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After I hit around sixth grade, my parents had nothing to do with my school attendance. I woke up after my dad had already gone to work and started walking to school before my mom got up for work. If I decided to go somewhere else, they wouldn't have known it until at least the end of the...

Not every state arrests students who cut; New York certainly didn't. Plenty of students cut and the worst that happened were poor grades and possibly in-school suspension. Yet they somehow still managed to graduate. To me, the "force applied" is absolutely comperable. There is a consequence...

Who mentioned anything about police? I'm quite sure if I didn't show up to my civilian job for no reason when I had one (or was late an excessive amount of times), I would not have that job for very long. I have yet to see the police get involved with anyone who decides not to show up to work...

The fact that anyone still thinks like this demonstrates that we have a long way to go. There were not 3 groups of people with whom you served; there were only Sailors. Once upon a time they weren't Sailors. While that may provide interesting stories on a boring mid watch, when you met them they...

It's easy to armchair qb as JO that Flag and General Officers should say "we can't." But maybe they did and the Commander in Chief said "you will." At that point there are two options: make it work to the best of your ability or get replaced by someone who will (see: Gen McChrystal).

Do they have a choice? This is not a rhetorical question... as a DIVO, my knowledge of "the system" is that the civvies in Washington approve a budget, part of that budget is designated toward parts, Flag Officers decide how to devide up that money between squadrons, and that there never seems...

I know a lot of people who were much more disciplined in attendance in high school than college. There are a high portion of people, again mostly non-technical/professional degrees, who can pass college by pulling all-nighters 6 times a year to cram for tests and writing an occassional paper...

I agree with you, and I'm not saying that everyone who enlists with a college degree does so because they can't find employment elsewhere. But you also have to figure that with two ground wars occurring and no Naval war in the near future, the motivation for the average person enlisting in the...

Your post is informative, but what is the measure of "quality" the survey is using? I'm finding that a good portion of Sailors who enlist with degrees do so because they couldn't make it in a competitive job market. The same traits that make them undesirable to private employers also cause...

Totally agree. The issue is that these NKOs/GMTs are like government agencies... once someone creates this training requirement, it's really hard to get another person to put his neck on the line to get rid of it. If a RDML manages to get rid of DOD IA training, he's putting himself in a...

There's just not enough space to fill up a submarine with a bunch of non-qual draftees to clean bilges and heads for 2 years. It's not just nukes these days that takes a while to train. A-school, bess, plus basic professional schools to meet ship requirements easily eat up close to a year of...

From a submariner perspective, a two-year enlistment would be useless. For nukes, they'd be on a sub long enough to do their check-in and check-out paperwork. For coners, they'd be onboard long enough to get pinned and leave before they actually got anywhere near decent at doing their jobs...

Well, yea, if a 1st tour JO walks around bragging about his OCS/USNA/NROTC class standing, that's certainly cannon fodder. But it's entirely different when a distinguished senior Officer mentions that in his bio as the start of a career that consists of a multitude of awards for sustained...

Wtf is OP on about now?

My take -- no reason to have two tiers of working uniforms. The Brits (similar to utilities, but look a hell of a lot better) and Coast Guard (2 piece coveralls) have it right wrt working uniforms. Either of those would be good, and ditch the other "tier." The NWU is horrendous, too heavy in hot...

Yea reading those lists gives you the impression that you'll be cut off from supplies for 6 months. In reality people in the class will need to go to the uniform shop, nex, etc for various reasons, so the candios will chaperone you there periodically.

Just some perspective... I did OHARP for 3 weeks. In that time, there were about a dozen people who contacted the office. Of those people, none had interest in an URL job. In fact, the most popular inquiry was about PAO, followed by intel and the occasional inquiry about something random that...

I'm pretty far removed from OCS at this point, so I don't know what the newest list of display items is for RLP. Having said that, when I attended I brought a lot of items based on gouge to leave in POV for later (eg starch, goo gone, etc), and discovered that there are entire rooms filled...

Because after reviewing about a dozen training products regarding collisions, the "root causes" always boil down to similar categories. Even the O-6's and above put a statement saying this in the "managing the risk of collision and grounding" section for the manuals for operating. Part of that...

Well, we'd sure hope it wasn't a purposeful collision. At least no one was killed. Interested to see the details, but suspect that there's nothing new to be learned here. Now the Hartford has company, and not in a good way.

The plot doesn't have to be realistic, it just has to be plausible in the fictional world it creates. When people criticize a show or movie for being unrealistic, they usually mean that the plot violates the premise of the setting. For example, The Green Mile is a critically acclaimed movie...

I don't know why the YNC on my ship was so hard-up about its use. The fact that squadron cared was merely speculation, since I got paid either way. It didn't stop me from using whatever card I wanted on travel.

Gov cc use is required for all Navy official travel. Our squadron won't book TAD orders without a gov cc on file to enter into DTS. Now whether you actually charge the gov cc is another story. Most I've had happen is th YNs get mad at you for whipping out a personal card to pay the final bill...

The CC is your card, in your name, under your credit (which is why I hate it so much). Just call CitiBank and cancel it.

Trader, I still don't buy your argument that "country x has a McDonalds, therefore we fought there for economic gain." I think your point that we go to war if we stand to gain resources from it has merit in the many cases, but there are enough exceptions in recent history (Kosovo, Somalia) that...

A lot of your "training" in the Navy, starting with OCS, is going to revolve around being told how much you suck and can't do anything right until YOU can figure out the right way. Keep that in mind as you are getting so down on yourself for a math question.

Trader, your thesis seems to be that we go to war when the military-industrial complex can benefit from it, but then you list countries that have at least one McDonald's restaurant as evidence for this claim. I don't follow.

Do surface ships even have instructor qualified personnel available to keep people current? In the Sub force there is no one trained in ship's force to keep guys current on in-port FP tactics and employment of intermediate weapons. The semi-annual gun shoot and 15 minute deadly force GMT...

I agree. Most people only care about government budget deficits when they are out of work or underemployed. When times are good we can spend whatever we want. @helo, I understood his point the first time. I still disagree with him on the degree of ramifications for reducing the budget in...

My suggestion is to get out of our "iphone" syndrome. Once upon a time, a phone that had internet capability was invented. The general public went "meh, what do I need internet on a phone for?" Then the iphone came out and made it "cool," followed soon after by android phones entering the...

Cutting and reforming are one in the same at this point. The key words in your argument are "perceived" and "future." The reality is that we are not at war with any blue water Navy, and the sheer size of our fleet dwarfs the next 13 nation combined. I don't know what capability gap that...

That's a load of bs. You can't instantly "dial up" lost training. The lost experience from a mid grade officer who has 80% of the sea time/flight hours as a guy in a previous generation cannot instantly be undone. That's like saying I can cut 15 minutes from a one hour workout over the course of...

Bonus is that as a result of the bloated spending on acquisition, we cut operational spending. Fat lot of good those fancy new jets do when the pilots who fly them are grounded to save on fuel costs.

I don't know if procurement can ever be fixed with the current model. I mean, where else do you get this kind of economic arrangement: -The entity that controls the funds (Congress) has an infinite supply of mandatory revenue via taxes and an infinite debt ceiling, so they have no real...

Done

$250k * approx 430 (more ships, but not each command gets equal funding) = $107,000,000. DON budget: 156,000,000,000 Operations and Maintenance budget: 50,000,000,000, which is where I'm assuming your 250,000 came out of. Procurement budget: 42,500,000,000 R&D budget: 17,000,000,000 Source...

There is a difference between a tight promotion rate and an Officer being "asked" to leave while he's still under contract or eligible to continue serving.

He's probably right that it's uncommon. Of the designators that go to OCS and require the ASTB (NA, NFO, SWO, Intel?) at least half require the whole test.

Big Navy has various ways to "shape" the composition of its Officers, but mostly that comes down to how high the bar is set for the next promotion or career milestone screening. There haven't been any Officers that I know of below O-5 that were simply told "see ya" for no other reason than the...

Not anymore.

Smaller classes sleep less (need to stand watch overnight more often). Also, the ritual 2am pee takes a toll on your sleep. In one of his last classes, the Black Ninja only graduated 13 when avg starting was 35ish. He also stationed a p-way watch anytime the class wasn't at class because a...

Talk to your doc about expected recovery time and communicate this to your recruiter.

9-10 min/mile is for formation runs; those are runs where everyone is in rank and file and yells cadence. They are only done for the aforementioned warmup in the AM and on special occassions like to support a graduation. Normally, runs are done at the pace of your run group, which varies in...

Running really is the least of your worries and one of the most relaxing exercises you'll do at OCS. I showed up having to go all-out for a good low, and never felt like I was behind the curve. Being able to hold yourself in the down stroke of a pushup or keep your legs 6" off the floor for...

When I was at Newport we ran one of 3 routes: 1) The 1.5 mile on the road along the river on flat pavement 2) A 2.2 mile run that went on roads throughout the base and included some hills 3) A 5K that went to the 'seawall' and back. This was only ran twice. They said it was a "at your own pace"...

If you can get good high-ish you should be fine (in-PFA requires SAT medium, but you don't take it the first day you arrive; a good high will ensure that fatigue doesn't bring you below standards). Remember when taking it that you don't get any brownie points for going above the minimum, so...

Jacks, I have an ex who went to graduate school in Moscow. Guess what American employers, private and public, thought of it? They thought it wasn't worth the paper her degree was printed on, that's what. If you want to be employed in America, you need to attend a school that is accredited...

Even on subs the uniform of the day inport (when they do most of the dirty work taking apart systems) is NWUs. They can change into greenies for really dirty stuff, but few actually do since they'd have to change at least 4x/day (start work, eat, start afternoon, finish afternoon), and that...

Didn't you see the vid? It will somehow save the Navy millions in uniform allowances :eek:! Pretty sure there's some fuzzy math there, since the uniform allowance is not based on how many times a particular individual has to replace his uniform, eg MM3 Smith doesn't get more allowance to...

It's the "I did it, so can you" and "it's always been that way and it works" mentality paired with "man, I would really be screwed if this went awry" paired with "too many moving parts and not enough funding." None of them are good reasons, really, but by the time someone reaches a rank where...