and saluted the raising of the Colors.

Now at most naval bases, all traffic stops for morning and evening Colors. Even if you don't know it's going on, you can see the pedestrians stop, face towards the Colors and salute while the Colors are raised. Even if they can't see them, they can hear the bugle call.*

But not at this facility. We would be standing on the steps of the Administration building, saluting the Colors and watching the traffic drive by. It bothered every one of us.

So one day, when I was ongoing or offgoing CDO, I don't remember which, when the four-note "Attention" call was played, we smartly marched right into the middle of the street, blocked traffic, and when the bugle call for Colors played, we saluted the Colors. When the "Carry On" played, we executed an about-faced and marched out of the street.

From then on, that was part of the drill for every duty day. I don't think we ever were honked at, for they probably believed that we'd just drag them out of their cars and beat the shit out of them. And we might have done just that.
_____________________________
* Bugle calls were pretty much only used for morning and evening Colors in the Navy. The Army and the Zoomies were, of course, big on bugle calls.

Dustoff!

2011-02-19T07:05:00.000-05:00

A videographer embedded with a Medevac unit in Afghanistan for ten days. This is the documentary that resulted. It is well worth the 25 minutes that you will spend watching it.

The Army has to be proud of these guys. This video could be used as a recruiting tool. Hell, it should be.

The kicker is that it aired on al-Jazeera.

Uniform Disasters

2011-02-01T11:40:00.001-05:00

While I was quite proud of referring to the new naval working uniform as "Battle Dress Oceanic," I have to admit that a commenter on "the Stupid Shall Be Punished" came up with a better term: Aquaflage.

Aquaflage. So it is written, so it shall be.

Sea Legs

2011-01-23T21:39:00.000-05:00

The old Grumman documentary about carrier aircraft from the 1970s.

Happy Birthday, Brown Shoes

2011-01-18T16:00:00.000-05:00

100 years since Eugene Ely made the first arrested landing on a warship (USS Pennsylvania, ACR-4)

Ely wasn't in the Navy, but his shipboard landing is now commonly regarded as the birth date for naval air. The first American aircraft carrier was authorized just after the end of the Great War and was commissioned in 1922.

Last Pilot From the Doolittle Raid.

2011-01-13T10:45:00.000-05:00

The last surviving pilot from the Doolittle Raid has died.

Col. William Marsh "Bill" Bower was 93.

Garbage Out, Garbage In

2011-01-05T10:50:00.001-05:00

Ships generate a fair amount of garbage and trash (which our cousins in the Royal Navy refer to as "gash"). In port, it was handled as any other business would; it was thrown into a dumpster on the pier.

I don't know how the Navy handles garbage and trash at sea now. Submarines supposedly compacted it and then ejected it overboard, so it would sink. Back in the day, surface ships would just throw it from the fantail; naval ships pretty much left a stream of garbage bags floating in their wakes. [1]

When a ship was at an anchorage, typically a civilian firm would be contracted to come by the ship once or twice a day to pick up the garbage. In some countries, a garbage lighter from a local navy base would do the honors and there would be impromptu trading of goods between the sailors on the warship and the crew of the lighters.[2] The lighters were supposed to take the garbage ashore and then it would be trucked to the local dump.

In Italy, of course, it didn't work that way. The garbage lighters would wait until it was completely dark. Then they would go several miles out to sea and throw all of the shit over the side. This often had one bad diplomatic ramification: Garbage with papers bearing the name of the USS UMPTECLUTCH would then drift ashore onto beaches favored by tourists. The mayor of that town would either complain to his foreign ministry or sometimes just call the local consulate directly and scream at the consular officials about American ships fouling his pristine beaches.

That usually resulted in a cable going to Foggy Bottom, which then was passed along to Fort Fumble. Some desk-bound captain or admiral would then send a message of inquiry to the offending ship, with the message copied to the commanders of the Second Fleet, the Sixth Fleet, the home cruiser-destroyer group, CTF 60, CTG 60.1 (or 60.2) and the home destroyer squadron. That was usually answered with a message that explained that garbage services were contracted through the local consular agent, or "we did what we were supposed to, whaddaya want from us?"

So one time (probably more than one time), there was an American naval ship anchored a mile or so off the coast of an Italian town. Garbage services were arranged as I described above. The garbage was handled by the lightermen as I also described. There were currents that took the garbage from where it was dumped into the Mediterranean Sea (more precisely, the Tyrrhenian Sea) back towards that town.

And back towards that ship.

When the garbage had floated back towards that ship, the garbage bags had taken on water. Some of them had submerged and were floating along about twenty or so feet under the surface. That put them right at the level of the sea chests[3] for the generators, the evaporators and the fire mains. The suction from the sea chests sucked the garbage into the sea chests, where the garbage clogged the inlet screens.

All that stuff kept tripping offline as cooling was lost. The cure was to connect a fire hose to the sea chest and backwash the shit back out. The chief engineer and the captain soon realized that the time might come when all of the firemain pump inlets were clogged at the same time. So the captain ordered that the Sea and Anchor Detail be set, the anchor was hauled up and the ship headed out to sea.

This happened around midnight or so, stranding several dozen sailors ashore. After it was fully light out, the ship came back in, though well away from the garbage current and sent in its boats to retrieve the rest of the crew. The boat crews were told to keep a watch out for garbage so that the sea chests for their engines weren't fouled.

In due course, the sailors who were ashore were recovered and the ship went off to its next mission.

_______________________________________
[1] Classified material was put into burn bags. Stuff classified as "secret" or above was supposed to first be shredded and then burned.
[2] In Muslim nations, a very desired trade good by the lightermen was American porn.
[3] A "sea chest" is the point of salt water inlet for a given system. For generators, sea water was used for cooling the condensers and sea water also cooled the air-conditioning plants. For evaporators, sea water was the raw material for making fresh water. Water for fire-fighting was also sea water.

Now Hear This: Happy New Year!

2010-12-31T19:16:00.002-05:00

That is all.

Food, or a Reasonable Facsimile Thereof

2010-12-20T08:21:00.000-05:00

see more Very Demotivational

An explanation.

69 Years Ago- The Second Happy Time

2010-12-18T10:03:00.000-05:00

69 years ago today, the first of five German U-Boats sailed to begin commerce-raiding operations off the east coast of the United States.

The U-boats were able to sink so many ships with so few German losses that the period from the arrival of the U-boats to about August of 1942 became known as the "Second Happy Time".

The reaction of the US Navy to the U-boat campaign, as well as the local governments in coastal cities, bordered on criminal neglect and dereliction of duty.

The Navy fought the institution of a coastal convoy system, despite the lessons learned during both the First World War and the high losses the British suffered at the onset of the Second World War. The Navy was extremely slow to react and resisted the formation of civilian aerial antisubmarine patrols (a measure that proved to be an extremely effective countermeasure). Until the Navy pulled its collective thumb out of its ass, many merchant vessels were sunk, most with the loss of their crews.

Merchant ships sailing independently tried hopping from anchorage to anchorage, sailing only in darkness. The U-boats were able to see ships operating inshore silhouetted by the lights of towns and cities. Civilian governments resisted the institution of a coastal blackout, because the local governments feared the impact of a blackout on their merchants, preferring to see ships on the horizon burning from U-boat attacks.

Keep in mind that although the film stock from the war shows the U-boats executing torpedo attacks, U-boats sank a lot of ships by surfacing and firing on those ships with their deck guns, because submarines of the day carried maybe 12-20 torpedoes. Surfaced U-boats were vulnerable to air attack; the later formation of the Civil Air Patrol, light aircraft armed with small bombs, forced the U-boats to discontinue surface attacks.

Between the CAP flights, convoying and Navy blimp patrols, merchant sinkings went down and U-boat losses climbed, making operations off the U.S. coast a lot more hazardous for the U-boat crews.

The Troll Under the Bridge, cont.

2010-12-04T22:47:00.000-05:00

Navy Times is reporting that CAPT Graf's continuation board recommended that she be forcibly retired with a general discharge.

I read through some of the comments that CAPT Graf was favored because her sister is an admiral. I don't know anything about that.

But a long time ago, I knew one admiral who was so dumb that he should have been watered twice a week and the only reason anyone could figure out that he had gotten so far was that his father and his uncle were both admirals. Maybe a cousin and a brother as well, I've forgotten. There were weekly stories going around the waterfront about what stupid thing that admiral had said or asked in the weekly staff meeting.

So yes, nepotism did exist in the Navy and it probably still does. Idiot offspring who are legacy admissions isn't confined to douchebag sons at Ivy-league universities.

(Original post.)

Thanksgiving at Sea, or "We Sail to Defend, What We Hold So Dear. "The DDGs, Welded to the Pier."

2010-11-25T11:50:00.003-05:00

I hope that you are having (or that you had) a nice Thanksgiving, Gentle Reader. Please spare a moment from your day of food (and football) to think of those men and women in the Armed Forces who are away from home on this day, with a special thought to those on the ground in Afghanistan and Iraq, and those who are sailing into uncertain waters off the Korean Peninsula.

I've spent a Thanksgiving or two at sea, it's not terribly uncommon in the Navy. If the cooks are halfway good, the meal is a feast like none other[1] (though cigars and cigarettes were no longer provided). It was a good idea to reflect on one's underway watch rotation before sitting down to eat, as showing up for watch ready to fall asleep from overeating was not a good idea.

On larger ships, a VIP might show up to thank the crew. A DoD or USO entertainment group might perform, which resulted in a sort of "mandatory fun" if not enough sailors showed up to watch the show.[2] Smaller ships were luckier, usually they got to be on their own. Unless it was truly wartime, Thanksgiving was a day of holiday routine; no work was done other than sweepers, watchstanding and cooking. Everyone could sleep in if they didn't have to be up.

I was surfing around, saw the usual press releases, and found this Plan of the Day from a warship's Thanksgiving thirty years ago. (Scroll down until you see the first typed image and then click on it.)

I don't know the story behind it, but it sounds as though the USS Joseph Hewes had to leave for Thanksgiving to cover something that the USS Sellers was supposed to do. Probably one of the crewmen, or more than one, wrote that poem. If I remember correctly, only line officers could qualify for surface warfare pins back then, so it is possible that one of the wardroom rats had a hand in that.

Covering another ship's commitments was a bittersweet thing. The bitter was that it meant more time away from home.[3] If it was over a holiday, your plans, the plans of your shipmates and everyone's families were ruined. The sweet was that there was considerable unit pride in being on a ship that could be told, on very short notice, to get underway and do someone else's job. [4] That was a hard thing to sell to one's family, but it was still true. The reverse was that the waterfront reputation of a ship that was indeed "welded to the pier" was not good. The higher-ups in the squadron and the group could be counted on to lavish the sort of extra attention on that short of ship which nobody on that ship relished receiving.
_____________________________
[1] If the cooks produced a terrible Thanksgiving meal, that may result in the Supply Officer and the chief cook getting fired.
[2] "You will attend and you will have fun."
[3] Between deployments, exercises and in-port duty days, it was common to sleep in your own bed maybe 60-70 days a year.
[4] I have no doubt that copies of that POD were mailed to the USS Sellers.

Lockout and Tagout

2010-11-12T10:56:00.000-05:00

One of the jobs I had before I went into the Navy was cleaning machinery in a factory. Each one of us on the cleaning crew was issued a padlock and a lockout hasp.

The first person on the job turned off the power to the machine, inserted the lockout hasp on the power switch and then locked the hasp with a padlock. Every additional person on that job added their lock to the hasp. Only the individual worker had the key to his or her own lock. The machine could not be cleared to run without everyone removing their locks. It was a suspendable offense to leave the site without clearing one's lock. Working on a machine without locking it out was a termination offense.

That didn't work that way in the Navy. There were redundant sources of power to a lot of machinery. There could be several inputs of things that might hurt someone working on a piece of equipment.

What there was, instead, was a tagout system. Yellow was used for caution, red for danger. Most of the tags that one would see were red tags. Sometimes there were a shitload of red tags. Tagging out a boiler required tagging out everything that fed into the boiler, was operated to service the boiler or fed from that boiler. Tagging out a boiler required over sixty red tags.

To do a tagout right, a sailor had to bring all of the proposed tags and the piping/wiring diagrams to the EOOW or the Duty Engineer, as well as a tagout sheet, which listed each tag (now they are serialized) and its location. The Duty Engineer (since most tagouts were done in port) was supposed to go over the tagout sheet and the diagrams with the worker, then they would sign all of the tags and the tagout sheet. After the equipment (valves, switches) were all tagged, the tagout sheet was logged into the Tagout Log in DC Central.

Tags were supposed to be inspected daily by the workcenter supervisor, the LPO in charge of the relevant work center. A missing tag meant that the work had to stop until both the thing tagged out was checked and a new tag procured and hung.

To remove the tags, the worker brought the tagout sheet to the Duty Engineer, who signed to authorize removal. The worker then removed all of the tags and brought the tags and the sheet back to the Duty Engineer, who would inventory the tags. Both the worker and the Duty Engineer signed each tag for removal and signed the tagout sheet. Once that was done, the sheet and the removed tags were entered into the tagout log. Then, and only then, was whatever was tagged out cleared for operation.

Violating tagout was a big Bozo No-No. It was a damn near certain guarantee of getting maxed out at Captain's Mast (demotion, restriction to the ship and extra duty for 45 days and loss of half-pay for two months). The tagout system was at the heart of plant safety; I know of no Chief Engineer or Captain who had any sense of humor about tagout violations.

A Rifleman Went to War

2010-11-10T12:35:00.001-05:00

I picked up a copy of "A Rifleman Went to War" from inter-library loan.

The author, Herbert McBride, was an interesting fellow. He clearly was eager to go to war, somewhere, as he wrote that he tried to get into the Boer War and the intervention into Mexico, both without success. When World War I broke out he had to have been in his early 40s, yet he went to Canada and enlisted. He fought in France until he was medically discharged in 1917 for what appeared to be a combination of battle wounds and shell shock.

Two decades or so before the war, he was living and working in Colorado to get over a case of tuberculosis. Working as a cowboy and for a coal company, he became acquainted with some of the famous gunfighters of the Old West:

From these men I learned many things, the most important of which was the point which they ll insisted was absolutely vital: the ability to control one's own nerves and passions--in other works, never to get excited.

(pg. 5)

If you want a cold, unsentimental yet proud look at life in the trenches, then the book is well worth reading.

If you have ever seen the somewhat execrable movie "Enemy at the Gates", you might recall a scene where Vasilii Zaitsev is talking about the unnatural actions of a German sniper in not relocating after reach shot. McBride machine-gunned a German sniper who didn't move after firing; he saw where a litter party was shot down and was able to triangulate back to a likely firing point.

McBride believed that the problems that occurred with the Ross rifle were due to substandard ammunition that was made in the rush to ramp up production for the war. He hinted at a manufacturer on the Hudson River, "National something or other", which unless he was referring to the Watervliet arsenal, I have no clue as to who he meant.

Update: National Conduit and Cable Co., Hastings-on-Hudson, NY.

Career-Limiting Move

2010-10-22T10:55:00.000-04:00

Running your submarine aground:

(Um, you couldn't figure out a way to try and steady your camera??)

Dear John

2010-10-19T15:33:00.004-04:00

Dear John letters were a fact of life in the Navy. Typically, they came roughly mid-way through the deployment. To be fair, it wasn't all the sea duty sailors being broadsided. There were sailors who met and fell in love when visiting foreign ports and who then dumped their stateside spouses. But for this post, let's talk about those who were dumped. Also, for the purposes of this post, I'll refer to the sailors in the male gender and the spouses back home in the feminine gender, though the opposite cases were becoming true (and now are certainly true).

The reasons why the dumpings happened were fairly similar. There were the wives who realized after a few months that their husbands were scum and didn't want them back. There were wives who fell for newer models, an appalling number of whom were other sailors. There were wives who already had new boyfriends lined up and used the deployments to carry out their plans.

The commencement of the breakup was stereotypical: There was the letter. The recipient would react in varying ways: In stoic silence, tears, screams of anguish, smashing fists into bulkheads (never a good thing to do) or smashing things. If the letter came during a port visit, the recipient would find a telephone exchange and try to call home. Those who had the money (usually officers) would try to take leave and fly home. Sleeplessness was common. So was heavy self-medication during liberty ashore.

Where the wives strayed often wasn't unusual. Where husbands were known to regard their marriage vows as being suspended once the ship passed the sea buoy out-bound, the wives sometimes became "deployment widows". For example, the Friday night dance at the NAS Oceana Officers' Club was notorious for being a place where single officers, especially airdales, could go to find a deployment widow for some fun and games.* Every naval community had a place or three like that, some off-base, some on-base. Probably most of the time, what happened was a short fling. But not always.**

Sometimes there wasn't even a Dear John letter. The husband would come back to find his place cleaned out, his bank account emptied and his family gone. That was usually facilitated by a trusting husband who gave his wife a legal power-of-attorney. I knew of one wife and boyfriend who wound up in prison for forging a power-of-attorney to sell the home.

There was one guy who came back from deployment and, like everyone else, was eager for the reunion. What happened was that another one of the wives sorrowfully gave him his car keys and told him that his car was in the parking lot. It was, jam-packed with all of his stuff.

There was another guy who, also eager for the reunion, was met by a process-server with a set of divorce papers.

There was the guy who found out where his soon-to-be-ex was with her new boyfriend. The sailor and a few of his buddies rode up on motorcycles, shot the shit out of the boyfriend's house and rode off.

The ones that were probably the worst to see were the ones where the wife broke the news and took her leave right there on the pier.*** Those probably set the record for the amount of spirit-crushing that took place. It was bad enough when the sailor had suspicions that the relationship was in trouble. It was terrible when the sailor was deluded or had no clue whatever that his marriage was imploding.

The aftereffects could be, well, interesting. In a good and supportive unit, the dumpee was looked after and helped, under a theory of "there but for the grace of G-d go I". In most commands, however, the attitude was "it sucks to be you". Self-medication with alcohol and other women was common.**** If things went well, the dumpee would recover and move on. But many times, there was enough self-medicating to hurt one's job performance, or if the captain was a self-righteous prig who regarded any family drama as career-limiting, then the dumpee had better plan on drafting a resume.

Dear John letters and their aftermath probably ended more careers, whether the sailor opted to leave or left after career suicide, than any other factor.

_______________________________
* Not just deployment widows, too. Lots of single women came to such places on the hunt for their own "officer and a gentleman" (I cannot tell you how much I hated that particular movie.).
** Even the flings could be destructive. I knew of one marriage that ended when the returned husband found a parking ticket in his car; the parking ticked was issued at the Oceana O-Club on a Friday night six weeks after he had deployed.
*** I've seen it go the other way, as well, when the sailor told the wife right there on the pier that the marriage was over.
**** In an interesting twist of fate, such sailors often pursued deployment widows for some meaningless sex.

The Future for the US Navy

2010-10-15T12:32:00.000-04:00

I had some thoughts on my home blog. You may be interested. Or not.

Nothing Ever Changes

2010-10-04T15:33:00.000-04:00

Once again, the Air Force is taking knocks for largely being a bunch of civilians in uniform, with their fine whines of: "It's dusty here!" "Our laundry is damp!" "Do we have to share with the Army?" ("no" on that one)

It was a standing joke back in the day that when the Air Force was given money to build a base, they'd spend all of the money to build the Officer's Club, the EM Club, base housing and one runway (in order to fly in the booze) and then go back to Congress for more money for incidentals such as repair shops and hangars.

It doesn't sound as though much has changed.

Volunteering the Army Way

2010-10-03T21:54:00.002-04:00

I posted this over on one of my other blogs, but it seems a shame not to have it here.

Operation Clusterfrak, Not the Video

2010-10-01T20:39:00.000-04:00

I don't think that Operation Clusterfuck would have been anything like this:

Watch Conditions

2010-10-01T09:31:00.000-04:00

I need to run through this for future posts.

Condition I: Condition I was Battle Stations, everyone on duty. All of the weapon systems and all of the repair lockers were manned and ready and the ship was kept in Condition Zebra. There was a limit to how long everyone could be kept on station, though.

Condition II: Condition II was almost battle stations. Certain weapon systems were manned, usually the AAW missile battery. The divisions that manned the systems were usually in two-section duty (six hours on and six hours off).

Condition IIAS: This was specific to ASW ships, usually the ones with towed arrays. Passive ASW, when done by hand, took a lot of people. On a 1052, there would be at least eight people in Sonar Control. CIC kept their ASW plots manned and a R/T talker on duty for helo ops. The LAMPS Det was in something like Ready 30. Sonar and CIC were in two-section duty.

Condition II manning could be maintained for two months, but it took a hell of a toll on people. Some maintenance had to be deferred. The XO would begin to go batshit because the berthing compartments were half-filled with sleeping men in the morning from the six-hour midwatch, which made cleaning for his inspection difficult.

Condition III: This was the standard condition for wartime steaming with no immediate threat and for at-sea exercises. CIC was manned for air and surface tracking. The TAO watch was manned. The AAW and gun batteries were often lightly manned (enough to get the first shots off), but not for exercises. Officers were normally in three watch sections, CIC would be in two or three. There were any number of voice radio circuits monitored on the Bridge and in CIC.

Condition IV: Peacetime steaming. Depending on the number of qualified OODs, the officer watches may be in four or five sections. CIC was manned for surface tracking and maybe one OS might sit at the air-search radar scope head.

The enlisted bridge watch was normally in four sections for all but Battle Stations. Steam engineers always tried to achieve three watch sections, but two-section duty was very common as the loss of one or two watch-qualified sailors, whether to illness, being sent home for family emergencies or being transferred, was enough to kick the hole watches back to two sections.

Meep, Meep!

2010-09-27T19:28:00.000-04:00

ASW, Japanese style:

(H/T)

But, But, I Might Get in Trouble!!!

2010-09-21T19:46:00.000-04:00

This is no shit (and all times are approximate):

I was on shore duty for a spell; I was stationed in the DC area. For some reason, the Powers That Be where I worked sent me and a bunch of civilian engineers to a four-hour presentation/lunch at the Little Creek Naval Base in Virginia Beach, VA. We had to all be at work at 0530 to ride a large passenger van down (the conference started at 1000) and the van would take us back to our offices at the end of the presentation.

Most of us snoozed on the way down.

I wish I could tell you what the presentation was all about, not because it was classified, but because I just don't remember. For some reason, we had to ride out in the harbor in a LARC-LX to watch some ship do something worth seeing. It was a nice day, the water was calm, a LARC-LX is one big mother on huge wheels (like a really big DUKW) and we got to eat a buffet lunch after the boat ride. But none of that is important to this tale.

It was an hour or so after we started back to DC that it became clear to me (and others) that the driver of the van was seriously tired. He was having trouble staying in the lane on I-64. I called out to him (I was two rows back) and asked that he make a pit stop as soon as possible, with the excuse that I really had to pee, "and I mean right now."

He pulled into a truck stop and everybody got out. I made a quick run to the head and got back to the van before the driver. I climbed into the driver's seat, buckled up and waited. When the driver came back, he didn't even put up an argument. He got into the right front seat and he was out like a light just after we got back on the highway. He slept until we pulled off the highway towards the facility where we worked.

The van had three lights to monitor mileage, the idea being that you were supposed to drive in such a way as to keep the green light on. I had the yellow or red lights on the whole way back. When we got to the facility, around 1900 or so, the gate guard did a double-take when he saw that I was driving, but he saluted and I drove in to the office building, where we all got out and the driver took the van back to the motor pool.

The next day, one of the engineers buttonholed me and said: "I was really happy that you took over from that driver. I could see that he was falling asleep at the wheel. We could have all been killed."

"If you knew that, then why didn't you volunteer to drive," I asked.

"But I don't have a government driver's license," he protested. He actually seemed scandalized at the idea that he might drive a government vehicle without one.

I looked at him and smiled. "I don't have one, either. But I'm not about to let the lack of a piece of paper get me killed."

The driver, though, must have told what had happened to his boss. For three days later, without my saying a word to anyone, I received a government driver's license through the interoffice mail. The effective date on the license was back-dated to a week before the trip.

The file had been papered.

A Day in Port

2010-09-19T17:41:00.005-04:00

This is from memory and it is based on the ships I spent time on. So if your ship differed, feel free to comment.

Sunrise- Topside lighting was turned off.

0600- Reveille. The Petty Officer of the Watch would turn on the 1MC (announcing system) to the common spaces and engineering and announce: "Reveille, reveille. All hands heave out and trice up. The smoking lamp is lit in all authorized spaces.." he would flip on the switch to Officers' Country and add "now reveille."

Of course, some people had been up for awhile. The watches, whether the ship was cold iron (hotel services being provided from the pier) or auxiliary steaming were manned. The cooks had been up for awhile preparing breakfast.

0615- "Early chow". The watchstanders, those who were taking the forenoon watch at 0700, got to eat. Lots of other people did, as well. Most of the officers drifted in by 0630 so they could change into working uniform and grab breakfast. The department heads and some of the division officers received copies of relevant message traffic; you could find them at the wardroom table, eating breakfast and scanning through the pile of copies of radioteletype messages. (Radio Central usually had more than one damn big xerox machine.)

0615- Sweepers. The offgoing duty section was supposed to give a quick cleaning of the ship. If the day was a weekend, it had better be a good one, as the oncoming Command Duty Officer would not release the offgoing duty section until the ship was cleaned to his or her satisfaction. The offgoing duty section hoped like hell that the oncoming CDO was badly hung over and wouldn't have noticed if the ship had sunk at the pier.

0630- Breakfast for the Crew. By now there was a steady parade of ship's company across the Quarterdeck. An officer from the off-going duty section had to eat breakfast on the Mess Deck in order to fill out a report.

0700- Relieve the Watch. The Forenoon watch was the first one for the oncoming duty section.

0700-0715- Expiration of Liberty. The exact time depended on the ship.

0720- Officers' Call. This was where the XO amplified on whatever was in the Plan of the Day. The XO would ask questions of the attendees and discuss anything that was on his or her mind. Depending on what was bugging the XO, this could be a very uncomfortable event.

On smaller ships, all of the officers and the command master chief attended Officers' Call. On larger ships, it was the CMC and the department heads; in that event, the department heads then met with their division officers. Any discomfort from the XO would be passed along.

0730- Quarters. All hands not on watch in port would assemble at their divisional mustering point. Attendance was taken and the Muster Report would later be turned into the Ship's Office. Attention would be called with words ranging from the formal (and prescribed) "Attention to Quarters", to, as I heard one Master Chief say: "Listen Up, You Varmints." The Plan of the Day was read out and then everyone would wait for the division officer to come back from Officer's Call and announce any modifications to the POD.

If the day was a weekend, the ongoing and offgoing duty sections would muster in one location. When the oncoming CDO was satisfied, liberty call would occur for the offgoing duty section.

0745- Turn To. Commence Ship's Work. In other words, get busy. Division officers were expected to be in their spaces for most of the work day. Good department heads toured their spaces as well, for on a warship, the best fertilizer was the farmer's shadow.

0800- Colors. The National Ensign and the Jack were raised. Either the colors bugle call was played (by a recording) or the National Anthem. If you were topside, you stood at attention, faced aft and saluted.If there were more than one nation's warship in port, that anthem was played as well. In a NATO task group, that could be several of them. You really didn't want to be caught topside for morning colors.

0600-0930- CO arrives on board. If the ship had no special inspections or other looming catastrophes, it was a sign of a well-run ship (and a competent XO) that the Captain arrived late and could go home early.[1] The XO would meet with the CO soon after the CO arrived to discuss the daily message traffic and whatever else was going on. The CO would also tour parts of his ship.

1000- XO's Inspection of Messing and Berthing. The XO, the CMC and a yeoman (who took notes) would inspect the berthing compartments, the heads, the galley, the scullery and the messing areas. This was very much a "shit flows downhill" inspection, as the XO would pour hell on the department heads. Department heads would then motivate their division officers, and so forth. After a couple of bad reports, an irritated department head might order the responsible division office to make a personal inspection prior to the XO and report back.[2]

1115- Early Chow (lunch)

1130-1230 Lunch. (Some ships called this "dinner"). The lunch hour was popular for those who wanted to work out or rack out. This hour was damn near sacred, bothering a person at lunch was considered to be an offense. Usually, immediately before lunch, the Officer of the Deck would send the Messenger of the Watch to make the Twelve O'Clock Reports to the Captain. These included the Fuel and Water Report, the Muster Report, the Mazagine Temperature Report and the Chronometer Report. The MOW had a spiel to recite as the reports were handed to the Captain.[3]

1230- Commence Ship's work.

1545- Sweepers.

1600- Liberty Call. This may be delayed on ships that had a lot to do. Individual divisions could let people go earlier or later. Usually the last people off the ship were the engineering officers. [4]

1715- Early Chow.

1730- Supper for the Crew.

Sunset- Colors. The National Ensign and Jack were lowered, the topside lights were turned on.

1830- Muster of Extra Duty Men with the Master of Arms. These were the fuckups who had been awarded extra duty at Captain's Mast. Divisions would request extra-duty men from the Master of Arms. Usually, this involved chipping paint in either the engineering spaces or the topside weather decks for two hours.

1830- Sweepers.

1900 (or so, it could be later)- Movie Call. This was more popular back in the days of real 16mm movies being shown on the ships. In the 1980s, the movies began to be replaced with tapes that were played either where a TV set was installed or on the ship's internal cable television system (SITE TV).

1930- Eight O'Clock Reports- The duty department heads would meet with the CDO to report that the ship had been cleaned. Underway, the meeting was between the department heads and the XO. If a department head was on watch, a division officer would attend. Eight O'Clock Reports were really disliked if one had the midwatch.

2200- Taps. The smoking lamp was extinguished, the interior of the ship was darkened, at least in the vicinity of the berthing compartments and in Officers Country. Before the adoption of privacy curtains, all bunk lights had to be shut off.

[1] The converse was also true. Captains were "bonged aboard" (page down to "boat gongs"), so it was common knowledge when a captain arrived or left the ship.
[2] A division which didn't seem to grasp the importance of complying might end up with their division officer and chief being ordered to attend the XO's inspection. That usually worked wonders.
[3] "Good morning, Sir. The Officer of the Deck sends his respects and reports the approach of the hour of twelve o'clock. All chronometers have been wound and compared. Request permission to strike eight bells on time, sir." The CO would reply: "Very well, permission granted. Carry on."
[4] The operations officers often were heard to complain about the commuter traffic on and of the base. The engineers had no idea what their beef was, for traffic was usually light by the time they went home.

The Purge

2010-09-09T18:50:00.000-04:00

I alluded to the story I am about to relate nearly two years ago, when I discussed selection boards.

The surface Navy's Department Head School, commonly referred to as the Destroyer School, was located on Coasters Harbor Island, Newport, RI. The school consisted of two parts. First there was the general curriculum, including the Tactical Action Officers segment, and then the students split into groups for the job-specific portion (Weapons, Operations or Engineering). Each class in the 1980s had 100 officers, usually 95% lieutenants in two sections of 50. The course was 20 weeks long and there were two full classes in session at any one time.

This is no shit:

In one of the classes that was in session when the LCDR Selection Board reported out, there was a LT who failed to select. They brought him back to the school in the middle of the night to inventory the classified material in his desk, then they gave him orders to somewhere else. As far as his classmates knew, he was there in class one day and gone the next. Nobody would tell them where he was sent to.

He was a popular young man and his classmates were not happy.

Two days later, they took the class photo, which was on the back cover of the graduation program for each class. The photo was a group photo of everyone standing on the steps in front of the Destroyer School building, three deep. The class left a one-man gap in the front rank and they put a combination cover on the ground in the gap.

The photographer didn't notice or didn't give a shit. The people who put together the graduation program didn't notice. The XO of the Destroyer School did notice on the day before the graduation, when it was too late to change the programs. The CO of the Destroyer School had to settle for a mass chewing out of the entire class at a special assembly.

Which, as is typical for such events, accomplished nothing.

Uniform Disasters- Zoomie Edition

2010-08-24T15:19:00.000-04:00

Take a look at this page, which shows, among other things, the Air Force ~~casual~~ informal uniform.

If I saw a Zoomie in that getup, I'd be tempted to ask where I could rent a DVD.

Here I thought the Navy's Battle Dress Oceanic had set a new standard for idiotic uniforms, but one can never count out ~~Uncle Sam's Christian Flying Club~~ the Air Force when it comes to institutionalized insanity.

The Battle of the Atlantic

2010-08-23T16:53:00.001-04:00

From "Morning Joe":

The book being flogged there is "a Measureless Peril.

"The Battle of the Atlantic" by Terry Hughes is long out of print, but it is an excellent work on the longest battle of the Second World War.

Damn

2010-08-13T15:23:00.000-04:00

Out of work.

And that is all.

Operation Clusterfrak

2010-08-01T13:11:00.004-04:00

In January 1987, a number of foreign citizens were kidnapped in Lebanon. There were approximately 3,000 American citizens in Lebanon. The order was given for American warships in the Sixth Fleet[1] to move closer to Lebanon and prepare for an evacuation of all Americans willing to leave.

The experts in that sort of operation are the Marines, who are embarked on amphibious landing ships. They are the ones with the landing craft and the skills to go ashore in a potentially hostile situation, evacuate civilians and kill anyone who gets in the way. The Navy's job is to get the Marines to the beach, to provide fire support from destroyers and airplanes and to drink copious amounts of coffee while doing so.

There was a slight problem: The amphibious ships were conducting an exercise on the Atlantic coast of Spain with their Spanish counterparts. Even if the Marines and all of their gear could re-embark on their ships immediately, it would take at least a week for those ships to get to Lebanon, as amphibs are not fast ships.

There were ships in the Eastern Med, though, a carrier task group, TG 60.2, if I remember correctly.[2], which was comprised of a carrier, two cruisers (a conventional Terrier shooter and a nuke Tartar shooter), some destroyers (both AAW shooters [DDG-37s and DDG-2s] and not [Spruance-class DDs]), and some frigates (both 1052s and FFG-7s). The order was given for those ships to move towards Lebanon and to prepare to evacuate American citizens.

And so was born Operation Clusterfuck, and this is no shit.[3]

First, the ships were told how many evacuees they might have to carry. None of the ships, other than maybe the carrier, had more than a few empty racks in any one berthing compartment. Only a few had the capability to handle mixed-gender passengers. How they were going to do it was left entirely in their hands,[4] which was a real sign that nobody in the stratospheric reaches of the command structure had any clue what to do.

Second, the ships were told that they would have to make their ships' boats available to both transport evacuees to the waiting ships and to patrol the area of operations. Those boats were to be armed and commanded by either a junior officer or a chief. Direction on that was similarly lacking; whether the boats had M-60 machine guns mounted or made do with rifles was up to the ships. The boats did not have machine gun mounts, but between the deck apes, the HTs and the MRs, those ships that wanted to mount machine guns on their boats figured out how.

Third, the ships were required to supply manning for landing parties to control the beach head. Here the ships had some direction, they were told how many sailors and officers to supply. If I remember correctly, most had to supply twenty or so sailors, with a division officer as a platoon leader. The cruisers had to supply more sailors, maybe 30, a division officer and a department head to act as a company commander. Other than "give them weapons", the details were left to the ships.

You have to imagine the head-scratching and expressions of "what the fuck" that transpired throughout the task group. At best, the ship's crews' small-arms training was limited to 30 rounds through a .45, five rounds through a shotgun and 30 rounds through a M-14 on a yearly basis. Nobody had ever trained at sending a landing force ashore. Hell, the only people who had ever seen a landing force were those who had watched either the Sand Pebbles or the Wind and the Lion. (Go 1:54 into this clip. It probably wouldn't have been like that.)

But they drew up their teams. The landing forces from each ship were made up a real mixture of sailors and officers. Some of the ships drew the teams mainly from the Weapons Department. Others went more widely and selected based on known familiarity with firearms and temperament. The officers sent were chosen both on their abilities and on whether they had subordinates strong enough to act in their places on the ships.[5] The officer in charge of the planning was either the Senior Watch Officer or the Weapons Officer.

The XOs, Supply Officers, Corpsmen and Master-at-Arms planned for how their ships were going to house, feed and care for civilians. If a berthing compartment was going to be emptied out, then the sailors had to hot-bunk with other sailors, but it was far more complicated than that. The ships were planning how to deal with injured or pregnant civilians, how to provide care for children and what to do in the event of a lot of casualties.

Off the ships, the shore staffs were trying to figure out where the ships could go (and quickly) to offload the evacuees. The closest friendly port was Haifa, but that was deemed not to be diplomatically practicable.

As the carrier task group steamed closer to Lebanon, a "cordon sanitaire" was declared and published by way of issuing Notice to Mariners. This basically said that any unknown vessel or aircraft which came too close or interfered with a USN ship was liable to be attacked without warning. Warnings were given to aircraft on the guard frequency (121.5MHz), though I was told that at least one small jet that had been chartered by some reporters was almost shot down by one of the missile ships before the jet turned back towards land.

In the end, though, the evacuation plan was never put into effect. I would imagine that somebody probably explained to the Reagan Administration the hazards of sending a few hundred sailors ashore into a potentially hostile situation when the sailors would be doing things for which they were not trained.

[1] A/K/A the Mediterranean Fleet.
[2] There were normally two carrier task groups in the Med, 60.1 and 60.2, so I have a 50% chance of being correct.
[3] My term for it. The blog title differs as at least one blog which blogrolls this one is "fambly friendly" and that blogger has requested that I not use nasty words in the titles of posts.
[4] Probably the first time on record that the "we have plenty of helpful guidance for you, Skipper" staffs, both afloat and ashore, were silent on anything.
[5] Marital status was also taken into account by some ships, a sign that few expected the operation to go very well.

Fleet Organization

2010-07-31T13:45:00.002-04:00

First, there are the numbered fleets. 2nd Fleet is the Atlantic, 6th is the Med, 5th is the Persian Gulf area, 3rd is the eastern Pacific and 7th is the western Pacific.

Then there were task forces, which reported to the fleet commander. TF 60 was the carrier force and their escorts. TF 61 was the amphib ships, TF 62 was the Marines on those ships, TF 63 was the logistics fleet. I've forgotten what TF the subs were (other than "sonar contact = enemy").

There were normally two carriers in the Med. Each carrier made up a task group, 60.1 and 60.2. The embarked destroyer commodore was head of the task unit for the their task group, making them 60.1.1, etc. Ships that were split off for independent assignments (which happened to the ASW 1052s frequently) were designated as task elements.

The commander of any of those forces was designated with a C, so the commander of TG 60.1 was known as CTG 60.1. That was a valid naval message address. So if the staff of Cruiser and Destroyer Group 2 was in the Med as the boss of TG 60.1 and you needed to send a message to the admiral, you addressed it to either COMCRUDESGRU TWO or CTG 60.1, depending on whether or not the subject matter was administrative or operational.

This is background for an upcoming post.

Uniform Disasters

2010-07-30T07:42:00.000-04:00

I still think that the new Navy working uniform looks stupid.

It makes them look like militia-wannabees.

Good Eats

2010-07-27T19:37:00.003-04:00

A long time ago, I was in Barcelona, Spain. This was before they had the Olympics and cleaned the place up. We were supposed to go ashore on the buddy-system, but I had a job with some weird-ass hours, so I just went ashore by myself, whenever the frak I wanted, and nobody said anything to me.

There was a wide plaza up from the waterfront that was called "the Ramblas", or something like that. It was sort of like being on a street with a median that was 100 meters wide; there were outdoor cafes along it. The entertainment was limited to people-watching, which on at least one occasion, included watching some dude slap his girlfriend around until the Guardia Civil showed up and hauled him off.

The Guardia wore some goofy-looking black lacquered hats that looked like pillboxes with a flat piece behind them. Some of the Guardia carried submachine guns. The Police Militare also patrolled the streets and they had SMGs of some flavor. Word was that only a fool messed with any of the Spanish cops.

A lot of the buildings had dark-grey stone facades. Whether the facades were that color because of decades of smoke or that was the natural color, I never knew. When I looked up at the buildings, especially on the side streets, I could see pockmarks from bullet impacts, presumably from street-fighting during the Spanish Civil War.

So anyway, in my meanderings, I found a hole-in-the-wall restaurant that, among other things, served half of a chicken, a big plate of steaming hot French fries and a beer for 250 pesetas which, if memory serves me correctly, was about three bucks American.

Maybe my taste buds had been hammered by the long- frozen French fries and blasted chicken that was standard fare in the Navy, but that fresh chicken and fries which that restaurant served up was unbelievably good. I made at least four trips to that little place and each meal was as good as the one before. I never saw anyone from any of the Navy ships in port then at that place and I kept my mouth shut, believe me.

Vernon Baker, R.I.P

2010-07-15T07:23:00.000-04:00

Vernon Baker, Medal of Honor recipient, has died. He was 90.

Almost 20 years ago, the Army began investigating why no African-Americans had been awarded the Medal of Honor during World War II. Based on the work of historians and then an Army screening board, they found ten men who should have been considered for the award. Seven men were deemed to have acted with bravery above and beyond the call of duty. Four had been killed in combat, two had died after the war. Only Mr. Baker was left alive by the time his bravery was recognized for what it was.

Repairs

2010-07-06T21:09:00.016-04:00

Earlier, I discussed the Planned Maintenance Subsystem, which is how the crew of any ship knew what maintenance work needed to be done. Quite often, though, maintenance or repair work needed to be accomplished which was beyond the capabilities of the ship's force. That work had to be accomplished by an outside entity.

The process was started by submitting a request on a pale green machine-readable form, OPNAV Form 4790/2K, which was known throughout the Fleet as a "2-Kilo".

2-Kilos had to be signed by the entire chain of command. After that, what happened depended on where the ship was and what was going on. If your ship was going into a tender availability, the 2-Kilos went to the tender's repair officer for evaluation. If the repair officer passed on doing the work, then the 2-Kilo would be sent to the home port supervisor of shipbuilding and repair (Supships) for submission for the next overhaul or selected restricted availability (SRA). What was accomplished in an overhaul or SRA was determined by Navsea and the type commander (SurfLant or SurfPac), and the main criteria was how much it would cost and how much money the type commander had for repairs.

Back in the day, ships of the Atlantic Fleet had to be able to rig "friendship lights". Imagine a 25' long string of 3-wire outdoor extension cord, with a 60-watt work light every foot or so. They looked like giant Christmas tree lights. Ships needed enough strings to completely circle the main weather deck, to go down the length of the gangway and to run from the fantail, up to the top of the mast and then back down to the bow. That was a shitload of lights.

It looked something like this:

Night time:

Daylight:

They were called friendship lights because lighting up the ship like that implied no hostile intent (and it told everyone who looked out at the harbor that a foreign warship was there). Everyone in the Atlantic Fleet called them "Med lights", because they were normally only used when deployed. More to the point of things, they were not repair parts, they were consumable items.

This is no shit:

There was a steam-powered cruiser in Mayport that was getting ready to deploy. The cruiser had a new chief engineer. The CHENG asked the Electrical Officer if the Med lights were ready to go. The Electrical Officer replied in the affirmative. The CHENG said fine, the ship was going to be in port for three weeks, so he wanted to see them all strung up in place and tested. The Electrical Officer protested that would be a lot of work for his division. The CHENG was unswayed and changed his phraseology from "I would like to see the Med lights strung up" to "you goddamn will string up the fucking Med lights". That was not a normal thing to do, but this particular CHENG was kind of an unreasonable bastard who had been badly burned on a previous tour by a division officer who had fed him a load of shit. He was a real piece of work in a job which tended to encourage becoming one.

Well, it seemed there was a bit of a problem. That ship needed about 3,000 feet of Med lights to fully rig the ship. They had 100 feet. The CHENG had the E Division supply petty officer determine the cost of 2,900 feet of Med lights. At that point, the CHENG turned white, for the cost would have wiped out the consumable budget for Engineering for the rest of the fiscal year and then some.

The CHENG went straight to the CO and told him that the ship essentially had no Med lights. The CO was a wise one who knew that there were times for going ballistic and times when it would serve no purpose. He thanked the CHENG for telling him and told him to "carry on." The CO then called his good friend, the CO of the destroyer tender down the pier.

Nobody would talk about what deal was struck (if any), but the CHENG was told to bring a 2-Kilo to the CO, filled out with the name of the ship, the work center, signed by the work center supervisor, the electrical Officer and the CHENG and otherwise left blank. The CO took the 2-Kilo, signed it, and then instructed the CHENG to personally hand-carry it to the CO of the tender.

Which the CHENG did. The tender's CO took it, thanked the CHENG and told him that he could send a working party over in two hours to pick up the lights he needed. The CHENG sent the available electrician's mates and IC men to get the Med lights, all three thousand feet of them. The ship had its Med lights for the cruise (though they had to buy a shitload of bulbs).

A copy of the 2-Kilo later came back for the ship's work order file. The text of it read: "Fabricate and provide 3,000 feet of waterline security lighting, ship's force to install."

We Hold These Truths to be Self-Evident

2010-07-04T06:00:00.003-04:00

IN CONGRESS, JULY 4, 1776

The unanimous Declaration of the thirteen united States of America

hen in the Course of human events it becomes necessary for one people to dissolve the political bands which have connected them with another and to assume among the powers of the earth, the separate and equal station to which the Laws of Nature and of Nature's God entitle them, a decent respect to the opinions of mankind requires that they should declare the causes which impel them to the separation.

We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness. — That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed, — That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness. Prudence, indeed, will dictate that Governments long established should not be changed for light and transient causes; and accordingly all experience hath shewn that mankind are more disposed to suffer, while evils are sufferable than to right themselves by abolishing the forms to which they are accustomed. But when a long train of abuses and usurpations, pursuing invariably the same Object evinces a design to reduce them under absolute Despotism, it is their right, it is their duty, to throw off such Government, and to provide new Guards for their future security. — Such has been the patient sufferance of these Colonies; and such is now the necessity which constrains them to alter their former Systems of Government. The history of the present King of Great Britain is a history of repeated injuries and usurpations, all having in direct object the establishment of an absolute Tyranny over these States. To prove this, let Facts be submitted to a candid world.

He has refused his Assent to Laws, the most wholesome and necessary for the public good.

He has forbidden his Governors to pass Laws of immediate and pressing importance, unless suspended in their operation till his Assent should be obtained; and when so suspended, he has utterly neglected to attend to them.

He has refused to pass other Laws for the accommodation of large districts of people, unless those people would relinquish the right of Representation in the Legislature, a right inestimable to them and formidable to tyrants only.

He has called together legislative bodies at places unusual, uncomfortable, and distant from the depository of their Public Records, for the sole purpose of fatiguing them into compliance with his measures.

He has dissolved Representative Houses repeatedly, for opposing with manly firmness his invasions on the rights of the people.

He has refused for a long time, after such dissolutions, to cause others to be elected, whereby the Legislative Powers, incapable of Annihilation, have returned to the People at large for their exercise; the State remaining in the mean time exposed to all the dangers of invasion from without, and convulsions within.

He has endeavoured to prevent the population of these States; for that purpose obstructing the Laws for Naturalization of Foreigners; refusing to pass others to encourage their migrations hither, and raising the conditions of new Appropriations of Lands.

He has obstructed the Administration of Justice by refusing his Assent to Laws for establishing Judiciary Powers.

He has made Judges dependent on his Will alone for the tenure of their offices, and the amount and payment of their salaries.

He has erected a multitude of New Offices, and sent hither swarms of Officers to harass our people and eat out their substance.

He has kept among us, in times of peace, Standing Armies without the Consent of our legislatures.

He has affected to render the Military independent of and superior to the Civil Power.

He has combined with others to subject us to a jurisdiction foreign to our constitution, and unacknowledged by our laws; giving his Assent to their Acts of pretended Legislation:

For quartering large bodies of armed troops among us:

For protecting them, by a mock Trial from punishment for any Murders which they should commit on the Inhabitants of these States:

For cutting off our Trade with all parts of the world:

For imposing Taxes on us without our Consent:

For depriving us in many cases, of the benefit of Trial by Jury:

For transporting us beyond Seas to be tried for pretended offences:

For abolishing the free System of English Laws in a neighbouring Province, establishing therein an Arbitrary government, and enlarging its Boundaries so as to render it at once an example and fit instrument for introducing the same absolute rule into these Colonies

For taking away our Charters, abolishing our most valuable Laws and altering fundamentally the Forms of our Governments:

For suspending our own Legislatures, and declaring themselves invested with power to legislate for us in all cases whatsoever.

He has abdicated Government here, by declaring us out of his Protection and waging War against us.

He has plundered our seas, ravaged our coasts, burnt our towns, and destroyed the lives of our people.

He is at this time transporting large Armies of foreign Mercenaries to compleat the works of death, desolation, and tyranny, already begun with circumstances of Cruelty & Perfidy scarcely paralleled in the most barbarous ages, and totally unworthy the Head of a civilized nation.

He has constrained our fellow Citizens taken Captive on the high Seas to bear Arms against their Country, to become the executioners of their friends and Brethren, or to fall themselves by their Hands.

He has excited domestic insurrections amongst us, and has endeavoured to bring on the inhabitants of our frontiers, the merciless Indian Savages whose known rule of warfare, is an undistinguished destruction of all ages, sexes and conditions.

In every stage of these Oppressions We have Petitioned for Redress in the most humble terms: Our repeated Petitions have been answered only by repeated injury. A Prince, whose character is thus marked by every act which may define a Tyrant, is unfit to be the ruler of a free people.

Nor have We been wanting in attentions to our British brethren. We have warned them from time to time of attempts by their legislature to extend an unwarrantable jurisdiction over us. We have reminded them of the circumstances of our emigration and settlement here. We have appealed to their native justice and magnanimity, and we have conjured them by the ties of our common kindred to disavow these usurpations, which would inevitably interrupt our connections and correspondence. They too have been deaf to the voice of justice and of consanguinity. We must, therefore, acquiesce in the necessity, which denounces our Separation, and hold them, as we hold the rest of mankind, Enemies in War, in Peace Friends.

We, therefore, the Representatives of the united States of America, in General Congress, Assembled, appealing to the Supreme Judge of the world for the rectitude of our intentions, do, in the Name, and by Authority of the good People of these Colonies, solemnly publish and declare, That these united Colonies are, and of Right ought to be Free and Independent States, that they are Absolved from all Allegiance to the British Crown, and that all political connection between them and the State of Great Britain, is and ought to be totally dissolved; and that as Free and Independent States, they have full Power to levy War, conclude Peace, contract Alliances, establish Commerce, and to do all other Acts and Things which Independent States may of right do. — And for the support of this Declaration, with a firm reliance on the protection of Divine Providence, we mutually pledge to each other our Lives, our Fortunes, and our sacred Honor.

JOHN HANCOCK, President

Attested, CHARLES THOMSON, Secretary

New Hampshire: JOSIAH BARTLETT, WILLIAM WHIPPLE, MATTHEW THORNTON

Massachusetts-Bay: SAMUEL ADAMS, JOHN ADAMS, ROBERT TREAT PAINE, ELBRIDGE GERRY

Rhode Island: STEPHEN HOPKINS, WILLIAM ELLERY

Connecticut: ROGER SHERMAN, SAMUEL HUNTINGTON, WILLIAM WILLIAMS, OLIVER WOLCOTT

Georgia: BUTTON GWINNETT, LYMAN HALL, GEO. WALTON

Maryland: SAMUEL CHASE, WILLIAM PACA, THOMAS STONE, CHARLES CARROLL OF CARROLLTON

Virginia: GEORGE WYTHE, RICHARD HENRY LEE, THOMAS JEFFERSON, BENJAMIN HARRISON, THOMAS NELSON, JR., FRANCIS LIGHTFOOT LEE, CARTER BRAXTON.

New York: WILLIAM FLOYD, PHILIP LIVINGSTON, FRANCIS LEWIS, LEWIS MORRIS

Pennsylvania: ROBERT MORRIS, BENJAMIN RUSH, BENJAMIN FRANKLIN, JOHN MORTON, GEORGE CLYMER, JAMES SMITH, GEORGE TAYLOR, JAMES WILSON, GEORGE ROSS

Delaware: CAESAR RODNEY, GEORGE READ, THOMAS M'KEAN

North Carolina: WILLIAM HOOPER, JOSEPH HEWES, JOHN PENN

South Carolina: EDWARD RUTLEDGE, THOMAS HEYWARD, JR., THOMAS LYNCH, JR., ARTHUR MIDDLETON

New Jersey: RICHARD STOCKTON, JOHN WITHERSPOON, FRANCIS HOPKINS, JOHN HART, ABRAHAM CLARK

Payday

2010-06-25T00:24:00.003-04:00

Military payday was held twice a month; on the 15th and the last day of the month (or the Friday before, if either of those days fell on a weekend).

In the days before direct deposit, there were three ways to be paid.

The first was by allotment. A sailor could designate all or part of his pay to be paid somewhere else, whether by deposit into a bank account or by a check which was written by the Navy's pay system in some godforsaken place like Memphis or Cleveland and which was mailed out from there.

The balance of the pay would be paid by check, cash, or a combination thereof. Several days before payday, payroll lists would be posted in spaces throughout the ship. The officers' pay list was usually posted on a bulletin board outside of the wardroom, the chief petty officers' pay list was posted in the Goat Locker, and the pay lists for divisions and departments were posted in their spaces. You would sign the list and indicate if you wanted any or all of it by check.

If the ship was in port, prior to payday, the disbursing officer and the disbursing clerk would go to the bank and draw enough cash to cover payday. "Enough cash" was $40,000 or more for a frigate, $60,000 or more for a cruiser.[1] Ships that deployed went with a lot of cash, but most of it was recycled on board as ship's company would get money orders at the ship's post office to send funds home or they'd buy stuff in the ship's store.[2]

Payday would commence at specific times in the day. The disbursing officer and the clerk would set up shop on the mess decks, in the wardroom and in the Chief's mess at those times. Everyone would line up, sign the pay list and get paid. The default method of payment was cash.

If you missed the line, you had to make alternate arrangements. Normally if you missed payday, the disbursing office would cut you a check and then hold it for pickup. They'd even cash it for you, unless you had pissed them off.

Sailors could wind up with a lot of money over a long cruise if they were frugal and if they didn't have it sent by allotment to bank accounts. Some would keep the cash in their lockers. Others would take most of their cash back to the disbursing office and have a check cut back to them, which was safer. The third method was to give a sealed envelope of cash to one's division officer and ask him (or her) to keep it in their stateroom safe, something that division officers really tried to discourage, as the safe was supposed to be used for storage of classified materials and special access keys.

Seems the captain of one ship decades ago had a wife who had no idea what he was paid; she had never seen a military pay scale and he was skimming several hundred dollars a month. He had ordered that the pay lists not be publicly posted, but kept in the disbursing office, to guard against his wife visiting the ship, as she frequently did in port, and seeing it.

The disbursing officer of that ship transferred out and a new one came in. The turnover did not overlap a military payday. The new ensign posted the pay lists throughout the ship, as he had learned to do in the Naval Supply School. The captain's wife came aboard that day and saw the pay list.

The captain sent the new disbursing officer ashore for "lack of confidence". The captain's wife filed for divorce.

[1] If the bank was on-base, the disbursing officer and the disbursing clerk went over with unloaded .45s. Ships in overhaul at civilian yards would send a security team, led by someone the captain trusted, and they'd have weapons which were fully loaded.
[2]There was some way it was done when the ship visited foreign ports and the disbursing office would change money into pesetas, lira, francs, pounds, etc. I don't know how the cash for that was handled. Smart sailors did their money-exchanges on the ship, as the rates were more favorable than those at the banks or the "cambio shops" ashore.

An Old Military Rule

2010-06-24T09:35:00.000-04:00

"A thousand `attaboys' will be canceled out by one `you dumb shit'."

And that, Gentle Readers, is all that I intend to say about the Affair de McChrystal on this blog.

Sea Smokes

2010-06-21T14:24:00.002-04:00

The Navy is extinguishing the smoking lamp on submarines.

Besides the issues of nicotine fits and second/third hand smoke, the biggest impact will be because the profits on the sales of cigarettes by the submarines' ship's stores went to the boats' Welfare & Rec funds. If you have ever toured a warship and seen the gear in the ship's gym, that stuff was bought from the Welfare & Rec Fund. It was not bought by the taxpayers. Among other things paid for by W&R money were things like the holiday parties and upgrades to the entertainment systems.

Sea smokes were cheap, incredibly cheap, because there was no tax whatsoever assessed when the ships were outside of U.S. waters.

How cheap, you might ask? The sales on military bases and on ships in U.S. waters are already free of state taxes. Once the ships sailed, Federal tobacco taxes were dropped. In the early `80s, the price was about $2.50 and that was per carton (25¢ a pack). By the end of the `80s, they had risen to maybe a dollar or $1.25 a pack; still cheaper than the price ashore.

Cigarettes and canned soda were the two most profitable items sold by the ship's store. As much as not having cigarette butts and ashes to deal with, not to mention the extended lifespan of air filtration and purification equipment that the cigarette ban will bring, I can't imagine that the XOs are going to be too happy about the decreased amount of money that will be going to the Welfare & Rec funds.

The Amityville Horror

2010-05-27T19:57:00.002-04:00

The house that was the site of the murders that sparked the Amityville Horror has been put on the market for $1.15 million.

This is no shit:

On most of the older steam-powered warships, the sailors lived in large berthing compartment that held anywhere from 15 to 100 men or more. In the early 1980s, the Navy began installing privacy curtains that went around each bunk. The curtains (known colloquially as "beat-off curtains") allowed individual sailors to read or to write letters after Taps. Before the installation of the curtains, everyone had to shut off their bunk lights.

There was a sailor who stayed up after Taps, reading the book The Amityville Horror. It was fair to say that he was really engrossed in it. Just after midnight, another sailor reached across the bunk next to his, slid his hand under the curtain and grabbed the ankle of the sailor reading the book. The screams of that sailor woke everyone up in two berthing compartments.

This is also no shit:

After the Brooklyn Naval Shipyard closed in 1966, a company called Coastal Drydock & Repair took over part of the shipyard. They did major overhauls and repairs on Navy ships. A little while after the Amityville Horror movie came out, a few sailors on one of the ships undergoing overhaul there decided to drive out to Amityville and look at the house. They found the house, took some photos and drove away.

The transmission on their car blew out a quarter of a mile down the road.

Landing On a Pitching Deck

2010-05-13T06:51:00.001-04:00

I've probably said before that the guys who flew SH-2s from the Knox class and Garcia class FFs were about the craziest fuckers around. Flying from a CV in heavy seas is almost as insane.

Part 1:

Part 2:

They earned their flight pay that day.

Can the Bubbleheads Do It Right?

2010-05-11T17:30:00.001-04:00

The first group of female midshipmen have been accepted into the submarine training pipeline.

Two things are given: First off, these 13 young women will be under a microscope. A guy can get bilged out of the training pipeline and nobody will ever say "oh, he flunked out because guys can't hack it." That'll be different for these women.

Second, the selectees, no doubt, are as prepared for the challenge facing them as they can be. I know nothing about them, but I would bet heavily that these women are the best of the best in the current graduating class. 8 were already slated for the nuclear-training pipeline, which means that they are brainy gearheads.

The question is whether or not the submarine community will get it right. I would hope that the senior officers in the 1120 community have studied how the surface and aviation communities handled their first group of women in the 1970s.

The consensus was back then that the airdales pretty much fucked it up. The blackshoes did it pretty slowly, taking over ten years to go from having women on AD/ASs to the UNREP force and then to the NRF tin cans before women were allowed on active-duty warships.

The bubbleheads don't have the luxury of having different grades of ships to play with, like the skimmers did. They have got to get it right from day one.

I think they are up to the task.

(Yes, I know, I stepped outside of my normal Cold War beat for this one post. Sue me.)

The Best and the Worst People Could Be Found There

2010-05-07T07:47:00.005-04:00

They could be found at the various naval facilities, known as Navfacs. That was the cover name for SOSUS stations.[1]

Female line officers started being assigned to the SOSUS stations at the end of the 1960s. Until the early 1980s, when women began being assigned to surface ships and began going into flight training, assignment to a SOSUS station was the closest thing to an operational job that the Navy had for women.[2] The women officers were unrestricted line officers (designator: 110x)[3] and they were the cream of the crop. Many had hard science degrees and/or advanced degrees

Male junior officers who were assigned into SOSUS in the 1970s were, on the other hand, generally a group of serious fuckups. Oh, there were some who were just there because of bad luck, like a few pilots who had been in crashes, been hurt badly enough to be disqualified from flight duty, and were serving out their time. But mainly the male JOs were complete fuckups who had been booted out of their warfare communities. These were guys who couldn't hack being on ships or guys who had been washed out of flight school and then couldn't hack sea duty. They were the guys who would eventually fail to select for lieutenant.

You could find these guys scattered all over the Navy, if you knew where to look. They were the ensigns and JGs who were doing paper-pushing at the recruiting offices, the ones that were not let within a league of a potential recruit. You might find them nominally in charge of the pass offices at places like the Brooklyn Naval Shipyard.

It took being a serious fuckwad to get fired from a ship as a first-tour junior officer. A captain who sent such a JO to the beach might have to wait a year or more for a replacement, when a twit like that could at least stand watches as a JOOD underway or an OOD in port.[4] So for a captain to throw someone like that off the ship meant that the young lad had to be one serious piece of human shit.

And that khaki-wearing turd could be pretty much counted to wash ashore at a SOSUS station.

[1]It's hard for me to grasp the fact that I can even write about this. SOSUS was once one of the most secret programs the Navy had.
[2] As opposed to an administrative-type job.
[3]110x was the designator for "unrestricted line", which by the late 1970s, meant women. Men who had the 110X designator were fuckups (or were possibly in a secret specialty).
[4] I knew of one JO on a ship on the East Coast whose job was "ship's photographer". It was more common to find them nominally as division officers of divisions with very strong chiefs.

Steam Applications (non-naval)

2010-05-02T13:30:00.000-04:00

Steam power had some interesting applications, other than driving ships, trains and generating electricity.

This is a website about a very large steam pump, the Cruquius Engine, that was used to help dewater Holland.

This is an animation of the engine room. This is an animation of the operation of the engine and pumps and a schematic animation to show the basic flow of steam.

The engine ran for something like 70 to 80 years.

(H/T)

Ship's Boats

2010-05-01T12:58:00.004-04:00

Destroyers and cruisers traditionally had two boats[1]. Both were powered by small diesel engines.

They were the Captain's Gig:

And the 26' Motor Whaleboat (this one was sold as surplus):

Boats were used primarily when the ship was anchored somewhere, though in far rarer occasions, they were used for "blue water" transfers between ships in the open sea. They were hoisted onto the ship and lowered by davits. The davits were double armed affairs that held the boats on cradles when they were not used. When in use, the davit would lift the boat up, tilt down so that the boat was over the water, and then lower the boat on pulleys (called "falls").

When the boats were being raised and lowered, only the bare crew was on the boat and they were required to hold onto the monkey lines (ropes with knotted hand-holds). For one end of the boat could slip off a fall and yes, they occasionally did.

The davits were powered by large electric motors which had limit switches to prevent the motors from breaking things. The motors wound and unwound the wire rope winches on the davits. The limit switches, though, were sitting right out there open to the salt air and they sometimes failed. When they did, the winch motors could wind things a little too tight and bend the living shit out of the davit arms.

During good weather, these boats had a three-man crew: A coxswain, a seaman and an engineman. The seaman and engineman handled lines fore and aft. In bad weather or at night, a boat officer was added, usually the junior-most ensigns in the duty section.

The motor whaleboat was pretty straight forward. The coxswain drove the boat from the steering station next to the motor. The motor had a straight shaft that ran right to the prop.

The gig was, comparatively, a maintenance nightmare. The engine was at the rearmost part of the boat. The driveshaft went forward into a "v-drive", which in turn drove the prop shaft. The housing of the v-drive was made of aluminum. There was no way to get to the bottom of the v-drive other than pulling it out. Aluminum corrodes nicely in seawater, which tends to get into the bilges of boats. So what would happen is that the bottom of the v-drive would swiss-cheese itself from corrosion, the oil would leak out of the v-drive and, if that was not caught, the goddammed thing would seize up.

The gig was the captain's boat and it was at his beck-and-call. A considerate captain would let his gig be used as a liberty launch for at least the chiefs and the officers, if not for the entire crew. It was incumbent upon those who were returning to the ship and who were really drunk to pass up on riding in the gig, as captains took a dim view of squids puking their guts out in the gig's cabin.

When boats were in use, a beach party with a radio was sent ashore for controlling the sailors at the landing point. The petty officer or officer there reported to the OOD. Anyone who was really drunk might have to wait for hours there until they sort of sobered up. The beach party also functioned as a security checkpoint, welcoming and screening visitors to the ship. The boats took their orders from either the beach party or the OOD.

When boats were in use, the senior line officer in the boat was in charge, even if an officer was assigned to the boat and even if that senior line officer was drunk on his ass. More than a few drunk lieutenants got into serious trouble after an incident when someone else on the boat was injured. ("Line officer", in this regard, meant that one was in a warfare specialty eligible for command at sea.)

It was common to hire water taxis when visiting foreign ports.

This served several functions. First off, it freed the ships from having to crew and operate their own boats. Second, it provided some work for the local charter boats, which meant there was some more interest in having naval ships visit. Third, because they were foreign vessels, the ship's officers were not responsible for safety of the water taxi.

Anchoring out was done in ports that either had limited pier/dock/wharf space (or the port wanted to reserve the space for freighters and cruise ships) or were too shallow for the ships to pull in. Most everyone hated anchoring out and using the boats. It was a strain on the duty sections. Boat crews were required to wear the uniform of the day, which meant trashing a set of whites in the summer.[2] Boating operations could be hazardous, especially if the weather was up. Boating might be secured,[3] which meant that you could find yourself stuck on shore for awhile.

A wise sailor on liberty made sure that he or she had enough money set aside to rent a cheap hotel room in case the weather soured. Worse case was when the weather really soured and the ship had to get under way to the relative safety of the open sea. It was not unheard-of for half of the crew to be stranded ashore for a few days, an event that would involve the local consulate/embassy to help out in caring for the strandees.

[1]Carriers and other large ships had personnel boats that were much larger. The admiral commanding a task group would also have his own boat, known as "the admiral's barge."
[2]Working uniform might be authorized if the weather was getting lousy, but that was not to be counted upon.
[3] "To secure" in the Navy meant "to end an evolution and tidy up." In the Navy, "to secure a building" meant to sweep down the halls, empty the trash, turn out the lights and lock the doors. To the Army, "secure the building" meant to post a guard at the front door. To the Marines, "secure the building" meant to attack the building, blow a hole in the side, go in and kill or capture everyone inside. To the Air Force, "secure a building" meant to negotiate and sign a lease for the building.

Fire! Fire! Fire on the USS Bonefish!

2010-04-24T21:29:00.000-04:00

22 years ago today.

Admin

2010-04-24T12:40:00.000-04:00

In this case, it is not shorthand for "administration". An "admin" is a hotel room that is booked by all of the officers of a ship. It can serve as a crash pad or as a place to have a few drinks in private or as a place to change clothes or, if one is lucky, as a place to have a little quiet sex.

All of the officers chip in to pay for the cost of renting the admin for the duration of a port visit. The ones who make the most use of it are the no-loads in the Supply, Administrative and Operations departments. The officers in the Weapons department are usually neutral about it, as some may have the free time to use the admin and some may not. Generally, the engineers are against the whole idea, as they work longer hours both in port and at sea. Junior officers who are behind on completing their SWO qualification may also be against it.

Usually those who are against it get out-voted during the wardroom meeting. After several of those, the engineers can (and do) develop hard feelings about it.

A Fitness Report

2010-04-15T18:54:00.004-04:00

This is a fitness report on Rear Admiral Spruance following the Battle of Midway.

Note that it is not fully "left-justified", in that Admiral Spruance had five marks that were 3.9s. Times were different then.

Admiral Spruance was one of the greatest commanders in the history of the US Navy, though there has been the inevitable sniping by the chairborne naval historians.

Two destroyers have been named in his honor.

Foreign Insanity

2010-04-14T16:18:00.003-04:00

The annual Royal Navy Field Gun competition, which has been held under different names.

Those guys are pretty crazy.

The Story of the Green Flare

2010-04-08T07:05:00.003-04:00

This is no shit:

The Navy conducts exercises at sea from time to time, operations that civilians refer to as "war games." The goal is to train the ships' crews to deal with the operational tempo, lack of sleep and some of the stresses of being in fluid and uncertain situations at sea.

I was one of the OODs of one of the ships in the exercise. My ship had a modest AAW defensive capability. That was simulated by the firing of a green flare from a Very pistol. For the duration of the exercise, the OODs wore a holster with the Very pistol and several flares.

There was a recognition procedure to identify friendly and hostile aircraft. If I remember correctly, friendlies were to approach ships by flying a certain true course. No radio calls were to be made.

When the EWs detected a contact, the information was passed up to the Bridge over the JA phone circuit. The lookouts were also on the JA circuit, so they would look for something. Because of this, the bearings to any possible threats were sent up as relative bearings (0 degrees being "dead ahead").

So there I was, on watch. The call came up: "Hostile aircraft, bearing 080." The lookouts almost immediately reported "air contact, 3 o'clock". I looked, sure enough, a helicopter was flying directly at the ship.

I loaded the Very pistol, raised it, and fired the flare.

The problem, of course, was that when one added the ship's course to the relative bearing of the air contact, the helicopter was on the "safe course".

The pilots, understandably, were not amused. They broke radio silence and rained some abuse down upon the R/T operator in CIC.

The Captain, though, was more sanguine about it. He came up to the Bridge and asked me what happened. I told him and apologized for fucking up. He shrugged and asked me if I had ever heard the Simon & Garfunkel song "the Boxer". I said I had and I guess my puzzlement showed.

He told me that there is a line in the song that "a man hears what he wants to hear and disregards the rest". He told me that I expected to see an enemy aircraft and that I saw what I thought I would see and that, in a hot war, people were always going to get killed that way. He told me the real trick was to be able to make fast decisions and yet be alert enough to question myself to make reasonably certain that I really knew what was going on.

I kept the shell casing from the Very flare for many years, eventually losing it in a move somewhere along the way.

Of course, what sparked this remembrance was the recent story about the crew of an Apache attack helicopter shooting at a Reuters news crew.

BZZT! Wrong!!

2010-03-29T18:38:00.000-04:00

In surfing around for news on the repairs of the USS Port Royal, I stumbled across this press release about the retirement of a RP1 (chaplain's assistant) from the Navy. It had this nugget of bullshit in it:

"There are not many people in the Navy that can tell you they have served on five different ships," said [Chaplain] Wade.

That is wronger than wrong. Virtually every surface warfare officer who made it through the commander command tour has served on five ships, and quite a few have served on six ships: First Division Officer tour, second DivO tour, first and second Department Head tours, XO tour and then CO tour. Sailors might serve on fewer, as their first sea tour used to be about five years or so.

Duty Stations

2010-03-23T19:59:00.002-04:00

The Navy had several types of duty stations and periodicity of assignments.

There were four basic types of duty stations: Sea duty, shore duty, training duty and neutral duty. The first three are pretty obvious. Neutral duty was for assignments that were not as cushy as shore duty, but did not have the separations of sea duty. Assignment to a destroyer or submarine tender was neutral duty, but if the ship was out of her home port for more than 30 days, the time away was reclassified as sea duty.

There were several kinds of periodicity:

Permanent change of station: This was a full move. The Navy paid to move your family and your shit. Actually, if you had a family, you were damned lucky if what the Navy paid covered your costs. A PCS assignment was longer than 26 weeks, but most were between 18 months and five years.

Unaccompanied duty: Your family stayed behind and you went for a year. Before the Iraq War, the most common unaccompanied duty was to the Naval Support Activity in Bahrain and to the USS La Salle (AGF 3), the flagship of the Commander of the Middle East Force, which was homeported in Bahrain. Now, unaccompanied duty includes being sent as an individual augmentee to Iraq or Afghanistan.

Temporary duty: This was usually training duty, where one was sent to a short-duration school. The most common was when you were sent to a school after you left one permanent duty station and were enroute to another. But it could also happen when you were loaned to another command for one reason or another.

Temporary additional duty: These were times when your command sent you away on a trip. It may be to a conference or a short school, ranging from a day or two to a few months.

When you were on TD or TAD, you were paid TDY, which was enough for three decent moderately-priced meals. For obvious reasons, TAD was also known as "traveling around drunk".

This is all background information for some stories, of course.

Ooopsie

2010-03-18T12:07:00.002-04:00

I posted to this blog this morning, but I meant to post to a different blog.

I deleted the post, but if it showed up in your feed: Sorry about that, Chief.

Vehicles

2010-03-17T18:30:00.004-04:00

When ships were in their home ports, the naval bases provided two vehicles to ships of the frigate through cruiser size. One was a pickup truck, the use of which was controlled by either the OOD or the CDO. The other vehicle was a four-door sedan, which was controlled by the CDO or the XO. They were the land-based analogues to the Motor Whaleboat and the Captain's Gig.[1] The vehicles were technically assigned to the local Supply Center's motor pool, which took care of maintenance. Gas was from the base gas station; the drivers would sign a sheet that gave the vehicle ID number.

Two vehicles did not begin to scratch the requirements for transportation of ships that had 250-350 people on board. Sailors and officers often had to use their personal vehicles for routine ship's business, though larger vehicles could be signed out of the motor pool for special uses.

So there was this one ship. A few sailors made it their practice to go over to Base Salvage from time to time.[2] One of the sailors found some vehicles and he tried to start them. One old step-side pickup truck started, so he took it back to his ship. The Supply Officer had a cow, so to speak, because the ship wasn't authorized three vehicles. He pointed out that they couldn't get gas at the base gas station, because the truck's serial number was stricken.

The XO told the SuppO to close his eyes and forget that he ever saw the truck. One of the chiefs drove to the far reaches of the base and found a similar truck. He wrote down the serial number of that truck. The unofficial ship's truck was then re-numbered to match the other truck.

When it was necessary to get gas, the only risk, although tiny, was that two identically-numbered trucks would be gassing up at the same time. But since there was more than one gas station on that huge base, the risk was negligible. The driver would drive up to the pumps and fill up the truck. The supply weasel at the station would note down the truck's number and the driver would drive away.

When the ship deployed to the Med, the truck was parked out behind the barn of one of the chiefs, who lived in a rural area. A large tarp was thrown over it and staked down. After the ship returned, the truck was retrieved and put back into service.

Finally the day came when the ship was assigned to another home port. Nobody was too keen on trying to drive that old truck a thousand miles or so over the highways, so it was parked in the pier's parking lot with the keys inside of it.

[1] A subject for a later post.
[2] Salvage was where ships and commands dropped off unneeded equipment. If another unit didn't want it, then it was disposed of after a period of time.

Mines

2010-03-09T18:08:00.005-05:00

Mine warfare has been around for well over a century. But first, a definition: I define a "mine" as "an explosive device triggered by the passage of a ship".

Mines actually go back a lot further than a century. There were attempts to make working mines in the 18th and early 19th centuries. The problem was how to trigger them, as before the invention of the percussion cap, the only practical way to detonate a mine was to attach it to a ship and light a fuse.[1] Even the invention of percussion caps did not make mines very feasible, as the firing mechanism had to be something that was both waterproof (black powder and water do not mix) and crushable (to fire the cap). Command-detonated mines were tried, but they had problems with water seeping in along the wires and disabling the charge.[2] Mines became practical when explosives less susceptible to moisture were developed.

There are three basic types of mines and three basic methods to place mines. The types are contact, pressure and magnetic (there are also hybrids, which can be both pressure and magnetic). The three methods of placement are bottom, moored and drifting.

Contact mines are the ones that you always see in old war movies: Big round iron or steel balls with something like 200lbs of high explosives. A ship or sub would contact it and have a hole blown in her side. Bottom contact mines required very shallow waters; they were most commonly used as an anti-landing craft defense. Drifting mines are heavily frowned on by the Hague Convention of 1907, but that has not prevented their being used.

Moored contact mines were typically laid from minelaying ships. They were rolled off the stern of the ship. The anchor section contained the cabling and the wheels for being rolled off. The cable would pay out to the desired length and anchor the mine.

Ideally, the length of the cable would be set so that the mine was submerged, both so that the mines were harder to avoid and that they would not be detonated by fishing boats and other small craft. Moored contact mines can be laid in very deep waters. It is possible to lay them so that the mine case is targeted towards submarines.

Magnetic mines are triggered by the passage of large chunks of metal, namely, ships and submarines. Pressure mines are triggered by the hydrodynamic pressure generated by a passing ship. These mines can be very sophisticated and may include counters so not just the first ship to pass by will trigger them. More specialized are acoustic mines, which will activate on the acoustic signature of a particular class of ship. There was development of mines which incorporated homing torpedoes, the USN version was called CAPTOR.

Mines were first laid by specialized ships, but now are laid primarily by aircraft, at least for USN usage. They can be laid by submarine, but that requires cutting into the torpedo load, which submariners hate to do. When laid by aircraft, an enemy will attempt to spot the splashes to aid in demining. As a result, it is common practice to drop mine cases that are filled with cement as dummies. This also works because few ship captains are willing to try a minefield.[3]

Mines could be used defensively (to keep opponents away) and offensively (the "North Sea Mine Barrage"). The threat of mines was often enough to prevent a naval force from moving into an area.

I will cover mine countermeasures in another post.

[1] The modern equivalent is a "limpet mine", which is attached by a frogman.

[2] Similar issues bedeviled the first undersea telegraph cables.

[3] I was told that when the Navy mined Haiphong Harbor, most of them were dummies. That might be bullshit, though, as it was a naval aviator who told me and they are famous for being bullshit artists.

Now Hear This!

2010-03-06T16:43:00.002-05:00

I just spent fifteen minutes deleting a shitload of Chinese spam.

Moderation of all comments is now in effect.

That is all.

"No Jews Allowed"

2010-02-17T11:53:00.003-05:00

This story took place in the early 1970s. A Knox-Class FF, home ported in Norfolk, was on duty in the Persian Gulf. A port visit was arranged in Saudi Arabia. This was a big deal at the time.

The frigate pulled into port and made up to the pier. After the brow ("gangplank" to you landsmen) was rigged, three officers from the Royal Saudi Navy came aboard, accompanied by the U.S. Embassy's naval attache. They met with the ship's officers and the command master chief to give a port visit briefing. Those briefings were usually pretty much standard fare, focusing mainly on the "dos and don'ts" for a port visit.

During the briefing, a conversation along these lines took place:

Saudi Officer: "Captain, do you have any Jews in your crew?"

CO: "Yes, a few. Why do you ask?"

Saudi Officer: "You will have to restrict them to your ship."

CO: "Why?"

Saudi Officer: "Jews are not allowed to set foot in the Kingdom."

CO: "I see. XO, make preparations to get underway. Engineer, begin preps to light off the second boiler, let the XO know when you expect it to be ready."

XO, Cheng: "Aye, aye, sir."

Saudi Officers, Naval Attache: "Wait, wait, what are you doing, why?"

CO: "I'm not going to restrict anybody to the ship because of their faith. Everyone goes ashore or nobody goes ashore. And if nobody can go ashore, then there is no reason for my ship to be here. So we're getting underway as soon as we can."

The Saudi officers conferred and then ran off the ship to make some phone calls. Within an hour, the Saudis dropped their demand that Jews be restricted to the ship. The port visit went ahead. Not that a port visit in a country with no liquor, bars or discos was any great treat to the crew. As one sailor was said to have put it: "If all I fucking wanted to fucking see was fucking sand and fucking camels, I could have fucking gone to the fucking San Diego Zoo."

Uniform Disasters, the Sequel

2010-01-25T16:02:00.002-05:00

(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

2010-01-14T16:34:00.004-05:00

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

2010-01-12T19:43:00.004-05:00

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.[1]

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; and not in the line of duty, due to one's own 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 immediately 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.

[1] The investigation of a death in which criminal charges would be brought was normally performed by local law enforcement or the Naval Investigative Service (when they could be freed up from their usual duties of investigating the break-ins of ship's stores or busting druggies and gays).

Water, Water, Everywhere Nor Any Drop to Drink

2010-01-12T19:40:00.004-05:00

(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

2009-12-29T21:57:00.001-05:00

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

2009-12-10T21:53:00.003-05:00

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

2009-11-20T20:20:00.003-05:00

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 ever-larger crews.[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 canceled 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.

Mental Health Fail

2009-11-07T15:41:00.005-05:00

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

2009-11-01T20:05:00.001-05:00

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

2009-10-26T13:30:00.003-04:00

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.

AAW Part V- the Weapons, Chapter 2

2009-10-12T08:12:00.007-04:00

(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

2009-10-08T19:05:00.003-04:00

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

2009-10-05T06:43:00.003-04:00

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

2009-09-20T18:18:00.008-04:00

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

2009-08-13T20:35:00.002-04:00

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

2009-08-09T18:58:00.001-04:00

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

2009-07-04T20:46:00.003-04:00

(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

2009-07-04T16:47:00.001-04:00

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.

Nicknames

2009-06-30T15:48:00.003-04:00

Nicknames were a fact of life. They were never chosen by the person to whom they applied. One guy, who had a deep Texas drawl, was nicknamed "Droop-a-Long". A boiler technician who picked up a dose of gonorrhea at the very first port visit was referred to as "Drippy Dick" by everyone other than the Captain and the XO. One sailor, who tended to be somewhat pear-shaped, was referring to himself as a "real stud" when another sailor interjected "`Stud"? You look more like a `spud' to me!" His nickname was "Spud" from then on.

One nickname backfired on an entire department. The sailors on one ship thought that the Operations Officer had a resemblance to Jerry Lewis. They wold refer to him amongst themselves as "Jerry". So one fine day, the Ops Boss was in CIC when he heard someone ask over the 21MC intercom (also known as the "Bitch Box") if "Jerry" was in Combat. The sailor nearest the Bitch Box answered in the affirmative. The Ops Boss knew that there wasn't a sailor in his department named "Jerry", nor was there such an officer.

"Who's Jerry," he wanted to know. Receiving only evasive replies, he asked again in a more demanding tone. More evasion. "Who the fuck is Jerry," he roared, and he was one of those guys that nobody wanted to piss off, for he was not adverse to exacting retribution.

"That's you, sir," one of the radar men said.

"What the fuck are you talking about? My name's not Jerry." The tone of the Ops Boss was between confusion and anger.

"Some of the guys think you look like Jerry Lewis, sir."

"Well, if I'm Jerry Lewis, that makes all y'all `Jerry's kids'," shot back the Ops Boss.

That stuck. From then on, the sailors in the Operations Department were known as "Jerry's kids." And nobody, but nobody, in the Operations Department referred to the Ops Boss anymore as "Jerry".