One of the biggest concerns for a Chinese invasion of Taiwan is the loss of TSMC, a huge company that makes around 80% of the world’s advanced microprocessors and chipsets and 55% of chips overall. Think about that for just one second…55% of all chips in the entire world are made by one company. In your home alone, there are chips in your computer, cars, certain HVAC components, smartphones, your wifi router, TVs, and even things like refrigerators. 55% of these chips come from one company.
That’s pretty crazy when you think about it. TSMC has facilities around the world, although the majority are located in Taiwan. Why wouldn’t it open more facilities in the US? Well, because its expensive due to all the red tape involved in making facilities in the US and because there is not enough talent in the US to make chips. If we drop the nice language, TSMC has basically said it costs too much and Americans aren’t smart enough to make these advanced chips.
Ouch. So much for all that STEM money we keep throwing at education that gets misused. Since chips are key components of most weapon systems, Congress passed the CHIPS act to subsidize and incentivize chip manufacturers in America. But guess what came along with the money? A whole lot of strings, including DEI strings:
The law contains 19 sections aimed at helping minority groups, including one creating a Chief Diversity Officer at the National Science Foundation, and several prioritizing scientific cooperation with what it calls “minority-serving institutions.” A section called “Opportunity and Inclusion” instructs the Department of Commerce to work with minority-owned businesses and make sure chipmakers “increase the participation of economically disadvantaged individuals in the semiconductor workforce.”
– The Hill
This is exactly why China and other nations can beat us at these high-end games. Americans are known for working hard and figuring things out, and until recently the advanced nature of American colleges and other education institutions was known around the world. But we’ve allowed morons (and if you support DEI, you are a moron) to write our laws and corrupt our institutions. The steady rise in costs from these morons has driven everyone away, from chip manufacturers and oil and gas production to basic tools and batteries.
We did this to ourselves. We can undo it too. Imagine a world without stupid bureaucrats running everything into the dirt. Imagine the US unleashing its potential and the hard work and smarts actually paying off, not being stifled by people insisting on laws and incentives that make no sense in the real world. A far better world, and one within our reach, if we choose to make it so.
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.
Re-entering the workplace after being a stay-at-home mother has to suck. It used to be considered a noble and honorable thing to take care of small children. Heck, it used to be considered a profession that would normally pay on the order of $100K-$120K a year. When you think about it, a stay-at-home mother is balancing checkbooks, cooking meals, taking care of sick children, constantly doing laundry and sanitizing her home (young children are terrible spreaders of disease), and increasingly home-schooling children while driving them to various activities.
Yet most employers look at the “break in resume” as a negative, and don’t view stay-at-home mothers as doing any work. Then again, most of these people probably forget to thank their mothers on Mothers Day, so perhaps I shouldn’t be surprised. My wife recently re-entered the workplace, and although she is working from home (and we still have a 2 year old), it was a challenge to find an employer that didn’t look down on her decision to care more about her children and husband then a career.
In honor of her decision, and given the increasing desire to hire older workers over younger workers, I asked Microsoft CoPilot to build some resume bullets for a stay-at-home mom re-entering the workplace, and I got these:
Multitasking & Time Management: Successfully managed a busy family schedule, including educational activities, sports commitments, and doctor appointments, while maintaining a clean and organized home.
Budgeting & Financial Planning: Effectively managed household budget, making strategic decisions to ensure financial stability and meet long-term family goals.
Conflict Resolution & Problem Solving: Developed strong problem-solving skills through mediating sibling disputes and addressing unexpected household issues.
Communication & Interpersonal Skills: Fostered an open and supportive family environment that encouraged open communication, emotional support, and mutual respect.
Project Management: Led and executed various projects, such as planning family events and home improvement tasks, demonstrating strong organizational and leadership skills.
Not bad CoPilot, but I think I can do better:
Professional chauffeur. Successfully balanced the extracurricular needs of five individuals whose activities are always located during rush hour traffic and at opposite ends of the city. Managed to avoid accidents, get children to places on time and yet still get dinner on the table.
Skilled negotiator. Can successfully argue with children from 2 to 18 years old, providing persuasive arguments in the wide spectrum of age ranges. Able to bribe without being discovered by peers.
Outstanding Communicator. Able to switch seamlessly between soothing words needed to calm a 4 year old to the angry words needed to vivisect a school administrator that decided pornographic books are a great idea in school libraries. Utilizes full volume range, from sweet whispers to banshee-level screaming to prevent small children from playing in traffic.
Multitasking Momma. Can you take a shower, get dressed and put on makeup, balance a checkbook, take out the garbage cans, make four lunches and boot a cantankerous teenager out the door to school, all before 7 AM and without the luxury of coffee?
Long Range Planner. Provided life guidance to children otherwise lost in the world. Able to keep a husband motivated despite a soul sucking job that cares little of him. Builds her own world that might look messy on the outside, but has more love and charisma then any corporate party.
Given that the next generation seems to whine about showing up on time, putting on real clothes (no, pajamas at your job interview don’t count), and can’t think out more than 2 days…I’ll take a stay-at-home mom as an employee over a whiny 20-something any day.
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.
Man, did the MS Society screw up big this time. After firing a 90-year-old volunteer who asked “what pronouns meant,” then doubling down on the firing, then realizing people were willing to move their donation money elsewhere, they issued a non-apology that said they had “the best of intentions.”
Plenty of people are calling for more than an apology, and I agree with them. It’s not enough to apologize. The fact that nobody was fired is always telling. Real apologies don’t contain excuses, they simply apologize and do right by the victim.
The leftist craziness that has taken over corporations and other organizations only stops when someone pushes back. Hard. Remember Target?
That drop in stock price was well understood. While Target is still a fairly woke store, it certainly has become far more restrained.
Budweiser too. And Harvard, Yale and Penn. And now the MS Society, because there are plenty of places to donate towards MS research. I guess MS Society might have to lay off some of the 118 employees that make over 100K a year, according to comments at Legal Insurrection.
Face it, the crazy left-wing folks want you to keep donating and buying their products while they wish you would die. I wish it wasn’t true, but it is. Stop donating to them. Don’t feel bad about donating to other causes. You can find better beer than Budweiser, better stores than Target, better colleges than Harvard, and better charities than MS Society. Walk away without looking back. Don’t fund the craziness.
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.
Not a week goes by without someone remarking that I must be lucky to have military medical insurance. A few years ago I would agree that military health care, despite the ups and downs, was actually not too bad. I’ve had surgery, preventative and acute care, and almost all the time it was decent.
The Military Sealift Command hospital ship USNS Comfort (T-AH 20) makes her way through the Panama Canal to cross into the Pacific Ocean on June 3, 2009. The Comfort is participating in Continuing Promise 2009, a four-month humanitarian and civic assistance mission providing medical and other services in seven countries throughout Latin America. DoD photo by the U.S. Navy. (Released)
That’s not true anymore. It’s now taking months to schedule an appointment. I called in January and was given first availability in April. The visits I have had recently are rushed, and I notice more doctors being borrowed between facilities to make appointments happen. Increasingly, I have to seek care at facilities more than an hour’s drive from my home.
What happened? Well, to put it bluntly, the military decided that health care is an expense, not an investment. Last year the services combined all military health records and scheduling into one system called MHS Genesis. This in itself is a good thing, since it means if I seek care at an Air Force hospital, they can get my records electronically without me having to bring physical records along from a Navy hospital
But someone used the merger to lay off thousands of employees. From the perspective of a twidget sitting behind a desk, heath care is an expense. You do everything in your power to minimize expenses, including firing people, shuttering facilities and offering less services in the pursuit of “finding efficiencies.” I’m sure it padded someone’s pockets, but it’s now resulting in less and less health care.
I’ll use myself as an example. I need a routine surgery. Normally it takes 2-4 weeks to schedule. Right now I’m looking at summer time at the earliest, because the USNS COMFORT is deploying, and when she deploys, they empty the nearby Naval hospitals of doctors to go underway. Great for Central America, terrible for our own military members.
Gee, the US government caring more about foreign citizens than their own people? Where have I seen that before?
If you need mental health appointments, better schedule a month out. While there are lots of suicide resources available on the spot, they are almost all over the phone and haven’t made a dent in suicide rates:
“Active Component suicide rates have gradually increased since 2011. While the 2022 Active Component rate is slightly higher (3%) than 2021, both years remain lower than 2020.” -Department of Defense Releases Annual Report on Suicide in the Military: Calendar Year 2022
Surprising no one, the military’s solution to lack of care is…bring more dependents into military health care?
Hicks laid out a plan to grow the number of patients who receive care in a military treatment facility by 7% by the end of 2026, compared to the number of beneficiaries in December 2022. That would mean 3.3 million people would be using the MTFs in three years, according to Military Times calculations.
So let me get this straight. You can’t see patients in a timely fashion now. You “right sized” health care so that it barely gets by. You prioritized treating foreign citizens over your own. You did one thing right, which was move dependents out into civilian care so they can get treated and not suffer. And instead of hiring more people, or changing how you man the USNS COMFORT, or any number of ways to address the inability to provide health care, you want to bring on MORE patients into an already stressed system?
This makes no sense except in one case: financial. In the FY2024 request for funding, there is this section:
Controlling Health Care Costs DOD’s budget request noted that private sector care accounted for 65% of the total care delivered to beneficiaries and that it “will continue to represent an important part of the overall health system in [FY2024] and beyond.” DOD did not state a long-term strategy to control these health care costs while sustaining military medical readiness requirements and other health-related program investments.
So well over half of military health care is delivered by the private sector. Literally, the military couldn’t make it work if it tried. But that’s expensive, and in typical fashion, the military thinks it can do it cheaper, despite not having a great track record in doing so.
Treating health care as an expense, rather than a mission enabler, means we’ll never get the surge capacity needed to deal with wartime injuries and never get appointment scheduling to a reasonable level. This limits the use of Tricare as a recruiting and retention tool, and will exacerbate an already difficult recruiting problem. It’ll force more people, including myself, to pay out of pocket for care we were promised when we first signed up. And for some reason, the military wants to shoot itself in the foot over this.
I don’t recommend it…I heard gunshot wounds take 4-6 weeks to schedule an initial appointment.
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.
People are finally beginning to pay attention to declining birth rates, since it will send Social Security into a death spiral, and there are plenty of efforts in Congress to provide tax cuts to promote people having more children. These efforts are doomed to fail, because more tax dollars motivates exactly zero people to have more children.
I have five kids at home, and in honor of them today, I’ll give you the top five reasons people don’t have more kids.
Number 5: Our public schools suck
I live in a fairly nice community, and my oldest daughter goes to a high school “academy” which has a specialized track for medicine. You have to apply to get in, so you would think it would be a fairly rigorous education. Sadly, you’d be wrong. There are kids that have failed classes in multiple semesters still hanging out, and just like how not prosecuting criminals brings more crime, not punishing poor performance brings more poor performance.
The older families at our church say “Well just homeschool,” but that is NOT cheap if you use a co-op, online curriculum, or anything other than doing it yourself…which takes a lot of time. Worse still, the child-hating Democrats in my state shot down bills that let homeschoolers participate in sports or get tax credits for expenses, so you get punished socially and financially for choosing homeschool. Worse still, the price of private education has skyrocketed, so if you’re a one-income family with mom or dad at home with lots of kids (like my family is), you better be loaded with money or else it’s a non-starter.
The fact is most large families have to rely on public school, and because they suck so bad, parents spend more time than they did in the past to supervise them, which takes away time from their own activities. You either tolerate loser teachers that don’t understand history, homeschool your kids or pay out the nose for education. Not exactly desirable. And speaking of the time suck…
Number 4: Most after school activities are run by inconsiderate people with no children
My son was in rec league baseball for a while. Good fun, but he would be out at games until 9 pm some nights…on school days, when he’s in middle school. When I was growing up, 9 pm was considered late as a middle schooler. You might be awake at home, but certainly not doing regular activities.
Not anymore. I regularly have kids in activities until 9 or even 11 pm at night! Ballet dance competitions and late night sports are by far the biggest offenders, but it’s everywhere now. These involve driving at night, getting home late, and then (for you as the parent anyway) waking up early to drive the 30-60 minutes to get to work (or more if you live in a big city). Talk about wearing you down! Worse still, half of these places have no pauses for dinner, so if you have a big family with small kids, pray you can pack enough food and that your little ones aren’t tired and cranky.
I particularly hate people that plan meetings or activities over dinner or lunch…pet peeve of mine.
All of this means most of my friends with two kids can manage a grueling rec softball season, but I have to balance five kids desires against my desire to get some sort of sleep. All at the expense of any hobbies I might want. Which brings up the next point…
Number 3: Society constantly tells you to not have kids
Now, I won’t begrudge people their hobbies, just like I don’t begrudge people that make more money than me. Everyone makes choices, and having more kids is a choice. But I’d be a rich man if I had a nickel everytime someone offered me advice along the lines of “You know how birth control works right” ***insert snicker here***.
A more salty friend of mine once, in a group conversation, replied with “I do, and I know your wife does too!”, which was the most alpha-male verbal throat chop I’d seen in a while. But I digress.
It’s already hard enough to find alone time with your spouse as a Catholic who follows the Marquette Method. It sucks having doctors push birth control on you every. single. visit. It’s even more fun to have them tell you that NFP doesn’t work and that you’re stupid for doing it (their words, not mine). And it’s rare to have anyone respond to “I have five living kids” with “Wow, what a beautiful family,” when the more common response is one of disdain. Speaking of disdain…
Number 2: Companies making having kids hard
Car seats used to be thin. Now they are thrones. And you can’t fit three across without making a sacrifice to the car seat goddess. It’s so bad that it is a form of birth control. And before you chime in about “safety ratings,” I looked up the safety ratings of these thrones, and I found the changes between seats to be similar to how professors change chapters in a book to force students to buy new books. The ratings are getting a whole lot better compared to the real estate they consume.
Unless you can explain how adding 5 pounds of side force to an already high rating significantly affects the safety rating, I’m going to always say that car seat manufacturers hate large families. I’ve done the math, it doesn’t add up.
Try eating out now…even McDonalds (which I don’t visit) is expensive. Now multiply it by 7. Try finding a home with enough bedrooms and fighting off investors to buy it, and definitely don’t tell your friends that your kids have to share a bedroom, because you’ll get looked at like some sort of monster. Or try fighting the little old lady HOA President that drives around your neighborhood and issues you tickets for your kids bikes in the front lawn.
Screw that lady…so glad I don’t live in a HOA…
Companies in general appeal to DINKs (Dual Income, No Kids), and if they do appeal to kids, they like you to have two. Anymore and you better be loaded. Which brings me to the last point…
Number 1: Society values work, not your family
If you say “I’m a homemaker” as a woman, you get looked down upon. Even if you manage five kids, which involves feeding them, balancing a checkbook, driving them everywhere, answering school emails and helping out on homework…somehow that isn’t “real work.” But you could sit in an office, drink coffee, chit chat with your office mates, and put in a whole 3 hours of work a day, and that’s “real work.”
Don’t worry though, like the Bobs, work will value you up to the point you are told your services are no longer required!
Face it, we stopped valuing stay-at-home parents a while back. We think they are lesser for picking their family over full-time paid employment.
And that’s the rub right there. When you create a toxic environment for people that have or want large families, you will get smaller families. The societal pressure permeates everything, far more than any financial incentive. Even if you got paid $20,000 a year per child, you’d be called a welfare rat for taking the money. It goes farther than even children, because when the point of getting married isn’t to raise kids, it makes it easy to simply “shack up,” which is why the current marriage rate is less than half that in 1976.
Until our society treats raising kids as a noble goal and worthy of the respect it deserves, we will continue to have declining birth rates among the majority of people that feel societal pressure.
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.
With all the dumb headlines and conspiracy theories surrounding Taylor Swift, you could be forgiven for missing a far more important headline: that the Ukrainians sank the Russian corvette Ivanovets using unmanned surface vessels.
The Ukrainians continue to use cheap drones to hit Russian troops on land and now attack vessels at sea. When you lack the money and infrastructure to build high end tanks, aircraft and ships, and you have to counter such units, cheap drones are going to be the best selection.
Right now we’re seeing wave attacks of guided drones, which require a human in the loop. This will last until electronic weapons become good enough that having a command link to guide the drones becomes too big of a risk. At that point we’re going to start seeing autonomous drones launched on one-way missions that will strike targets without ever calling back to home.
This isn’t to say that drones make ships, aircraft and troops obsolete. Drones can’t occupy land (at least, not until Skynet has its way) and they can’t run airports and seaports. Drones will act as a way of denying the use of these facilities, sea lanes or land. The opposing side will have to develop cheap ways of responding, because its not economically feasible to use a million dollar missile to shoot down a $10K drone every time you are attacked. The United States would do well to develop these methods now before we have to develop them in a hurry in the Red Sea.
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.
Plenty of people make New Years Resolutions. Plenty of those have been broken by this time already. It seems the Navy wants to engage in that silliness too. Check out NAVADMIN 003/24, titled America’s Warfighting Navy. Sounds cool right? Well, let’s take a look.
1. Who We Are. We are the United States Navy, the most powerful navy in the world. We are the Sailors and Civilians who have answered our Nations call to service. We are Americans who embody character, competence, and dedication to our mission. Our identity is forged by the sea and we serve with honor, courage, and commitment.
2. What We Do. We are here to preserve the peace, respond in crisis, and win
decisively in war. We operate far forward, around the world and around the
clock, from the seabed to space, in cyberspace, and in the information
environment to promote our Nations prosperity and security, deter aggression,
and provide options to our nations leaders. We deliver power for peace, but
are always postured and ready to fight and win as part of the Joint Force and
alongside our Allies and partners.
3. Where We Are Going. The threats to our nation and our interests are real and growing. The strategic environment has changed; gone are the days of operating from a maritime sanctuary against competitors who cannot threaten us. The National Defense Strategy makes clear that we must defend our homeland, deter strategic attack, deter and be prepared to prevail in conflict against the Peoples Republic of China, and meet the acute challenge of an aggressive Russia and other persistent threats. Our adversaries have designed their militaries to overcome our traditional sources of strength. We must move rapidly to stay ahead and continuously create warfighting advantages. We must think, act, and operate differently, leveraging wargaming and experimentation to integrate conventional capability with hybrid, unmanned, and disruptive technologies. Tomorrows battlefield will be incredibly challenging and complex. To win decisively in that environment, our Sailors must be the best warfighters in the world with the best systems, weapons, and platforms to ensure we can defeat our adversaries. We will put more players on the field platforms that are ready with the right capabilities, weapons and sustainment, and people who are ready with the right skills, tools, training, and mindset.
4. Our Priorities. We will focus on Warfighting, Warfighters, and the Foundation that supports them. a. Warfighting: Deliver Decisive Combat Power. We will view everything we do through a warfighting lens to ensure our Navy remains the worlds preeminent fighting force. We will prioritize the readiness and capabilities required to fight and win at sea, and the logistics and shore support required to keep our Navy fit to fight. We recognize that we will never fight alone. We will advance naval integration with the Marine Corps, and synchronize and align our warfighting efforts with the Joint Force. We will design and drive interoperability with our Allies and partners to deliver combined lethality.
b. Warfighters: Strengthen the Navy Team. We will use the principles of
mission command to empower leaders at all levels to operate in uncertain,
complex, and rapidly changing environments, ready to take initiative and bold
action with confidence. We will build strong warfighting teams, recruiting
and retaining talented people from across the rich fabric of America. We will
provide world- class training and education to our Sailors and Civilians,
honing their skills and giving them every opportunity to succeed. We will
ensure our quality of service meets the highest standards, and we will look
after our families and support networks, who enable us to accomplish our
warfighting mission.
c. Foundation: Build Trust, Align Resources, Be Ready. We will earn and reinforce the trust and confidence of the American People every day. We will work with Congress to field and maintain the worlds most powerful Navy and the infrastructure that sustains it. We will team with industry and academia to solve our most pressing challenges. We will cooperate with the interagency to bolster integrated deterrence. We will align what we do ashore with the warfighting needs of our Fleet.
5. Our Charge. America is counting on us to deter aggression, defend our
national security interests, and preserve our way of life. With the right
tools, a winning mindset, and the highest levels of integrity, we will
operate safely as a team to deliver warfighting excellence.
Well…good luck! You certainly have your work cut out for you!
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.
To nobody’s huge surprise, “Dr” Fauci revealed that the 6 foot “social distancing” rule was basically made up.
More made-up science. If you doubted it back then, you were ridiculed as anti-science, censored, silenced. Now it becomes clear: “trust the science” really means “obey authority.” https://t.co/pMETn98T4R
Lest anyone forget, there were plenty of 6-foot Nazis that screamed at you for getting inside the 6 foot distance…unless it was at a BLM riot. People were doing all sorts of logical backflips to justify riots while shutting down church services. I remember having to open church doors and stream service using a cell phone, laptop and projector so the people outside could still attend.
What frickin’ rubbish.
But that’s not the point of this article. During this time thousands of service members were dismissed from service for refusing the vaccine, which we are finding doesn’t work well, and that COVID is going to essentially be like the flu: annoying, even temporarily incapacitating, but not really a threat to young and healthy that (at least now) make up our military force. Most of these were General Discharges, which can negate the amount of VA benefits you receive. Worse still, this was done as businesses were recovering from the shutdown, so many servicemembers and their families suffered through unemployment and underemployment.
Plenty of Republican lawmakers are making it easy for those members to return to service, and most are…not taking it. These same lawmakers are proposing legislation to open VA benefits to these servicemembers and discharge upgrades. I don’t have an issue with any of this, except that this is first aid, and in reality people should be fighting back.
First aid helps people that have been hurt. In this case, servicemembers got screwed out of good jobs, retirement benefits, VA benefits, and all the other things they were promised if they raised their hand to defend our country. Restoring those things will help in the near term, but its not going to repair the long term damage done. Look at how poorly our recruiting efforts are going. More than a few young people watched how a loved one was poorly treated and said “Gee, I’m not signing up for that!”
First aid isn’t enough. People need to fight back.
Every official that pushed this nonsense needs to be punished.
Court martial flag officers that pushed for General Discharges. At least the Navy had the good sense to use Honorable Discharges for most of its folks. Every flag officer that used a General Discharge knew they were screwing people out of benefits, and even late in the game they continued to push for it. Court martial every, single one of them. For the ones already retired, bring them back and charge them, which is still legal (although perhaps bringing back a few admirals and generals will get this thrown out).
Fire the civilian leaders that pushed this nonsense. Their zeal and glee in punishing people needs to be matched with stiff fines and jail time.
First aid doesn’t save you when you’re being assaulted. Only fighting back will.
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.
Over the holiday period I didn’t bother checking the latest NAVADMINs, because spending time with my family was for more important. So when I looked this week, I saw I missed a doozy: the Navy’s message concerning retention boards.
In December the Navy announces its promotion boards, which are in January (for Captains), Feb-March (for Commanders), and April-May (for Lieutenant Commanders). Some years ago the Navy began convening the retention board immediately after these boards to decide the fates of anyone not selected for promotion. The overarching policy of retention boards is a direct measure of the health of the service, and well, the Naval Service is not healthy.
Paragraph 2 states that any Captain (O-6) that has certain AQDs (basically, special training or expertise in a specific area) that relate to Acquistion can stay until 33 years of service. Normally Captains have to retire at 30 years of service. This isn’t a huge surprise, the Navy is in dire need of Acquisition Workforce personnel, so it’ll keep anyone that it can.
LCDRs (O-4s) that twice failed to select for CDR (O-5) will simply be kept until 20 years, when they can retire. They won’t even be considered for retention…it’s assumed. In the past the retention board could be used to shape manpower by removing the bottom performing LCDRs. That is not happening at all now, essentially if you have a pulse and made O-4, you can stay till 20 years.
Let’s say you’re a LCDR that is a flight instructor, chaplain, cyber warfare engineer, foreign area officer, information professional, maritime space officer, medical corps, nurse corps or supply corps. What if you want to stay past 20 years? Well, you can!
URL 1310 aviators with primary AQDs of DIP or DA5/DA7/DB2/DB5/DB6/DD1/DH3/DL3/DS2 (TACAIR), CWE, FAO, IP, and SC officers selected for continuation will be continued for a period of 3 years to 23 YOAS. CHC, MSO, MC, and NC officers selected for continuation will be continued until the last day of the month in which the officer completes 24 YOAS.
That right there is a bad sign. That means we are significantly short in all those areas, and we’re willing to keep people for an additional 3-4 years to cover the gaps.
What about Lieutenants (O-3s)? Typically LTs that are passed over twice for O-4 are sent home at the end of the next fiscal year. The only LTs I’ve seen the Navy hold onto are people that were prior enlisted and needed another year to reach mandatory officer retirement criteria. But now:
Lieutenant (LT) Aerospace Engineering Duty Officer (AEDO), CHC, CWE, Cryptologic Warfare (CW), Dental Corps (DC), FAO, Intelligence Officer (INTEL), IP, Judge Advocate General's Corps (JAGC), MC, Medical Service Corps (MSC), MSO, NC, and SC will follow the below as applicable: a. 2XFOS LTs covered in paragraph 4 with less than 18 YOAS and selected for continuation will be continued for a period of three years, but not beyond retirement eligibility at 20 YOAS.
FOS stands for “Failure of Selection.”
So now LTs can stay for 20 years until they can retire. I never thought I’d see that, but here we are. Granted, it’s not every officer, but it won’t surprise me if the retention board eligibility expands to include more officer specialties.
I want to remind everyone that this crisis was generated 100% by our own government:
We changed the retirement system way back in 2016-2018, which was the number one thing that kept good people in past 5-10 years of service. I predicted this would end badly, by the way.
Then we started losing wars, specifically Afghanistan. We drew out of Afghanistan in a horrible way, so everyone that lost limbs or part of their sanity fighting in that war felt betrayed. This in turn made them tell their kids to never join the military.
Oh, and we stayed around in Syria so more of our people could die needlessly. Because nothing says we love our Special Forces more than allowing them to die needlessly in a crappy country where we don’t have an exit strategy.
NOW, we are SHOCKED! SHOCKED! that we are in a huge recruiting. crisis. I made a prediction back in February that the Navy would use its “BINGO card” to keep people in:
Not kicking people out for physical fitness test failures
Waiving darn near everything, from age to non-violent felonies
Asking people to pretty-please stay around a few more years
Opening OCS and other admissions
Raising bonuses
Make life better for officers
Reduce opportunities to leave early
Op-Hold people
The Navy has in fact done all the things in bold. The only missing one is making life better. Maybe that’s a draw, since if you wanted free time and per diem off to go murder your unborn baby, you can now get it. The only prediction that hasn’t held was that the Navy would remove marijuana from its drug test, although it was totally an option in Congress.
My prediction for 2024: it only gets worse!
We’ll relax rules on marijuana, opioids and other drugs
Mental health rules will relax
Bonuses will be handed out just to get on the bus
We’ll create some new ribbon candy to congratulate people on passing boot camp
We’ll see Navy advertisements EVERYWHERE, especially on Reddit, YouTube, Amazon Prime and other streaming platforms
None of it will work. When we spend more time focused on renaming the John C Stennis aircraft carrier, continue to allow flag officers to violate rules and get away with it (remember, you can sexually assault people and not go to jail, so long as you’re a 3-star in the Air Force), and continue to allow a broke acquisition system to churn out expensive weapons, we can’t recruit the best people. The best men and women want to join the Navy to fight for their country, with people and leaders they trust and on equipment that works. They want people held accountable for their actions, and they want others to hold them accountable because that’s how they become better.
We’re doing all the wrong things, and I expect 2024 to be another terrible year for military manning.
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.
Republican lawmakers are some of the weakest people in the world. With the notable exception of Donald Trump and a few Senators and Representatives, the overwhelming majority of Republicans elected to office can be relied upon to negotiate like Pope Francis did with Communist China (as in, sell out on all accounts and get nothing), find excuses for not pushing reforms that matter to the voters, and then reliably asking for more money because otherwise the evil Democrats will come to power.
Meanwhile, progressive lawmakers on the Democrat side push everything from porn in elementary classrooms and allowing sexual assault to go unpunished if the person is transgender to EV mandates and our military bankrolling abortion. They get pretty much all of these things, and since Republicans maybe roll back half of them, this means that “progress” is happening.
I don’t want Republicans to be conservative. Conserving means someone focuses on maintaining the status quo. That status quo is never going to happen. Technology changes our environment. Advances in medicine and communication means we can live longer, instantly communicate around the world, and even travel into outer space. It also brings on new challenges. Who would have thought that we’d be asking ourselves what to do with one million frozen embryos babies? Or how we would keep our faith if we lived on Mars?
The typical conservative response is to stick one’s head in the sand and refuse to accept the change. At my church, I have a parishioner that believes WiFi is damaging to your brain and causes cancer. When I installed a campus-wide WiFi network, every young person was ecstatic, but this guy was incensed. He spent an hour verbally blasting me while I was working, finally causing me to express some notably non-Christian phrases and tell him to…well, you can probably guess.
Yet after the network was complete, every young mom could stream the Mass on YouTube in the parking lot when they had to take their screaming 2-year-old out of the church. My church didn’t want a Facebook page until I pointed out that most of our young people were on Facebook, and if we didn’t put a message out, someone else would. Now we have a Facebook page, a solid following, and another way to build our community.
We cannot afford to simply conserve. It is not enough to just reside in the world, protect what we have and hope someone doesn’t come and upset our little piece of the world. Someone IS going to upset it, whether they come rioting in the streets, stabbing people on the train, or coming for your kids in school. Most of our elected Republicans lack the spinal cord to promise anything but a return to what used to be, which is pointless. We aren’t going back to the age of steam, the 1950s, the Victorian era, or any previous time. Birth control pills, social media, and all the recent advances in technology won’t disappear. Instead of wishing for things the way they were in the past, lawmakers need to push for their own version of progress. Since they seem void of ideas, here are my proposals that would make 2024 a far better year for Republican progressives:
100% free adoption for any unwanted pregnancy. Fund the health care, maternity leave and all adoption costs. We have so many willing families that end up adopting kids overseas due to the legal and funding hurdles associated with adopting American babies.
End Daylight Savings Time. We already have states that don’t follow it. End it in the U.S. permanently.
Eliminate Physical Education in schools, bring back driving class, home economics and shop class. I mean seriously, physical education is a joke. Just drop it already. Kids need to learn how to drive, balance a checkbook, cook a meal, and build things with their hands. Boys and Girls, we are far better off with more girls knowing how to use a power drill and the more boys knowing how to cook basic meals.
Bring back medical billing transparency. This was a pretty big issue that President Trump signed into law, but has gone largely unenforced. We can’t begin to talk about keeping health care costs in check when we have no idea how much it costs in the first place.
Turn Social Security into a TSP-like structure. Congress will rob Peter to pay Paul using Social Security unless its changed into a defined contribution plan.
Cap Congress Senators and Representatives at 30 total years of service. Seriously, do we need someone hanging around for more than 30 years? After 30 years between the Senate and House, folks need to move on to something else.
Legalize marijuana and tax it. It’s fine if the DoD or other places won’t hire if you use drugs, but we’re probably better off just taxing it instead of trying to ban it.
I’m sure there are plenty of other items to add to this list. The point is, rather than trying to return to the mythical “good ole’ days,” we should be pushing for better rules that reflect the reality we are in.
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.
Datechguyblog 