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Kaiser Schnitzel posted:There's not a SEAPOWER thread (though my dad used to get this big encylcopedia of ships and weapon system from the navy league every year called SEAPOWER and man would I sperg over that), so I'll ask this here. The old thread mentioned in passing that the US Navy has problems crewing all it's ships adequately and in the milhist thread someone mentioned similar problems in the Royal Navy. What's the deal? Nobody joins the navy anymore or is there something else going on? Too many ships we don't need requiring too much maintenance or what? there also seems to be a feedback loop where ship maintenance is getting deferred due to over-capacity shipyards, which means less ships available for deployment, which means more and longer deployments for those that can, which leads to even more deferred maintenance, etc. what it means for sailors is that they are more likely to constantly be at sea, since operational demands only go up and ships available only go down. i don't know the details of what's going on in the Royal Navy, but i can imagine they face a similar situation.
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Jan 16, 2020 19:10
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Unemployment in the West is really low rn and has been for years, cohort sizes aren't what they used to be, lots of the rest are not suitable for one reason or another, military spending is unpopular so wages can't be increased enough to be competitive, plus wages compete with the new toys budget. I read that one in six of the suitable people in every cohort have to apply for the Bundeswehr for them to have some semblance of choice in who to accept and they're looking at opening up recruitment to residents without a German passport. A Kosovar Albanian apprentice we used to have told me that he'd die for Germany and idk I could dig having a Shqipëri legion.
aphid_licker fucked around with this message at 19:40 on Jan 16, 2020 |
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Jan 16, 2020 19:36
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for the USN at least their issue isn't recruitment... they do great with that and have for many years. retention is the problem, and it is a very hard one to solve.
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Jan 16, 2020 19:40
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We should have some ships sponsored by corporations. The “Nimitz” sponsored by Amazon! Packages delivered faster than warheads on foreheads! Save some money on paint at least.
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Jan 16, 2020 23:59
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Nebakenezzer posted:With the Royal Navy, in addition to the problems mentioned, the pay stinks and so other navies are luring experienced RN sailors away with better pay. This is just the tip of widescale problems in recruiting and retention that the US and the UK have. Essentially poo poo's hosed in so many ways, and people inside the military are protesting the only effective way they can, with their feet. This seems to be the case across large chunks of British society-- large numbers of British police officers and tradespeople have been immigrating to Canada over the past decade or so for better pay, opportunities and lower costs of living.
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Jan 17, 2020 00:26
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In the UK as well there has been a public sector pay freeze for around a decade now, which affected the military as well. There is also isn't the incentive to go into the military for healthcare/education either unlike the US. It's also just kind of the case that the UK military just isn't that prestigious anymore thanks a lot of aforementioned neglect and corruption - the pride of the Royal Navy are it's two aircraft carriers but they are kind of just considered expensive boondoggles by a lot of people. One of them nearly got scrapped immediately after being built after all.
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Jan 17, 2020 01:16
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LingcodKilla posted:We should have some ships sponsored by corporations. Onion News Network did this but I'm having a hell of a time finding the clip of USS Buffalo Wild Wings.
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Jan 17, 2020 01:27
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Ah, found it
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Jan 17, 2020 02:49
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A cool video, but I was expecting USS B-dubs.
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Jan 17, 2020 03:00
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MikeCrotch posted:In the UK as well there has been a public sector pay freeze for around a decade now, which affected the military as well. There is also isn't the incentive to go into the military for healthcare/education either unlike the US. Mothballed, not scrapped.
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Jan 17, 2020 03:24
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Re: Navy good recruitment bad retention: I think once you're in, staying military is a hard sell. I think the buracracy cant keep up with the changes and theres so much unnecessary pain that people don't want to stay. This generation cares about lifestyle. There are people truly interested in sacrificing that lifestyle for a worthy cause, but once they experience life on the inside, they math out how much of it was spent for nothing and decide that their options are better elsewhere.
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Jan 17, 2020 03:56
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Every generation cares about lifestyle. Part of it is that an increasing number of young people in Britain do not consider the armed forces a "worthy cause", and the economic incentives aren't really there either (except for the Army if you're 16 and have no GCSEs or something in which case you might not have a lot of options).
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Jan 17, 2020 15:47
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piL posted:Re: Navy good recruitment bad retention: I think once you're in, staying military is a hard sell. I think the buracracy cant keep up with the changes and theres so much unnecessary pain that people don't want to stay. This generation cares about lifestyle. There are people truly interested in sacrificing that lifestyle for a worthy cause, but once they experience life on the inside, they math out how much of it was spent for nothing and decide that their options are better elsewhere. It's not lifestyle. It's "Am I making a real contribution? Is this actually the most useful thing I could be doing with my life? Or am I making poo poo worse?" It's really hard for someone to think about joining the military right now and feel like that's true when we're all so cynical about the reasons for the wars, and when it's apparent that as a member of the armed services you are not likely to receive the support that you were promised through institutions like the VA, it becomes very hard to justify for anyone who has the ability to plan for the future. You're risking the possibility of getting a life changing injury in service to your country like a double amputation... then having your legs repossessed. When does opening yourself up to not only sacrifice, but getting hosed over completely, ever become a rational calculation? Especially when it's hard to tell whether what you're doing is really making the world any better? If our military wasn't showing massive signs of systemic breakdown due to foreverwar, and if political leadership didn't keep getting caught starting massive, costly, pointless conflicts for political reasons, and if people had more assurance that they would be given more than false promises of care after exiting, I think you'd see a lot more people willing to sacrifice lifestyle for a worthy cause.
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Jan 17, 2020 17:00
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sorry, but that's not correct. those might be your personal views, and that of a minority of the population, but the service branches are not having issues finding recruits. a quick google gives numbers on FY19 recruiting goals: https://www.army.mil/article/227317/us_army_achieves_recruiting_goals quote:WASHINGTON -- The Department of the Army announced today that it will achieve its recruiting goals for Fiscal Year 2019. https://www.dvidshub.net/news/354176/fy19-navy-recruiting-numbers-reflect-growth-despite-strong-civilian-economy quote:MILLINGTON, Tenn. (NNS) – Navy Recruiting Command closed out fiscal year 2019 and exceeded nearly all officer and enlisted goals and set the second highest number for active duty contracts within the last 15 years. Despite a booming job market in the civilian sector and a low national unemployment rate, Navy recruiters were able to overcome competitive hiring and write 40,755 active duty contracts. https://www.af.mil/News/Article-Display/Article/1985545/air-force-recruiting-total-force-enterprise-makes-fy19-goal/ quote:JOINT BASE SAN ANTONIO-RANDOLPH, Texas (AFNS) -- the issue, like others have said, is with retention of those recruits.
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Jan 17, 2020 17:30
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There are still recruitment problems for specific jobs, if not in total number of bodies. For air defense, a bunch of the MOS's require high GT scores, little or zero criminal record, and little or no bad finanicial reporting. People with those qualifications either don't joint the Army, or they don't want to go to the not-very-glamorous world of air defense and then enjoy a really, really rough Deploy to Dwell ratio, with those deployments being almost entirely to pretty unglamorous or, more recently, straight up middle-of-nowhere locales in the middle east. With no real sign of slowing down. Since last May, the public number of air defense troops deployed to the middle east has more than doubled. I also don't think the family business is a great long-term solution: quote:More and more, new recruits are the children of old recruits. In 2019, 79 percent of Army recruits reported having a family member who served. For nearly 30 percent, it was a parent — a striking point in a nation where less than 1 percent of the population serves in the military. https://www.nytimes.com/2020/01/10/us/military-enlistment.html  Are there enough of these? You never know.
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Jan 17, 2020 17:56
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mlmp08 posted:There are still recruitment problems for specific jobs, if not in total number of bodies. definitely, i'm not suggesting that all is well (because it certainly isn't), just that the overall service-wide recruiting goals are being met. accession rates for specific fields is another matter. this, in particular quote:then enjoy a really, really rough Deploy to Dwell ratio
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Jan 17, 2020 18:07
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MikeCrotch posted:Every generation cares about lifestyle. Yeah, you're right. What I'm hunting at but haven't really fully formed is that we've created a lot of technologies that make a lot of things easier. I can just tap on my phone and know the status of all of my accounts. But that technology is weaponized against government workers. One thing I realised reading the reports and letters in Sherman's memoirs is that, if the cost was cleanly handwriting a letter and having someone physically deliver it across dangerous ground, I'd probably have less tasking to complete the same exact checklist but in the format from this publication not that publication. Not none, but less. Edit: a lot of responses since my drafting. I blame some portion of issues on far more banal reasons than most want to attribute.
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Jan 17, 2020 18:11
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bewbies posted:retention is the problem, and it is a very hard one to solve.
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Jan 17, 2020 18:16
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brains posted:sorry, but that's not correct. those might be your personal views, and that of a minority of the population, but the service branches are not having issues finding recruits. a quick google gives numbers on FY19 recruiting goals: You're absolutely right and I should have phrased that whole post more in terms of "...but there's bound to be a big old information gap for the people most likely to decide to join. There are more than enough people who are not as aware of these systemic issues, so retention is an issue because at that point people get in, see the difference between commercials and real life, and GTFO ASAP."
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Jan 17, 2020 18:21
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The Army started up some kind of "pilot" direct commission program for Force Management officers last year, putting job ads at a few top business schools. One of the officers running it is in my program; he told me they got about 10 applicants. They're trying to commission MBAs as captains and majors. I gather this is part of trying to solve a shortage in mid-level officers.
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Jan 17, 2020 18:21
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They want to just drop people in to those jobs? That strikes me as pretty dumb, and I know absolutely zero about the military.
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Jan 17, 2020 18:30
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Force Management makes a kind of beep boop sense, but I have known exactly one person in my entire life who opted to go FM as a CPT(P). He basically was sick and loving tired of deployments and decided he could pound his face into FM while his wife got some stability and finished her degrees. So it might be the type of place where searching for number crunchy and legal/policy wonks makes sense.
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Jan 17, 2020 18:34
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As you can tell, OP, this is a **BIG** topic. My personal piss take is that all that "we said we do this, but now that you are out gently caress off and die" would drive me insane with anger, so anyone walking away because of that I support. Also, just hanging out in this thread we've heard countless examples of how toxic the military life is. When people think about 'lifestyle' to me they are looking at this system that seems to run on burning out people and tossing the husks as quickly as possible. Nobody wants to be a sucker. Two articles to illustrate what I mean: https://features.propublica.org/navy-accidents/uss-fitzgerald-destroyer-crash-crystal/ https://features.propublica.org/navy-accidents/us-navy-crashes-japan-cause-mccain/
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Jan 17, 2020 18:40
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wiegieman posted:They want to just drop people in to those jobs? That strikes me as pretty dumb, and I know absolutely zero about the military. It actually can counteract what I think is one big problem the military. The military's rigid authority system combined with time served requirements means that you get these large cohorts of officers with the same experience. Every Admiral and General in the US, for example, last had undergraduate experience before 2000, some before 1990. It may be longer than that (if ever) since they worked a job that wasn't in the military. You might get some new experience when these people went to grad school, but since they likely did that before their ten year mark that was still 2010 and assumes they didn't receive that experience from a war college or military postgraduate school. Bringing people in at higher point could mean more modern ideas in the conversations 20 years from now. When Mattis retired in 2013 for example, he was 63 years old. It was 41 years since he had attended a school not funded by the DoD, ran by a military officer. There's a huge opportunity for senior members of the military to form their own shared and sheltered opinions that requires active effort and lots of reading to avoid. For it to be worth it, you have to be careful about how many you let in, and that indoctrination probably has to be very strong to ensure your newly gained O-3 can work effectively with people who have 4-8 years of military experience.
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Jan 17, 2020 19:01
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I love how all declassified WARPAC plans always start with “NATO totally surprise attacks us first” Speaking of, anyone got more declassified Soviet plans like 7 Days to the River Rhine?
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Jan 17, 2020 20:58
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piL posted:It actually can counteract what I think is one big problem the military. The military's rigid authority system combined with time served requirements means that you get these large cohorts of officers with the same experience. Every Admiral and General in the US, for example, last had undergraduate experience before 2000, some before 1990. It may be longer than that (if ever) since they worked a job that wasn't in the military. You might get some new experience when these people went to grad school, but since they likely did that before their ten year mark that was still 2010 and assumes they didn't receive that experience from a war college or military postgraduate school. Bringing people in at higher point could mean more modern ideas in the conversations 20 years from now. Do you have any data to back this perception up? It contradicts my personal experience but maybe I'm in a biased situation. I worked at some big defense cos who hired lots of former officers. Their careers typically went something like: HS -> (Join Military OR Get Bachelors) -> (Join Military OR Get Bachelors) -> Serve for 6-10 years -> Get MBA or M.S. degree -> Join defense company (Usually at year 10+/-2) I've seen others in this thread talk about how the Air Force in particular leads to this (dropping out at year 10), so the idea there isn't Masters degree level training going on in officers after 10ish years in is seemingly untrue, at least in my anecdote. Also the idea that people in the military are that much insulated as to not gain new insights and ideas given the existence of the internet seems pretty unlikely.
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Jan 17, 2020 21:12
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It seems like a reasonable idea to me. What I gather is that force management is a job that doesn't appeal to the kind of person who signs up to be an Army officer. You will be filling out lots of spreadsheets, writing reports, crunching numbers, etc. But if you're a civilian MBA, who's looking at consulting, finance, marketing, etc. the prospect of being an excel monkey in uniform and basically never deploying might be appealing.
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Jan 17, 2020 22:25
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the DoD has thousands of those already... they're called the civil service. and contractors. if you're going to go through the trouble of training someone and paying for all the associated benefits and other costs that comes with uninformed service then they have to be a deployable asset.
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Jan 17, 2020 22:34
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So, should the force management branch not exist? I don't really know much about what it does.
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Jan 17, 2020 22:36
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For that matter basically the entire Space Force is going to be computer jockies. That's not a criticism, that's how space as a warfighting domain works.
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Jan 17, 2020 22:48
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CarForumPoster posted:Do you have any data to back this perception up? It contradicts my personal experience but maybe I'm in a biased situation. No, it's all anecdotal. But in my example, Mr. Mattis got his M.A. from National Defense University, which is likely staffed by non military civilians and universities like that have spots for civilians to try to avoid the issue that I'm talking about. I just think theres something to be gained by including a diversity of ideas. Masters degrees happen often, but anecdotally, the level of exposure to cohorts in those degree programs is limited. The majority of just go and focus on school oppotunities, at least in the Navy, are at military based institutions. A lot of people are getting masters through online programs or piecemealing one together because they're billeted to a squadron on a shore tour who still expects them there from 07-16. Even those blessed to go to an ROTC arent integrated like normal grad students because of the age difference and having a working day. The example you give of the common track for people that leave and get a job outside is exactly what those people are doing. People who stay in are getting Masters degrees, but unless it's part of a specialty career path (EDOs @ MIT) or programs with limited slots (Politico Military Masters), then it's probably at a military school, war college, online or part time. Which is fine for exposure to scholarship[1]. But even if you get 2 years to focus on your education in one of those highly selective situations, the experiences of a 30 year career will still carry many similarities. Here's what made me think this was a problem originally. Before I joined the Navy, I worked at a hip scene restaurant for a bit, and in that job, when a new restaraunt opens up you overstaff and bleed down to make sure you have extra trained personnel and to support the additional complications you have from unfamiliar operating procedures. So then I see what happened at LCS. Theres obviously other problems abound, but the Navy bought a new ship with a new operating paradigm. We're going to do this with a small crew--optimal manning! They started with exactly the number of people they thought were necessary, based on the math of a service that only started studying working hours on ships in port within the last five years. No more. When that didn't work, they increased the crew a couple of times. They never got the plates spinning first. This is obviously a bad idea to someone who worked in a restaraunt community. But who on that staff would of? Senior engineers? 50 year old O-6s who hadnt worked outside the military since a summer job before the Academy? Maybe it was mentioned and just couldnt be swung because of politics or acquisitions regulations. But I suspect, though can only assume, that few wait staff or restaraunteers were consulted on managing the LCSX program. [1] in the Navy, a lot of us are doing this on our own without Big Navy making room to make it work. It's all very luck based. In the following link, the Navy's Chief Learning Officer explains some of the challenges: https://blog.usni.org/posts/2019/11/16/on-midrats-17-november-2019-episode-515-building-a-thinking-force-the-navys-clo-john-kroger piL fucked around with this message at 23:10 on Jan 17, 2020 |
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Jan 17, 2020 23:05
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Got too passionate without a point here, so I deleted the post.
piL fucked around with this message at 23:44 on Jan 17, 2020 |
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Jan 17, 2020 23:27
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Hey I used to be friends with an air force computer janitor. But his computer was in orbit, and instead of taking selfies it took ruskies.
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Jan 18, 2020 01:57
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CarForumPoster posted:Do you have any data to back this perception up? It contradicts my personal experience but maybe I'm in a biased situation. As an AF officer, you kinda need to have your master's before the 10 year mark. It is sometimes a factor in promotion before that. AACSC gives you what they call a master's, but nobody really thinks of it that way and it's too late in the career; same with a doctorate from Air War College. I started my master's program in my 7th year; most of my peers were done or close to it. Edit: The masters was a literal checkbox on the form, so as long as it was accredited, any bullshit for-profit program was as valid as anything else. Godholio fucked around with this message at 02:20 on Jan 18, 2020 |
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Jan 18, 2020 02:17
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This is extremely niche in it's application and doesn't work nearly as well as the video implies, but it's still kind of neat. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pZMyWEWHCTM
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Jan 18, 2020 02:41
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Is there any nation on earth with a military that doesn't claim to respect the laws of war?
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Jan 18, 2020 16:36
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Nebakenezzer posted:Is there any nation on earth with a military that doesn't claim to respect the laws of war? US SEALs.
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Jan 18, 2020 16:50
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The Wu-Tang Killer Bees.
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Jan 18, 2020 16:50
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Nebakenezzer posted:Is there any nation on earth with a military that doesn't claim to respect the laws of war? The Islamic State, to whatever extent it was briefly a de facto nation.
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Jan 18, 2020 17:44
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I ask because brick of dumbshit and pulitzer prize winner tom friedman in his last column asserted that America was unique in that it followed the laws of war, and after laughing it got me thinking if there was any nation on earth that was all "the Genevia Convention is for losers."* *Let's set aside Tromp **While it's something that every nation has violated if they've been to war, I'm thinking official stated policy here Captain von Trapp posted:The Islamic State, to whatever extent it was briefly a de facto nation. I think that works.
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Jan 18, 2020 17:45
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