As a former naval officer, I was shocked to hear they didn't still require conning officers to plot and track the closest point of approach of all contacts on paper. To rely on a computer or radar system to do that for you is craziness. Sure, the commercial ships do that, but then in this case they should have avoided hitting Navy ships, but they are rather stealthy and weren't broadcasting their positions, so it's up to the junior officers on watch. Doing this on paper keeps you alert and reduces boredom, believe me.

It is possible to get into a "Kobayashi Maru" situation coming into a busy shipping channel with contacts coming in from all sides, similar to the iPhone game "HarborMaster" which always ends with a collision. But there are rules to follow along the way, whether it's adjusting course to avoid a close approach, contacting other ships on bridge-to-bridge VHF radio, waking the captain, blasting the ship's horn, making evasive maneuvers before you get "in extremis". None of these happened. This is what I found so hard to believe in these two cases, but it makes perfect sense when you're relying on imperfect automated systems and essentially driving asleep at the wheel.

I'm just an amateur sailor but I had an incident in the Atlantic on a racing yacht where I came up top just prior to a shift change and said "isn't anyone concerned that we're going to go right into the side of that tanker." The guys up top (including the watch leader) said the skipper was on it. I pointed it out to the skipper downstairs and he said "it's alright, I can see it on the radar." I replied "I think you'll find that's a squall, that's the ship". Rather sobering!

I know nothing about ships, the Navy, or combat.

I do know that most or all of our Navy ships are highly computer controlled/integrated, so maybe the following would be moot today, but...

...wouldn't it be prudent for officers to have the skills to plot and do things on paper in the event that during combat or for other reasons the ship sustains such damage that limits or eliminates the ability to use the computer systems to do that same task?

Again - maybe it's one of those things where if the computer systems are down in such a way that you can't do the task, it is likely that you have bigger problems to worry about. Even so, I would think this would be a critical skill to have, if a "just-in-case, cover-yer-butt" scenario presents itself where it could mean the difference between life or death, survival, rescue, etc.

By that logic we'd never have single engine or single seat attack aircraft. In a lot of situations, you _have_ to rely on the technology in order to most efficiently spend your resources, even considering the potential failure modes. In many situations you're better off perfecting one mode of operation than in maintaining two redundant modes.

Seems the best reason to teach these things isn't because we expect them to be used to any substantial extent in combat, but because they're critical and necessary exercises for honing and maintaining the skills needed to wield the high-tech tools, much like in bballard's example. Learning and regularly applying the fundamentals is often critical to understanding the problem space. When you're commanding a naval ship I imagine the problem space is immensely complex, much more so than most other roles in the military, or anywhere else for that matter. If you can't foresee or recognize the problems quickly, you certainly won't be able to respond in a timely manner no matter how fancy the tools.

Yes, that was the reason we were told we had to do it on paper, in case the systems failed. Only we always did it on paper, not just for practice.

That's how our codebase evolves at a large internet company. A new shiny product is desired by sales, and to cheer us up into building it they promise we'll be allowed to delete the crappy old stuff when done. Rinse, repeat, 10 years later we have 10 legacy systems to support. Makes me think of "The Girl Who Sold Matches" whenever one of these comes up...

Skipping on training to save money -- with a budget the size of nearly half the world's military expenditure.

US military expenditure is a stealth job creation program. It's politically untenable for any American government to announce a $1.5 trillion dollar scheme to create 100,000 skilled manufacturing jobs in the rust belt, unless that scheme produces a fighter aircraft. It's a woefully inefficient job creation scheme, but that inefficiency means that a lot of different stakeholders can get a slice of the pie.

Everyone would be better off if that money was spent on clean energy or healthcare, but the American electorate are far more willing to sign a blank check for defence.

    1 500 000 000 000
    ----------------- = 15 000 000
              100 000

That would, in theory, result in 8-figure jobs for every serviceman. Is that right? Where is the excess going?

I was obliquely referring to the F-35 program, which is forecast to cost ~$1.5tn and is estimated to have created ~100,000 jobs within the services and via contractors, subcontractors and suppliers. The F-35 is a dreadful aircraft that is grounded indefinitely because it keeps trying to suffocate pilots, but it has kept a lot of factories busy and made a lot of senators happy. Lockheed Martin proudly trumpet the fact that there are suppliers for the F-35 project in 46 states - that's a lot of pork to go around.

The US defence budget is lousy with pork-barrel projects. The Army Chief of Staff has repeatedly asked Congress to stop buying new Abrams tanks, but the tanks keep rolling off the production line nonetheless. The services might be facing deep sequestration cuts, but there's been no let-up in the procurement of expensive and unnecessary hardware.

http://www.businessinsider.com/congress-approves-useless-mil... http://www.military.com/daily-news/2015/01/28/pentagon-tells...

> The Army Chief of Staff has repeatedly asked Congress to stop buying new Abrams tanks, but the tanks keep rolling off the production line nonetheless.

Wow. One has to wonder when some of those tanks will eventually reach regular law enforcement, like lots of other military hardware tends to.

The military budget is $600B. There are 1.2M active and 0.8M reserve servicemen.

Like any old organization, they have legacy costs: healthcare and pensions for former and retired servicemen are phenomenal.

I thought healthcare and pensions weren't included in that $600B, but farmed out to other parts of the budget?

Nope. Pensions (technically, retired pay and retainer pay) come out of the MILPERS budget. Military retirees are still military personnel, and generally exist within one of three statuses within the reserve component of the last armed service in which they served. For Navy personnel, for example, they are on the Retired List, the Retired Reserve, or the Fleet Reserve.

Unfortunately the way that it gets handed to the service components, they can only spend the money on what it's budgeted for. This leads to situations where training budgets are very tight but you have a huge office supply budget. So units buy $1000 chairs but can't afford to send their troops to training

Gotta pay those defense contractors somehow. We can't skip out on those payments!

>only a couple of days are dedicated to navigation and mariner skills.

couple of days :) ... couple of years during middle school that i spent going to "Young Sailor Club" (USSR version of sea-skill oriented Boy Scouts) half the time was my specialization - electronics, half the time - the generic maritime skills, navigation, sailing, classic communication (Morse, flags), firefighting, actually going out on a [small training non-armed] Navy ship, etc..

In the US, this is the Sea Scouts. Almost nobody knows about them, but anyplace near big water likely has several ships (same as a troop). It's a great program, we were involved when my son was a teenager - they (group of teenagers) literally ran a 100 ton, 95 foot former USCG Cutter. It's great for boys and girls, I'm convinced they get more training than the Navy does. :-)

Sounds like you had an interesting childhood (and likely one that provided skills to serve you well into adulthood)!