USS Bonhomme Richard, Amphibious Assault Ship, on fire with explosions reported

Airedale260

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I mean...
We also get a bunch of dumb ass training in the army

I feel like this sounds like an easy excuse for the officers that they shouldn't have and is an attempt to let them off the hook. They had a responsibility to prioritize and do actual sailor stuff. It's actually quite possible to do all this (some of which, like human trafficking awareness, DOES make sense when you consider that there are a ton of women and children being trafficked to be prostituted here and overseas).

Regardless of the subject matter, though, you're talking about what is basically an hour's worth at most of a presentation in a three-month period. If the leadership can't figure out how to shoehorn in the important stuff, then that is a problem because pretty much any manager in a large institution needs to know how to do just that.

What also doesn't help is that there are a bunch of idiotic failures like nobody knowing if their uniforms were the safe ones, or equipment problems, or poor communication and coordination. Hell, you had the entire ship's leadership at the dock and NONE of them could figure out how to coordinate efforts between the Navy and the federal fire department (to say nothing of SDFD, who actually left because nobody was giving them orders and couldn't tell them how or where to slot in and acting as if they should have been telepathic. It took the admiral who commands the entire strike group (who has zero responsibility for firefighting ops or running of a particular ship) to step in and coordinate things on the fly.

And to make matters worse, the Navy KNEW about problems with fires in port after the USS Miami fiasco and wrote updated regs in 2012. But nobody bothered to follow up on them, and nobody did updated training. That’s right: In eight years, *nobody* bothered to schedule any updated training. That’s not “oh, we’re just really busy with other stuff” that’s “we don’t give a fuck.”

Word seems to be a bunch of senior officers (from the ship’s leadership as well as admirals tasked with overseeing compliance with this) are going to get their careers wrecked. It’s long overdue, and quite frankly, it’s a miracle nobody died despite the Navy being incredibly stupid over this.
 

Abhorsen

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Regardless of the subject matter, though, you're talking about what is basically an hour's worth at most of a presentation in a three-month period.
See, here's the problem: Trainings add up to cover vital time. There aren't that many hours a month to spend training, most of it is needed doing work. So each little training is a noticeable timesink, and Prosobiac is right to worry not just about trainings its popular to hate, but generally useless ones. The idea it's just a few hours is how you get 70 training sessions of irrelevant details. Because each one individually isn't bad.
 

Airedale260

Well-known member
See, here's the problem: Trainings add up to cover vital time. There aren't that many hours a month to spend training, most of it is needed doing work. So each little training is a noticeable timesink, and Prosobiac is right to worry not just about trainings its popular to hate, but generally useless ones. The idea it's just a few hours is how you get 70 training sessions of irrelevant details. Because each one individually isn't bad.

Perhaps, but my job requires training on a variety of issues (some of which aren’t relevant to my role but are required). Yet when it comes to actually doing my job and getting training sessions that are relevant, while not compromising my effectiveness, it’s usually not an issue. And if it is, I have a clear chain and method to address such concerns with my boss and further up the chain.

Reasonable people can argue what is relevant and what isn’t, but in such situations, the managers/officers responsible for training should be composing messages and making copies of same, showing they forwarded them on. And if nothing else happens, then they should have resigned as in days past. Because nothing says “Hey, we have a big fucking problem” like the Navy’s officer corps suddenly being gutted because people are fed up with the bullshit.

But they don’t, because they’re more interested in punching clocks and getting their time in so they can retire. Again, in eight years, nobody bothered to address this, or even bother to go over the new regs the Navy put out in cases like this. That isn’t an overload of training, that’s just laziness and the old “Well, this is the way we’ve always done it so we’ll just continue to do it” mentality (which I am all too familiar with).

Again, I don’t think it’s unreasonable to question how much of this training is relevant across the board, but I also think the greater issue is the Navy brass not giving a fuck about effectiveness. And if they’re fucking around on basic stuff, where else are they falling down on the job?

I just don’t want this to be an excuse for the Navy to be let off the hook when the problems it’s focusing on are bureaucratic as opposed to actual warfare. It’s like with the Air Force accidentally sending nuclear weapons unguarded in 2007 -it’s a colossal fuckup and heads need to roll, and publicly.
 

Bacle

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I just don’t want this to be an excuse for the Navy to be let off the hook when the problems it’s focusing on are bureaucratic as opposed to actual warfare. It’s like with the Air Force accidentally sending nuclear weapons unguarded in 2007 -it’s a colossal fuckup and heads need to roll, and publicly.
How much did you actually read about where the arsonist started the fire, how the fire progressed on the ship, and why it was so hard to fight compared to what it should have been?

Because unlike with that accidental nuke transport, this was very much an intentional act, and the arsonist lit the fire during a repair/overhaul period where the normal compartmentalize nature of the ship was wide open to let hoses and shore gear in easier. The fire also started in/beneath the vehicle storage area, and was not caught immediately.

Yes, the Navy brass has been fucking basic damage control shit for nearly a decade now. Yes, there are unnecessary training requirement being tacked on all the time, usually for political purposes, not because they are needed. And yes, the officers of the USN have turned the service in to an 'officer cult' that has meant the Navy is having a hard time retaining enlisteds, which has many knock-on effects.

But what happened here was no accident, it was an intentional act during a particularly vulnerable time period for the ship, and we should be thankful the fucktard who lit the fire didn't kill anyone, even if he totalled the ship.
 

Airedale260

Well-known member
How much did you actually read about where the arsonist started the fire, how the fire progressed on the ship, and why it was so hard to fight compared to what it should have been?

Because unlike with that accidental nuke transport, this was very much an intentional act, and the arsonist lit the fire during a repair/overhaul period where the normal compartmentalize nature of the ship was wide open to let hoses and shore gear in easier. The fire also started in/beneath the vehicle storage area, and was not caught immediately.

Yes, the Navy brass has been fucking basic damage control shit for nearly a decade now. Yes, there are unnecessary training requirement being tacked on all the time, usually for political purposes, not because they are needed. And yes, the officers of the USN have turned the service in to an 'officer cult' that has meant the Navy is having a hard time retaining enlisteds, which has many knock-on effects.

But what happened here was no accident, it was an intentional act during a particularly vulnerable time period for the ship, and we should be thankful the fucktard who lit the fire didn't kill anyone, even if he totalled the ship.

Plenty, and the arsonist is going to almost certainly get his ass nailed as he should.

But again, this was not the first time this sort of thing has happened. The Navy knew that if shit went down while they were in port, whether due to an accident or sabotage, the situation was going to be a complete disaster because they sucked at in-port fire fighting, something that the USS Miami debacle had proved.

Had the Navy not fucked around with in-port fire fighting training (something developed in the aftermath of the loss of the Miami), then it’s much less likely they wind up losing a second warship in port when some asshole decides to fuck around and find out.

I think what’s getting lost here in the discussion is that I see two major problems: The arson itself, and the fact that a significant contributing factor in this is the Navy’s institutional failure to not take potential dangers like this seriously.

The arsonist deserves to rot in the brig for a couple of decades. But the Navy shouldn’t be allowed to blame one guy because they deliberately ignored established safeguards and procedures established to prevent exactly this after someone else had already done it. That’s why I say it is similar to the nuclear weapons incident in 2007 -had the leadership followed proper procedures, it’s very likely that the fire wouldn’t have wrecked the BHR. But they deliberately chose to ignore this danger, and, well, their careers are also wrecked.
 

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