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Comment by c7b | Hacker News Reader

> The Navy may claim that rust doesn’t affect the operational readiness of the fleet

Shouldn't that matter much more than prestige? How much punch you can pack in the field, how safe it is for your troops,... not how it looks or feels.

Camouflage was once seen as not suitable for the morale of troops who were used to Napoleon-era bright colorful uniforms, now it's perfectly common.

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How about the brown M&M argument, if they are neglecting these basic tasks and responsibilities what other duties are they shirking.

And for the record I don't buy for a second it won't effect the operational readiness of the fleet.

Yeah, there's no inherent value to canaries in coal mines, but if you see a dead one, you run.

There's a finite time budget, and the question is what tasks they allocate it to. I don't suspect them of slacking, so if anything, I'd expect the time spent on other tasks to decrease the more time they put into polishing their decks.

I can't speak for the Army lately, but the entire Navy and Marine Corps seem Hell-bent on shoving 15lbs of shit into a 10lb-bag. It could be argued we've been doing this since at least ~2005....well, chickens are coming home to roost, the people who suffered in silence due to their post-9/11 motivation are at/near retirement age. Folks with <10 years service are looking at the insane workloads, the shit compensation, and are not sticking around.

Senior "leadership" is a mix of careerists who don't know when to push back against generals that demand a higher operational tempo, or who don't understand why constant 12-16-hour workdays are a problem, because that's how they came up the ranks.

Total failures of basic resource-to-task analysis and management. They want EVERYTHING done, and they want it all done last Tuesday, and they don't want to hear about how many man-hours that should take. "Stop making excuses, or it will be reflected in your next Fitness Report."

Hmmm...

https://www.publichealth.va.gov/exposures/camp-lejeune/

https://www.npr.org/2021/12/15/1064514935/water-contaminatio...

https://taskandpurpose.com/news/navy-aircraft-carrier-uss-ab...

https://taskandpurpose.com/news/navy-uss-nimitz-water-contam...

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2022/jun/06/military-bas...

We lost an amphibious assault ship to friendly fire two years back https://www.cnn.com/2022/07/15/politics/navy-uss-bonhomme-ri...

The whole point of having a fleet is to have a fleet that says "We're ready to fight" and can demonstrate it. Having rusty ships with sailors who are barely trained, and some recent spectacular failures goes against this.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fleet_in_being

This is a peacetime fleet though, which should have the spare resources needed to maintain aesthetic concerns. The lack of such is a warning sign that it may not have the spare capacity necessary for sustaining the much elevated manpower and resource requirements of active combat.

> This is a peacetime fleet though

Is it?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_armed_conflicts_involv...

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