Armed Polite Society
Main Forums => The Roundtable => Topic started by: MillCreek on June 22, 2019, 12:52:33 AM
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https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2019/07/future-of-work-expertise-navy/590647/
Interesting article about multi-specialty sailors on a small ship with minimal crew. I wonder if this will apply to the military or industry in general any time soon.
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My oldest is an NROTC midshipman, and this article goes along with what he's being taught. All of the Navy Mids are required to study maritime engineering, navigation, computer science, and physics, with the theory being that as an officer on a ship, they may need to work in a department where those skills are necessary. An engineering officer may end up on the bridge. A bridge officer may end up in weapons control. So they are doing a lot of cross training. From what he has told me, the only real officer specialization seems to be aviators, lawyers, medical, and clergy
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This is how the Army runs our watercraft as well.
We have Operators (above decks) and Engineers (below decks). You have to know pretty much everything, and once they get proficient at their jobs we start cross training the other one, so that lookouts can stand generator watch in port, and engineers can help on lines if needed.
It lets us get buy with a lot less folks on small ships, but also leaves us open if someone gets hurt or has to leave. There's not a lot of crew redundancy.
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I see some of that in my industry. A lot of push for multi-craft technicians at the plants. Unfortunately, there isn't so much push for multi-craft pay.
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Somebody had to post it:
“A human being should be able to change a diaper, plan an invasion, butcher a hog, conn a ship, design a building, write a sonnet, balance accounts, build a wall, set a bone, comfort the dying, take orders, give orders, cooperate, act alone, solve equations, analyze a new problem, pitch manure, program a computer, cook a tasty meal, fight efficiently, die gallantly. Specialization is for insects.”
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Cross training makes a lot of sense, especially on a ship that may take casualties . . .
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Submarines have operated like to some degree for a long time.
I see it in my current line of work as well. While in the broad sense it's all "communication" related central office techs were more specialized even a dozen years ago. In my typical day it is pretty normal for me to work on a pretty broad range of technology. Plain old analog dial tone on copper up to 100gbps ethernet on fiber and everything in between. Current state of the art video transmission equipment to 30+ year old long lines switching equipment.
Jack of all trades, master of none.
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Cross training makes a lot of sense, especially on a ship that may take casualties . . .
Doubly so for officers and NCO's.
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Just had dinner with my son, and we talked about this. The Lieutenant teaching his Naval Science class told them that a good officer on a ship has to be able to step in and do the job of any of the sailors in his/her command. He said with all of the specialized tech on ships, it's both harder and easier to do other jobs. Harder to know all the tools, easier to do the jobs if you do.
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I may get to on a long rant. Good idea in theory...
22 years total service, 14 active, sea counter ten years and one day. Yeah, I miss my sea pay. If you are on a ship you will do many things that are not your job. For example, I started life as an airframer. Metal, fiberglass, we screw, we nut, we bolt. Get to a carrier first thing I learn is cleaning, second thing is working in a high volume dining facility.(did this again at the end of my last four, but as the head cookie cop this time. I am uniquely qualified to wash dishes for a thousand people all by myself.)
Once you survive the messdecks, time to be a firefighter. By the time I left the carrier I was the guy to lead two hose teams, numerous schools, tons of training hours. My second sea tour I went to get more fire schools and was second in command of a forty person repair locker. Mmm, that ate some admin time.
In between that, on both ships my happy little division owned 70-80 spaces. Passageways, work shops, troop berthing, airwing shops, you name it. So got to spend plenty of time as the handyman. Oh, and a year of my life as the planned maintenance scheduler which I stupidly allowed to be found out by my second ship...
So here's where it gets dumb. First, rate mergers. I was trained as a metalsmith. They merged my rate with my hydraulic sisters. Presto, I owned a hyd shop. Ok, I can figure this out, but do I have a school for that test bench??? Or do we merge a rate and have a poor sap with 18 years in the surface community suddenly land in aviation? Happens all the time. Or do we invent a retention program that moves people out of their job if they want to stay in? Sure do, I lost an aircraft mechanic with three hard to get schools so he could be a fireman full time. Seen the Navy spend six months on an electronic school and convert the guy to a boiler tech.
Next, the sheer volume of everything you have to learn when you come to a ship is sheerly voluminous. :) And of course being the Navy you have to have a sign off from a qualified trainer for every task line item. Thick books worth, now endless computers worth. If everyone actually did or was proficient in every line item well Davy Jones still wouldn't be fully qualified. But fear not, quals are a huge metric in performance evals, so guess what happens? And that mentality transfers over to zero bs get you killed fields like shipboard firefighters or aviation QA, another place I spent most of my career. I left my reserve command still not full systems quality assurance because I refused to let people sign off stuff I didn't know cold. I was fine with flight controls and all my other stuff, engines were easy, but the rest was a bit tough to learn one weekend a month. Believe me, I caught *expletive deleted*it for that. The sheer volume of tasks ensures everyone is good at nothing. But just in case they are we will send them to a new place in three years!
And finally, minimally manned ships are fine right up until a not minimally manned ship starts poking holes in yours.
A lot of this is an exercise in looks good on paper that someone in the puzzle palace got a really spiffy fitrep for writing.
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And finally, minimally manned ships are fine right up until a not minimally manned ship starts poking holes in yours.
A lot of this is an exercise in looks good on paper that someone in the puzzle palace got a really spiffy fitrep for writing.
That's kind of the way I viewed it. The notion that the U.S. Navy can drive a 400-foot, 3,400 to 4,000 ton combat ship into a hostile situation thousands of miles from home with a crew smaller than a typical Boy Scout troop is asinine.
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And finally, minimally manned ships are fine right up until a not minimally manned ship starts poking holes in yours.
You don't even have to get that far. It's fine right up until a piece of gear breaks and you have a workcenter working round the clock trying to figure out what's wrong, on top of everything else they have to do. Minimal manning just burns people out.
Some of the stuff they mention are things already done, like line handling or going FSA (cranking).
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You don't even have to get that far. It's fine right up until a piece of gear breaks and you have a workcenter working round the clock trying to figure out what's wrong, on top of everything else they have to do. Minimal manning just burns people out.
Some of the stuff they mention are things already done, like line handling or going FSA (cranking).
A lot of this stuff was always done. I like the part where you can step in and do someone else's job. And for watchstanding, firefighting and general stuff sure you can. But who is going to fix a radar? Or make a titanium line for a hovercraft?(did that one) Minimal manning seems to have happened already by accident. A carrier V-2 division seemed like it never had more than thirty workers and they owned and operated four catapults and four arresting gear engines. Cyclic ops came along where we doubled typical 100 sortie days to 200 and those kids didn't sleep. Twenty hour days and sleeping next to their station were typical.
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The sheer volume of tasks ensures everyone is good at nothing. But just in case they are we will send them to a new place in three years!
That's something that always bugged me working in a mixed civilian/uniformed office. We'd get someone in, get them trained up, which could easily take a year or more, then once they were proficient, off they went in three years to a new billet. We were occasionally able to submit a justification and get them extended for a year, but more often not.
It often felt like we were just a training school, which I guess is part of career rotation. Except if somebody got a DC billet, somehow they could stick around there for a decade. We had one O-6 who did I think two sea tours in his career, hit DC as an O-3, and retired in DC. Different job titles, but basically the same administrative job. He moved between adjacent buildings or between floors instead of across the world.