Comments on: Motivating the Navy

By: XBradTC

XBradTC — Sat, 28 Mar 2009 08:33:55 +0000

…they’d actuate the explosive bolts on your command at sea pin.

Ha! How’d I miss that delightful phraseology the first time around?

By: otim

otim — Sat, 28 Mar 2009 06:15:33 +0000

Oh Lex

Ben there done that, I doubt there are many boats able to to do 90 north. Back in the day if your tube had an “ice suit” and you were a decent shot you got to wear a nice warm parka doing polar bear watch. Thry showed you this cool movie from the sixties or so where a team on the ice got totaly mun ched by a big white cuddly bear. Your job was to hang in the sail and bang a way at Algores best buddies if they happened to show up while the “weather techs” were putting there stuff on ice( my thought on this was that not a chance we would hit the bear but the guys on the ice would run home as soon as we started shooting). Did this a few times and never did see a bear, kinda wish I could have kept that nice fur parka though.

By: virgil xenophon

virgil xenophon — Thu, 26 Mar 2009 00:51:24 +0000

JoeC/

Boy are you correct! And sometimes we in the services do it to ourselves without mis-guided SECDEFs. There are STILL some mission profiles we can’t fly since the F-111 went away–but if we wanted to reconstitute the force now and build new, improved variants, would be almost impossible–the AF big kids hated it so much they ordered all the jigs thrown away/destroyed when they closed the assembly lines!

By: JoeC

JoeC — Wed, 25 Mar 2009 23:53:58 +0000

.. and even IF you can get those draftsmen and engineers and welders and technicians and electricians and ad infinitum assorted skilled tradesmen back from whence they went, the lost ability that would have to be relearned takes time. “use it (the skill) or lose it” is NOT just a saying, it is reality for all skilled trades. Just today I had to write from semi scratch a database maintenance script…one skill I hadn’t touched in years… and getting the fingers to hit the right keys even when the system was spitting out informative messages took time, and what I did was on the simple side. I can’t imaging trying to visualize bulkheads, wiring, piping, and and sundry other infrastructure in my head and be able to somewhat ‘know’ what ain’t right after being away from it for years….which is what the DOD is really asking the poor suckers to do when reviving these programs. Here “guess” is not an option, not if you want that design to survive some goat plucker in a speed boat with 500lbs of dynamite…. let alone a hyper speed sea skimmer missile.

By: BMG Mike

BMG Mike — Wed, 25 Mar 2009 16:25:36 +0000

Torpedoist Emiritus has a good handle on this. Look at attempts to resurrect . . . well, almost anything, that hasn’t been made for a while. You know, stuff like missiles, or planes, or ships. Stuff that worked, and worked well. Only .gov didn’t buy enough of them when they were writing contracts. And now we need to buy just a few more.

So the skills that went into building them has moved on to other things, and all that precious knowledge that was once part of a team that could produce, is now part of a team producing something else. A drawing package does not capture institutional memory.

The relearning of the “lost” skills is a painful process, one that we can ill-afford when the product is national defense.

Mike

By: BlameitonRIO

BlameitonRIO — Wed, 25 Mar 2009 14:43:16 +0000

The point is to show that our missiles can reach their targets even faster when they’re parked at the Pole. The Soviets spent a lot of time, money and effort on ASW in the far northern climes, so they obviously got the message.