The USS Fitzgerald had been steaming on a secret mission to the South China Sea when it was smashed by a cargo ship more than three times its size:
The 30,000-ton MV ACX Crystal gouged an opening bigger than a semitruck in the starboard side of the destroyer. The force of the collision was so great that it sent the 8,261-ton warship spinning on a 360-degree rotation through the Pacific.
[...]
The Fitzgerald’s captain selected an untested team to steer the ship at night. He ordered the crew to speed through shipping lanes filled with cargo ships and fishing vessels to free up time to train his sailors the next day. At the time of the collision, he was asleep in his cabin.
The 26-year-old officer of the deck, who was in charge of the destroyer at the time of the crash, had navigated the route only once before in daylight. In a panic, she ordered the Fitzgerald to turn directly into the path of the Crystal.
The Fitzgerald’s crew was exhausted and undertrained. The inexperience showed in a series of near misses in the weeks before the crash, when the destroyer maneuvered dangerously close to vessels on at least three occasions.
The warship’s state of readiness was in question. The Navy required destroyers to pass 22 certification tests to prove themselves seaworthy and battle-ready before sailing. The Fitzgerald had passed just seven of these tests. It was not even qualified to conduct its chief mission, anti-ballistic missile defense.
A sailor’s mistake sparked a fire causing the electrical system to fail and a shipwide blackout a week before the mission resulting in the crash. The ship’s email system, for both classified and non-classified material, failed repeatedly. Officers used Gmail instead.
Its radars were in questionable shape, and it’s not clear the crew knew how to operate them. One could not be made to automatically track nearby ships. To keep the screen updated, a sailor had to punch a button a thousand times an hour. The ship’s primary navigation system was run by 17-year-old software.
Fitzgerald seems like an inauspicious name.
Read the whole story, and watch the animation, too.
The Ford Report is a devastating indictment of the state of that ship and its crew and officers. We have a Navy that is too small by far for the missions it is assigned, and the Navy makes do by sending half-trained or even untrained men and women to sea and by delaying or simply not doing maintenance. The Navy simply has to sharply curtail deployments and spend a lot more time in port doing training and maintenance.
This is a Potemkin Navy. If we stumble into a war with either Russia or China, we will fair badly.
You should also go over to the now quiet “In from the Cold” blog, and peruse its archives. There are a number of posts on the land-based legs of our nuclear Triad, and they make really disturbing reading. The people and weapons in those parts of the Triad are simply not ready to perform their duties. One hopes the Ohios are, but one is suspicious.
I think you’d be surprised at just how prevalent all this sort of thing is, across our entire armed forces.
Thing is, only the Navy really has the inherent nature to highlight this set of issues in peacetime, because their normal everyday activities are so similar to war and are also highly visible. You’re not going to see the evidence of a armored brigade’s unreadiness for war being demonstrated by that brigade inadvertently running into a city, or something… The Navy can’t hide shit, when it loses the bubble.
Readiness for war is one of those things you just can’t assess, in a lot of cases. It’s my contention, along with a lot of other folks who were “in the know”, that the 3rd ID did much better during the invasion of Iraq than we had any right to expect. Frankly, based on what we were seeing down at the NTC in the years immediately prior to all that, the invasion should have been an ‘effing disaster. In the event, only the 507th Maintenance Company actually demonstrated the sort of performance that I and a lot of other fellow trainers had come to expect out of around 90% of the stateside divisional units, and that was primarily due to the lack of exposure that unit had to the environment it was sent into.
I speculate that there was a residue of competence left over from the “old days”, which came to the fore in 2003, and that the lengthy stay in the Kuwaiti desert did a lot to focus minds and tighten up standards. All 3rd ID had to do for about six months was train and work on things out in the camps–It wasn’t like there were weekends or much of anything else to distract.
One shudders to think what 2003 would have looked like, if it had truly been a “come as you are” sort of affair–Judging from the way 4th ID operated, it would have been “interesting” in the sort of sense that Kasserine Pass was “interesting”.
One thing to keep in mind is something I only learned in retrospect:It isn’t the “best” army that wins; it’s the least ‘effed up one that gets the victory parades.
Military excellence is something you can only evaluate in relative terms: Say that you have the most exquisitely trained and proficient horse cavalry in the world, but you can only afford a few regiments of them. Comes time for war, and what you discover is that those expensively trained men and their excellent horses are easily defeated by the mass conscript armies of infantry that your enemies threw at them… All that excellence? Useless, without the rest of the factors you’d need for victory.
This is something that the Germans and Japanese had to learn the hard way, in WWII. We would do well to observe where they went wrong, and keep that in mind as we contemplate our own military position in the world.
Cdr Salamander’s blog has been presenting this issue at some length, and his commenters [some I think shared with Isegoria] certainly have views.
I guess I’m not surprised with the condition of the USN, given its tempo over many years, undermanning, undermaintenance, and so on. Add to that the neglect of fundamentals in favour of Buck Rogers solutions or social engineering. But the sheer scale and depth of the problem revealed by this incident suggests something worse than I would have imagined- something like the 1970s US armed forces were reputed to be like after Vietnam. And I don’t even know if that was true or not. So maybe things are trending worse now than then.
As a veteran of the US Army as it actually was during the early 1980s, when it was on the path out of the 1970s malaise? LOL… Dude, trust me on this: Take your most outrageous imaginings, multiply them by about a factor of three, square it, and you might just be close to approximating the level of dysfunction that was the standard out in the line units which were not “lavished” with the funding and attention that the so-called “elite” formations like the 82nd Airborne got during the ’70s.
Stories I could tell… Sweet baby Jesus, you would not believe the crap I saw, experienced, and worked through at my first assignment here in the continental US from about ’82 to late ’84. Germany, where I went after that, was a revelation–The reform effort had kicked off there probably about 1981, and there had been considerable progress made by the time I got there. Things had been starting to get fixed where I was in the US, but most of it was rumor more than substantive fixes.
As an aside… Readiness-for-war is one of those nebulous things that’s hard to define, and harder to assess when you’re looking at a unit or an army. Sure, they may look good, but the question is, how will they perform under fire? Hell, how will they perform if you just put them under trial-by-the-unforeseen in peacetime?
The other thing that’s a bit of a problem, and why the rest of you ought to be more than slightly concerned about such things, is that the Army traditionally trails the Navy in actual effective readiness–Because, the Navy can’t hide the fact that they’re running their ships into things. The Army, on the other hand…? There are multitudinous sins of readiness that tight budgets and unrealistic preparation for war can leave laying in wait for the unready. The 507th Maintenance Company’s inept performance just trying to move as a part of the division trains of the 3rd ID is an indicator of just where bad readiness and unrealistic training can take you. If I had to project, probably about 90% of the Army was were the 507th was circa 1983–At least, from my then-worm’s eye view of it all. From my perspective now, looking back? I suspect I probably was overly optimistic in that assessment, because the indicators I was seeing then actually exposed more dysfunction than I recognized at that point in my career, and having gained that perspective through experience…? Yeah; we were ‘effed the hell up.
The people of the United States have no idea how much they owe the soldiers of my generation who volunteered and worked in the Army during the 1980s–Without the crap we put up with and fixed, none of what happened during the 1990s and early 2000s would have been possible. Instead, the effort during Desert Storm and the post-9/11 campaigns would have looked a lot like the Carter-era debacle at Desert One during Operation Eagle Claw.
Readiness is something that takes decades to build, and can be pissed away in a few short years or even months.
An example of this would be the Iraqi Army that we spent all that money building up during the mid- to late-2000s: Due to the feckless incompetence of the Obama Administration in cutting the deployments of advisers and then withdrawing from Iraq, all the money and time we lavished on that force evaporated like so much water spilled out of a canteen onto the desert floor. Why? Because the Shiite government simply quit paying the troops we trained, because a lot of them were Sunni, and not affiliated with any faction in the government. By the time ISIS showed up, that force was a hollow one, with most of the people we trained having gone home, to be replaced by politically reliable incompetents that were beholden to the Shiia factions in the Iraqi government. That change in readiness took place over less than a year or two; had the original formations that we’d trained remained intact, none of that embarrassment when ISIS invaded would have taken place.
Military readiness is a fragile thing; quit paying for rigorous training exercises, and keep the troops in garrison for a year after year? Kiss goodbye to doing things like Desert Storm on the spur of the moment. It’s nowhere near as sexy as getting a ship named after you, so the politicians tend to discount that sort of thing–Until they’re waking up the way we did in 1940 and realizing that our Army was incredibly behind the power curve. To be quite honest, had we actually kept things up, the result of WWII would have been quite different, if only because the calculus made by men like Hitler would have had to include the fact that we had a competent and capable force with which to intervene. The German officers who’d observed our Army during the ’30s were rock-solid certain that we’d never be able to overcome the deficiencies which we’d allowed to grow up in those years–And, to be honest, a lot of them weren’t ever overcome until the 1980s. And, were promptly pissed away under the supposed “peace dividend”. Thank you, George Bush and Bill Clinton…
I’d just like to quietly back up what Kirk has said. I was on active duty (1LT) in the Army in Germany from early ’86 through the end of ’89. The bad old days that had gone on before my time were history, but recent history, and you could see some of it living on in NCOs and the field grade officers. We needed to do a lot work, and so we did. I was in a _good_ Infantry battalion. Yet readiness remained a matter of constant despair for me. Granted, tearing the backside out of Iraq in 1990 wasn’t a total surprise. But if the same units had been put up against their Wehrmacht equivalent, it would’ve made Kasserine look like a tea party. And I worry that we’ve returned to this state, because combat capability can be screwed up in six months flat (given rotation of soldiers).
I Was There Too,
I honestly don’t know about the Wehrmacht being that much qualitatively better than we were, back then. And, a lot would depend on precisely which Wehrmacht you picked as competitor–The Wehrmacht of 1939, before Poland? After Poland? The Wehrmacht that went into the Soviet Union during Barbarossa? The remnants which withdrew, in ’45?
My assessment of such things changed a great deal after 2003; what I’ve concluded is that “readiness for war” is a chimerical thing, and is entirely dependent upon who you’re fighting, and things like equipment and so forth are somewhat irrelevant, within reasonable equivalencies. Had the Iraqi and US armies swapped out gear, the results would have been the same; but put into a situation where the Wehrmacht at its height would have been facing American troops at their post-Vietnam height, say 1990…? The issue would have been dependent entirely on whose equipment they had. Wehrmacht vintage ’41 or ’42 would have gone down, hard, encountering the M1 and the Brad plus the attendant supporting gear. Given the technological differences, were you to give both forces equivalent gear and time to gain proficiency with it, I’m not sure which would come out on top. The Wehrmacht was capable, certainly–But, the thing is, they were fighting 1930s-vintage French, British, and Russians. It’s like the Moshe Dayan thing, where he reputedly said that the great secret of Israeli battle success was that they were fighting Arabs: We look back at the German wartime performance, and think that it was amazing. Truth is, it’s as much a reflection of precisely who they were fighting, as much as their own prowess.
I remember talking to a German Landser, who’d fought in a lot of infamous battles as an MG42 gunner. Dude was a consummate expert on his weapon and its uses, but the key point is that he walked nearly everywhere he went into combat. A US division of the late 1980s damn near had more vehicles than men… I can’t think of too many fights they’d get in with the equivalent Wehrmacht outfit where the Germans would wind up chopped into pieces due to the sheer difference in mobility. Skill-at-arms is irrelevant if your enemy renders that skill meaningless…
Besides nuclear subs, does it even make sense to have a Navy? What exactly are we expecting to accomplish with a bunch of easily sunk missile magnets?
Not being a person of vast naval knowledge, I’d suggest that the main reason you need surface combatants is the same reason you can’t do everything with aviation: It isn’t conquered until you’ve put a bunch of heavily armed 18 year-old infantrymen on top of it. Without surface ships, you’ve basically got the same situation going that you have with trying to bomb the enemy into submission.
Control requires that you actually be there, occupying the space in question.
I was in the air force in 1980. Same thing. Around 1982 things got better. We spent a massive amount of time pulling parts out of flying aircraft to put in non flying aircraft so that the schedule said we had so many operational planes. It was a lie. We didn’t have the parts to keep them all flying. I KNOW, or at least I would bet a large sum of money, this is what happened to the F-22 planes that got clobbered by the hurricane. They didn’t have the parts to patch them up and fly them out. I bet everything they could fly got out of there.
As for the Navy look at this article on the amphibious landing problem. We have a lot of useless overbuilt stuff that is of limited use but looks great and feeds the contractors. This is a very good read.
http://www.g2mil.com/Devo-Amphibs.htm
We should go back to building a LOT of the old school Landing Ship Assault. I, of course, would say we build them out of concrete in molds and mass produce them. Also I would add legs on sides so they could crawl up on the beach or any other shore. It could walk sorta like a centipede. Draglines. a little different but another model, move with the legs and set down on it’s base. Dragline video
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-NhAR_qJVZk
The front of the ship should look like this, sorta, but with more straight lines for mass production
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/M80_Stiletto
This type boat comes from the Hickman sea sled tunnel hull (VERY FAST), it traps air under the hull. Hickman invented this. I’m told he was a genius but hard to deal with so it didn’t catch on.
https://www.gerrmarine.com/Articles/SeaSleds.pdf
If you look at the M80_Stiletto you could imagine something a bit straighter angles on the front like the Hickman with slab straight side. The front and rear would be ramps that come down. The legs could tilt the boat so that even low clearance trucks could load stuff inside. The sides and bottom resembling a Landing Ship Assault like the first link. So you would have maybe 8 molds for the bottom, (because the air tunnels would be different all down the bottom). 6 different molds for the sides, (2 front side molds, 2 rear side molds, 2 flat wall side molds). 3 different molds for the top, (a front, a rear and the middle) to build a 200 foot ship like the WWII tank attack. Once you have the molds you could produce these in quantity very cheap.
The reason you want a Navy is over “…40% of the world’s population lives within 100 km (about 63 miles) of the sea…”.
I’ve read much higher figures. If you included rivers you could go up in a boat it would be very high. Maybe 85% of the population or higher. If you’re going to invade something you need to be able to go where the people are.
I’ve thought a lot about these boats a lot. I could go into absurd detail. If fitted out correctly you could use a couple types for most any Navy use you would need and maybe add a 10,000 ft. model to land any plane you want on it. It would be a floating air-runway carrier. Anything you need you just drive up in the ship and mount on shipping container brackets. Fuel-drive in fuel tanks, soldiers-drive in shipping container troop sleeping quarters, food-food trucks. Very versatile. Now we build a bunch of special purpose things that don’t even do the job they’re supposed to most of the time. Why not have a 3,000 ship Navy and just rotate the equipment in them??? We could also rent them to the merchant marine.
Landing Ship Tanks
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SLCeXkSDuxs
Kirk-
I’d be interested if you cared to highlight deficiencies in the US Army that were present in the 30s and never repaired until the 80s.
I’m used to thinking of WW2 as having been a crucible getting rid of everything, although I’ve read enough to suggest that rot crept back in fast enough. Never read quite enough to get much sense of how, where, when or why, at least until the war in Vietnam itself, but presumably there were problems already before that.
WWII was a work-around kludge, particularly from the standpoint of building a long-service professional army akin to the Roman Legions–Which was what the US needed, going into the status of superpower.
Institutionally, the US Army has never really reconciled itself with the idea of being a standing army of what amounts to an imperial power. The draft era was particularly bad, in that they did not ever stop to think through the implications of moving from a mentality of “tiny peacetime army of professional cadre, ready to expand to mass wartime army”. Manning in the officer corps was particularly inimical, because a huge part of the rationale for the staff bloat we suffer from to this day stems from the idea that we need to keep massive numbers of officers available for expansion–Which only encourages a number of the syndromes we suffer from, in regards to ticket-punching and careerism.
Structurally, too–The entire training base is a remnant of WWII and draftee era thinking. Why do we have these huge institutional abortions under TRADOC, and why do we devote the mass of trained manpower to them? It would be better, in terms of creating a lot of experienced officers who’re familiar with the issues of training, to take and put initial entry training under the direct control of unit commanders the way it was before WWII. The way we do it now, with a huge institutional training base, is an artifact of the WWII crisis era, and was never re-thought the way it should have been.
More thoughts vis-a-vis Graham’s query:
WWII posed an issue for the Army, and that issue was “How the hell do we build a force that wins, from nothing…?”. Some of the answers worked, some didn’t, and the unfortunate fact is that the Army tends to stop adapting and evaluating things once they’ve struck on what appears to be a winning line of effort. Historically, what you find is that when you go back and look, whatever the US Army did in the last victorious war is what they tend to keep right on doing… Until it quits working. Peacetime reforms don’t usually happen, unless someone like Elihu Root shows up to break the iron rice bowls. Those guys are vanishingly rare, because nobody puts people like that in charge of the US military, unless they’re Teddy Roosevelt.
The personnel system, with its emphasis on individual replacements vs. unit replacement after attrition, remained in place until the ’90s–And, vestiges of it still hang around, creating in-ranks turbulence that’s entirely inimical to building good units. That policy of treating individual soldiers as so many fungible cogs in the machinery is a result of policies going back to Marshall, who observed the way the Allies wasted experienced and trained officer manpower keeping units alive who had had their entire forces of enlisted combat manpower ground away to nothing–So, for WWII, he instituted the individual replacement policy, which kept him from having to worry about wasted vestigial headquarters, but which also increased anomie among the troops, and vastly complicated acculturating them to soldiering and their units. Deliberate choice, forced on him by circumstance–And, never re-examined by anyone in charge up until lately.
The Army is a vast and inertia-laden thing, institutionally. You know the old saw about “Nobody ever got fired for buying IBM…”? Well, that’s the watchword for most changes in the Army–”Nobody ever got in trouble for doing that, so we’ll keep right on doing it…”. Never mind if it makes any bloody sense at all, with a long-service professional force of volunteers.
A lot of our personnel policies are flatly insane–The way we have failed to adapt to women in the Army is another whole realm of feckless stupidity. I will contend that the Army has not yet grasped the implication of putting boys and girls together resulting in f**king, which has a tendency to result in pregnancy and children. If it had, there’d be some common-sense policies that clearly laid out when and how such things were permissible, and those policies would look to the good of the unit and mission first. The way we do it now? LOL… Asinine. All the decision-making assholes running the show are afraid of looking like meanies to the little girls they’ve created in their minds in place of the actual women-with-agency they have serving, and the policies they create and enforce reflect that.
In a lot of fundamental ways, the Army is stuck in an atavistic mode of operation–The dichotomy between enlisted and officer is another example. During the days when there were clear class differences between the two, there was some sense in all the different privileges and social distance. Today? It’s positively inimical, because the enlisted force structure is where most of the actual institutional memory resides, and that isn’t ever tapped for input. The whole thing is still top-down driven, in terms of how it works, and there’s little to no flow from the bottom up. As wars increase in complexity, this ain’t a good thing–The guys out on the pointy end of things create solutions that never get institutionalized because they don’t have a pipeline into the formal institutional organs that think they run everything.
Case in point would be the way WWII was actually fought, out in the squads and platoons. The manuals said one thing, but actual practice? Much, much different. And, because all the guys who really knew what they’d done were discharged and cut free from the institution, when they went to do things like develop new small arms reflecting WWII experience, we wound up with things like the M14 and 7.62mm NATO, instead of an intermediate assault rifle combination.
Institutionally, the Army is still stuck on an awful lot of stupid…
Kirk,
Thanks for that. That really put some meat on the bone. And gave me lots to chew on. End metaphor.
I think some of those points I encountered in academic and personal reading going back to the 90s, but your quick summary put it into an interesting perspective- less Old Army flaws unsolved, than Old Army flaws left over plus many, many more draft army and bureaucratic workarounds.
It’s a surprisingly comprehensive and clarifying frame for the entire military history of the Cold War, as it pertains to the US Army.
It starts to clarify for me the challenges faced after the decision to build a professional force. In retrospect, I guess it’s rather obvious that going from a frontier constabulary and occasional expeditionary force through mass conscript if relatively high tech armies, they were almost starting from scratch again in the 70s to build a large, professional, technologically enabled, mostly overseas force for every contingency. They had only a few of those pieces in place in the army’s own history.
Your comments on the replacement system are particularly interesting. I could certainly see where Marshall was coming from.
I don’t know if the US Army practised mainly unit replacement in WW1 but I am aware that Civil War units tended to go into battle and get slowly [or quickly] reduced in number, and eventually get replaced by fresh regiments including higher-numbered units from their home states. In that era, superfluous unit headquarters presumably were too few in officer complement to be a big deal since the shrinking units were at the regiment level. I have no idea whether this was better or worse for esprit de corps.
With WW2, I hadn’t realized the British followed the policy they did. I’m in Canada, and I assume we did the same. Although our army wasn’t in major ground combat until Italy from 1943 and France from June 1944. I know there was a manpower crisis in 1944, as with Britain and the US, but that was a bigger picture. I had thought the Germans followed a unit replacement policy, until they were stuck with a no replacement policy. Actually- I’m not so sure. They had the entire ersatz heer [usually- replacement army] command structure with unit parallels down to the battalion level at home, so I’m not sure how they operated in practice. I have read of critically damaged units rotating out, even back to Germany, but also of replacement drafts being sent to deployed units, so it must have been a mixed, wartime hybrid.
Would I be correct in thinking that the better solution, perhaps even with the conscript armies of the war, would have been unit replacement in the sense of pulling whole units off the line for larger-number of replacements and retraining together? Is that the sort of idea you were getting at? For the kind of army the US seems to want now and the kind of wars it has been fighting, it almost seems the inevitable solution and I can see where failure to operate that way would be demoralizing. Perhaps even more so than in a situation like WW2.
A bit of a tangent, but the other element that strikes me as significant was what they used to call Total Force- the full integration of the National Guard and reserves and the off-loading of entire capabilities to it. That seems to have paid off in terms of the performance of Guard and reservists in the field, at least overall, so all honour to those who served in these roles, but using reservists and Guard in prolonged overseas deployments in an ‘imperial’ setting was not what they had in mind in the 80s. And whether it has been good for the kind of ideal personnel system you are talking about I’m less sure.
Although I have seen at least one British commenter write of solving British manning problems through allowing departure and reentry into the regular force itself to give both officers and members flexible career options. That kind of system might mean less strain on actual reservists trying to keep day jobs, long term.
Graham,
There really is no perfect system for managing combat losses with regards to personnel.The Germans opted for unit cohesion, and dealt with the consequences. The US opted for raw efficiency, and a lot of those consequences flowed into the post-WWII military, individual replacement becoming the default for Korea and Vietnam–Despite it’s manifest negative effects on cohesion, training, and discipline.
Today, we’ve got kind of a hybrid system, one that sort of works, but whose characteristics are overall inimical to both the mental health of the troops, and the cohesion of the units. The US Army has this mentality that they’re running people through a massive training system, one that’s unconsciously mean to produce the maximum number of barely qualified mediocrities to man a mass-expansion Army that’s probably not going to ever materialize until there’s a severe change in the nature of war.
It’s amazing to observe the number of unspoken and unreviewed assumptions that a lot of this stuff is based on–The way they churn the commanders through, for example, is intended to result in the maximum number of young company-grade officers getting their career tickets punched, so that they’ll be available to fill out the manning rosters for some unconsciously assumed mass army we might need in the future. This is a vestigial “baseline assumption” of the personnel system, one that’s left over from the early Cold War and the post-WWII era. They’re doing what they think should have been done in the 1930s, in order to better prepare for the expansion of WWII. Only thing is, the whole idea is wrong for what we’re doing now, and entirely ill-adapted to current conditions.
The Army’s personnel system, with regards to officers, is designed to produce lots and lots of them, in order that we have enough of them to go around in case of another mass mobilization war. For that, you need a lot of mediocre officers that might throw up a few Pattons, so what we’re doing is in alignment with that reality. However, the wars we’re actually fighting, and with a small professional Army? The officer production/procurement/management system ought to be biased towards producing really proficient, high-quality experienced officers that can take on highly ambiguous situations like you find in counter-insurgencies. Ticket-punchers who do 12 months in command ain’t answering the mail…
Similar issues exist through the enlisted force, and for similar reasons. The Army has institutionalized mediocrity in the name of homogenization and keeping enough folks around to do another mass mobilization–And, again, that doesn’t suit current conditions.
On the micro level of things, this results in things like the frustrations I had as a squad leader trying to attain true excellence in machine gunnery–You’d train up your three-man team, and by the time you got them past the initial stages, you’d wind up having one or more of them leave the unit for reassignment, end-of-service, or re-purposing within the unit. If machine-gunnery could be ideated as being an A-B-C-to-Z affair, with progressive complexity of tasks for each letter, the situation was that you’d normally be caught in an endless cycle of doing A-B-C-D, and then having to start over again because the First Sergeant needed a new driver, and grabbed your gunner. So, select new guy, go A-B-C-D in the training sequence, and then the Assistant Gunner comes down on orders for Korea… Because of personnel management like this, you never get to the point where you’re training the more advanced and complex stuff, so as an NCO, you’re highly proficient at training the simplistic tasks and completely lost when it comes to things like planning and directing your guns for indirect fire–Because, you’ve never had the opportunity to do that.
Couple of good books out there, for background on how all of this came to happen: One would be by Geoffrey Perret, There’s a War to be Won: The US Army in WWII, which is a really good popular history that goes into a lot of depth for just why things were done the way they were, and why the decisions were made. There are a bunch of decent first-person accounts of Army life during the interwar years, whose titles I’d have to go looking for for you. A good overview of that period is to be found here: The Regulars: The American Army, 1898-1941, by Edward Coffman.
Kirk, I’m a bit skeptical of your occupancy claim. To be useful, a surface ship would need to have a level of durability which I’m just not sure ships any longer have. Unless there is some defensive technology that can reliably combat cruise missiles, a 50 million dollar autonomous weapon outmatches a 50 billion dollar ship. At that rate of exchange, the reliability of the system would need to be in excess of 1000:1, or 99.9%, taking into account neither loss of life nor the marginal offensive capability of the ship (which is…?). In addition, ships are impossible to hide, whereas missiles can be anywhere: military bases, deep underground, scattered throughout vast uninhabited wastes, underwater, in cargo boxes, et cetera.
None of this is to say that I know much of anything about the military.
Kirk,
Thanks for the recommendations and all that further analysis. I found it illuminating.