I guess this got started because I asked so I'll ask again. Is our whole Navy in this bad a shape ? How about all the other branches ?
Quality training is time consuming and expensive. How many times must we see the results of not doing it? I guess I can understand the motivation during a war when raw recruits were rushed to the front...why now? A missile defense ship that can't fulfill its mission is useless except as a paper tiger. Those fakes are quickly understood by the enemy.
Budget and staffing cuts most definitely contributed heavily to the state our military is in now. It has gone through these ebbs and flows in the past. When Obama took office, he openly stated that one of his goals was to transform the military. By cutting back resources and turning it into a big social experiment, he certainly contributed to the deterioration we see now. Some of it is obviously cultural as well (cue your blaming of millennials here). As happens when a new regime comes into office, officers that aren't with the program either quit or are forced out. The same thing is happening now but 8 yrs can't be undone overnight. It doesn't rest solely at the feet of Obama though, the Republican controlled Congress also played a part in those spending cuts. At the same time, money doesn't solve everything, that money has to be going to the right things. There are certainly plenty of pet projects siphoning off and wasting much of the money that is designated. I saw the same thing happen when I was in and Clinton took office, although not nearly to the same extent. They were offering very aggressive early retirements packages in an attempt to downsize. It was the end of the cold war and the thinking was we just didn't need to the same size military. One thing that never seemed to get sacrificed at least when I was in was training. We literally spent 75% of our non-sleeping time training and drilling and when we were in port for refit, we were going to some school or another and training some more. Monday through Friday or Saturday (depending on the Captain's mood) we were either drilling or doing preventative maintenance. If we were solo, our drills usually consisted of weapons system drills, security drills (fun), damage control drills (sucked). Other times we were doing war games typer exercises with other ships and navies. I would also add that naval accidents are not new, but these last two do seem particularly egregious. One of our subs took out a Japanese fishing trawler because they managed to not see them during their surface scan prior to surfacing. That one is a little more understandable but not excusable. Going back further in time, one of our aircraft carriers cut one of its destroyers in half killing 176 due to a navigational error by the destroyer. I would be curious if @Waterboy has any thoughts on the current state of affairs as he seems to have more recent experience than my own.
Our military has no shortage of funds. Far from it. We have a shortage of good leadership and an over abundance of waste on stupid initiatives and pet projects.
I don't disagree. Funds have been cut for sure, but it is the prioritization and utilization of those funds that is the bigger issue. There are definitely other cultural issues at play as well that have zero to do with money.
Disagree I think there is some of both though the funding has improved. Obama not only cut R&D it was horribly mismanaged in many cases. He considered it more a jobs goal than future security of our country (after all we were the problem according to him)
Yup. When military leadership retires from .mil they head right over to one of the myriad defense contractors. The suggestion they are starved for money comes from the people who profit off it. Defense spending lines pockets and grows companies, it doesn't benefit troops or the country. It's not my opinion, it's how it actually works and has for very long time. Let's not even get into the programs which waste millions and are never completed or once completed are never adopted. But they want more money. Can never find a dollar amount for what was wasted on the XM8 and it's various iterations. And that was probably a comparatively cheap one.
Thus the gasps of horror that Trump will reduce our war footprint. There's no market for new shit unless you use the old shit.
I have exposure to a decent number of very early development projects of decades. About 50% get fielded and these are cutting edge type stuff so some of the flops are that it was just not possible. Some are politics and some did not make sense to do. Guess what the exact same things happen in cutting edge development in the commercial world and academia. Now I would agree that military is not efficient due in part to laws and bureaucracy. Both are required to keep our system as a whole in balance. Further an efficient system would be a mercenary system however those always end in the country who paid them failing.
I seems to me that there is (was?) a prioritization problem. Pork barrel projects just to keep some senator's base or industry funded suck...especially if training and a total focus on military leadership aren't addressed. I can appreciate how much it must of sucked for the skipper of the Fitzgerald...I can only hope that his lackadaisical superiors also got the axe.
From what I saw when I was retiring, leadership is a problem. I think it's in the process of being fixed but it needed some work. I retired as a Chief Petty Officer and the troubling trend I saw was the lack of leadership listening to their Chiefs when they should. They don't like it when you tell them what they don't want to hear...