Top navy admiral wants rust-free ships
gcaptain.com
gcaptain.com
Edit: I also agree with the posts about outsourcing leading to ossification and rigid stratification. You want rigid stratification? Try military medicine.
FWIW, BAH (pay for housing that is tax-free) is $4000 for an O-6 in Point Loma v. $2777 in Offut, NE. Seems to be aggressive adjustment, no?
Enlisted pay might be another story…
EDIT: I know one guy who griped about pay once…kind of in passing. Went on to be a YC founder haha.
>URL JOs
>BAH
if only i knew what any of those words mean. Why haven't people learned to describe their abbreviation unless they already pre-established that the audience will definitely know them?
The ELI5 is that the Navy pays officers who do the core ship/flying activities quite well. Compared to their civilian peers, Navy lawyers, doctors, and cyber people don’t get paid well.
The posted article is about rust on ships. A ships management team is paid well. Low pay is unlikely to be the cause of dissatisfaction.
To be clear, “paid well” is not “paid well” as measured by FAANG tech salaries. A submarine officer with 8 years of experience is making something equivalent to $200Ks if I am to believe the calculators that adjust for tax advantages of military pay, discounted value of future retirement cash flows, etc.
I’d just note that the service academies crowd the rankings for highest paid graduates at early/mid career https://www.payscale.com/college-salary-report/bachelors#ful...
Anecdotally, I had a reservist friend with a Harvard MBA who realized he could pull down more money as an activated reservist in Bahrain than his role at BlackRock.
Your mileage may vary…
That only flies in an email or on a specialized forum.
It's curious that you are smart enough to come up with an arguement yet apparently at the same time innocently simple enough not to know why it's invalid.
Counterpoint: It doesn't.
They made a reply to a military member on a thread about military equipment. Googling a few acronyms + "military" would surely lead one to the answer.
I'm reminded of an acronym at work: CIM. They come in two variants, CIM-A and CIM-B. I'd been there a year before I finally decided I needed to ask a more senior colleague what they stood for, and he didn't know either. The intention was obvious from the context of their use (although whether -A or -B was more serious wasn't) but most of the people in the weekly meetings discussing Critical Incident Management didn't actually know that was what they were discussing. Nowadays we have a culture that better encourages definition of terms upon first use, and it's less common that someone needs to ask "stupid" questions.
I know what you mean, but I don't think it would merely be unexpected if one did somehow. I'm pretty sure it isn't possible because, being specialists, they can't also be a line officer. It seems like logic stops them, but then leads me to wonder about the vague possibility of a horribly unfortunate event leaving only specialists on-board... what then? Would logic stop them from sailing, or inexperience and lack of expertise?
BAH has a description in parens immediately following, but could be better.
Why do people on technical message board with lots of jargon refuses to do even a modicum of research? If I didn't drop a description of a monad after I said it here would you also be mad? How about Term Sheets. I see Alpha used all the time and I have to look it up.
Does anyone have time to cite a source for this? I was thinking this number was a lot higher.
Dang mentions quite often that HN has a very international readership, for example: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23363430 and https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23438403 and https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27052434
An old poll with 32% US (probably the number I remembered): https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13819771
There's also a recent poll w/ 47% (2346 of 4891), although this might be timing related: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30210378
> There's also a recent poll w/ 47%
Clearly you need one more poll to decide this, as per XKCD 927.
Another point that I haven't seen brought up here is that usually the people who paint ships are school washouts. They couldn't get through school and have no classification, so this is what they do. I wasn't in the Navy but this is always what I heard.
I was a submariner, so I’m not certain who ends up chipping paint on surface ships. Submarines don’t get the people who washed out of schools.
The employer, or politicians, 5, 10, 20 years from now can cut funding and reduce access from MDs to NP/PA, or only cover certain meds, or require excessive prior authorizations to dissuade using the healthcare.
Worse still, many NP programs are now giving out "doctorates" of nursing practice so that NPs can introduce themselves to the patient as "Dr." Smith.
In short, the VA is willing to gamble with your life if it means saving a few bucks. It's pretty harrowing.
But of course, nobody cares. The rich will get MDs and the poor will get midlevels.
And people have limits, because they need lives and aren't robots.
Morale and aligning work to allow for happiness in life is a requirement for people bringing their best to work. If you ask people to toughen up and suffer through the suck to get the job done... there'd better be an eventual light at the end of that tunnel. Otherwise, it's just a death march.
PS: Thank you for your service, and especially through COVID.
Assuming both sought living accomodations outside of free base housing, I was curious what those figures actually looked like[1]:
- O-6 colonel stationed at, e.g. Fort Riley, KS 66442, would draw up to an additional $1500 without dependents, $1911 with.
- O-6 captain stationed at, e.g. NAS North Island, CA 92135, would draw up to an additional $3342 without dependents, $4026 with.
It's worth mentioning for those unfamiliar that, just like BAS (i.e. food allowance), this BAH (i.e. housing allowance) is completely tax-exempt.
The game that active service members play here is to secure a home mortgage (often through VA home loan), then apply BAH directly towards monthly mortgage payments throughout service all the way to retirement. It's not hard to imagine other tax advantaged games to be played here. Applying BAH to rent a house off base is a naive fool's errand.
In terms of annual cost of living adjustments to base pay, uniformed service received +2.7% increase this year; in contrast, +2.2% for federal GS civilians. The year before that, it was +3% v. +1%. These adjustments have historically favored uniformed service over the federal civilians that work beside them. Sure, they're lowball relative to inflation, but that ought to be squared against military tax-exempt BAS/BAH and hugely subsidized commissary entitlements.
Exceptionally common amongst Navy personnel, married sailors typically draw an additional $250/mo family separation allowance[2] when out at sea for more than 30 continuous days. This will obviously have a greater financial impact amongst the enlisted ranks than officers. Depending on rank and job, there's a litany of allowances, bonuses and incentives (beyond the scope of this remark) that are often ignored when the conversation of military service compensation is brought up...nevermind that no one ever talks about the opportunity to retire with guaranteed pension + benefits for life as young as 38.
As an outsider, I'm inclined to agree that military health professions do seem to pay a substantial indirect opportunity cost despite the unique bonuses they're entitled to[3].
I do wonder what individual circumstances led you to choose a Navy commission over everything else?
[1] https://www.defensetravel.dod.mil/site/bahCalc.cfm
[2] https://www.dfas.mil/militarymembers/payentitlements/fsa/
[3] https://www.dfas.mil/militarymembers/payentitlements/Pay-Tab...
Both industries substantially outsourced functionality in the 90s in an attempt to cut costs.
Consequently, they are now less empowered (vs historical levels) to effect change in their own processes in a timely manner.
Large organizations need to pay more attention to ossification of processes as a serious future risk, that needs to be balanced against immediate savings.
The real problem is the unaccountable bureaucratic management, which are neither physicians nor nurses, and the numbers of which continue to expand (sucking up financial resources) while physicians and nurses workload increases and pay continues to decrease in real terms.
There are too many micro-specialties and not enough crossover. Imagine if once you were a frontend dev you would have to go back to school for 2 years full time to be legally allowed to do ui design of a button even though there is a lot of crossover and knowledge sharing between roles.
This definitely causes shortages and issues when the demand naturally rises and falls for various Healthcare disciplines.
I'm not saying formal education isn't important but there could be a much more fluid crossover between various allied health disciplines than their is currently.
Maybe more transition programs or seeing individual billing codes for Medicare attached to education modules
If it weren't profitable to have large numbers of staff per doctor, there wouldn't be large numbers of staff per doctor.
Now make an argument that the current arrangement is more optimal than the one we might end up with if there were more doctors.
For example Advanced Nurse Practitioner status grants nurses almost all prescribing rights you'd get as a doctor. They're allowed scheduled drugs (ie stuff that's commonly abused) because a bunch of those are effective painkillers and a key reason to have Advanced Practitioner is that "This patient is in agony, and I know the only thing a doctor would do is give them these stronger drugs, but I'm not allowed to do that on my own" is a stupid situation to put an experienced nurse in, so let's just authorise them to do it.
I believe there are Advanced Practitioner variants for several other healthcare roles including midwife and pharmacist; in some cases you just get limited prescription rights (so you can only give people some specific prescription drugs from a list) but in other cases like Advanced Nurse Practitioner it's the whole thing, if your knowledge and experience tells you that off-label use of a heart medicine is the right way to solve your patient's acute hiccups you can do that just like a doctor could.
To qualify for advanced practice these professionals are doing much of the same work student Doctors do - but just focused to their specific discipline. Lots of Chemistry, learning how to read research literature, and so on. They get a post-graduate degree of some sort, I don't remember the exact title.
What in the world is that supposed to mean? I've been hearing that for years now, and I have not the foggiest idea of what we're even talking about.
Nothing is different. What is extraordinary?
Edit to add: If these times are extraordinary, then that is a valid excuse for rust and a lot of other problems.
Totally government run in the case of the military, and healthcare is the most heavily regulated industry (by far) in the US. Heavy bureaucratic regulations make an organization unable to adapt to local and/or changing circumstances.
I read in the book "The Pity of War" by Ferguson that the reason the death rates of the German army in WW1 were so much lower than that of the British is the British generals would craft detailed orders on how the soldiers were to achieve objectives. The German generals would instead just give the officers the objectives. The officers were free to adapt to local circumstances.
A similar idea is a story I heard where a class of new lieutenants were asked how would they go about raising a flagpole. The lieutenants all wrote down detailed instructions and procedures. The instructor said you're all wrong. The correct answer is "sergeant, get that flagpole up!".
Indeed, what saved the Entente in World War 1 was the fact that Belgium, which had been expected to roll over and allow the German army unmolested free passage, actually called up its military and fought. That ruined the German timetables, allowing France to complete its mobilization and brought the British into the war preventing a quick German victory on the Western Front.
Towards the end of the war, yes, Germany was beginning to move towards what we would consider a "commander's intent"-based system. Erwin Rommel's text, Infantry Attacks, captures this transition. However, it's inaccurate to say that the German military was any less rigid than the British.
It is also inaccurate to say that the death rates of the German army were any less than they were for the British. Perhaps in 1914 and 1915, as well-trained German regulars were facing off against the "Pals Brigades", the Germans inflicted more casualties than they received. But by the end of the war, as the German economy was crumbling and the prospect of US involvement made the German generals desperate, they resorted to mass infantry charges with relatively untrained soldiers, and took extremely heavy casualties as a result.
If anything, your description of the German army is more accurate for the Wehrmacht in World War 2 than it is for the Kaiser's army.
"As Table 32 shows, the greatest of all the paradoxes of the First World War is that, despite being disastrously disadvantaged in economic terms, the Central Powers were far more successful in inflicting death on their enemies. According to the best available totals for wartime military deaths, some 5.4 million men fighting for the Entente powers and their allies lost their lives, the overwhelming majority of them killed by the enemy. The equivalent total for the Central Powers is just over 4 million. The Central Powers' superiority in killing was thus of the order of 35 per cent. The official British statistics published shortly after the war give an even higher margin of 50 per cent, as do the figures in a number of modern textbooks.52 In other words, the Central Powers were at least a third better at mass slaughter." pg 294
"The trouble was - and here the excuses must stop - that the entire culture of the British regular army militated against effective improvisation. The command structure was based on obedience to superiors and suspicion of subordinates; men could still advance according to their connections; and commanders could still be 'unstuck' by personal quarrels.83 This could have serious repercussions: when Haig questioned Rawlinson's original Somme plan, the latter felt unable to stand his ground, with the result that Haig was able to insist on the suicidal breakthrough objective. As Rawlinson said, 'It is a gamble to go for an unlimited offensive but D. H. wants it and I am prepared to undertake anything within reason [sic].'84 An Army Commander did not presume to correct the Commander-in-Chief, even when tens of thousands of men's lives were at stake.85 Similar inhibitions existed at every level. Orders were issued at the top and fed down the line; there was little traffic in the other direction. As a result, officers, NCOs and men grew accustomed to 'waiting for orders'. In battle, as J. M. Bourne has remarked, 'when German shelling interrupted communications paralysis set in'. To adapt the not inappropriate language of industrial organization, this was 'line management', and it provided no mechanism by which the views of 'junior line managers' could be relayed back to head office.86 Partly for this reason, the proponents of a more technocratic approach made slow headway against the traditional believers in war as a moral rather than material contest.87 Too much emphasis was placed on morale, courage and discipline; not enough on fire-power and tactics." pg 305
"These German tactical strengths were rooted in a distinctive military culture. According to Dupuy, the German military establishment had 'discovered the secret of institutionalizing military excellence'.109 Martin Samuels likewise points to a distinctively German philosophy of combat, which acknowledged its fundamentally chaotic character.'10 This in turn influenced the way command structures evolved. The Germans favoured 'directive command' (task-oriented and decentralized decision making, flexible at all levels) whereas the British preferred 'restrictive control', which deliberately discouraged initiative."1 Differences in training also followed logically from this. German 'chaos theory' demanded a high level of training to promote adaptability; the British approach required only obedience. Moreover, the German officer did not stop learning on obtaining his commission; the officer corps was meritocratic, and dud officers were ruthlessly weeded out."2 This line of argument has been further developed by the work of Gudmundsson on stormtroop tactics, which (he argues) depended for their success on the existence of a 'self-educating officer corps'."3 pg 309
If that's not enough, there's plenty more backup in the book. It's a good read, I recommend it.
If the advice you just gave is so good, why couldn't you (or the book's author) have found an example in which the side following the advice actually won the war?
As for WW1, Germany did defeat Russia. It took America's entry into the war to defeat Germany.
But you want an example. Take WW2. When Hitler allowed his generals to run things, things went well for the German army. When Hitler decided he knew better, he micromanaged the Wehrmacht into defeat and ruin. The Luftwaffe's problems were greatly impeded by Goering making a hash of things, despite his officers pleading with him. Goering would dictate tactics that negated the advantages of the Me-109s in the Battle of Britain. Goering also infamously ordered a literal decimation of his pilots for cowardice, an order that was quietly ignored.
In the naval war, the U-Boot commanders knew that Enigma had been broken and tactics had to change, but Admiral Doenitz knew better and sent them to their doom. Some histories assert that the Germans were clueless about Enigma, but the U-Boot commanders knew the truth.
Ships rust. Officers don't chip paint and paint. Technical enlisted and NCOs don't chip paint and paint either. Junior, and especially unrated (not trained in a vocational area yet) enlisted do. This looks like a simple case of being undermanned, and/or having "too many chiefs and not enough braves". Reality is that it probably has to do with pay rates for Enlisted. Fedex pays $36-$42k/yer for package handlers. An E-1 makes $21k/year base. With all benefits, you might be at parity with Fedex, but you give up a lot of freedom.
I'll commit a little naval heresy here but surface ships are probably nearing obsolescence if not already obsolete. They are slow, easy to find, and hypersonics, drones, cruise missiles, aircraft and submarines are just incredibly lethal, and perfect point defense doesn't exist. The sinking of the Moskva is really just a sign of the times. The carrier battle group may fare better because of the range of air cover and subsurface escorts, but we're in an era of weapons that can kill a carrier with a single hit.
In a "morale emergency" an effective leader will lead from the front, showing the behavior that she needs her team to show.
The chief of maintenance on those ships should be chipping and painting in their free time until the people under them have enough shame and/or pride to start doing it correctly on their shifts.
I once had a problem with "that's not in my job description", pitting security guards against truck unloaders. I took one trip with 25kg of rice on my shoulder and then looked back to see a line of security guards following behind me.
Moo.
Maintaining the paint on a destroyer is really hard to do, and the sailors I served with, well, there was no shortage of people willing to work and lead by example. That said, picture a 154 meter destroyer and compare that to a 4" paint scraper. How many effective leaders does that take?
>Moo
Agree
The solution to ship-killer weapons is decentralization, replacing a single juicy target with many dispersed targets. A Predator or Bayraktar sized drone designed for naval operations could be launched from a "dronecarrier" much, much smaller and cheaper than the current carriers.
But are planes the most cost-effective form of throwing high-explosive long distances? Once, they were. They had a much greater range than a battleship's guns and thus obsoleted the battleship.
These days, missiles have double the range of carrier aircraft. So a very inexpensive frigate with long-range missiles is far more cost-effective than a huge expensive Carrier Group. (Most of the Group's ships are there merely to protect and support the carrier. Without the carrier, they are redundant. Sure, a Group looks big and powerful, but cost-effective? No.)
Sounds like a classic case of trying to do the same job with less people, and management only taking notice when the issue becomes public-facing.
But there is hope on the horizon. The submarine construction programs (Virginia SSNs and Columbia SSBNs) are proceeding smoothly, as are the Flight III destroyers. DDG(X), the future replacement of the Arleigh-Burke class destroyers and Ticonderoga-class cruisers, is in development, and the first Constellation-class frigates will soon be laid down.
US GDP (nominal) in 2021: USD$23T
https://www.wolframalpha.com/input?i=%24160B+in+2022+convert...
Meta: (1) Oh, that's cool, using Wolfram to look up inflation data! I'll try to remember that.
(2) "Trying to gently... I'd suggest..." strikes me the same as "With the greatest respect..." Maybe just post the link next time.
The Navy has failed to accomplish the modpro packages on the current CGs & LSD, including Gettysburg, Vicksburg, and Tortuga. Those three I have personally been involved with in many ways. The 5XXX and structural work on the CG program has been wildly underestimated. The money for Tortuga was never there and as she lay idle in the shipyard problems grew. They are not simply east coast/BAE issues either. The issues repeat themselves here on the west coast at Vigor. It was a huge mistake to leave behind cost+ and switch to FFP. There is too much time lost to pointless contract fighting.
There is hope on the horizon with new subs and DDGx and FFG. Time will tell if the new build construction yields a new DDG1000/LCS or a workhorse like the earlier DDG flights.
As for corrosion it is a necessary evil. Too many armchair metallurgists point to various alloys as a solution. The ocean is cold, salty, and miserable. The planning yards, repair yards, and Navy are full of extremely bright and hardworking folks. It takes time and money to fight rust at sea and in port.
There's a big issue with manning on the civilian and Navy side. At the end of the day there are few people in my generation lining up to enlist or to do body-damaging labor. I can't say I blame them.. I became and engineer and then joined program management. Few in the yards want the same for their children as they had in their life. Those who are left are primarily 30+ years of experience or 1-5 years of experience looking to get out.
I would strongly advise waiting until the first Flight III ship is going on deployment before making this claim.
On the poor leadership front, less people on the front line and they have been burnt out for longer than ever on overextended deployments. Enduring stress for too long simply breaks you down. The attention to detail eventually dissipates and people are just trying to keep their heads above water.
On the strong leadership front, everything continued to function to expectations except appearance which may be argued to be the last remaining detail. Appearance however is everything in the military and goes back quite some time to tradition:
> An old Navy tradition has it that the ship's cook shines the ship's bell and the ship's bugler shines the ship's whistle. This tradition may still be observed in some of the ships of the modern Navy. However, in normal practice, the ship's bell is maintained by a man of the ships' division charged with the upkeep of that part of the ship where the bell is located.
This seems like a fun college-level question for a leadership/military/software class. What is your argument and why?
https://www.history.navy.mil/research/library/online-reading...
If you run your teams and equipment beyond the threshold, your equipment and team will suffer and degrade your abilities.
This is a failure of leadership, and it was avoidable!
That isn’t to say there is no effect - people might start to see themselves as more disciplined if they look sharp. “Look good, play good”, as my coach used to say.
Is it so far stretched to say that a person who is in good shape, takes proper care about his hygiene and stuff like hair/beard might be a more self disciplined and organized person compared to someone that is lazy about his hygiene, physical condition and appearance?
In my experience, some people place a high priority and gain significant pleasure from looking sharp, while others consider it a chore and would prefer to minimize the time spent on it. Thus a significant part of the "looking sharp" signal is measuring preference and priorities rather than level of successful execution.
In addition, issues with hygiene are more common in people with ADHD, autism etc so if you over apply this metric you may end up excluding some very smart, neurodiverse individuals.
If you see a rundown looking restraunt, you might conclude it isn't worth trying, but you'd be better off looking at how busy it is or the reviews. A rundown restraunt with a line out the door is probably gonna be better than a sharp looking restraunt with no customers, especially if they are side by side (in the same context). Beyond that, if I see a sharp restraunt and a dingy restraunt, both with lines out the door, I will pick the dingy one because I see that as signaling higher confidence that the consistent quality of their food will drive all the repeat business they want.
Edit: I'd also point out that "smart looking" is intricately tied into social class status signaling in many contexts.
To look sharp and fit you HAVE to be disciplined. That's a fact. Yours, is a speculation. That is a difference.
Notice that I have never said that being a disciplined individual, which is a fact for who takes lots of care about himself implies a better professional, or a more self disciplined worker.
That being said, imho, there is a correlation between those things. If someone has good self discipline often he can probably translate this at a place of work or study.
Again, not in my experience. There are other ways to be fit than a rigorous workout scheme and diet. Some people are fit as a side effect of something they love to do. A mountain biking enthusiast doesn't have to be disciplined to be fit, just a little obsessed. Some people have obsessive body issues and their level of exercise is the result of an unhealthy lack of discipline. You are whitewashing a complex topic with your bias and stating it as an unassailable fact.
I think it is easy to confuse obsession with discipline sometimes. I think the obsessed tend to outperform the disciplined in their areas of focus and the combination of the two can lead to quite incredible things.
Edit: I will say that a lack of fitness can be a sign of a lack of discipline IF you know the context of the goals and priorities of that individual, but as a stand alone signal, it is meaningless without specific contexts.
The issue is that we take one aspirational characteristic and use it to project things that might or might not be correlated.
Better to just measure what you want to measure directly. If it’s an important evaluation, it’s worth the cost. If it’s not important, why bother even with a cheap evaluation that may or may not be connected?
If a company can put energy into looking sharp while also staying in business, that proves some sort of viability/success of the business. There seem to be a few qualities you could have to achieve this, discipline being one of them. But, even if it's discipline that's being used to look sharp, that doesn't mean it transfers to the work the business produces -- all we know is that they're still in business and are successful enough to look sharp. For all we know they could use shady practices, under-deliver, know how to protect themselves contractually, and extract wealth from large inefficient organizations.
I find that to be a very valuable signal, and I’m struggling to imagine how I could be disagree with on this.
It’s a classic case of the halo effect. If you had an electrical issue, you wouldn’t contact your doctor because they are good at figuring things out and pretty smart.
Domain specific skills and habits are just that.
While I have certainly seen idiots with nice clothes make bad decisions in management, I do think that all things being equal, some level of professionalism is beneficial to an environment. Attitude and aptitude are critical, and I think dress can help the former.
An overheard Chief's response to the question, "why do we have to clean all the time?"
These kinds of symptoms are pervasive.
Everyone laughs at the poorly maintained Russian tanks without realizing we're heading that direction.
Does it matter that they have visible rust?
If the performance is the same and it’s just a veneer with no effect on ability, who gives a damn?
I had a CO who once told me: “I trust the guy who’s got mud on his boots vs the one whose shoes are always spit shined.”
https://www.defensenews.com/naval/2022/04/04/us-navy-reveals-ships-facing-potential-decommissioning-next-year/https://www.entrevinosypagos.com/en/plantamos-rosas-los-vine...
Solutions:
Switch to 100% stainless steel. Stainless steel is an alloy and contains a minimum of 11% chromium. This allows the formation of a protective film of chromium oxide which acts as a shield against rust. The protective film will re-form if damaged. Corrosion resistance can be further enhanced with the addition of nickel.
Use a weathering steel, also known as “COR-TEN” steel which contains up to 21% of alloying elements such as chromium, copper, nickel, and phosphorous. The alloys form a protective rust patina which reduces the corrosion rate with time. COR-TEN steel tends to be cheaper than stainless steel.
Galvanized steel. Galvanizing is a method of rust prevention. This is accomplished through hot-dip galvanizing or electroplating. The iron or steel object is coated in a thin layer of zinc. This stops oxygen and water from reaching the metal underneath but the zinc also acts as a sacrificial metal. Zinc is more reactive than iron, so it oxidizes in preference to the iron object. The zinc oxide layer prevents the formation of iron oxide, thus eliminating the possibility of rust forming.
Corten can work in less aggressive environments, but it has been known to fail to provide the expected protection in places with more acidic rain than was expected. Salt water is really aggressive.
Hot dip galvanizing does work, and is common for small boats, dock fittings, and other smaller items. There are also likely sacrificial anodes on the ship made of zinc.
(1) Rust wouldn't go all the way through. Surface rust isn't a problem.
(2) You want high-quality armor; toughness is key. Steel composition should be primarily chosen for toughness-to-weight
(3) And cost, of course.
Stainless would have been expensive, and given little upside, and potentially a lot of downside in terms of less effective armor plating.
Obviously, modern ships are entirely different (much less armor, actually, instead relying on active defenses), but I assume there are sensible reasons for materials choices.
But modern ships generally don't have any amount of armor except against the smallest of gunfire. The idea being is that if someone gets close enough to shoot at you with a sizeable cannon you're already dead.
The Navy would love armor that can stand up to modern missiles, but it isn't really possible, and the compromises in costs and inside space mean it isn't worth it. Maybe someday we will find a new material that would work, but for now ships rely on not getting hit.
I'm sure it was a concern in WWII, and that they took all steps they could to preserve their vessels, but I'm also guessing that as long as they weren't rusting so fast as to become junk in three or five years, they were much more worried about surviving combat than rust.
What could go wrong?
Galvanizing basically works like anodic protection. Already used, but a galvanized coating will disappear (even a very thick one) in just a few years at sea, and can’t be reapplied in the field effectively. Paint works better.
Cor-ten works best where the rusting surface isn’t exposed to wear directly (like a ship hull). Something like a bridge span member or a shipping container side, or a side of a building. It has to rust for it to work.
If exposed to a particularly corrosive environment it still rusts through pretty quickly. A lot of Corten products (like shipping containers) still get painted to slow the process down.
Ships have desired operational lives of 20+ years. Painting and rust removal is the only way that works.
So any sailor doing any kind of patching or repair to whatever part of the hull is stainless needs extra education and extra PPE. As well as monitoring for blood levels and other health issues. Nothing insane, but an added inconvenience in an already inconvenient job.
Joking aside: There are many ways to prevent rust, though I think environmental concerns are also an issue. Galvanising might leak heavy metals into the sea? And chrome is also a pollutant. Iron is not.
If the point is for the ship to look 'not-rusty', Cor-Ten is probably about as far from that goal as one can get
You need to have the right toughness, ductility, fatigue, etc.
Steel varies a lot. You can buy a 1000 page book that just lists different steels, along with their material properties.
Saying “just use stainless” is kinda like saying “just 3d print it” or “just make it out of carbon fiber”
This is why "worker productivity" is one of the most important measures of innovation. If we've been sending out the same number of dudes to chip and paint for the last 100 years, that's a good sign that technology is lagging or has been underinvested in.
It's too bad since I liked the concept and the new technology being tested out on the ships. There was even speculation one of the ships would have the first working rail gun installed.
Could have bought a lot of paint.
The modern materials are required since the EPA outlawed the coatings they used to use that actually worked.
That said, safety and mental health sounds like vital issues to address.
Sorry - I couldn’t resist.
Maybe you're thinking of the Spearhead-class EPFs [0] and the issue with high sea states? But those were designed from the ground up to be cheap ($180M each) and "good enough" for sealift and harbor basing missions.
[0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spearhead-class_expeditionar...
Not a capital ship, nor quickly written off - but 2,300 tons (light) is between the Allen M. Sumner- and Gearing-class (late WWII) destroyers. And "forgot that aluminum hull + steel propulsion hardware + salt water = galvanic corrosion" is a "never bothered to calculate GM" (the metacentric height) level of cluster#_$&'ing incompetence for any shipbuilder.
I'm definitely in the learning phase with respect to how different metals and alloys interact, but I'm pretty sure I would have caught that myself. Galvanic corrosion is a pretty well-known issue when dealing with aluminum.
1. I hope I'm reading this wrong. I can guarantee Sailors arn't committing suicide, or arson, because of a fugly rusty ship.
2. If their is any real problem it's the way our Navy treats Sailors, and lies to them upon signing that contract, and tries to renig on any lofty promises upon signing.
I once heard the Navy will send you to school upon enlisting. Navy, "Become a Lawyer. We pay for it.". This commercial was around that movie with Tom Cruise playing the spiffy lawyer in his whites going up against Jack Nicholson. "You can't handle the truth!". Forget the name.
I looked it up. The military at the time was picking up tuition for 8 enlisted men to go to law school.
The guys are angry because once they enlisted, it wasen't the opportunity they thought it would be. Period.
Sad to see that HN discussions stow so low so as to not discuss the things the piece actually mentions
> The situation is not much better for American shipyards. On the morning of April 11, Captain Brent Gaut, the commander of the USS George Washington — an aircraft carrier undergoing major shipyard work at Newport News, Virginia — got on the ship’s intercom to announce that two sailors had died, and Gaut was alerting the crew that those deaths were the eighth and ninth suicides the ship had experienced in the nine months the ship has been stuck in shipyard. What was the Navy’s response? Gilday’s top enlisted adviser, Master Chief Petty Officer of the Navy Russell Smith, told sailors they need to do a better job “managing expectations” then he chastised them by saying “What you’re not doing is sleeping in a foxhole like a Marine.”
> This type of “toughen up, stand up” approach sounds eerily familiar to those of us who worked offshore in the years leading up to the Deepwater Horizon catastrophe.
> In 2020, while undergoing shipyard repair in San Diego, conditions aboard the USS Bonhomme Richard were so bad a crew member set fire to the ship leading to the ship’s destruction. The responsible crew member was arrested but – despite investigators finding bad morale, delays, and poor training – the ship’s captain (and his chain of command) was left in charge and was allowed to celebrate the decommissioning of the ship he had lost.
Please, next time just review the piece
This is a great point that I started thinking about 2-3 days ago, i.e. that the present war in Ukraine is, almost by definition, a continental war (think Napoleon or the Eastern Campaign in WW2), and, as such, that an organisation like the US Navy might feel like it has been left out (like this quote actually emphasises). At which point it gets tricky when it comes to justify your budget, as in: "why should we assign so much money to the Navy when we're most worried about a continental war?".
The "solution" that I saw in my head for this dilemma (from the POV of the Navy) was a re-emphasis on Taiwan and on China, i.e. trying to bring forward (again) the danger that the Chinese pose to Taiwan and to SE-Asia more generally speaking. That's a lot of sea/ocean for the Navy to cover and protect.
Russia values the coastal territory it has grabbed b/c d they can use it to support a navy, something Russia has historically always wanted and needed (to project military power). But they have always done poorly and continue to do so:
https://finance.yahoo.com/news/why-russias-military-is-so-sh...
Thwarting Russia's naval progress is cost-effective since it takes tremendous resources and history to run a navy effectively. Only Great Britain and the USA have been successful at establishing modern multi-ocean navies.
Having one aircraft carrier or ten-eleven won't make that much of a difference when the battle happens on the steppes of Eurasia (like it is now happening in Donbas), there are only so many such carriers that one can place inside a "small" sea like the Black Sea (assuming that they'll be allowed to pass the Bosphorus).
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nicholas_J._Spykman#Geostrateg...
Disclosure: My first car was rust-colored, in more ways than one.
Arguably, in a nuclear era, this state of affairs is managed by maintaining the undeniable obviousness of mutually assured destruction. Securing peace by preparing for war.
Who cares if the US Navy's ships look like crap, this isn't a particularly intellectually stimulating topic, nor is it one that is of much interest outside of the US.