Compass Points – Fleet Ops & Romance?
Good order, discipline, & dating?
Compass Points – Fleet Ops & Romance?
Good order, discipline, & dating?
March 27, 2025
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Good order, discipline, & dating?
The US fleet is not as numerous, robust, or ready as it needs to be. The new Secretary of the Navy will be rapidly getting briefed on the serious problems with ship building, ship maintenance, and with the lack of adequate shipyards and shipyard workers.
All these issues have been discussed many times, but perhaps there is a problem that is rarely discussed but one that also degrades the performance of every Navy warship and supply ship on the water.
First though updates on ship readiness.
Inside Defense is reporting that some in Congress are concerned with accuracy in the readiness of amphibious ships. Some older amphibious ships are designated as ready when they have not been mission capable for years.
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On Tuesday, [Senator] Kaine, the Senate Armed Services seapower subcommittee ranking member, questioned whether this language has allowed the Navy to count ships that are not actually able to perform, exacerbating amphibious warship readiness gaps. “We want 31 [amphibious warships] but we don't want 31 discounted by a deep fraction of temporarily unavailable ships that we really can't count on,” he said during a hearing on shipbuilding.
According to Shelby Oakley, the Government Accountability Office's director of contracting and national security acquisitions, GAO found that the Navy has applied the “temporarily unavailable” label to ships that were out of commission for years at a time. A December report from GAO found half the amphibious fleet to be in “poor condition” with ships not on track to meet their expected service lives.
-- Inside Defense
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To improve ship maintenance will require more skilled shipyard workers. The Navy has several programs underway to recruit new workers. Unfortunately, even when a new shipyard worker is successfully recruited, many do not stay.
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The Navy’s effort to recruit thousands of new shipyard workers is suffering from more than half of its recruits leaving the industry within their first year of being hired, a senior Navy official told lawmakers. “We’ve had 16 million hits on [the recruiting website], 2.5 million applications. It’s led to about 9,700 employees hired” in fiscal year 2023,
Brett Seidle, the Navy’s acting acquisition executive told a Senate Armed Services subcommittee on Tuesday. “Those folks are coming, and then we’re attriting out way too quick. We probably are seeing 50 to 60 percent attrition in our first-year employees.” Seidle said the biggest reason for the attrition was down to paychecks and the Navy and industry’s evident inability to compete with other private sector manufacturing and service jobs.
-- Breaking Defense
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The problems are not only with the Navy warfighting ships, there are also problems with the vital strategic supply ships of the Military Sealift Command.
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The US Transportation Command’s Military Sealift Command (MSC), the subordinate organisation responsible for strategic sealift, is unprepared for the high intensity fighting of a war over Taiwan.
In the event of such a war, combat commanders would look to MSC’s approximately 125 ships to transport about 90 per cent of US Army and Marine Corps equipment into the Western Pacific for combat operations: fuel, ammunition, vehicles, missile launchers, spare parts and more.
MSC readiness levels have dropped to 59 per cent, due mostly to vessel material condition and age. Most of its sealift ships are reaching an age at which maintenance and repair costs are ballooning, and service-life extensions won’t improve readiness.
Most alarmingly, current estimates indicate that the sealift fleet will lose 90,000 to 180,000 square meters of capacity each year as ships reach the end of their useful life. That compares with the current capacity of about 840,000 square meters.
Recent fleet exercises also indicate that most of MSC’s vessels cannot complete long voyages or are completely non-mission-capable. Without immediate investment, sealift will remain largely incapable of supporting major sustained combat operations.
-- Barid Maritime
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Besides the number of ships and the number of shipyard workers, is there a another rarely discussed issue that is degrading fleet performance around the globe?
Retired Navy Captain Kevin Eyer says there is a terrible problem. In his Real Clear Defense article, "The Navy's Mix of Sparks and Gasoline" he warns of a problem that is bad now and growing worse.
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I have two daughters. If either of them told me they wanted to join the Service, I would be proud, and fully supportive. They do, and should, have the right to serve on the same ships that I did. Still, based upon my experience as the executive officer of the first fully integrated cruiser, and my subsequent commands of several fully integrated cruisers, this is clear: mixing men and women in combat ships comes at a demonstrable cost to effectiveness. Not because the women are less effective or engaged, but because of the enormous burdens placed upon the ship's ability to prepare for war when you mix sparks and gasoline.
The sustainment of the entire human race is inescapably dependent upon the attraction that men and women feel for one another. It is also inescapably true that in a combat unit, the mixing of genders impacts the "Good Order and Discipline" of these units – and that degrades their ability to prepare for combat.
. . . Before women in combat units, there was a vital and palpable cohesion; a glue that bound everyone together. Following the advent of women, a split, throughout the crew, was easily observable. Sailors were, by and large, unable to assume the gender blindness mandated by higher authority. Cohesion changed into a competition for the attention of the opposite sex. Just like in real life. While this erosion is impossible to quantify, it is plain to those who served before, and then after, the integration of women. It has metastasized into a greatly diminished Fleet.
-- Kevin Eyer, Real Clear Defense
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There are many aspects to building and maintaining a powerful fighting fleet. Having the right kinds and numbers of ships is crucial. Once ships are constructed and launched, however, there is something even more important. It takes a relentless focus on warfighting. It takes constant good order and discipline. To deter and destroy the enemies of the US, it takes leadership and it will always take leadership to grow high performing crews, battalions, and squadrons.
It will take nothing less than our best leaders, best ships, and best crews to deter and defeat the best of China, Russia, Iran, and North Korea.
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Inside Defense - 03/26/2025
Congress May Look To Tighten Amphib Readiness Requirements In Future Authorization Legislation
By Nick Wilson
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Breaking Defense - 03/26/2025
Amid Shortage, Navy Recruiting Program Struggles To Keep Half First-Year Shipbuilders: Official
By Justin Katz
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Barid Maritime - 03/26/2025
The Dangerous Collapse Of U.S. Strategic Sealift Capacity
By Andrew Rolander
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Real Clear Defense - 03/24/2025
The Navy's Mix of Sparks and Gasoline
By Kevin Eyer
Captain Eyer (U.S. Navy, ret.) served as a Surface Warfare Officer for twenty-seven Years. He served in seven cruisers and commanded three Aegis cruisers; USS Thomas S. Gates (CG 51), USS Shiloh (CG 67), and USS Chancellorsville (CG 62).
Spot on—fleet ops are the Corps’ soul, and FD2030’s MLR obsession’s bleeding it dry. E=MC² proves it: mass and speed win. Desert Storm’s MAGTFs—88,000 Marines, 144 ships—crushed Saddam in 100 hours. Today’s MLRs? 1,800 bodies, no tanks, no amphibs to move ‘em. Haiti 2010 showed MAGTF’s magic—III MEF hit fast, global, no politics. Now we’ve got zero afloat MAGTFs in the Med or Red Sea, and MPS ships are rusting relics—14 left, down from 33. China’s not the only game; Iran, Russia, Africa don’t care about our Pacific fetish. Scrap this MLR nonsense, rebuild the MAGTF—24 battalions, tanks, amphibs—and keep the fleet rolling. Time’s ticking, and romance won’t save us when the next 9/11 drops.
Semper Fi
There is a common denominator here. It is a gross lack of integrity for the sake of toxic ambition. To put ships into the category of “temporarily not available” when they are simply unable to get underway in years is lawyer speak and a technicality over morality. Leadership and integrity failures at every level.
The mixing of fuel and sparks is an ongoing farce that has been lied about for decades. Once again integrity would demand truth. Integrity is a rare bird. You can slice and dice this any way you want from “ in the chain of command” to “not really an issue”. Yet, there it is. Undeniable. The proof is revealed daily and denied daily. With a heterosexual and now homosexual environment there is only one draconian solution. Currently DoD is the most LGBTQI, mommy friendly, hook up friendly institution on earth making a college campus or corporations look monastic in comparison. To make matters worse the anointed contend that Jane has the athletic and fighting prowess of Tarzan.
The industrial base to build warships of high quality, quickly simply must be rebuilt as fast as possible. National survival depends on it. In the interim we must buy ships from foreign shipyards as fast as possible and finish them out with the classified portions in the US rapidly. Currently our undersized, over committed, marginally trained Navy cannot control the global SLOC’s. The Marine Corps portion of that mission self cancelled.
Women and homosexuals are a part of the personnel and manning paradigm. That is irreversible and will remain problematic. Three things are policy related and can be adjusted to accommodate reality:
1. The assignment of occupational specialties must realistically be applied to the norms of genders not the 1% outliers. The rejection of this reality will be paid in blood. Integrity in this regard has been absent. If flying a fighter jet requires 20/20 vision, an infantryman must be able to throw hand grenades beyond their bursting radius and prevail in a bayonet fight.
2. Pregnant women, for the sake of the child, mother and the unit must be transferred out of units with a 18 month leave of absence after the first trimester to accommodate birth, bonding and reconditioning for return to active service. Details on pay, benefits, date of rank, obligated service etc TBD.
3. The services must adopt a strict non fraternization policy that forbids any intimate contact between service members regardless of rank, gender, billet or chain of command. No dating, no marriage, no intimacy, no casual physical relationships. This will put a large dent into favoritism, conflict of interest, adverse impacts on unit synergy, sexual harassment, sexual assault and the drama associated with relationship failures. It will not stop the human attraction paradigm of the species but it will reduce it to very clearly defined and understandable parameters. Punishment must be handed out to both parties and the harshest to the most senior. This will take a rewriting of the UCMJ and an acknowledgement that military service is like no other in a modern, liberal society. Of course, love and war are like no other human endeavors and they do not mix well.
Our nation is in a perilous situation. Our global defense needs cannot be met with the force we have. Too small, too poorly trained, too lacking in focus and naively, blissfully unaware on all three counts. We are unprepared for an extended conventional conflict with peers and non peer adversaries let alone a combination of them.