Your lawn requires maintenance. If you don’t put time and effort into filling your lawn with nice grass, it will eventually fill up with undesirable weeds. Nature abhors a vacuum, so its going to fill the lawn if you don’t. Similarly, the Navy is going to fill its manpower requirements one way or another. Between draining its DEP rolls, slow-rolling retirements, suspending body fat and physical fitness failures, and even suspending high year tenure, you’d think for just a minute that it all might work, that this nibbling around the edges of the problem (instead of addressing it directly) would bring in enough recruits.

Nope.

The Navy, still circling the drain, has now decided to start draining the reserves. Reservists are folks who typically served an initial enlistment and then decided to leave the military but retain a connection to the service. They muster one weekend a month and typically serve a two-week period during the year on active duty. In return they remain eligible for health care and get a cut-down retirement. It’s not a bad gig, but in the past most reservists were barely meeting standards and were thought of as a “break glass in case of emergency” manpower solution. The terrorist attacks on 9-11 changed that and resulted in a bit of a change so that reservists were more available for extended deployments.

Not surprisingly, the Navy is making it easier to tap into reserves and making it harder for people to fail out of the reserves. Let’s look at the following NAVADMINs:

NAVADMIN 158/23: POLICY FOR ACTIVATION AND EMPLOYMENT OF RESERVE COMPONENT FORCES IN FY24 AND BEYOND

NAVADMIN 160/23: SELECTED RESERVE ADVANCEMENT TO WARFIGHTING POSITIONS PROGRAM PHASE I

NAVADMIN 167/23: SEPTEMBER 2023 (CYCLE 260) ACTIVE-DUTY AND TRAINING AND ADMINISTRATION OF THE RESERVE (TAR) E-4 THROUGH E-6 ADVANCEMENT AND MODIFICATION TO SELECTED RESERVE E-4 ADVANCEMENT ANNOUNCEMENT (CYCLE 113)

NAVADMIN 158 references the a memo that basically says Navy Individual Augmentees (IAs) are eating the force alive, and lays out a plan to have Navy Reservists fill more of these billets, even if they are involuntarily activated…meaning they get told “Drop your civilian job and take this crappy military job.”

I am NOT a fan of IAs. These were initially brought out during the invasion of Afghanistan because the Army was short people, and the Navy said “We can send some people to Afghanistan to fill slots!” Seems like a good idea, until 20 years later we were STILL filling IAs. Meanwhile, Navy manpower went missing at key places like shipyards, support facilities and the like, so our Navy platforms suffered, our shore facilities rotted, and Sailor morale went into the toilet. Somehow in 20 years the Army couldn’t staff its own war? Color me skeptical…

So even after we lost Afghanistan, we’re STILL using IAs…and why this is true still boggles my mind. Naturally, it kills morale to go to one job then get yanked to go to another, especially one shore duty when you were promised some time with your family. So instead of killing active duty Sailors morale, we’ll kill Reservist Sailor morale.

NAVADMIN 160 tells us that if you’re an E-4 or E-5, you can take a Selected Reserve (SELRES) job one paygrade above, and after completion you get a permanent paygrade bump. Not bad, you might think. But lets be honest…why would a Sailor not make the next rank? Perhaps he just had bad timing. But more often, he or she was probably not all that great of a Sailor. So now, performance be damned, you get promoted if you take the right job.

NAVADMIN 167 basically makes it even easier to promote. If you’re an E-3 wanting to make E-4, all requirements have been removed, so long as your Commanding Officer says OK, you’ll make rank. High year tenure (where you get booted from the military if you haven’t made a certain rank by a certain number of years in the military) is suspended through 2024…and my guess is they’ll suspend it again. This NAVADMIN is basically making it easier than ever to stay in the Navy no matter how dumb or bad at your job you are.

The sad part is…this won’t work. The Navy continues to not address the morale issues brought on by a restrictive COVID-19 “vaccine” requirement, white supremacist training and the inability to do basic things like fix ships, have decent berthing and fight naval wars. Even Navy veterans like myself are telling our kids not to join. Until the Navy addresses the fundamental issues at hand, these short-sighted efforts will fail.

This post represents the views of the author and not those of the Department of Defense, Department of the Navy, or any other government agency.

I never thought I’d see the day. In fact, I waited till this morning to write this post, because I thought for sure someone would cave in.

But it happened:

And even better:

Lose talent??

Wait wait wait wait a second.

DoD thought it would simply bypass the Hyde Amendment without any consequences? Remember when I wrote that the Department of the Navy basically threatened anyone that challenged spending command funds on elective abortions? Re-read that again and think about how condescending that last paragraph is. Apparently at least a few people called their Senators and Representatives, because now we have some action on it.

I find it insulting that the military’s free health care won’t pay for orthodontic work or specialized contacts to prevent myopia in my children, but they will bend over backwards for abortions and transgender surgery. I’ve had Tricare for quite some time now, and yet I continue to spend money on my kids medical care, often in cases where the doctor says “This is necessary care,” but Tricare refuses to cover the bill.

And in case anyone is wondering, I had one kid with two teeth that came in at an angle that would have had them punching out her lip. I had to pay over $2,000 for specialized braces with chains to pull them into place. Somehow Tricare said that wasn’t “medically necessary.”

So yeah, I’m totally fine with the DoD taking it in the shorts and being slapped around by Congress and told to enforce the Hyde Amendment. Even better, the first person that violates it (and you know that is going to happen) needs to be investigated and blackballed from promotion, because if you don’t take enforcement actions, it’s just a hollow threat.

As to losing DoD talent, spare me. The same generals and admirals that lost in Afghanistan, lied to President Trump about putting troops in Syria (tell me again how good that’s going), can’t fix our ships, can’t roll out advanced weapon systems to deal with China, and have now presided over a huge drop in morale and can’t recruit enough warm bodies for the coming slaughter new young people to be Sailors, Soldiers, Airmen, Marines, Coast Guardsman and Guardians….that’s the “talent” we want to recruit?

If I got to say anything Senator Tuberville, I would simply ask: can you run off more of that so-called talent?

If anything is going to make a difference quickly, it would be finding the O-7, O-6 and O-5 talented warfighters that are somehow still in the service and to begin cultivating them for high level jobs. Getting the right leaders into place can make a huge difference. Just ask Admiral Rickover, who single-handedly drove the development of the Navy’s nuclear submarine and carrier program.

If you have Republican Senators or Representatives, tell them to keep it up AND to start searching for the talented O-6s and O-7s, because its only by promoting these people that we can hope to save the military. They need to search now because you can trust the current promotion boards to find talented warfighters for tomorrow’s conflicts.

Overall, I’m happy House and Senate Republicans found their spinal cord. Let’s hope they continue to stay resolved on these matters.

This post represents the views of the author and not those of the Department of Defense, Department of the Navy, or any other government agency. That’s because it represents actual views from warfighters, and as we’ve already seen, our existing government agencies don’t want to actually win any wars.

A few years ago, a young lady knocked on my door in Hawaii. She happened to be a volunteer from the Census Bureau, and I spent about 30 minutes answering Census Bureau questions. Unlike most of the other door to door surveys that I promptly ignore, I actually wanted my voice heard by the Census Bureau. About halfway through the survey, I was asked by the surveyor “Do you approve of smoking in the home?”

Me: “Uhm, in my home or other people’s homes?”
Surveyor: “The question doesn’t specify.”
Me: “Well, that’s kind of important. I don’t smoke, and I don’t let people smoke in my home, but I really don’t care if they smoke in their homes.”
Surveyor: “The question only has a Yes or No answers.”
Me: “Then my answer is Yes, I’m OK with smoking in the home.”

Not surprisingly, the overall results showed something like 85% of people disapproved of smoking in the home, which was then used as proof that we should conduct more smoking cessation programs.

I’m willing to bet that more than a few people felt the same way I did but chose “No.” When you design a survey question without allowing for nuance or more than a binary answer, you skew the results. That’s not good from a simple truth perspective, but its really not good if you intend to base financial and policy decisions on the results. With that in mind, flash forward a few years and I receive an email asking me to take the Health of the Force survey for the Navy. I wrote about this survey before and how it showed that the Navy is VERY unhealthy in so many ways, so I was hopeful the survey would dig further to identify the areas where the Navy can improve.

Yeah….not so much. I took screen shots as I completed the survey so you can see just how bad it was.

Let’s start with the question “What factors are or would most likely influence you to get out of the Navy?” That’s a legitimately good question, and you get to select your top five options. Maybe the Navy should put something in the survey about readiness and shipyard issues, given the massive amount of news coverage on ship schedules slipping and Sailors committing suicide in Newport News. Or what about wokeness? Or the COVID “vaccine”? Maybe people are particularly incensed about it, or maybe they aren’t, so listing it as a choice would help shed some light on it.

Nope. All the answers are super generic responses that don’t ask any hard questions. They have responses for “Leadership at current command,” but nothing about shipyards, logistics, medical, or other support services that Sailors constantly complain about.

The best option I had was “Senior Navy leaders.” I selected that, and I expounded in the comments, but again, super generic, and not going to result in anything actionable.

Another set of questions asked about Command leadership, still focused on the local command. They did bring in enlisted leaders, which is good, because in the past they often only focused on the Command Triad (the Commanding Officer, Executive Officer and Command Master Chief). But there are no support questions. Plenty of Sailors are frustrated with Navy’s Mandatory Crappy Internet (NMCI), or the lack of investment in our shore facilities, but neither of those issues are the command’s fault. Those decisions are made by top brass, who are never held accountable for how miserable they make Sailors.

What about “How I feel in the Navy” questions? Again, touchy-feely stuff, but nothing that gets at the hard issues we have going on.

And then the DIE questions. That’s like a full 30% of the survey, but I’ll spare you the agony of reading the questions. All of these ask about sexual harrasment and racism and such, which are important…but aren’t the reasons Sailors commit suicide in their baracks room.

This survey was frustrating. I wrote paragraphs in the free-form section, which I am sure will be promptly ignored by the non-warfighter HR officer bent on using the survey to justify more white supremacy training in the fleet. This survey will provide no useful results and will continue to ignore the actual problems in the fleet. It will be used by the Department of the Navy to justify more money in DIE and other stupid programs when we need more efforts towards fixing ships and training our Sailors to be ready for combat. As a taxpayer, you should be angry over this survey and demand better from your elected representatives.

This post represents the views of the author and not those of the Department of Defense, Department of the Navy, or any other government agency.