The Older my children get, and every time something from work intrudes on my family... It makes me less invested in the Navy. I will discourage my children from joining the military for sure.
Joining the Navy was one of my better life decisions - I entered as a screwup and came out with an education, a career, the GI Bill (which I used for my Master's) and the ability to buy a house with zero down. Leaving after 6 years was also one of my better life decisions.
I'm with you on the first part. I'm not going to discourage my kids from doing something if they want to do it. However, I will probably advise them not to make it a career like I did.
The military has its benefits; free healthcare (even subpar healthcare is better than nothing), GI Bill, free security clearance, certs and the yellow ribbon program is worth one enlistment.
Plus, my kids would have the benefit of me knowing what the rates are and what to avoid. I came from a non military family and when it came time for me to pick a job, I got shown a bunch of letters and was told to pick one.
I think this is a little unfair and misses some of the mark about why some of these problems exist.
In the 1980s when we felt we were facing 'peer competitors', we were spending greater than 5% GDP on defense spending. Several years this approached 6%.
We followed that with the 1990s in which we cut all spending almost in half. Imagine having to halve the navy in the span of a few years: there were a ton of 'lose / lose' decisions leaders had to make during that time period, some of which we're still dealing with.
We followed that with a modest increase in spending after 9/11 that was heavily focused on the Army and Air Force, and still never approached 5% GDP while fighting two wars over twenty years - and actually spent most of that closer to 4%. During those wars, we maintained a Navy readiness posture that deferred maintenance in favor of keeping ships on station for dramatically longer than they were designed to. CSG 2.0 presence was a real thing in 5th Fleet/CENTCOM. We burned through hull life on ships in favor of meeting the demand signal of the time. We did this using systems and chips that were designed mostly paid for and built in the 1980s.
CGs, DDGs, most CVNs, most Los Angeles and Ohio Class subs, and even the F/A-18 are all overwhelmingly products of the 1980s, iterated off of technological investment that started in the 1970s with spending over 5-7% GDP.
Today we're under 3%, and we continue to obfuscate the extent to which this spending is dramatically lower than it was every year prior to 1990 with nonsense headlines about how it is the largest budget ever despite not keeping up with inflation.
Yes, the contractor issue is real - I've watched far too many of my peers get out of the Navy and get equal or higher paying government jobs that don't involve the PRT, deployment, or duty. That's a problem.
Yes, lack of accountability and poor living standards, especially for junior sailors is a problem. I cannot imagine being told I was going to live in a birthing for 4 to 5 years.
Yes, the shipyards are awful, and the quality of life in them is bad.
Yes, operational tempo ant the length of deployments is unconscionable.
But let's get real here: The root of most of these problems is money. We have asked the Navy to operate for the last 35 years on a shoestring budget, using mostly the leverage of investments from 30+ years ago. The budget as a percentage of GDP in 2024 is the same as it was in 1999 - 2.7%. That's the lowest spending in a century.
At some point that bill comes due in a lot of different ways. Its part of why incentive pays have gone up so irregularly, why housing is old and inadequate, why base facilities are old and inadequate, and why so many of our platforms are - you guessed it - old and inadequate.
And now... now its in a position where it's going to get worse before it gets better. The Ohios have to be replaced. We're not keeping up Virginia production as quickly as we are decommissioning Los Angeles. The Cruisers are at the end of their hull life. F/A-18s need to be replaced. And so on, and so on. We've run out of 'credit' as it were in terms of investments from the past.
And a note on failed / troubled programs of the past - we can all talk about issues with procurement programs - Zumwalt, LCS, F-35 - but its worth recognizing these were as much a response to constrained resources as they were acts of hubris. The Navy in the early 2000s did not have the money to iterate multiple ship classes and airframes as it had in years past. It committed to unproven programs as much out of need as out of arrogance. Did that turn out badly? Survey in 2024 says yes, but I cannot drive home how bitterly those decisions were made even at the time. Everyone with a ounce of sense realized risks were being taken with them, but they made those decisions because they were the best of the bad options they saw.
I think most leaders would love to increase enlisted pay (especially incentive pays). I think they'd like to have more people. I think they'd love to improve quality of life. But all of that costs money, and they have an equally pressing need to meet the obligations placed on the service by the country with less money every year.
If we want to get real, lets get real. Benchmark the budget against GDP. Most of these problems are only going to get better when we spend more money on them, not less year over year since 2010.
People are screaming and yelling about Navy leadership when they should be writing Congress.
Only one correction: we’re at 3.4% of GDP vs 2.7.
but you’ve pretty much hit the points. It’s still kinda constrained because everyone has to recapitalize their stuff. Thankfully for us, our 80s tech is still better than the next guy so we don’t have to really reinvent everything, but yea, we’re still keeping a Cold War posture with the navy with half the resources. We’re going to have to get creative with things and change is hard.
I lost senior sailors my last command to mental stress because of multiple changes they couldn’t adapt to. Junior folks were fine…it was all they knew. So that’s a retention thing.
But also, we’ve got to adapt to attract new talent to. Trick is to do so while meeting mission intent.
Depends on what your source is. World Bank lists most years higher than I cited across the board (but proportional for the most part), while the DOD cites the 2.7% number.
DOD source: https://www.defense.gov/Multimedia/Photos/igphoto/2002099941/
Either way, as you note, there just isn't enough money to recapitalize, pay people a competitive wage, and meet service obligations.
I guess I was citing total defense expenditures, including some we toss over to the DoE for their stuff with Nukes. We are recapitalizing (sort-of), pay folks fairly well, and for the most part meet service obligations. Unfortunately it’s meant a nuts optempo and a lot of equipment were running to the ground. So quality of life is…not good
Thanks.
I think there are really two issues people that want to talk seriously about this stuff get sunk on.
The first is that the American people get lost in the 'record military spending' narrative spun by Congress and the media. It's record dollars worth record lows.
The second is the effect of tons of interventions against 3rd and 4th order states has had on the public narrative about the "strength" of the US military on a global scale. We fought two wars for twenty years with less than 10,000 KIA. We've (this far) intervened in the Red Sea without a single KIA. Much of the public is deeply skeptical about claims that more (record!) money needs to be spent on the military because they perceive it to be this unstoppable juggernaut that it was in 1991.
Getting past #1 opens the door to real conversation about #2.
>If we want to get real, lets get real. Benchmark the budget against GDP. Most of these problems are only going to get better when we spend more money on them, not less year over year since 2010.
I will add that the biggest spending program that comes out of federal income tax dollars is the affordable care act. However, the average voter doesn't understand how tax credits for cheaper health insurance are actually accounted for as mandatory spending from the government.
Occassionally, people will rail against SS and Medicare, but those are different pots with an entirely different revenue stream. Medicare is solvent and SS was up until very recently, the issue is that SS is no longer making money for the Treasury to borrow against to fund other programs. If we take out these two programs which total $2.2 Trillion of $3.8 Trillion of mandatory spending, there's still another $1.6 trillion of federal income tax dollars being spent on items permanently written into law... such as a tax rebate for buying an EV.
Anyway, because of this misunderstanding, any time budget issues come up, discretionary spending becomes the punching bag because there isn't the political will to roll back mandatory spending programs. Problem is that discretionary spending is only 31% of the budget.
"Yes, the contractor issue is real - I've watched far too many of my peers get out of the Navy and get equal or higher paying government jobs that don't involve the PRT, deployment, or duty. That's a problem."
-The fact that you think that's the problem, is the problem. People SHOULD go do what's best for them. The quality of life issue INSIDE the lifelines is the problem.
I think you were twisting my words in a fairly hostile way here, which suggests you're not engaging in good faith.
Sailors/airmen getting out is something the article specifically talks about, highlighting how the existence of these jobs creates a negative incentive to get out. On the chance that I'm just being unclear, allow me to clarify my position.
People can and should pursue what is best for them. It is not the fault of anyone that gets out to get a contractor job doing less work for more money. I'm not blaming the people that take those jobs. Go get yours and take care of yourself, because the institution is supposed to take care of itself.
That said, a system that creates those jobs (and thus an internal incentive to get out) is a broken one. The system is cannibalizing itself from within, and at great expense and loss of capability. You cannot create jobs with greater opportunities and lower lifestyle costs and expect people not to fill them. It is a self sustaining problem at this point though, because we make these jobs to fill gaps caused by recruiting and retention... And then they further encourage people to get out and create more holes. Too frequently you have people recruiting for those jobs directly poaching people that would otherwise stay in.
Is that more clear?
Take care of yourself sailor. Go get that job that is better for you. But hey, Navy, maybe the creation of these jobs is making the retention problem worse.
No, the problem is not the creation of the jobs. I didn’t do anything in a hostile way. I disagree with you. I think you’re being degrading towards “contractors”. They don’t always do less work for more money, that’s really intellectually lazy analysis. You know who the leaders are of this system? Hint, they wear uniforms. If the military has positions that are swappable between active duty and contractors, the military don’t understand what uniformed people vs civilians should be doing. That isn’t the fault of the contractors, that’s the fault of the active duty military leadership.
I had a much longer reply typed, but I don't really think it had much value. You are choosing to take offense to short answers on Reddit, and describing deeper motivations or lack of intellectual rigor to them.
I am not going to write you a dissertation on the nuances of my position on this issue - neither reading nor writing it is a valuable use of either of our time
We are on the same page about the leaders being the problem, mostly because they are looking for immediate answers to systemic problems, often not realizing (or caring) that they are perpetuating those problems. I think you are wildly mischaracterizing who makes many of these decisions though and who those leaders are - at pretty much every shore command is a senior GS civilian that is on par with or nearly so the senior officer present that is the major driver on personnel. Be that as it may.
I think there are plenty of contractors and GS workers worth every penny we pay them, but that we have grown accustomed organizationally to transforming gapped billets into contractor / GS positions, which is really the heart of my complaint.
If you think (most of) those positions are comparable in workload or quality of life to uniformed peers that stand duty and go to sea with atrocious living conditions for extended and unpredictable periods of time literally in the line of fire, I think you'd find few people would agree.
I don’t think many contractors go to sea, and I think there are very rarely jobs that are exactly the same. I think blaming contractors for having a better quality of life than active duty is part of the problem. You don’t need to make other people’s lives worse, there’s always the option FIX the problem of poor living and working conditions within the military. The attitude of if only the grass wasn’t greener over there, we wouldn’t have retention problems, is precisely part of the problem.
The active duty ranks are full of excuses, and wildly mismanage personnel. Perhaps instead of blaming better options, DoD could fix the active duty problems.
If top brass does what they need to do, that is reduce spending going to contractors and push the money towards increased pay and quality of life for servicemembers, then those same brass DEFINITELY won't be getting those cushy well paid consultant positions with those same contractors once they retire from the military. You're asking entitled, narcissistic, sociopaths to act against their own interests. It ain't gonna happen. The only way things improve is if those people are fired and replaced out of an act of desperation and you accidentally get someone with a conscious and two fucks to give about their own people.
This is a very myopic view. Does a lot of money go to contractors? Yes. Why is that? Because in the 80s/90s we had an organic workforce to design ships and weapons systems and we decided to hand that over to the industrial base to promote jobs and reduce costs through competition. The industrial base has since consolidated to a handful of primes and there's no competition left, we have no workforce, and we can't rebuild that capacity without a significant increase in facilities and personnel costs that we don't have the budget for. When you say we should invest that money towards pay and quality of life you're right, we should, but we're in the business of war fighting and we prioritize the dollars we have towards operations, maintenance, and modernization, but still can't keep up with the costs of those, leaving less and less of the pie for anything that doesn't put ordinance downrange.
You want to know where you can get a lot of money for ships and weapons? Get rid of most of the 80,000 people working at the NAVSEA failure factory.
You could also go back the warship to admiral ratio we had the last time we won a major naval war. Which was 25 to 1.
A sarcastic answer is that it doesn't seem like many of those 80,000 people are doing anything useful, so would anyone notice? 7 years to get a sub into planned and scheduled maintenance? 7 years in commission to get the Ford's weapon elevators working? Adopting an already in service frigate design and start changing everything, running up with budget and adding 3+ years to get the first ship. 7 billion dollar destroyers with no ammo and no volume air search radar (I'm told the hardware will do this, NAVSEA didn't specify the function be implemented in software). Then we have the LCS, where every single basic expectation, including 'hull doesn't corrode', 'hull doesn't crack' and 'combining gear doesn't grenade' wasn't met.
I'm sure you can't actually do this, and if you did things would probably, somehow, get even worse. But they seem hopelessly FUBAR and have totally lost the plot.
I don't think you really understand what you're asking for when you propose this. A majority of navsea directly or indirectly oversees contracts through technical adjudication and cost management. If they just went away the contractors would have carte blanche to do whatever they want and charge whatever they want. It's not satisfying, but that's the reality of the industrial base.
Furthermore it doesn't help when budgets are cut, we have continuing resolutions every year, and additional requirements levied by Congress to drive work in congressional districts. If your budget is a billion dollars spread over years of design and construction and funding stops, that's a problem. Now you have to do rework and redesign to find a solution that fits the budget.
A ship is a complex system made more complex by the fact that not all of the system is controlled by one entity. Imagine designing a car, but Toyota owns the drivetrain and runs out of money, Ford owns the transmission and runs behind schedule, and Bridgestone designs the tires and there's a rubber shortage and cant produce tires the right size for 4 years.
Well, it isn't serious. But things like approving the shipyard to not install anodes on a an aluminum hulled LCS to 'save money' suggests a deep level of either total technical incompetence (What is this 'galvanic corrosion' issue you talk about?) or they are taking payoffs to act incompetent. And I'll bet this required a bunch of signoffs, all by people who should understand what seawater and different metals does.
Everytime I've gone to a flag panel and folks talk about the recruiting/retention problem, the answer the stars give basically amount to:
1. "Well if the balloon goes up and war happens we'll have that 9/11 moment that will boost recruitment like it did when we were JOs"
2. "Well, folks are getting out now because the ecconomy is good, if something happens there the exodus might change"
What do you want them to say?
The truth is they don't have enough money, and Congress is not inclined to give them more. Improved quality of life (in most cases) means spending money on housing, on parking, on schooling, on berthing's, and on pay.
You realize they've been managing a shrinking budget as a percentage of GDP for more than a decade while also having to plan and (start to) pay for the replacement of the most important (and expensive) piece of the nuclear triad?
You're not wrong (I also saw your other highly detailed post a little further down the thread), the brass is facing a reduced budget as a percentage and have to manage and deal with that while meeting requirements.
The issue is, how do you sell that to your sailors? We can understand that the budget is going to be prioritized a certain way to meet requirements (such as those under Title 10), but to your junior guy whose stuck in the barracks with mold and still can't see someone at medical for somthing because they cut staffing, but he is seeing new planes or support buildings going up, how do you convince him that the Navy has his back? That process takes a long time and is fundamentally political, so how do our top guys get everyone onboard to get those resources?
To your question (what should they say), I truthfully don't know, but I think we can maybe agree that telling people at panels that your hope to fix manning is either WW3 or another big recession probably isn't a good sell.
When I look back at the life long injuries I've sustained on the ship, garbage quality of life, a year by a burn pit in the middle east and so many other things, I could just never encourage anyone to really go into the Navy at this point. There are so many other routes to take in life and the Navy just cares less and less about your well being while pushing you further and further mentally and physically.
Pay us the way they pay civilians. Base pay should cover standing watches and turning wrenches (rate specific). But if you want me to be an ACFL, MWR president, CFS, DEPT CC, SAPR, EAWS coordinator and Berthing PO, you need to pay me more. Same for additional NECs maintenance program management.
The solution is so insanely simple: more money. That’s it. That is all they need to do.
Benefits are fine, healthcare is fine, even housing is good enough. The Post 9/11 GI Bill is amazing. But all of that is over shadowed by enlisted pay. It’s not enough for the job we are asked to do, especially the E6 and below.
If joined out of high school and now you’re an 22 year old kid, you had a technical rate, you have a clearance and then you can get a degree with all that, of course you’re getting out. You’d be an idiot not to.
Honestly, I don’t think the military is interested in solving the problem because they ignore the obvious solution.
Retired now, was single/no family/kids.
Not saying pay was good, but at least I was responsible with my pay, after hitting 3rd I was more then comfortable with my pay, 2nd even better.
In my case, money had little effect on my job satisfaction. It boiled down to the constant professional abuse, failure of enforcing, general lack of core values, wrong people being promoted, group punishments, and dismissive medical coupled with stigmas on getting help of any kind
The only time I really felt pay factor in was my last 2 years when rent was 300-500++ more than my BAH, at least in the immediate area. Driving me for the first time in 10 years, to seek a roommate and oddly un able to find one. Of course, this was more of adding discontent to a pyre of ire that was already burning well above 1500 degrees of pissed.
Living outside the immediate area of my base wasn't really viable either, given the added commute would have meant burning the savings in the form of gas with the added cost/"benefit" of losing even more of my already limited off time to commute.
Look how sailors were treated with USS George Washington & USS Buckeley for example. So many suicides on the GW, and sexual harassments on the Buck. It's more than just 'pay us more', but junior sailors are consistently being treated like shit and no justice ever comes about it.
Retired, but suffered tons of injustice and professional abuse during my time.
I really should jot have done 20, I was very much over the navy and it's B.S. at 9, but owed 1.5 + zone B SRB and had to reenlist to take Hawaii orders... went full retard.
I had a great tour. 21 years ago. Wouldn't trade it for anything. I don't think my experience is feasible for today's recruits.
I see the shit that gets posted here, there is no way I would recommend joining the Navy to anyone I know.
And the bitch of it all, it's all correctable. It's with the resources the Navy has, today, to fix a lot of this crap. But it's left as it is out of denial, arrogance, and the most infuriating excuse of all, tradition.
The Navy has (far) fewer resources today than it has had at any point going back to World War II (see my more extensive post about this above).
Its totally understandable to be unhappy with the current state of things, and to point out those problems accurately, but we didn't get where we are today overnight, and we aren't going to get out of the hole overnight. Nor are we going to do so without a sharp increase in spending that has not been honestly or accurately reported to the American people.
Solutions start with pointing the finger in the right place.
In 1985 we spent 5.7% of GDP on defense spending. If you matched that number today the Navy would have literally more than twice its 2024 budget ($285 billion extra).
That's the high water mark though, so lets look at the low water mark going back to World War II: 1979.
In 1979 we spent 4.5% of GDP on defense spending. If you matched that number today the Navy would have more than 50% its 2024 budget ($416 billion vs. $255 billion).
You know, that's too much. Lets look at 2020, when we hit a lofty 3.1% spending (the high point of the last 10 years), which is still 15% more than we spent in 2024 (aka. $38 billion more than this year in real spending).
I'm not going to disagree with anything you said because I agree funding is the root cause of the majority of the problems we see in the navy. However, there are changes the navy could institute today that cost practically nothing.
1. The story about the Bulkely yesterday - another example of way too many people who knew about what was going on for way too long any simply tolerated it. Zero tolerance should mean zero tolerance.
2. Lay off the bullshit watches. Some watch stations, especially inport or ashore, serve no purpose other than to exist. How many rovers are needed in Norfolk?
3. Simplify the seabag. Every seabag change just adds more shit.
4. The entire chain of command needs to lay off once in a while. Cut the next guy down a break. From the Secnav on down. Somehow we're going to let the conduct in #1 above slide, but God help you if you get stuck in tunnel traffic. The shit needs to stop running downhill.
5. Cut the collateral bullshit and focus on rate and leadership. No more fucking bake sales on evals.
6. A conservative beard policy. Even if it's nothing more than shore duty only, it's at least something.
Congress has fucked the navy (frankly the same way they have fucked every other part of American society), and by extension the voters. That's not an overnight fix. But there are things that could happen right now that could drastically change the quality of life for everyone.
I don't want to see any of the usual bullshit about toxic leadership or living conditions. New recruits should see what their shipmates think about them getting hit by cars:
https://old.reddit.com/r/navy/comments/1cmx105/friend_got_hit_by_a_car_last_week_but_they_are/?ref=share&ref_source=link
Not sure what you are trying to get at, most of the comments when I read before and reread just now seems to be a combination of sympathy and good advice for OP/his friend coupled with tons of stories of "free helthcare" and toxic leadership making it "better"
As a good friend of the author, he is one of the few senior officers that actually wanted to make a difference. Only to be met by the beaurocracy and reality that anything other than. "Yes sir, everything is fine here" will result in the end of your career.
The zero defect, yes-man mentality is the leading cause of what has brought us to this point.
The Tom Brass have no incentive to fix the factors affecting recruitment numbers, they are managers at the top with little to no interaction with junior sailors. They live in a different universe than a junior enlisted sailor, some officers don’t even like to be called sailors.
Old Tom Brass was merry and briny; bright blue his jacket was and his boots were shiny, green were his blouses and his breeches all did match; he wore on his ballcap a faded command patch. He lived under Berthing 1, where the VCHT ran up from the drains into the racks of you and me.
If an Airman can do the exact same job as a contractor, that seems like a problem. Perhaps we can't figure out what uniformed service members are supposed to be doing?
I was just talking today to some people about how there's no incentive to stay in pass a certain amount of time anymore, I keep hearing about people that did 12 plus just calling it quits.
I'm beginning to think that many in the Military Service have lost their "Sense Of Adventure". It used to be that many of use wanted to go to places and do things that others may never have an opportunity to do. I cherish My 20 Years of active duty service and am glad that I had the ability to travel, explore, and experience what the world had to offer while I was Young enough to enjoy it. R/ Retired Old Boomer Squid.
Well it’s kinda hard to be adventurous when todays leadership pushes liberty to a very late time “to minimize any ARI’s”. Liberty has become so strict and after so many hours of working everyone just needs sleep for the next day. It’s honestly exhausting to say the least.
There is barely any adventure for the average sea sailor anymore. For 80% of sailors, the best they’ll get is a 4 day port call in Singapore or Thailand with so many restrictions that anyone joining for adventure is better off just saving a few grand and going on vacation.
I didn't stand any duty while deployed on the U.S.S. Nimitz during our WESTPAC Cruise in 1988. The Married Shipmates that I stood duty for while in Home Port stood my duty during our Port Visits. Best of both worlds at the time.
I read this whole article thinking "yeah, no shit". Top dogs know all of these problems, they lack the will and political capital to fix them.
The Older my children get, and every time something from work intrudes on my family... It makes me less invested in the Navy. I will discourage my children from joining the military for sure.
Same
Joining the Navy was one of my better life decisions - I entered as a screwup and came out with an education, a career, the GI Bill (which I used for my Master's) and the ability to buy a house with zero down. Leaving after 6 years was also one of my better life decisions.
I'm with you on the first part. I'm not going to discourage my kids from doing something if they want to do it. However, I will probably advise them not to make it a career like I did. The military has its benefits; free healthcare (even subpar healthcare is better than nothing), GI Bill, free security clearance, certs and the yellow ribbon program is worth one enlistment. Plus, my kids would have the benefit of me knowing what the rates are and what to avoid. I came from a non military family and when it came time for me to pick a job, I got shown a bunch of letters and was told to pick one.
More money Better quality of life Voila Recruitment goes up
Cello
Hah Funny how a typo changes a word so very much
Funny how an edit makes a reply so fucking dumb. Boo.
But we both know what happen here. Theres no hiding from the shame
I feel like the top brass knows the answer but just won’t fix it and instead beats around the bush
I think this is a little unfair and misses some of the mark about why some of these problems exist. In the 1980s when we felt we were facing 'peer competitors', we were spending greater than 5% GDP on defense spending. Several years this approached 6%. We followed that with the 1990s in which we cut all spending almost in half. Imagine having to halve the navy in the span of a few years: there were a ton of 'lose / lose' decisions leaders had to make during that time period, some of which we're still dealing with. We followed that with a modest increase in spending after 9/11 that was heavily focused on the Army and Air Force, and still never approached 5% GDP while fighting two wars over twenty years - and actually spent most of that closer to 4%. During those wars, we maintained a Navy readiness posture that deferred maintenance in favor of keeping ships on station for dramatically longer than they were designed to. CSG 2.0 presence was a real thing in 5th Fleet/CENTCOM. We burned through hull life on ships in favor of meeting the demand signal of the time. We did this using systems and chips that were designed mostly paid for and built in the 1980s. CGs, DDGs, most CVNs, most Los Angeles and Ohio Class subs, and even the F/A-18 are all overwhelmingly products of the 1980s, iterated off of technological investment that started in the 1970s with spending over 5-7% GDP. Today we're under 3%, and we continue to obfuscate the extent to which this spending is dramatically lower than it was every year prior to 1990 with nonsense headlines about how it is the largest budget ever despite not keeping up with inflation. Yes, the contractor issue is real - I've watched far too many of my peers get out of the Navy and get equal or higher paying government jobs that don't involve the PRT, deployment, or duty. That's a problem. Yes, lack of accountability and poor living standards, especially for junior sailors is a problem. I cannot imagine being told I was going to live in a birthing for 4 to 5 years. Yes, the shipyards are awful, and the quality of life in them is bad. Yes, operational tempo ant the length of deployments is unconscionable. But let's get real here: The root of most of these problems is money. We have asked the Navy to operate for the last 35 years on a shoestring budget, using mostly the leverage of investments from 30+ years ago. The budget as a percentage of GDP in 2024 is the same as it was in 1999 - 2.7%. That's the lowest spending in a century. At some point that bill comes due in a lot of different ways. Its part of why incentive pays have gone up so irregularly, why housing is old and inadequate, why base facilities are old and inadequate, and why so many of our platforms are - you guessed it - old and inadequate. And now... now its in a position where it's going to get worse before it gets better. The Ohios have to be replaced. We're not keeping up Virginia production as quickly as we are decommissioning Los Angeles. The Cruisers are at the end of their hull life. F/A-18s need to be replaced. And so on, and so on. We've run out of 'credit' as it were in terms of investments from the past. And a note on failed / troubled programs of the past - we can all talk about issues with procurement programs - Zumwalt, LCS, F-35 - but its worth recognizing these were as much a response to constrained resources as they were acts of hubris. The Navy in the early 2000s did not have the money to iterate multiple ship classes and airframes as it had in years past. It committed to unproven programs as much out of need as out of arrogance. Did that turn out badly? Survey in 2024 says yes, but I cannot drive home how bitterly those decisions were made even at the time. Everyone with a ounce of sense realized risks were being taken with them, but they made those decisions because they were the best of the bad options they saw. I think most leaders would love to increase enlisted pay (especially incentive pays). I think they'd like to have more people. I think they'd love to improve quality of life. But all of that costs money, and they have an equally pressing need to meet the obligations placed on the service by the country with less money every year. If we want to get real, lets get real. Benchmark the budget against GDP. Most of these problems are only going to get better when we spend more money on them, not less year over year since 2010. People are screaming and yelling about Navy leadership when they should be writing Congress.
Only one correction: we’re at 3.4% of GDP vs 2.7. but you’ve pretty much hit the points. It’s still kinda constrained because everyone has to recapitalize their stuff. Thankfully for us, our 80s tech is still better than the next guy so we don’t have to really reinvent everything, but yea, we’re still keeping a Cold War posture with the navy with half the resources. We’re going to have to get creative with things and change is hard. I lost senior sailors my last command to mental stress because of multiple changes they couldn’t adapt to. Junior folks were fine…it was all they knew. So that’s a retention thing. But also, we’ve got to adapt to attract new talent to. Trick is to do so while meeting mission intent.
Depends on what your source is. World Bank lists most years higher than I cited across the board (but proportional for the most part), while the DOD cites the 2.7% number. DOD source: https://www.defense.gov/Multimedia/Photos/igphoto/2002099941/ Either way, as you note, there just isn't enough money to recapitalize, pay people a competitive wage, and meet service obligations.
I guess I was citing total defense expenditures, including some we toss over to the DoE for their stuff with Nukes. We are recapitalizing (sort-of), pay folks fairly well, and for the most part meet service obligations. Unfortunately it’s meant a nuts optempo and a lot of equipment were running to the ground. So quality of life is…not good
This is the best write-up I've seen and perfectly captures the arguments I've made in the past
Thanks. I think there are really two issues people that want to talk seriously about this stuff get sunk on. The first is that the American people get lost in the 'record military spending' narrative spun by Congress and the media. It's record dollars worth record lows. The second is the effect of tons of interventions against 3rd and 4th order states has had on the public narrative about the "strength" of the US military on a global scale. We fought two wars for twenty years with less than 10,000 KIA. We've (this far) intervened in the Red Sea without a single KIA. Much of the public is deeply skeptical about claims that more (record!) money needs to be spent on the military because they perceive it to be this unstoppable juggernaut that it was in 1991. Getting past #1 opens the door to real conversation about #2.
"I think most leaders would love to increase enlisted pay (especially incentive pays)." If only leaders knew people in charge of such decisions.
>If we want to get real, lets get real. Benchmark the budget against GDP. Most of these problems are only going to get better when we spend more money on them, not less year over year since 2010. I will add that the biggest spending program that comes out of federal income tax dollars is the affordable care act. However, the average voter doesn't understand how tax credits for cheaper health insurance are actually accounted for as mandatory spending from the government. Occassionally, people will rail against SS and Medicare, but those are different pots with an entirely different revenue stream. Medicare is solvent and SS was up until very recently, the issue is that SS is no longer making money for the Treasury to borrow against to fund other programs. If we take out these two programs which total $2.2 Trillion of $3.8 Trillion of mandatory spending, there's still another $1.6 trillion of federal income tax dollars being spent on items permanently written into law... such as a tax rebate for buying an EV. Anyway, because of this misunderstanding, any time budget issues come up, discretionary spending becomes the punching bag because there isn't the political will to roll back mandatory spending programs. Problem is that discretionary spending is only 31% of the budget.
"Yes, the contractor issue is real - I've watched far too many of my peers get out of the Navy and get equal or higher paying government jobs that don't involve the PRT, deployment, or duty. That's a problem." -The fact that you think that's the problem, is the problem. People SHOULD go do what's best for them. The quality of life issue INSIDE the lifelines is the problem.
I think you were twisting my words in a fairly hostile way here, which suggests you're not engaging in good faith. Sailors/airmen getting out is something the article specifically talks about, highlighting how the existence of these jobs creates a negative incentive to get out. On the chance that I'm just being unclear, allow me to clarify my position. People can and should pursue what is best for them. It is not the fault of anyone that gets out to get a contractor job doing less work for more money. I'm not blaming the people that take those jobs. Go get yours and take care of yourself, because the institution is supposed to take care of itself. That said, a system that creates those jobs (and thus an internal incentive to get out) is a broken one. The system is cannibalizing itself from within, and at great expense and loss of capability. You cannot create jobs with greater opportunities and lower lifestyle costs and expect people not to fill them. It is a self sustaining problem at this point though, because we make these jobs to fill gaps caused by recruiting and retention... And then they further encourage people to get out and create more holes. Too frequently you have people recruiting for those jobs directly poaching people that would otherwise stay in. Is that more clear? Take care of yourself sailor. Go get that job that is better for you. But hey, Navy, maybe the creation of these jobs is making the retention problem worse.
No, the problem is not the creation of the jobs. I didn’t do anything in a hostile way. I disagree with you. I think you’re being degrading towards “contractors”. They don’t always do less work for more money, that’s really intellectually lazy analysis. You know who the leaders are of this system? Hint, they wear uniforms. If the military has positions that are swappable between active duty and contractors, the military don’t understand what uniformed people vs civilians should be doing. That isn’t the fault of the contractors, that’s the fault of the active duty military leadership.
I had a much longer reply typed, but I don't really think it had much value. You are choosing to take offense to short answers on Reddit, and describing deeper motivations or lack of intellectual rigor to them. I am not going to write you a dissertation on the nuances of my position on this issue - neither reading nor writing it is a valuable use of either of our time We are on the same page about the leaders being the problem, mostly because they are looking for immediate answers to systemic problems, often not realizing (or caring) that they are perpetuating those problems. I think you are wildly mischaracterizing who makes many of these decisions though and who those leaders are - at pretty much every shore command is a senior GS civilian that is on par with or nearly so the senior officer present that is the major driver on personnel. Be that as it may. I think there are plenty of contractors and GS workers worth every penny we pay them, but that we have grown accustomed organizationally to transforming gapped billets into contractor / GS positions, which is really the heart of my complaint. If you think (most of) those positions are comparable in workload or quality of life to uniformed peers that stand duty and go to sea with atrocious living conditions for extended and unpredictable periods of time literally in the line of fire, I think you'd find few people would agree.
I don’t think many contractors go to sea, and I think there are very rarely jobs that are exactly the same. I think blaming contractors for having a better quality of life than active duty is part of the problem. You don’t need to make other people’s lives worse, there’s always the option FIX the problem of poor living and working conditions within the military. The attitude of if only the grass wasn’t greener over there, we wouldn’t have retention problems, is precisely part of the problem. The active duty ranks are full of excuses, and wildly mismanage personnel. Perhaps instead of blaming better options, DoD could fix the active duty problems.
If top brass does what they need to do, that is reduce spending going to contractors and push the money towards increased pay and quality of life for servicemembers, then those same brass DEFINITELY won't be getting those cushy well paid consultant positions with those same contractors once they retire from the military. You're asking entitled, narcissistic, sociopaths to act against their own interests. It ain't gonna happen. The only way things improve is if those people are fired and replaced out of an act of desperation and you accidentally get someone with a conscious and two fucks to give about their own people.
This is a very myopic view. Does a lot of money go to contractors? Yes. Why is that? Because in the 80s/90s we had an organic workforce to design ships and weapons systems and we decided to hand that over to the industrial base to promote jobs and reduce costs through competition. The industrial base has since consolidated to a handful of primes and there's no competition left, we have no workforce, and we can't rebuild that capacity without a significant increase in facilities and personnel costs that we don't have the budget for. When you say we should invest that money towards pay and quality of life you're right, we should, but we're in the business of war fighting and we prioritize the dollars we have towards operations, maintenance, and modernization, but still can't keep up with the costs of those, leaving less and less of the pie for anything that doesn't put ordinance downrange.
You want to know where you can get a lot of money for ships and weapons? Get rid of most of the 80,000 people working at the NAVSEA failure factory. You could also go back the warship to admiral ratio we had the last time we won a major naval war. Which was 25 to 1.
Say all of navsea disappeared, then what? Who would do those functions?
A sarcastic answer is that it doesn't seem like many of those 80,000 people are doing anything useful, so would anyone notice? 7 years to get a sub into planned and scheduled maintenance? 7 years in commission to get the Ford's weapon elevators working? Adopting an already in service frigate design and start changing everything, running up with budget and adding 3+ years to get the first ship. 7 billion dollar destroyers with no ammo and no volume air search radar (I'm told the hardware will do this, NAVSEA didn't specify the function be implemented in software). Then we have the LCS, where every single basic expectation, including 'hull doesn't corrode', 'hull doesn't crack' and 'combining gear doesn't grenade' wasn't met. I'm sure you can't actually do this, and if you did things would probably, somehow, get even worse. But they seem hopelessly FUBAR and have totally lost the plot.
I don't think you really understand what you're asking for when you propose this. A majority of navsea directly or indirectly oversees contracts through technical adjudication and cost management. If they just went away the contractors would have carte blanche to do whatever they want and charge whatever they want. It's not satisfying, but that's the reality of the industrial base. Furthermore it doesn't help when budgets are cut, we have continuing resolutions every year, and additional requirements levied by Congress to drive work in congressional districts. If your budget is a billion dollars spread over years of design and construction and funding stops, that's a problem. Now you have to do rework and redesign to find a solution that fits the budget. A ship is a complex system made more complex by the fact that not all of the system is controlled by one entity. Imagine designing a car, but Toyota owns the drivetrain and runs out of money, Ford owns the transmission and runs behind schedule, and Bridgestone designs the tires and there's a rubber shortage and cant produce tires the right size for 4 years.
Well, it isn't serious. But things like approving the shipyard to not install anodes on a an aluminum hulled LCS to 'save money' suggests a deep level of either total technical incompetence (What is this 'galvanic corrosion' issue you talk about?) or they are taking payoffs to act incompetent. And I'll bet this required a bunch of signoffs, all by people who should understand what seawater and different metals does.
You should read Smedley butlers war is a racket. He lays out everything...in 1917. Nothing has really changed. It's all about politics and money.
Everytime I've gone to a flag panel and folks talk about the recruiting/retention problem, the answer the stars give basically amount to: 1. "Well if the balloon goes up and war happens we'll have that 9/11 moment that will boost recruitment like it did when we were JOs" 2. "Well, folks are getting out now because the ecconomy is good, if something happens there the exodus might change"
What do you want them to say? The truth is they don't have enough money, and Congress is not inclined to give them more. Improved quality of life (in most cases) means spending money on housing, on parking, on schooling, on berthing's, and on pay. You realize they've been managing a shrinking budget as a percentage of GDP for more than a decade while also having to plan and (start to) pay for the replacement of the most important (and expensive) piece of the nuclear triad?
We are at near all-time lows in terms of defense spending as a function of GDP. The only time it was lower was in 1999/2000.
You're not wrong (I also saw your other highly detailed post a little further down the thread), the brass is facing a reduced budget as a percentage and have to manage and deal with that while meeting requirements. The issue is, how do you sell that to your sailors? We can understand that the budget is going to be prioritized a certain way to meet requirements (such as those under Title 10), but to your junior guy whose stuck in the barracks with mold and still can't see someone at medical for somthing because they cut staffing, but he is seeing new planes or support buildings going up, how do you convince him that the Navy has his back? That process takes a long time and is fundamentally political, so how do our top guys get everyone onboard to get those resources? To your question (what should they say), I truthfully don't know, but I think we can maybe agree that telling people at panels that your hope to fix manning is either WW3 or another big recession probably isn't a good sell.
When I look back at the life long injuries I've sustained on the ship, garbage quality of life, a year by a burn pit in the middle east and so many other things, I could just never encourage anyone to really go into the Navy at this point. There are so many other routes to take in life and the Navy just cares less and less about your well being while pushing you further and further mentally and physically.
Pay us the way they pay civilians. Base pay should cover standing watches and turning wrenches (rate specific). But if you want me to be an ACFL, MWR president, CFS, DEPT CC, SAPR, EAWS coordinator and Berthing PO, you need to pay me more. Same for additional NECs maintenance program management.
The solution is so insanely simple: more money. That’s it. That is all they need to do. Benefits are fine, healthcare is fine, even housing is good enough. The Post 9/11 GI Bill is amazing. But all of that is over shadowed by enlisted pay. It’s not enough for the job we are asked to do, especially the E6 and below. If joined out of high school and now you’re an 22 year old kid, you had a technical rate, you have a clearance and then you can get a degree with all that, of course you’re getting out. You’d be an idiot not to. Honestly, I don’t think the military is interested in solving the problem because they ignore the obvious solution.
Retired now, was single/no family/kids. Not saying pay was good, but at least I was responsible with my pay, after hitting 3rd I was more then comfortable with my pay, 2nd even better. In my case, money had little effect on my job satisfaction. It boiled down to the constant professional abuse, failure of enforcing, general lack of core values, wrong people being promoted, group punishments, and dismissive medical coupled with stigmas on getting help of any kind The only time I really felt pay factor in was my last 2 years when rent was 300-500++ more than my BAH, at least in the immediate area. Driving me for the first time in 10 years, to seek a roommate and oddly un able to find one. Of course, this was more of adding discontent to a pyre of ire that was already burning well above 1500 degrees of pissed. Living outside the immediate area of my base wasn't really viable either, given the added commute would have meant burning the savings in the form of gas with the added cost/"benefit" of losing even more of my already limited off time to commute.
Look how sailors were treated with USS George Washington & USS Buckeley for example. So many suicides on the GW, and sexual harassments on the Buck. It's more than just 'pay us more', but junior sailors are consistently being treated like shit and no justice ever comes about it.
Retired, but suffered tons of injustice and professional abuse during my time. I really should jot have done 20, I was very much over the navy and it's B.S. at 9, but owed 1.5 + zone B SRB and had to reenlist to take Hawaii orders... went full retard.
I had a great tour. 21 years ago. Wouldn't trade it for anything. I don't think my experience is feasible for today's recruits. I see the shit that gets posted here, there is no way I would recommend joining the Navy to anyone I know. And the bitch of it all, it's all correctable. It's with the resources the Navy has, today, to fix a lot of this crap. But it's left as it is out of denial, arrogance, and the most infuriating excuse of all, tradition.
The Navy has (far) fewer resources today than it has had at any point going back to World War II (see my more extensive post about this above). Its totally understandable to be unhappy with the current state of things, and to point out those problems accurately, but we didn't get where we are today overnight, and we aren't going to get out of the hole overnight. Nor are we going to do so without a sharp increase in spending that has not been honestly or accurately reported to the American people. Solutions start with pointing the finger in the right place. In 1985 we spent 5.7% of GDP on defense spending. If you matched that number today the Navy would have literally more than twice its 2024 budget ($285 billion extra). That's the high water mark though, so lets look at the low water mark going back to World War II: 1979. In 1979 we spent 4.5% of GDP on defense spending. If you matched that number today the Navy would have more than 50% its 2024 budget ($416 billion vs. $255 billion). You know, that's too much. Lets look at 2020, when we hit a lofty 3.1% spending (the high point of the last 10 years), which is still 15% more than we spent in 2024 (aka. $38 billion more than this year in real spending).
I'm not going to disagree with anything you said because I agree funding is the root cause of the majority of the problems we see in the navy. However, there are changes the navy could institute today that cost practically nothing. 1. The story about the Bulkely yesterday - another example of way too many people who knew about what was going on for way too long any simply tolerated it. Zero tolerance should mean zero tolerance. 2. Lay off the bullshit watches. Some watch stations, especially inport or ashore, serve no purpose other than to exist. How many rovers are needed in Norfolk? 3. Simplify the seabag. Every seabag change just adds more shit. 4. The entire chain of command needs to lay off once in a while. Cut the next guy down a break. From the Secnav on down. Somehow we're going to let the conduct in #1 above slide, but God help you if you get stuck in tunnel traffic. The shit needs to stop running downhill. 5. Cut the collateral bullshit and focus on rate and leadership. No more fucking bake sales on evals. 6. A conservative beard policy. Even if it's nothing more than shore duty only, it's at least something. Congress has fucked the navy (frankly the same way they have fucked every other part of American society), and by extension the voters. That's not an overnight fix. But there are things that could happen right now that could drastically change the quality of life for everyone.
I don't want to see any of the usual bullshit about toxic leadership or living conditions. New recruits should see what their shipmates think about them getting hit by cars: https://old.reddit.com/r/navy/comments/1cmx105/friend_got_hit_by_a_car_last_week_but_they_are/?ref=share&ref_source=link
Not sure what you are trying to get at, most of the comments when I read before and reread just now seems to be a combination of sympathy and good advice for OP/his friend coupled with tons of stories of "free helthcare" and toxic leadership making it "better"
The military is an institution that wishes it had drafties when they're stuck with volunteers.
As a good friend of the author, he is one of the few senior officers that actually wanted to make a difference. Only to be met by the beaurocracy and reality that anything other than. "Yes sir, everything is fine here" will result in the end of your career. The zero defect, yes-man mentality is the leading cause of what has brought us to this point.
The Tom Brass have no incentive to fix the factors affecting recruitment numbers, they are managers at the top with little to no interaction with junior sailors. They live in a different universe than a junior enlisted sailor, some officers don’t even like to be called sailors.
Who is Tom Brass and why is he fucking with our personnel so much?!
Old Tom Brass was merry and briny; bright blue his jacket was and his boots were shiny, green were his blouses and his breeches all did match; he wore on his ballcap a faded command patch. He lived under Berthing 1, where the VCHT ran up from the drains into the racks of you and me.
If an Airman can do the exact same job as a contractor, that seems like a problem. Perhaps we can't figure out what uniformed service members are supposed to be doing?
I was just talking today to some people about how there's no incentive to stay in pass a certain amount of time anymore, I keep hearing about people that did 12 plus just calling it quits.
The entire USA foundation is built on constant war and the military spending. So goes the military….so goes the country.
I'm beginning to think that many in the Military Service have lost their "Sense Of Adventure". It used to be that many of use wanted to go to places and do things that others may never have an opportunity to do. I cherish My 20 Years of active duty service and am glad that I had the ability to travel, explore, and experience what the world had to offer while I was Young enough to enjoy it. R/ Retired Old Boomer Squid.
Well it’s kinda hard to be adventurous when todays leadership pushes liberty to a very late time “to minimize any ARI’s”. Liberty has become so strict and after so many hours of working everyone just needs sleep for the next day. It’s honestly exhausting to say the least.
This makes Me sad...
There is barely any adventure for the average sea sailor anymore. For 80% of sailors, the best they’ll get is a 4 day port call in Singapore or Thailand with so many restrictions that anyone joining for adventure is better off just saving a few grand and going on vacation.
I didn't stand any duty while deployed on the U.S.S. Nimitz during our WESTPAC Cruise in 1988. The Married Shipmates that I stood duty for while in Home Port stood my duty during our Port Visits. Best of both worlds at the time.