The annual Royal Navy Field Gun competition, which has been held under different names.
Those guys are pretty crazy.
Getting Old, What an Adventure
1 day ago
Wednesday, April 14, 2010
Thursday, April 8, 2010
The Story of the Green Flare
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.
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.
Monday, March 29, 2010
BZZT! Wrong!!
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.
Tuesday, March 23, 2010
Duty Stations
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.
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.
Thursday, March 18, 2010
Ooopsie
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.
I deleted the post, but if it showed up in your feed: Sorry about that, Chief.
Wednesday, March 17, 2010
Vehicles
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.
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.
Tuesday, March 9, 2010
Mines
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.
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.
Saturday, March 6, 2010
Now Hear This!
I just spent fifteen minutes deleting a shitload of Chinese spam.
Moderation of all comments is now in effect.
That is all.
Moderation of all comments is now in effect.
That is all.
Wednesday, February 17, 2010
"No Jews Allowed"
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."
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."
Monday, January 25, 2010
Uniform Disasters, the Sequel
(Original post)
It seems that Service Dress Khaki is going forward.
I would expect that Service Khaki, which is the office-puke analogue to the soon-to-be-abolished Working Khaki, is not long for this world.
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.
Thursday, January 14, 2010
The Troll Under the Bridge
If you read my original post about screamer COs, it seems that things have changed:
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)
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.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.
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.
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)
Tuesday, January 12, 2010
Alcohol
I've written before about the peculiar dry status of Navy ships. This post is about the use of alcohol away from the ships.
Decades ago, it was considered almost an indicator of how good a time a sailor or naval officer had ashore if he came back to the ship knee-knocking,puke-stained drunk.A certain amount of rowdiness was expected from drunken sailors (officers, even if drunk, were expected to maintain some decorum). "He got blasted like a real sailor" was one way to put it. I saw sailors come back so drunk that they were lashed, face-down, into Stokes litters, which were then secured into the overhead near the Quarterdeck, so that the Petty Officer and Messenger of the Watch could keep an eye on them.
The sailor who was the Duty Corpsman in a liberty port could pretty much expect to get no sleep. If the ship was anchored out (using boats to send liberty parties to and from the beach), it would not be unusual to have at least one clown break a limb during a port visit from falling down the accommodation ladder from the main deck to the boat.
Things started to change in the latter half of the 1970s. Drunken sailors ashore in foreign ports-of-call were creating incidents that the State Department was getting tired of having to smooth over. In some ports, the local cops took a very dim view of drunken shenanigans and some sailors would up being extended guests of the local criminal justice systems.
The word went out: Crack down. Ships who had reportable incidents would end up having liberty for sailors and shore leave for officers curtailed. No ship captain wanted to be told by the group commander or the fleet commander that the entire ship was on "cinderella liberty" (everyone had to be back aboard by midnight).
The next crackdown was on drunken driving. But first, a little bit of a discourse on procedure:
Whenever there was a serious accident or death, two parallel investigations were commenced. One was a safety investigation to find out what happened and what could be learned from it. The other was a "JAGMAN" investigation, usually conducted by a line officer and conducted in accordance with the Manual of the Judge Advocate General (hence the name). JAGMAN investigations were more concerned with fixing responsibility so that appropriate disciplinary action could be taken.[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).
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
(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.
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.
Tuesday, December 29, 2009
Drugs
It is fair to say that drug use was very common in the Navy in the 1970s. The only way to nail someone for drug use then was to catch them possessing drugs. Normally, that happened when some idiot was smoking grass in a place where the odor was detected.
Ventilation fan rooms were a common place to smoke weed, but some fools did not bother to check to see where the fan output went. One classic case was a sailor who was smoking pot in a fanroom which fed air to the Captain's cabin. One sailor made sure that the fanroom he used exhausted to the outside of the ship; it was his bad luck that the exhaust outlet was over a refueling station and the ship was refueling alongside an AO at the time, bathing the ensign in charge of the refueling station, the BM1 who was really in change, and the twenty or so linehandlers with the sweet smell of pot smoke.
One funny one was when two sailors were smoking pot in the ship's vehicle; the next user was the ship's master-at-arms, who then obtained the permission of the Command Duty Officer to search the two sailors and their lockers. Another one was when two signalmen, one on each ship, made a deal for some hash by using semaphore signals; they didn't know that an officer on one of the ships, who could read semaphore, read the conversation. The purchasing sailor was met at the quarterdeck by the master-at-arms.
Court-martials on smaller ships were a real pain in the ass to conduct. They could only be held in port and they were a major drain on the ship as it took a considerable amount of time to go from beginning to end. As a result, most disciplinary problems were handled at Captain's Mast, otherwise known as Non-Judicial Punishment, or NJP. The most that could be done at Captain's Mast was to reduce a sailor by one paygrade, a maximum fine of half a month's pay for two months, and confinement.
Confinement options ranged from a maximum of three days in the brig on bread and water or thirty days in the brig or 45 days restriction to the ship with 45 days of extra duty. Hardly anyone was sent to the brig for other than the three days of bread and water and that was only done when those in the sailor's chain of command thought that he was still reachable. Otherwise, restriction to the ship was awarded, for that that way, the miscreant was still available for duty. Extra duty often tended to involve chipping paint and painting either the weatherdecks or the bilges in the enginerooms and firerooms.
The problem was that once a sailor decided that he liked to smoke pot, you might end up catching him once or twice a year, if that. The hard-core stoners just put up with the punishment, even if it meant that they were sent for repeated cranking tours, for they had no intention of re-enlisting, they lived on the ship and they simply didn't care.
In the early `80s, it all changed. The Navy instituted mandatory urine testing, which was soon nicknamed Operation Golden Flow. Once a year, everyone in the command was urine-tested, including all of the officers. Every so often, maybe once a month or once a quarter, the XO rolled a ten-sided die; everyone whose social security number ended in that digit was immediately mustered for a random piss test. Those who had security duties or high security clearances were subject to an additional piss test each year. The urine sampling was witnessed in order to combat cheating.
For officers and chief petty officers, failing a piss test was grounds for discharge. Petty officers, non-rated seamen and strikers were on a "two strikes" system. Some sailors appealed the discharge order and they were then brought before an administrative discharge review board made of three officers, normally headed by a lieutenant commander. The command was represented by a junior officer, the only attorney present was provided to the accused. Most of the boards took their duties seriously and some sailors did prevail, but the vast majority had their discharge orders confirmed and they were thrown out.
The result was, over time, drug usage in the Navy was greatly reduced. There were a lot fewer NJPs (and fewer extra-duty men available for dirty jobs).
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).
Thursday, December 10, 2009
The Worst Teaching Job in the Surface Navy
That was being an instructor at Department Head School.
Department Head School, in Newport, RI, was a 20 week school for senior lieutenants. It was the only school in the surface navy that was considered to be a permanent change of duty station for the students, which meant that the Navy moved the families. (All other schools were temporary duty; the students stayed in the BOQ and the families stayed home.) Department Head School, formerly known as Destroyer School, was even longer in the 1970s, but then they stopped teaching everyone calculus, Morse code and semaphore signals.
Much of the school was the Tactical Action Officer course, where the students had to learn everything about the US and Soviet navy's warships. You had to know the difference between a Brooke and Garcia FF and a Krivak and a Kashin, as well as all of the weapon systems in both navies. It was important stuff, for as a TAO, you wouldn't have the time to look it up in a book when you got the word that a flock of Badgers were inbound or someone had detected a Vampire. There were lessons in ASW, AAW, ASUW, landing force operations, navigation refreshers and basic engineering concepts.
Once everyone had their orders, the classes would split into job specifics: Operations, Weapons, Steam Engineering, Diesel Engineering and Gas-Turbine Engineering. Most of the steam engineers-to-be also went to Philadelphia for advanced fire-fighting and to the Great Lakes Training Center for "hot-plant" classes (they had working engineering plants in buildings, the engine shafts drove huge water brakes). Diesel andtwidget 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.
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
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.
Friday, November 20, 2009
Water, Water, Every Where
Nor Any Drop to Drink
Ships do not carry enough water to sustain all of the ship's requirements until they reach port. Ships distill their fresh water from seawater.
The process is called flash distilling. Seawater is heated to nearly boiling temperatures and pumped into a distillation chamber. The chamber is at a lower pressure than atmospheric pressure. Water boils at a lower temperature when atmospheric pressure is reduced; some of the heated seawater flashes to steam, that steam is collected and condensed into fresh water. The remaining water is pumped to a second distillation chamber, which is of a lower pressure, and more of the water flashes to steam. The water is then pumped to a third and final chamber and the process is repeated. The remaining water, or brine, is now far more salty than seawater; it is pumped back into the sea. The heat of the brine is not wasted. It flows through a heat exchanger to help heat the incoming water.
Once an evaporator was operating, it would not be shut down until the plant was shut down. A typical small steam-powered combatant would make 12,000 gallons of fresh water per evaporator (two evaps per plant). The rule of thumb was that 12,000 gallons per day went to the engineering plant as feed water to make up for steam leaks and for use in steam atomization of the boiler fuel. The other 12,000 gallons per day was supposed to be potable water which was used for "hotel use": Cooking, cleaning, dishwashing, showers, drinking water, bug juice and, of course, coffee.
As each potable water tank was ready to be used, the ship's corpsman had to test the water in the tank. Seawater in a port or near land was considered to be contaminated by sewage and fecal matter. It could be used, in theory, but heavy doses of bad-tasting chemicals were required to ensure the water was healthy. In practice, to avoid having to heavily treat potable water made from contaminated seawater, fresh water from the evaporators was not "cut into" the potable water tanks until the ship was well out to sea. If a ship was anchored out, a freshwater barge would resupply the ship each day.
Each day, as part of the Twelve O' Clock Reports to the Captain, the Engineering Report listed the amount of fresh waster and feed water on hand, both in gallonage and percentage (and also gave the statistics on fuel used, received and on hand). If the percentage of fresh water was too low, then "water hours" would be initiated. The newer and smaller steam ships made more water than they could use; the potable water and feed water tanks were generally topped off by 0200 each day and the evaporators' output would be piped back into the sea until the work day started.
Older ships were perennially on the edge of having to ration water. Engineering plants developed leaks as they aged and even the most energetic maintenance program could not keep a large steam plant in "as new" condition. Over time, sensors and weapons were added to every ship, which resulted in 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.
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.
Saturday, November 7, 2009
Mental Health Fail
The mental health of officers and sailors in the Navy was, obviously, a concern of the Navy. But from the way that the system was set up, you would think quite the opposite was true.
The shining example was the Personnel Reliability Program, or PRP. People in the PRP included anyone whose job had to do with nuclear stuff and, for all I know, intel and crypto folks (but don't quote me on the latter two). If someone was in the PRP,on the left side of the inside of the folders holding their service record and medical records was a large pink sheet with a triangle that proclaimed that particular service member was in the PRP and that any issues pertaining to reliability, etc. were to be reported to that person's commanding officer.
It took no great skill of imagination to realize that the initial result of such a call would be that you'd lose your security clearances and, depending on what you did, your job. You'd be sent to some bullshit medical holding billet while the Navy figured out how best to get rid of you. If you weren't shitcanned outright, you'd have a black mark on your record showing a hint of unreliability, which would be fatal for the career of any officer. Even without being a member of the PRP, most everyone knew that admitting to any mental health problem was a career-killer. Since everyone knew this, there was terrific real-world pressure to keep quiet about anyone 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 case 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.
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 anyone 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 case 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.
Sunday, November 1, 2009
Stupid Engineering Tricks
Engineers had a series of checklists and diagrams that made up the two parts of the book on running a steam plant. The procedures for normal operation made up the Engineering Operational Sequencing System, or EOSS. The emergency procedures made up the Engineering Casualty Control System, or ECCS, and they were practiced by a set of exercises known as the Basic Engineering Casualty Control Exercises, or BECCEs.
BECCEs often involved wrapping up the engineering plant, which was no big deal in a twin-screw ship, as you practiced on one plant and steamed the other. On single-screw ships, it was a big deal, as doing boiler drills meant the ship went "hot, dark and quiet" at different times during the drills. For that reason, the XOs wanted BECCEs to be done on the midwatch, so that the flickering of power "wouldn't upset the ship's routine."
Engineers hated midwatch BECCEs. The engineering training team, which ran the BECCEs, had to be off-watch in order to run them. Both the officers and the sailors on the training team could count on maybe getting three hours of sleep on a BECCE night. Worse, to my mind, was the message that midwatch BECCEs sent to the engineers, which was "your drills are not as important as anyone else's". Operations and Weapons drills were run during the day; the only routinely run engineering drill that was run during the day was a main-space fire drill, as that drill took the ship to GQ.
I did see one time when a ship I was on ran BECCEs after lunch. The engineers were awed, even flattered, that their drills were being run during the working day. It was a simple thing, but it made a huge impact on their morale. The XO, though, was ripshit about the disruption to the work day of having the power go on and off as generators were taken offline and brought online.
The dumbest thing that the surface navy did to the engineers, though, was the "outchop OPPE", the "Operational Power Plant Examination" that was held as the ships steamed back from the Mediterranean for home. OPPE (the West Coast pukes called them OPRES, with the R for "readiness") were the major engineering inspection. Everything was examined, from training records and administrative records to normal steaming and casualty control drills. That meant that the engineers had to be be at their best as everyone else was mentally gearing up for coming home. Worse, the frigates who had towed array sonars almost always had their arrays out underway; they were reluctant to do full BECCEs because of the risk of damage from stopping while having an array out and the captains did not want to take the time to recover the array before the BECCEs and then deploy it afterwards.
To cut to the chase: On that series of outchop OPPEs, every twin-screw ship passed their OPPE. Every single-screw ship failed. From what I heard, life on those ships that failed was not much fun for the next few months.
No other major inspection was done in the Navy that way. Only the engineers had to spend their deployed time training and preparing for a major inspection. This sent a message to the engineers that their time, their work, was not as valued as the other departments, that their training and readiness was less important to the Navy, so let's just work the engineers harder on deployment so as to not take any time when the ships were home.
The message was received loud and clear.
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.
Monday, October 26, 2009
Lack of Sleep
I generally try to stay away from current affairs in this blog and stick to the old days of the steam Navy, but not for this post.
There is an article in Navy Times concerning the lean manning of ships and the effect of lack of sleep on the crews. And it's not just ships that are feeling the pinch.
This may be a concern because of fewer sailors, but as a matter of fact, in the ranks of watchstanders, this has always been a serious problem for officers. It was routine to stand 3-section underway watches, which means that you are on watch for roughly eight hours a day and then, in the off-time, you have to do your job. One day out of three you get the luxury of coming off watch at midnight and then being able to sleep until 0600, when you then have to get up, grab a quick shower, and go on watch at 0700. When you stand a forenoon watch (on deck at 0345), you were previously on watch until 2000 the evening before. The midshitter is the cruelest watch; you go on at 2345 and you're there until roughly 0400. You are damned fortunate if you can get two hours of sleep on either side.
All that is if there is nothing else going on. You might have a night refueling, which calls you to a refueling station. I know of one OOD who damn near ran a ship around on Sardinia because of exhaustion; that particular OOD was on refueling station from 2100 to 0130 (the ship was in waiting station for hours because the ship ahead of her had a fouled rig or something and could not disconnect) and then stood the rev watch from 0345 to 0700. The OOD was dog tired and could not think at a much higher level than "fire bad, tree pretty". That was, by far, not the only example I can think of. I've seen some hairy-ass shit happen because sailors and officers were overtired.
I knew of one refueling ship over 20 years ago (an AOR, I think) whose captain refused to obey an order to take her to sea because the ship was so undermanned in boiler techs. It was the talk of the waterfront for awhile, the captain probably killed his career, but everyone knew that he had made the right call.
The problem is only going to be exacerbated on the new littoral combat ships, which are supposed to be operated with a very small crew. That means that it will be operated with a very tired crew that will make mistakes. That also means that the ships will wind up looking as rusty as a Russian Navy destroyer; First Division on a 1052 had about 20+ sailors to do topside maintenance and that would be half the crew of a LCS. Computerization is nice, but computers can't chip paint, swab decks or paint shit. And unless the ships have halon fire-suppression everywhere ("evacuate the compartment, shut the doors/hatches and pump in halon"), I do not see how a ship with 40 people will be able to fight a serious fire.
I suspect that the Navy is asking for some serious problems beyond the grounding of the USS Port Royal.
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.
Monday, October 12, 2009
AAW Part V- the Weapons, Chapter 2
(Part IV)
(N.B. I am not considering 5" and 76mm guns in this discussion. Nothing has fundamentally changed there since the development of the VT fuze) during the Second World War.
Very short range defense against incoming missiles, or "point defense", was initially a crash program within the Navy, which became very interested in point defense in 1967, following the sinking of an Israeli destroyer after it was hit by a number of Styx missiles.
The first system was pretty slapdash, but it worked. It was the "Basic Point Defense Missile System" or BPDMS. It was a system that would have made McGyver proud and it was developed and implemented at near-record speed for a non-hot war procurement situation.
BPDMS took eight Sparrow missiles, straight from the stocks for F-4s, and put them in a trainable box launcher.[1] It took two of the nose radars from an F-4 and mounted them on a separate hand-slewed mount. There was a little CRT in the mount with an eyepiece so the operator could press his face to it (avoiding showing light at night and keeping rain off it). When it was turned on, the operator would be told, by sound-powered telephone, where the target was. He would slew his radar rig to that and elevate it as necessary. The missile box would automatically train and elevate to follow the radar director. The operator would both acquire the target and fire at it.
The disadvantages were obvious. BPDMS relied on a man, standing outdoors, to work it. At night, in the rain, in the cold, whatever the weather, somebody had to be at the director in order for it to function.
NATO Sea Sparrow got rid of the human-operated director;
NATO Sea Sparrow also began the process of "navalizing" the Sparrow missile to make it better suited for shipboard requirements. BPDMS,as I mentioned, had taken the issue Sparrow as used by fighters. That was fine for a crash program, but it was not optimal, so a naval variant was developed.
NATO Sea Sparrow, however, was not suitable for ships much smaller than a destroyer (though BPDMS had been installed on frigates). The Phalanx Close-in Weapon System, CIWS, was developed for smaller ships, though it has been installed on everything up through aircraft carriers. The idea of CIWS[2] was to have a system that could be welded to the deck in short order, if necessary, with only lines run to it to provide for electricity and command capabilities.
CIWS can be fully autonomous, though it can also accept designation from CIC. CIWS has its own tracking and acquisition radars in the white dome. The gun is a 20mm gatling gun which when loaded for wartime, fires sub-caliber (saboted) depleted uranium projectiles which are supposed to smash into an oncoming cruise missile and cause it to blow up.[3] CIWS was often referred to as "R2D2".
CIWS worked. Some navies went for a larger gun, such as Goalkeeper, but the larger systems require penetrating the deck to mount part of the works below the deck, which limits where the mounts can be placed.
The last line of AAW defense is, of course, damage control.
[1] You may see references that say that BPDMS used a modified ASROC box launcher. Those reference are full of shit. The BPDMS launcher box system was a lot smaller than ASROC.
[2] CIWS is also a generic term for any close-in defense system.
[3] There is a potentially serious problem with this idea. A CIWS kill will take place between 300 and 500 yards. Eastern-bloc antiship missiles were designed to disable large ships and it is highly likely that they use some type of shaped-charge. Detonating one a few hundred yards from a destroyer might still sink it. Even if the thing blows up omnidirectionally, the shrapnel has a good chance of fucking up the ship's radars.
(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.
Thursday, October 8, 2009
Victory at Sea
The music, in MP3 format, from the 1952 TV series. If you have never seen the series, it is worth trying to track down a copy of the DVD set. (I found mine in the $5 bin at Wally-World.)
Or you can watch them here.
Or you can watch them here.
Monday, October 5, 2009
Lunchtime
This past weekend, I had lunch with a friend who lives in a smallish city. That city has a Navy-Marine Corps reserve center. We went to a Chinese buffet and sat in a booth. Sitting in the next booth behind me were two naval officers; from their ranks and age, I guessed that they were both mustangs.
An elderly man walked by their booth. He appeared to be old enough to have been in either the Second World or Korean Wars and asked: "How's the navy?"
"The Navy's doing fine," was the reply.
"I was in for four years," the old man said. "I hated it."
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."
Sunday, September 20, 2009
AAW Part IV- the Weapons, Chapter 1
Parts 1, 2, and 3)
Air defense weaponry fell into five basic categories: Airborne interceptors, long-range missiles, medium-range missiles, short-range missiles, and point defense. Let's consider each in turn.
Airborne interceptors were basically the Combat Air Patrol, launched from the carrier. CAP could be airborne, or ready on deck in various alert states. Ready 5 would have the aircrew sitting in the aircraft, hooked up to the catapult and with the engines turning. In Ready 15, the engines were shut down. Ready 30 would have the crew outside of the aircraft and the aircraft near the catapult. Ready 45 and Ready 60 would have the crew in the ready room below decks.[1]
The king of the airborne interceptors was the F-14 Tomcat. The Tomcat carried a powerful radar system, the AWG-9, and the Phoenix missile.
The Phoenix was a serious long-range AAW weapon. Given that the F-14 might have been flying a few hundred miles from the carrier battlegroup and then that the Phoenix itself had a range of something on the order of a hundred miles or so, the F-14/Phoenix weapon system had the capability to engage Soviet Naval Aviation cruise-missile shooters before they reached firing range.
Phoenix's main limitation was that it was not a dogfighting missile, it was a missile that made the F-14 into a flying guided-missile ship. Phoenix was designed for a general hot war, where the only aircraft in the sky would be Ours, Theirs, and Civilians Stupid Enough to Fly Through a War Zone.[2] It was not designed for a limited-war environment where the rules of engagement required visual target identification. Phoenix could only be carried by F-14s, so once the F-14s were retired, so was the Phoenix missile.[3]
Talos was the first long-range shipboard AAW missile.
Talos was a monster in its size. The missile itself was not a rocket, it was powered by a ramjet. It was akin to firing an unmanned aircraft at a target, as the missile weighed something like 7,000lbs and was 35 feet long (give or take). Originally, Talos had a range of 50 nautical miles, the later versions doubled that. The warhead was either continuous rod or nuclear. Talos was so huge that ships carried them both ready to use and, to save space, more missiles were unmated, with the booster, the sustainer and the warheads all separated.
Only one ship, the USS Long Beach, was purpose-built to fire Talos; it was also the only one to shoot them during wartime at a live target (two North Vietnamese MiGs). All the other Talos shooters were rebuilt heavy-gun cruisers from World War II. They were ugly ships; the missiles came out from the deckhouse onto a launcher sited where the first 8" gun turret had been. The missile radars were where the superfiring gun turret had been.
Talos was retired around 1980 as were all of the Talos shooters except Long Beach. She was converted to fire Terriers. The Talos missiles left in inventory were converted into flying targets and all were eventually used up for that duty.
Terrier started out as a medium-range missile, with a maximum range of 20nm. It was, like Talos, a two-stage weapon, but the second stage was powered by a rocket motor. Terrier was also a large weapon, but nowhere near as large as Talos. It was employed by DLGs, which, in 1975, were redesignated as either DDGs or CGs. The warhead was either continuous rod or nuclear, though unlike Talos, the weapons were carried assembled.
To save space, though, the fins were not added to the missiles until they were on the rail in the missile house behind the launcher.
Tartar was a short-range single-stage rocket, basically the front half of a Terrier. It was fired from Adams class DDGs, Brooke class FFGs, and Perry Class FFGs.
Some Knox class FFs had two Tartars in their ASROC launcher box. Tartar had a range of 10nm or so and only had a continuous rod warhead.
Talos, Terrier and Tarter were sometimes referred to as "the T-birds". All functioned about the same way: They rode a beam towards the target and then homed in from the radar reflections as the ship's missile illumination radar shined on the target ("semi-active homing"). They were always "tail-chasing" the target; they were flying towards where the target just had been. Range against a crossing-target was piss-poor. Worse, the ships could only have as many missiles in flight as they had radars.
Terrier was replaced by the SM-1/2ER missiles, Tartar by the SM-1/2MR missiles, though the ships that used them were still referred to as "Terrier ships" or "Tartar ships". The Standard missiles did away with beam-riding, instead steering the missiles towards their target by a datalink that could predict an intercept position and fly the missiles there, using semi-active homing for terminal guidance. That, along with better rocket motors and more powerful boosters for the ER series greatly increased the range of the missiles. The datalink system also permitted the ships to have many missiles in flight at one time per fire-control radar system. The latest models of SM-2MR have a range almost the same as the later models of Talos, while the SM-2ER can fly even further.[4]
There was concern that at some firing angles, the SM-2ER booster could erode the ship's deck, but I do not know if it was ever addressed. During the late 1980s and early 1990s, the steam-powered Terrier ships were given a "New Threat Upgrade" to their missile systems in overhauls that cost over $50 million each to permit them to employ the then-latest variants of SM-2ER. Unfortunately, the Cold War ended soon after the NTU upgrades were put in service and the steam-powered Terrier ships were almost immediately retired.
All of the steam-powered Terrier and Tartar ships have since been scrapped or sunk. The fucking Navy couldn't be bothered to save a single one as a museum ship to the Cold War.[5]
[1] All this is from old memory, so if I'm wrong, meh.
[2] The latter two groups you could shoot at.
[3] During the reign of the Shah, Iran purchased F-14s and Phoenix missiles. They may still have some missiles left.
[4] SM-3ER is designed for ballistic missile defense. This is why.
[5] The Adams-class DDGs were also all scrapped or sunk. Only the German Navy, which had three built here (and customized to their own needs), saved one. The Navy saved numerous ships from WW2, but only the USS Barry and the USS Nautilus, which is historic in its own right as the world's first nuclear sub, were spared.
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.
Thursday, August 13, 2009
Wisdom Teeth
Bubblehead has a post on wisdom teeth.
I was on a ship when I went into the naval base dental clinic for my yearly dental exam. The Navy, in its infinite wisdom, only had people come in annually. If you have ever gone a year without having your teeth cleaned, I don't recommend that you do. Back in the days before the water-jet descalers, plaque build-up had to be removed by scraping. A lot of of plaque builds up in a year and the process of removing it was not a lot of fun.
So anyway, there I was, lying flat on my back in the dental chair, when the dentist (a captain) told me (a lieutenant), that I needed to have my two wisdom teeth removed. Having long gotten past the point where staff-puke rank impressed me, I asked why that was so. He said: "Some day they'll bother you." I shot back with: "Some day my back will bother me, too, you want to remove that, sir?"
He ordered me to make an appointment to "come back in two weeks and have those wisdom teeth out." So I did, though, for some reason, it slipped my mind that my ship was deploying in ten days. Sure enough, about a month into the cruise, the XO got a nasty letter from the dental clinic that I had missed an appointment. And sure enough, by the time the ship had returned to home port, the matter had been forgotten.
I got out of the Navy with my wisdom teeth intact.
Six years later, I had to have them pulled for about $150. So being a stubborn jackass cost me real cash money.
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.
Sunday, August 9, 2009
The 3M System and PMS
No, this had nothing to do with the scotch tape people. In the Navy, the 3M system was the "Maintenance and Material Management System". The 3 M system was made of various subsystems, which included supply management, maintenance management and maintenance tasks.
PMS was the Planned Maintenance Subsystem. The maintenance tasks were called "PMS checks". The scheduling is probably all done on computers now, but it was done by hand back in my day.
Each division on a ship was broken down into work centers, usually on the basis of spaces. Boiler Division on a frigate would have one work center, two on a destroyer or cruiser. A-gang may have two or three. AS Division could have two or as many as six work centers. R Division had the most, as each repair locker was a work center and each divisional DCPO was a separate work center. Each work center had a "leading petty officer" in charge, though the LPO could be a chief in a larger work center.
PMS checks were maintenance procedures for specific pieces of equipment ranging from the very small to the very large. PMS checks were done by reference to the PMS card for the check. Each card listed the number of sailors required to do the check, specific supervision, if required, the tools required, the consumables required and the estimated time to perform the check. The cards were like recipe cards; they set forth each step of the check.
PMS checks were designated in each work center by a letter and number. The letter designated how often the check was to be performed and the number was a series number within each work center. The letters were D (daily), W, M, Q, A, and R (other requirement). The first monthly check in work center WS01 was M-1, then M-2, M-3, and so on.
In each department office was the quarterly PMS scheduling board for the work centers, by week. This listed every PMS check for the quarter that had a less-than-weekly periodicity. This PMS schedule was kept on paper, in pencil. The schedule was signed by the division officer and approved by the department head. Each work center had a laminated weekly schedule that showed each day and what checks were scheduled. The weekly and daily checks were often printed on the schedule before lamination. The LPO would write in the monthly, etc. with a grease pencil. This schedule was signed by the LPO and approved by the division officer.
The LPO assigned sailors to do the PMS checks. If a PMS check was done on the day it was scheduled for, it was crossed out on the schedule. If not, it was circled and rescheduled, with an arrow connecting the original date and the rescheduled one. This was also done on the quarterly PMS schedule. At the end of each quarter, the quarterly PMS schedules were reviewed by the XO and the Captain. Any division that was found to be less than diligent about completing its PMS checks would receive extra scrutiny. So a wise division officer kept a sharp eye on the completion rate and a good department head did likewise.
PMS performance was also spot-checked. Each week, the division officers had to do spot-checks on PMS checks, though it was left to their discretion whether to watch a check being performed or to go back later and see if the check was done. The sailors doing the check had to show that they had the required tools and supplies. The procedures for the checks were verified and, if for some reason, a check should be performed differently than the way specified, a report was supposed to be submitted up the chair of command to the Naval Sea Systems Command for review of the procedure.
The results of the spot-check had to be submitted. Some commands were better than others in enforcing the spot checks. The department heads were supposed to do one spot check per division per week. The CO and the XO were supposed to do a weekly spot check as well.
PMS was easy to gun-deck (ie, fake) if the spot-checks were not done. Smart officers knew the value of PMS checks and made sure they were performed.
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.
Saturday, July 4, 2009
Uniform Disasters; Followup
(Original post)
If this article is to be believed, the newBattle 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.
If this article is to be believed, the new
I still think they look silly.
Also, I was near a navy base several weeks ago. I saw a couple of young squids wearing the new summer uniform of a black pisscutter, a khaki shirt and black trousers. They looked like knock-off jarheads.
The new uniforms are just dumb.
The Fourth
The Declaration of Independence and a comment. The link at the top of the Declaration will take you to the NPR recitation of its text.
I hope you have a happy Fourth. Don't blow yer fingers off.
I hope you have a happy Fourth. Don't blow yer fingers off.
Tuesday, June 30, 2009
Nicknames
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 would 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".
One nickname backfired on an entire department. The sailors on one ship thought that the Operations Officer had a resemblance to Jerry Lewis. They would 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".
Monday, June 22, 2009
Google Search Results
This Google search result popped up today:
"i got a 3.2 on my fitrep in the navy am i in trouble?"
Probably not, because if you had to go to the Google to ask that question, then you probably are too junior for that grade to hurt you too badly. You're probably an ensign who has received his or her first fitness report. You have time to improve your performance. The critical selection boards are likely several years away and since it is not unheard of for butter-bars to trip over their feet a time or two, don't sweat it. (But don't make a habit of it.) I once knew an ensign who screwed up so badly that he almost wound up in front of a general court martial, but he survived his fuckup and did command tours both afloat and ashore.
But if you are a lieutenant and you've been an officer for at least four years and you're asking that question, then you need to have a good long talk with someone, and by that, I don't mean talking to the chaplain and getting a key to the Weep Locker. For while I don't know the current climate, back in my day, when the Navy had a lot more ships than it does now, for an O-3 to get a 3.2 on a fitrep was a subtle message that one should consider investigating another line of work.
(And if you are an O-3 and you don't already know the answer to the question that you Googled, that smelly stuff that you are neck-deep in is not kimchee.)
"i got a 3.2 on my fitrep in the navy am i in trouble?"
Probably not, because if you had to go to the Google to ask that question, then you probably are too junior for that grade to hurt you too badly. You're probably an ensign who has received his or her first fitness report. You have time to improve your performance. The critical selection boards are likely several years away and since it is not unheard of for butter-bars to trip over their feet a time or two, don't sweat it. (But don't make a habit of it.) I once knew an ensign who screwed up so badly that he almost wound up in front of a general court martial, but he survived his fuckup and did command tours both afloat and ashore.
But if you are a lieutenant and you've been an officer for at least four years and you're asking that question, then you need to have a good long talk with someone, and by that, I don't mean talking to the chaplain and getting a key to the Weep Locker. For while I don't know the current climate, back in my day, when the Navy had a lot more ships than it does now, for an O-3 to get a 3.2 on a fitrep was a subtle message that one should consider investigating another line of work.
(And if you are an O-3 and you don't already know the answer to the question that you Googled, that smelly stuff that you are neck-deep in is not kimchee.)
Thursday, June 4, 2009
The End of the Beginning
(N.B.: I posted this at my home blog. On further reflection, I should have posted it here, so I am cross-posting it.)
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Today is the 67th anniversary of the Battle of Midway. The battle marked the turning point of the war against Japan. The Japanese sent a large force to invade Midway Island, spearheaded by four carriers. The US Navy had three carriers and, thanks to the Navy's code breakers, some knowledge of what the Japanese plan was.
The Japanese carriers launched strikes against the island, only to be found and attacked.
USN divebombers badly damaged three of the carriers on the morning of June 4th. All three were out of the fight, they were all abandoned and scuttled.
The fourth Japanese carrier struck back. Her planes badly damaged the USS Yorktown, which was later sunk by a Japanese submarine while under tow. This photo shows the Yorktown under attack.
The fourth Japanese carrier was sunk that afternoon.
Turning points to a war are only apparent long after they happen. At this point, the US and her allies in the Pacific had been at war with Japan for six months, the war would continue on for three more years.
The person who saw this most clearly, though, was Admiral Yamamoto, who, in 1940, was quoted as saying this about the prospect of a general war in the Pacific: "In the first six to twelve months of a war with the United States and Great Britain I will run wild and win victory upon victory. But then, if the war continues after that, I have no expectation of success."
He was right and he was proven to be so 67 years ago today.
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Today is the 67th anniversary of the Battle of Midway. The battle marked the turning point of the war against Japan. The Japanese sent a large force to invade Midway Island, spearheaded by four carriers. The US Navy had three carriers and, thanks to the Navy's code breakers, some knowledge of what the Japanese plan was.
The Japanese carriers launched strikes against the island, only to be found and attacked.
USN divebombers badly damaged three of the carriers on the morning of June 4th. All three were out of the fight, they were all abandoned and scuttled.
The fourth Japanese carrier struck back. Her planes badly damaged the USS Yorktown, which was later sunk by a Japanese submarine while under tow. This photo shows the Yorktown under attack.
The fourth Japanese carrier was sunk that afternoon.Turning points to a war are only apparent long after they happen. At this point, the US and her allies in the Pacific had been at war with Japan for six months, the war would continue on for three more years.
The person who saw this most clearly, though, was Admiral Yamamoto, who, in 1940, was quoted as saying this about the prospect of a general war in the Pacific: "In the first six to twelve months of a war with the United States and Great Britain I will run wild and win victory upon victory. But then, if the war continues after that, I have no expectation of success."
He was right and he was proven to be so 67 years ago today.
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