VCNO Goes Salamander

After awhile, does it get old saying, "We told you this years ago, over & over ... "?

Nawwww! Viva la FrontPorch!

The surface Navy’s optimal manning experiment is over, the Navy’s No. 2 officer declared in a speech before the Surface Navy Association’s national symposium on Tuesday.

“We’re going to effectively migrate, reconstitute in a way, the surface fleet afloat,” Vice Chief of Naval Operations Adm. Jonathan Greenert told the audience of about 200 contractors, sailors and officers. “We’ve just taken too much risk in things like optimal manning and others and that’s pretty well documented.”

Here is where I blog through gritted teeth.

Sir, you (senior leadership) were told this years ago behind closed doors. You were told off the record by others. You actively silenced those who warned that optimal manning went against everything we knew about running, maintaining, and fighting a ship. You created a command climate where this was silenced due to no other reason than it supported some people's pet theories - reality be d@mned.

You designed a whole class of ships, LCS, LPD-17, and DDG-1000, around these concepts. The second and third order effects will be felt for decades. First with jury-rigged additional berthing for more crewmembers, and second with maintenance issues that even additional manning won't solve.

Worst of all - we have another data point from the lost decade that was 2000-2010 where our credibility in front of Congress, the taxpayer, and worst of all the Fleet was eroded to almost nothing.

The active campaign to silence all criticism of LCS, DDG-1000, Optimal Manning, and the rest of the pet projects of the transformationalists is now bearing fruit. Fruit you were warned about, and any objective review of hundreds of years of making ships and Sailors work would have warned you of as well.

It is one thing to go, "Oops." Now let's hear who made these decisions and why. Oh ... yea ... I see. Nevermind.

So, BZ for coming around before any more damage was done to the Fleet. Now take a deep breath and ask yourself, "What other pet projects promoted to support tender egos pursuing toxic agendas do we have left now that we have retreated from the revolutionary to the evolutionary and Optimal Manning?"

What other things have a proven, historical record of being destructive and unworkable? Hmmmmm ..... I'll give you something else to ponder. Visit here any Thursday to get a hint.

Hat tip Scott.