No need to kid. You're right. It's a fact. Just look at the timeline.This is when Naval Aviation began to auger in . . . .
. . . . I keed (to the OP) of course.
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Naval Aviations "One" Problem...
- Thread starter Empire16
- Start date
I understand why it exists, but we shouldn't be shocked that this kind of stuff pushes the needle to make people want to leave - and then they actually do. I don't even think our travel rules are all that bad, but trying to get a travel claim with the tiniest hint of something nonstandard is an exercise in futility when the person who has to approve it is a GS-4 and is laser focused on "but but but, it has to be this way!"
Again, it's just one cut out of a 1,000, but they add up.
Here’s a thought, punish the offenders, and don’t treat everything as a systemic issue, e.g. “You all have to wear diapers, because airman Timmy pooped in his pants.”
Just because a system can be abused doesn’t mean it is broken. Expect integrity from your people, and you’re likely to get it from most of them. The ones who don’t get with the program were likely going to be a problem either way. Make a system of perpetually added rules, and you encourage administrative abuse of members by bureaucrats (you know who you are… jerks), a culture of workarounds, and frustration.
I agree. But sometimes they highlight holes in the system and someone, somewhere decides to 'fix the glitch'.
Every retirement ceremony, every change of command, that I have attended in my now 15 years in the military, the officer has said, "I couldn't have been here if not for the sacrifices of my wife and children. Sacrifices they didn't choose to make, but had to endure for my career."
It's perverse in how we celebrate it, how we wear it like a badge of honor. "My wife is better than yours because my career treated her life like shit."
How many families are broken because the active duty military expects spouses and children to be strong, resilient, understanding of the sacrifices they must make because of the military members career? Many of my commanders have been divorced at least once, or have kids they don't really know/have a good relationship with- why? Because they couldn't sacrifice at the behest of big Navy/USMC/AF/Army and be happy.
If the family is happy and can do what they like to do, if my wife can have the career that she wants and finds fulfilling, if the kids can make friends and go to the school they want and do the activities they desire, if the home front is happy, then a lot of the other bullshit is at the very least tolerable.
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Awesome. What I really meant was, they need to make it a category for grading on the fitrep itself, e.g. "How well did you reduce administrative workload in your shop/division/ship/squadron? - 1/2/3/4/5". Make it the standard to reduce, not increase administrative burdens.
STOP rewarding people for "fixing the glitch" by addition. Fix the glitch by simplifying, streamlining, and reducing administrative friction, so people actually have time to think about what they're doing, not dig themselves out from under a perpetually growing stack of forms.
If that is a fact it was at the very least partially self-inflicted, and it has become a bit of a tired trope by now. The Navy's overreaction was excessive to the point of institutional abuse but the original event itself that spurred everything was an ugly mess at the time and only looks worse as time has gone on.
It is a different world now, for good and bad.
1. The contracts and how they are written and incentivized. As an organization, we really only care about cost so we write the contract to test for and reward reductions in costs. The DoD has zero idea on how to classify, measure, and reward value. It's why our attempts at Agile and DevSecOps have had such mediocre outcomes.
2. Lack of investment. For decades, we treated software and business (DTS, NCMI, NAVSUP, NSIPS, BoL, etc.) systems the exact same way we treat hardware systems. We pay to establish a system like DTS, buy the software, and then once it's up and running we hand it off to a different, cheaper contractor to maintain. We rarely if ever put money in to modernize or sustain beyond basic patching.
3. Plain old mismanagement. We often get lost chasing the latest shiny sales pitch. I saw this frequently in my last job. Leaders at the PM, PAPM, and PEO level consistently wanted to put money into the latest industry buzzwords (AI/ML, Agile, DevSecOps, drones, hypersonics, quantum computing, etc.) and robbed the maintenance and sustainment budgets routinely to do so. When I took over, we had critical systems running on software and hardware that was over a decade old. We couldn't even get patches from vendors let alone run fancy AI-based analytics or whatever and yet our budgets were being cannibalized for AI products and we were paying millions to our vendors for "extended support" licenses.
4. Poor technical understanding. Our political and acquisitions leadership largely doesn't understand technology and doesn't keep up with the latest trends in private industry and the consumer sector. I have worked with people in senior positions who don't even know how hardware and software virtualization works or the difference between containers and VMs. You can't have a good IT system or network design if your leadership doesn't see the value in it or even understand what's wrong and how to fix it.
Exactly this. DTS, NMCI, and systems like them are largely dictated by the contract (Which is very, very old now) and those contracts are often not written with the end user in mind. They're written at a level that allows the government to control overall costs and schedules IAW the Nunn-McCurdy Act. See my comments above about how the government has no idea how to quantify, measure, or reward value. A lot of it comes back to the fact that we lack a profit motive.
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Spousal employment is a big deal. The Navy is paying a bit of attention, but it becomes more difficult with white collar work (aka career, not jobs). Not a lot of lawyer/tech/whatever jobs in Lemoore or Fallon.
So my controversial opinion is that DTS isn't that bad, at least within the constellation of enterprise software the Navy uses. Yes I'm sure the update process is fucked and that the lowest bidder maintains it (the fact that I can pick Midwest Airlines and ATA as options for frequent flyer numbers indicates a bit of age). But the biggest issue with that platform is incompetent unit-level admin who don't understand the JTR and presumably orgasm every time they hit "deny." This is followed very closely by arcane rules like the need to use your GTCC (corporate welfare if ever I've seen it), that your flight isn't ticketed until 72 hours prior to departure which can lead to fuckery if there are issues with aforementioned GTCC, and that for some reason SATO is thrown into the mix and there is no self-service function.
Sounds like a company looking for good help (not OnlyFans) knows where to open an office.
Not a joke- My wife, and a good buddy's wife, both had to attended a spouses orientation when we were Lts at MATSG-21. My wife has her BFA in, and is an Equity Stage Manager (union recognized, not easy to do). Buddy's wife is a Lawyer, but not a member of the Bar in Florida.
They had to sit through a spouse's job presentation in which they were told they could be a dog walker, work in child care, or work at the Exchange.
Another buddy's wife is a chemical engineer. Similar story.
None of us are on AD anymore. I'm the only one in still in the military.
I would assume this is getting easier with the move in the corporate world to remote work. I have quite a few friends whose spouses have been able to maintain employment and career progression by taking advantage of remote opportunities. The only thing that seems to screw it up is how intrusive and inefficient the PCS process is because they are without the infrastructure and home office environment to be able to telework during the actual move.
Another issue is that the JTR rules aren't programmed into DTS properly. I've had quite a few issues where I needed to travel under certain programs or lines of accounting that leveraged special case rules within the JTR and it was a huge problem trying to get it squared away. Each time the command's DTS admin had to go in and manually override everything. I miss the days where my PS or admin department would just set everything up and hand me my ticket and TAD orders.
I'll summarize the one problem: The Navy will go out of its way to NOT take care of its own people.
Here is an example: I quit the Navy because of one specific civilian who screwed me over time and time again. It seems if there is ever a decision to make in the Navy civilian world between taking care of a Sailor or screwing them over we will step on our own crank while making sure we screw our people over.
I did 4 consecutive overseas tours and received the appropriate COT leave 0 times out of 3. Even ask Admiral Moran about it when he was at PERS and was told to pack sand by his lacky O-5. Was later told by someone at PERS that the civilian had incorrectly applied the JTRs but it was then too late to make it right and I was just fucked. The same civilian also screwed me over by incorrectly applying the Fly America Act during travel. I happened to be stationed at an AF base at the time and the travel people there just laughed at me and how fucked up the Navy was. The AF will consistently go out of their way to take care of their people.
Here is an example: I quit the Navy because of one specific civilian who screwed me over time and time again. It seems if there is ever a decision to make in the Navy civilian world between taking care of a Sailor or screwing them over we will step on our own crank while making sure we screw our people over.
I did 4 consecutive overseas tours and received the appropriate COT leave 0 times out of 3. Even ask Admiral Moran about it when he was at PERS and was told to pack sand by his lacky O-5. Was later told by someone at PERS that the civilian had incorrectly applied the JTRs but it was then too late to make it right and I was just fucked. The same civilian also screwed me over by incorrectly applying the Fly America Act during travel. I happened to be stationed at an AF base at the time and the travel people there just laughed at me and how fucked up the Navy was. The AF will consistently go out of their way to take care of their people.
I think the promise of remote work is oversold and a lot of companies are expecting more of a hybrid work environment (that has certainly been my experience in the non airline pilot job market). There are definitely remote jobs out there, but they tend to be either pure tech (coding) or they are more rote (Medicare coding).
Hard for me to express how infuriating and unsurprising that is.
So I spent a tour with the AF and worked a ton with the AF throughout my time on active and the reserves. The AF absolutely does admin better than the Navy and does a lot of things really well. That said, they too are hemorrhaging people. That tells me that the grass is perhaps not as green as many would make it out to be. I think they have serious cultural issues that are causing that.