Road to 350: What Does the US Navy Do Anyway?

[Duc'-guy25]

The worst material condition ship I ever served on was a Cruiser. Fun fact: was not commanded by an aviator at any point.

There’s something to be said for inherent knowledge in maintaining a ship, but the principles between maintaining a ship and an aircraft are actually not that different. 3M is also the worst maintenance system I have ever seen, and was not at all optimized when I interacted with it. Dudes were chipping paint off of things to inspect welds for corrosion that should never need anything other than a visual inspection at the O-level when they could have been fixing the damn deck machinery.

A lot of it comes down to CO’s that punt or put off maintenance to meet operational requirements, or pad their own fitreps with numbers from the operations side. A couple CO’s do that in a row and a ship is in a tough spot… not unlike the aviation side.

 

[robav8r]

Probably not, unless it’s a knee jerk reaction from incident. A SWO has no business commanding a ship with 30+ aircraft onboard.

I’ll add that the worst knowledge or experience base of amphibious ops in my career came from SWOs. Not bad people, but lack the institutional knowledge to be as effective as their winged peers. An aviator no matter the background understood deck cycles, basic air-planning, and time critical decision making. Horrible decision all around.

When I deployed on BOXER and the 13th MEU, the ship’s CO (Gumbleton) was a 1310, the MEU CO (Taylor) was a 1310, and the PHIBRON CDRE (Potts) was a 1310. To say there was a common sense synergy about everything we did would be an understatement.