Not fixing our shipyard, 20 years later

I retired from the Navy yesterday after 20 years of service. My career started in the shipyard onboard a submarine. At the time, the shipyard was a miserable place to work, we were constantly fighting to stay on schedule, and it seemed like the shipyard was fighting us nearly every day. The location, Portsmouth, was miserable to: I remember we were warned about parking our cars because the locals nearby would break windows just for fun.

When I and other junior officers complained to our Commanding Officer, he threatened to send us to Afghanistan. Yes, telling people to suck it up because Afghanistan is worse was a thing long before MCPON Smith told the Sailors onboard the BUSH in 2022 the same thing. When four Sailors committed suicide in a row onboard BUSH, and Congress-people starting asking questions, Navy leadership quickly rolled out a…study…to figure out how to improve WiFi and parking.

WiFi and parking. These were issues 20 years ago in the Navy. For 20 years, Admirals gazed at the problem and did absolutely nothing to fix it, yet they found time to standdown the military for extremist training and to add nonsense books to the required reading list.

Here non-warfighting Admiral, let me fix this for you:

• Pay a company to put WiFi on the berthing barges and in the barracks. Find one that does WiFi for hotels and just copy/paste the contract.
• Calculate how many people work on the shipyard when all the piers are full, add 30%, and build parking structures to accommodate those vehicles.

Done. There’s your study. Someone will say it’s not perfect. I agree. We’ve had 20 years of morons in charge of the Navy. We need change now, and this is far better than our current situation. The study will take a year. You could roll out WiFi and build at least parking structures using precast concrete in one year. That would show some actual care for our Sailors and yield immediate results.

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.