81–90 of 143 posts
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Ok, I can buy that - it's not perfect, but the world is messy. :-/
It's also worth noting that it was a suicide bomber attack, which is rarely a facet of conventional warfare.
So they're publishing a Navy report on the issue, they withheld publishing until the Pentagon gave them the OK, and the report seems to place as much blame as possible on the sailors. But it's not blatant propaganda because the Navy really doesn't want this public! If the Navy feels understaffed and overworked, they can stop illegally blockading countries.
Umm, the Navy has do what they are told, even if they feel they don't have enough people/equipment. Also, which countries is US actively blockading illegally?
They are supposed to require a deceleration of war going through Congress, but that has largely been circumvented. They are not just some puppet, the ballooning budget shows their input is considered. If there were some sense that the Navy was resisting the current state of affairs, I'd be more sympathetic.
And the other poster is correct, I was considering the Yemen blockade. Any pretense of legality requires deliberately bending the description of what's taking place, or acknowledging that the US has made itself exempt from prosecution for war crimes.
I was stationed on a Destroyer from 2015-2017 and subsequently deployed with them as an IT in the radio shack. CIC looks like something out of a movie (and really the only part of the ship that does) - it's very dark, has lots of glowing monitors covered in charts, surveillance feeds, and a whole lot of people. In the radio shack, we worked 12 on, 12 off, 7 days a week. I cannot remember CIC's watch rotation exactly…
Sounds like normalisation of deviance [1]. The exception happens so many times that it becomes normal, then the exception to that normal and before you know it you’re way outside the original normal and you’ve blown up a space shuttle [2].
1: https://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/Professionalism/Diane_Vaughan_...
2: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Space_Shuttle_Challenger_disas...
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Ok, I don't like these bastards who attacked Cole, but how can they be terrorist? They attacked a military target. Is it because they masqueraded as civilians - didn't follow the laws of war?
The word "terrorist" has been reappropriated, possibly because "guerilla warfare", "asymmetric warfare" etc sound too glamorous. In the US it mostly means any military action by non-state actors against the US and its allies.
It's interesting that when a government or party that's not in the US's best interests is in power, it's okay for the CIA to use asymmetric tactics to fund rebels and favourable terrorism, stage coups d'etat, overthrow governments and meddle in foreign elections but when those parties seek to do the same to the US, it's terrorism.
Kind of hypocritical really. But that's US exceptionalism for you. It's only bad when someone else does it.
It's almost impossible at this point to point a finger and say "there's the bad guy, right there" because both sides are as bad as the other and both using much the same tactics on one another, both spewing rhetoric and hatred in the face of the other terrorists. It's like trying to mediate a kindergarten playground fight where the cost of losing the fight is death instead of being dragged to the principal's office by your ears. It's so undignified it's nauseating.
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> The CO and XO shouldn't be sleeping while their ship is crossing a busy sealane full of behemoth freighters driving on autopilot in the dark. That was certainly how it worked 40 years ago aboard the USS Enterprise (the aircraft carrier, not the starship). Day or night, the CO would always come to the bridge whenever another ship got to within about two- to four miles and was predicted to come within one mile. And i…
Floated alongside the Enterprise in the 70's on a nuclear cruiser. In engineering we didn't change watch getting underway on entering port until past the sea marker or tied up.
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Ok, I don't like these bastards who attacked Cole, but how can they be terrorist? They attacked a military target. Is it because they masqueraded as civilians - didn't follow the laws of war?
The word "terrorist" has been reappropriated, possibly because "guerilla warfare", "asymmetric warfare" etc sound too glamorous. In the US it mostly means any military action by non-state actors against the US and its allies.
According to retired officers, the issue stems from training cuts. >For nearly 30 years, all new surface warfare officers spent their first six months in uniform at the Surface Warfare Officer’s School in Newport, Rhode Island, learning the theory behind driving ships and leading sailors as division officers. But that changed in 2003. The Navy decided to eliminate the “SWOS Basic” school and simply send surface fleet…
They are expensive to put together, twenty billion to thirty billion per task force and hundreds of millions per year just in crew salaries to run.
[1] https://www.defensenews.com/naval/2019/01/15/the-us-navy-mov... [2] https://www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-defense-carriers/u-s-...
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As I said, that's poor management. You will loose to an enemy who does it properly. The US was once envied for their officers training and education. Edited to add: Also, what will people do? They will drink less than they should to avoid the humiliation. On top of a tired crew you will get also a dehydrated one. This is a surefire recipe for bad things to happen.
> You will loose to an enemy who does it properly. I agree with the need to always keep training in top shape. There is no naval enemy on earth that is even remotely competitive with the US in any regard. Iran? North Korea? ISIS? What enemy? Russia has no global naval projection, it can barely sustainably push beyond the Black Sea with its surface ships. Their sub fleet is a medium threat. The US is also not at war w…
It's a good thing the US is still friendly with Europe. Everything I've read about their (admittedly much smaller) navies is that they're far more professional and better run, and look at the Americans as unprofessional and even dangerous when they have to do training exercises with them.
Of course, this shouldn't be too big a surprise; just take a trip to Europe and see how much better day-to-day stuff is run. Public transit is excellent and much larger in scope, unlike America where the subways are falling apart and Amtrak is a joke. Airports are smoothly run, unlike America where they aren't even paying the security people (TSA) to come to work. Bridges in Europe aren't dilapidated and literally falling down like they are in America.
Navy Times should hold its readers in higher esteem. Of course we assumed the worst.
> Since 2015, the Fitz had lacked a quartermaster chief petty officer, a crucial leader who helps safely navigate a warship and trains its sailors — a shortcoming known to both the destroyer’s squadron and Navy officials in the United States, Fort wrote. The accident took place on June 17, 2017. So for 2 - 3 years, they couldn't find a chief petty officer to accept the assignment? I wonder, were potential chief petty…