Edit: I also agree with the posts about outsourcing leading to ossification and rigid stratification. You want rigid stratification? Try military medicine.
FWIW, BAH (pay for housing that is tax-free) is $4000 for an O-6 in Point Loma v. $2777 in Offut, NE. Seems to be aggressive adjustment, no?
Enlisted pay might be another story…
EDIT: I know one guy who griped about pay once…kind of in passing. Went on to be a YC founder haha.
>URL JOs
>BAH
if only i knew what any of those words mean. Why haven't people learned to describe their abbreviation unless they already pre-established that the audience will definitely know them?
The ELI5 is that the Navy pays officers who do the core ship/flying activities quite well. Compared to their civilian peers, Navy lawyers, doctors, and cyber people don’t get paid well.
The posted article is about rust on ships. A ships management team is paid well. Low pay is unlikely to be the cause of dissatisfaction.
To be clear, “paid well” is not “paid well” as measured by FAANG tech salaries. A submarine officer with 8 years of experience is making something equivalent to $200Ks if I am to believe the calculators that adjust for tax advantages of military pay, discounted value of future retirement cash flows, etc.
I’d just note that the service academies crowd the rankings for highest paid graduates at early/mid career https://www.payscale.com/college-salary-report/bachelors#ful...
Anecdotally, I had a reservist friend with a Harvard MBA who realized he could pull down more money as an activated reservist in Bahrain than his role at BlackRock.
Your mileage may vary…
That only flies in an email or on a specialized forum.
It's curious that you are smart enough to come up with an arguement yet apparently at the same time innocently simple enough not to know why it's invalid.
Counterpoint: It doesn't.
They made a reply to a military member on a thread about military equipment. Googling a few acronyms + "military" would surely lead one to the answer.
I'm reminded of an acronym at work: CIM. They come in two variants, CIM-A and CIM-B. I'd been there a year before I finally decided I needed to ask a more senior colleague what they stood for, and he didn't know either. The intention was obvious from the context of their use (although whether -A or -B was more serious wasn't) but most of the people in the weekly meetings discussing Critical Incident Management didn't actually know that was what they were discussing. Nowadays we have a culture that better encourages definition of terms upon first use, and it's less common that someone needs to ask "stupid" questions.
I know what you mean, but I don't think it would merely be unexpected if one did somehow. I'm pretty sure it isn't possible because, being specialists, they can't also be a line officer. It seems like logic stops them, but then leads me to wonder about the vague possibility of a horribly unfortunate event leaving only specialists on-board... what then? Would logic stop them from sailing, or inexperience and lack of expertise?
BAH has a description in parens immediately following, but could be better.
Why do people on technical message board with lots of jargon refuses to do even a modicum of research? If I didn't drop a description of a monad after I said it here would you also be mad? How about Term Sheets. I see Alpha used all the time and I have to look it up.
Does anyone have time to cite a source for this? I was thinking this number was a lot higher.
Dang mentions quite often that HN has a very international readership, for example: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23363430 and https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23438403 and https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27052434
An old poll with 32% US (probably the number I remembered): https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13819771
There's also a recent poll w/ 47% (2346 of 4891), although this might be timing related: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30210378
> There's also a recent poll w/ 47%
Clearly you need one more poll to decide this, as per XKCD 927.
Another point that I haven't seen brought up here is that usually the people who paint ships are school washouts. They couldn't get through school and have no classification, so this is what they do. I wasn't in the Navy but this is always what I heard.
I was a submariner, so I’m not certain who ends up chipping paint on surface ships. Submarines don’t get the people who washed out of schools.
The employer, or politicians, 5, 10, 20 years from now can cut funding and reduce access from MDs to NP/PA, or only cover certain meds, or require excessive prior authorizations to dissuade using the healthcare.
Worse still, many NP programs are now giving out "doctorates" of nursing practice so that NPs can introduce themselves to the patient as "Dr." Smith.
In short, the VA is willing to gamble with your life if it means saving a few bucks. It's pretty harrowing.
But of course, nobody cares. The rich will get MDs and the poor will get midlevels.
And people have limits, because they need lives and aren't robots.
Morale and aligning work to allow for happiness in life is a requirement for people bringing their best to work. If you ask people to toughen up and suffer through the suck to get the job done... there'd better be an eventual light at the end of that tunnel. Otherwise, it's just a death march.
PS: Thank you for your service, and especially through COVID.
Assuming both sought living accomodations outside of free base housing, I was curious what those figures actually looked like[1]:
- O-6 colonel stationed at, e.g. Fort Riley, KS 66442, would draw up to an additional $1500 without dependents, $1911 with.
- O-6 captain stationed at, e.g. NAS North Island, CA 92135, would draw up to an additional $3342 without dependents, $4026 with.
It's worth mentioning for those unfamiliar that, just like BAS (i.e. food allowance), this BAH (i.e. housing allowance) is completely tax-exempt.
The game that active service members play here is to secure a home mortgage (often through VA home loan), then apply BAH directly towards monthly mortgage payments throughout service all the way to retirement. It's not hard to imagine other tax advantaged games to be played here. Applying BAH to rent a house off base is a naive fool's errand.
In terms of annual cost of living adjustments to base pay, uniformed service received +2.7% increase this year; in contrast, +2.2% for federal GS civilians. The year before that, it was +3% v. +1%. These adjustments have historically favored uniformed service over the federal civilians that work beside them. Sure, they're lowball relative to inflation, but that ought to be squared against military tax-exempt BAS/BAH and hugely subsidized commissary entitlements.
Exceptionally common amongst Navy personnel, married sailors typically draw an additional $250/mo family separation allowance[2] when out at sea for more than 30 continuous days. This will obviously have a greater financial impact amongst the enlisted ranks than officers. Depending on rank and job, there's a litany of allowances, bonuses and incentives (beyond the scope of this remark) that are often ignored when the conversation of military service compensation is brought up...nevermind that no one ever talks about the opportunity to retire with guaranteed pension + benefits for life as young as 38.
As an outsider, I'm inclined to agree that military health professions do seem to pay a substantial indirect opportunity cost despite the unique bonuses they're entitled to[3].
I do wonder what individual circumstances led you to choose a Navy commission over everything else?
[1] https://www.defensetravel.dod.mil/site/bahCalc.cfm
[2] https://www.dfas.mil/militarymembers/payentitlements/fsa/
[3] https://www.dfas.mil/militarymembers/payentitlements/Pay-Tab...
Both industries substantially outsourced functionality in the 90s in an attempt to cut costs.
Consequently, they are now less empowered (vs historical levels) to effect change in their own processes in a timely manner.
Large organizations need to pay more attention to ossification of processes as a serious future risk, that needs to be balanced against immediate savings.
The real problem is the unaccountable bureaucratic management, which are neither physicians nor nurses, and the numbers of which continue to expand (sucking up financial resources) while physicians and nurses workload increases and pay continues to decrease in real terms.
There are too many micro-specialties and not enough crossover. Imagine if once you were a frontend dev you would have to go back to school for 2 years full time to be legally allowed to do ui design of a button even though there is a lot of crossover and knowledge sharing between roles.
This definitely causes shortages and issues when the demand naturally rises and falls for various Healthcare disciplines.
I'm not saying formal education isn't important but there could be a much more fluid crossover between various allied health disciplines than their is currently.
Maybe more transition programs or seeing individual billing codes for Medicare attached to education modules
If it weren't profitable to have large numbers of staff per doctor, there wouldn't be large numbers of staff per doctor.
Now make an argument that the current arrangement is more optimal than the one we might end up with if there were more doctors.
For example Advanced Nurse Practitioner status grants nurses almost all prescribing rights you'd get as a doctor. They're allowed scheduled drugs (ie stuff that's commonly abused) because a bunch of those are effective painkillers and a key reason to have Advanced Practitioner is that "This patient is in agony, and I know the only thing a doctor would do is give them these stronger drugs, but I'm not allowed to do that on my own" is a stupid situation to put an experienced nurse in, so let's just authorise them to do it.
I believe there are Advanced Practitioner variants for several other healthcare roles including midwife and pharmacist; in some cases you just get limited prescription rights (so you can only give people some specific prescription drugs from a list) but in other cases like Advanced Nurse Practitioner it's the whole thing, if your knowledge and experience tells you that off-label use of a heart medicine is the right way to solve your patient's acute hiccups you can do that just like a doctor could.
To qualify for advanced practice these professionals are doing much of the same work student Doctors do - but just focused to their specific discipline. Lots of Chemistry, learning how to read research literature, and so on. They get a post-graduate degree of some sort, I don't remember the exact title.
What in the world is that supposed to mean? I've been hearing that for years now, and I have not the foggiest idea of what we're even talking about.
Nothing is different. What is extraordinary?
Edit to add: If these times are extraordinary, then that is a valid excuse for rust and a lot of other problems.
Totally government run in the case of the military, and healthcare is the most heavily regulated industry (by far) in the US. Heavy bureaucratic regulations make an organization unable to adapt to local and/or changing circumstances.
I read in the book "The Pity of War" by Ferguson that the reason the death rates of the German army in WW1 were so much lower than that of the British is the British generals would craft detailed orders on how the soldiers were to achieve objectives. The German generals would instead just give the officers the objectives. The officers were free to adapt to local circumstances.
A similar idea is a story I heard where a class of new lieutenants were asked how would they go about raising a flagpole. The lieutenants all wrote down detailed instructions and procedures. The instructor said you're all wrong. The correct answer is "sergeant, get that flagpole up!".
Indeed, what saved the Entente in World War 1 was the fact that Belgium, which had been expected to roll over and allow the German army unmolested free passage, actually called up its military and fought. That ruined the German timetables, allowing France to complete its mobilization and brought the British into the war preventing a quick German victory on the Western Front.
Towards the end of the war, yes, Germany was beginning to move towards what we would consider a "commander's intent"-based system. Erwin Rommel's text, Infantry Attacks, captures this transition. However, it's inaccurate to say that the German military was any less rigid than the British.
It is also inaccurate to say that the death rates of the German army were any less than they were for the British. Perhaps in 1914 and 1915, as well-trained German regulars were facing off against the "Pals Brigades", the Germans inflicted more casualties than they received. But by the end of the war, as the German economy was crumbling and the prospect of US involvement made the German generals desperate, they resorted to mass infantry charges with relatively untrained soldiers, and took extremely heavy casualties as a result.
If anything, your description of the German army is more accurate for the Wehrmacht in World War 2 than it is for the Kaiser's army.
"As Table 32 shows, the greatest of all the paradoxes of the First World War is that, despite being disastrously disadvantaged in economic terms, the Central Powers were far more successful in inflicting death on their enemies. According to the best available totals for wartime military deaths, some 5.4 million men fighting for the Entente powers and their allies lost their lives, the overwhelming majority of them killed by the enemy. The equivalent total for the Central Powers is just over 4 million. The Central Powers' superiority in killing was thus of the order of 35 per cent. The official British statistics published shortly after the war give an even higher margin of 50 per cent, as do the figures in a number of modern textbooks.52 In other words, the Central Powers were at least a third better at mass slaughter." pg 294
"The trouble was - and here the excuses must stop - that the entire culture of the British regular army militated against effective improvisation. The command structure was based on obedience to superiors and suspicion of subordinates; men could still advance according to their connections; and commanders could still be 'unstuck' by personal quarrels.83 This could have serious repercussions: when Haig questioned Rawlinson's original Somme plan, the latter felt unable to stand his ground, with the result that Haig was able to insist on the suicidal breakthrough objective. As Rawlinson said, 'It is a gamble to go for an unlimited offensive but D. H. wants it and I am prepared to undertake anything within reason [sic].'84 An Army Commander did not presume to correct the Commander-in-Chief, even when tens of thousands of men's lives were at stake.85 Similar inhibitions existed at every level. Orders were issued at the top and fed down the line; there was little traffic in the other direction. As a result, officers, NCOs and men grew accustomed to 'waiting for orders'. In battle, as J. M. Bourne has remarked, 'when German shelling interrupted communications paralysis set in'. To adapt the not inappropriate language of industrial organization, this was 'line management', and it provided no mechanism by which the views of 'junior line managers' could be relayed back to head office.86 Partly for this reason, the proponents of a more technocratic approach made slow headway against the traditional believers in war as a moral rather than material contest.87 Too much emphasis was placed on morale, courage and discipline; not enough on fire-power and tactics." pg 305
"These German tactical strengths were rooted in a distinctive military culture. According to Dupuy, the German military establishment had 'discovered the secret of institutionalizing military excellence'.109 Martin Samuels likewise points to a distinctively German philosophy of combat, which acknowledged its fundamentally chaotic character.'10 This in turn influenced the way command structures evolved. The Germans favoured 'directive command' (task-oriented and decentralized decision making, flexible at all levels) whereas the British preferred 'restrictive control', which deliberately discouraged initiative."1 Differences in training also followed logically from this. German 'chaos theory' demanded a high level of training to promote adaptability; the British approach required only obedience. Moreover, the German officer did not stop learning on obtaining his commission; the officer corps was meritocratic, and dud officers were ruthlessly weeded out."2 This line of argument has been further developed by the work of Gudmundsson on stormtroop tactics, which (he argues) depended for their success on the existence of a 'self-educating officer corps'."3 pg 309
If that's not enough, there's plenty more backup in the book. It's a good read, I recommend it.
If the advice you just gave is so good, why couldn't you (or the book's author) have found an example in which the side following the advice actually won the war?
As for WW1, Germany did defeat Russia. It took America's entry into the war to defeat Germany.
But you want an example. Take WW2. When Hitler allowed his generals to run things, things went well for the German army. When Hitler decided he knew better, he micromanaged the Wehrmacht into defeat and ruin. The Luftwaffe's problems were greatly impeded by Goering making a hash of things, despite his officers pleading with him. Goering would dictate tactics that negated the advantages of the Me-109s in the Battle of Britain. Goering also infamously ordered a literal decimation of his pilots for cowardice, an order that was quietly ignored.
In the naval war, the U-Boot commanders knew that Enigma had been broken and tactics had to change, but Admiral Doenitz knew better and sent them to their doom. Some histories assert that the Germans were clueless about Enigma, but the U-Boot commanders knew the truth.