[diracs_stache]

For the interested reader: https://cdrsalamander.substack.com/ (The Good Commander has dedicated himself to exposing problems of this sort that plague our Navy) I had the pleasure of spending part of my service trying to escape the shipyards. I lacked the perspective of these widespread issues as a lowly Junior Officer (I was trying to survive the equivalent of the daily standup without getting flayed for any number of issues that would become our responsibility with little agency to help). But I mostly fought against system upgrades that had no semblance of deconfliction ( my tracker had something like 8-10 medium mods with another 2 large ones eating our bandwidth). A shop of a handful of sailors that had to provide maintenance support, and operational support, conduct training/development and also quite literally babysitting some of the shipyard workers and many lacked experience (I certainly did). The QA work was poor as was acceptance testing, and always created issues later as kicking cans down the road created issues during workups. Also culture goes down the drain as the leadership has no incentive to address the inevitable scope increases ("growth work") will require more time in the shipyard which is unacceptable. I've read a lot of administrative action proposed (which is part of the issue) but as others have stated the quality must improve, shoddy work does absurd damage down the line (fires a la Bonhomme Richard and Oscar Austin) and defeats the purpose of mooring up to get the vessel right.

[DavidPastrnak]

I was an enlisted sailor aboard the USS Mount Whitney when it experienced a major fire in the shipyards in Croatia and extended our visit by months[0]. Career growth was halted during that period for nearly everyone as they spent months babysitting contractors and standing extra watches with only the slightest bit of valuable training conducted over the period.

[0] https://news.usni.org/2015/08/03/command-ship-uss-mount-whit...

[MilStdJunkie]

I love Salamander, but respectfully disagree when it comes to Cultural Marxism being responsible for the destruction of the officer corps. Has it[1] helped? Probably not? But you're tweensing needles off the fir tree in the middle of a very big forest, and the forest is made of bankers.

Everything else, he's great.

[1] Insofar as Kulturbolschewismus is an actual thing, that is

[nvm0n2]

Bankers?! Surely the one class of people least relevant to US Navy funding! The article is pretty clear that commercial shipyards crush the Navy in efficiency and management competence.