Comment by bballard | Hacker News Reader

Comment by bballard | Hacker News Reader

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As a former naval officer, I was shocked to hear they didn't still require conning officers to plot and track the closest point of approach of all contacts on paper. To rely on a computer or radar system to do that for you is craziness. Sure, the commercial ships do that, but then in this case they should have avoided hitting Navy ships, but they are rather stealthy and weren't broadcasting their positions, so it's up to the junior officers on watch. Doing this on paper keeps you alert and reduces boredom, believe me.

It is possible to get into a "Kobayashi Maru" situation coming into a busy shipping channel with contacts coming in from all sides, similar to the iPhone game "HarborMaster" which always ends with a collision. But there are rules to follow along the way, whether it's adjusting course to avoid a close approach, contacting other ships on bridge-to-bridge VHF radio, waking the captain, blasting the ship's horn, making evasive maneuvers before you get "in extremis". None of these happened. This is what I found so hard to believe in these two cases, but it makes perfect sense when you're relying on imperfect automated systems and essentially driving asleep at the wheel.

I'm just an amateur sailor but I had an incident in the Atlantic on a racing yacht where I came up top just prior to a shift change and said "isn't anyone concerned that we're going to go right into the side of that tanker." The guys up top (including the watch leader) said the skipper was on it. I pointed it out to the skipper downstairs and he said "it's alright, I can see it on the radar." I replied "I think you'll find that's a squall, that's the ship". Rather sobering!

I know nothing about ships, the Navy, or combat.

I do know that most or all of our Navy ships are highly computer controlled/integrated, so maybe the following would be moot today, but...

...wouldn't it be prudent for officers to have the skills to plot and do things on paper in the event that during combat or for other reasons the ship sustains such damage that limits or eliminates the ability to use the computer systems to do that same task?

Again - maybe it's one of those things where if the computer systems are down in such a way that you can't do the task, it is likely that you have bigger problems to worry about. Even so, I would think this would be a critical skill to have, if a "just-in-case, cover-yer-butt" scenario presents itself where it could mean the difference between life or death, survival, rescue, etc.

By that logic we'd never have single engine or single seat attack aircraft. In a lot of situations, you _have_ to rely on the technology in order to most efficiently spend your resources, even considering the potential failure modes. In many situations you're better off perfecting one mode of operation than in maintaining two redundant modes.

Seems the best reason to teach these things isn't because we expect them to be used to any substantial extent in combat, but because they're critical and necessary exercises for honing and maintaining the skills needed to wield the high-tech tools, much like in bballard's example. Learning and regularly applying the fundamentals is often critical to understanding the problem space. When you're commanding a naval ship I imagine the problem space is immensely complex, much more so than most other roles in the military, or anywhere else for that matter. If you can't foresee or recognize the problems quickly, you certainly won't be able to respond in a timely manner no matter how fancy the tools.

Yes, that was the reason we were told we had to do it on paper, in case the systems failed. Only we always did it on paper, not just for practice.

That's how our codebase evolves at a large internet company. A new shiny product is desired by sales, and to cheer us up into building it they promise we'll be allowed to delete the crappy old stuff when done. Rinse, repeat, 10 years later we have 10 legacy systems to support. Makes me think of "The Girl Who Sold Matches" whenever one of these comes up...

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