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Comment by drblast | Hacker News Reader

This is drilled into you when you join the Navy.

Then you get to an aircraft carrier. You're the in port officer of the deck. You know the rules. You make sure every sentry is checking ID's.

Then someone tries to get through with a piece of laminated red paper with their name on it. You turn them away. They say, "Hey, I'm a contractor, I'm supposed to be here."

You call the Command Duty Officer. He says, "Oh, if it's a contractor, they have their own ID's, let him through."

You ask, "What do the contractor ID's look like?"

He says, "Oh, they're all different depending on the contracting company."

You ask, "Do we have samples of them, or can anyone just make one up and walk on board?"

crickets

Then you peek out and stare at the line of about 300 contractors and dock workers who, if you're doing your job, aren't going to get to work on the ship that day.

Lesson: rules are great but execution really matters.

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Concur. A charming read that plays on the reader's generally inaccurate assumption that the military is just like "Full Metal Jacket".

I too had to memorize these and then once the screaming stopped, I never saw them again.

I think these are a big deal in the Marine Corps and that's it.

Even in the Marine Corps, many Marines forget them after their initial training. Overall, Marines make sure to be attentive on post and challenge all personnel attempting to enter. The general orders just spell out the reasonable course of action most of the time when on guard duty.

Like most things, it depends. In the USMC infantry the general orders are pretty relevant to daily activity (all the way up to Sgt), so practical application reinforces the learning. I can still rattle off the definition and justifications of deadly force in a single breath, and its been 10 years since I did any interior guard duty. I had to do some scripting in perl 4 years ago, maybe 10% of the day for a year, and I don't remember much of it aside from the shebang at the top and the *.pl file extension.

Every contractor really is a massive security risk. If it was wartime and there was any threat to the navy, all the work would be done by navy technicians. It really shows the extent to which bureaucracy has taken over the American military.

Not bureaucracy, corruption. In my own experience, the contractors cost more (though the individual workers don't see more money) with the extra money going to the company, which spends some of it lobbying or offering nice jobs to those who award the contracts. You see this at all different scales.

Yes a terrible security risk what happens when some one tailgates a bunch of contractors with a made up pass. Easy way to smuggle bad stuff onto a ship.

Sounds like the start of a NCIS episode.

>Every contractor really is a massive security risk.

Exhibit A: Snowden. (while he didn't disclose any really secret information, the NSA/etc. treated the information he disclosed as secret and expected others to treat it that way too)

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