The military drops its non-partisan mask

The race for the Indiana first congressional district happens to feature a Republican candidate who is female, African-American and a combat veteran of the Iraq War. One would think this was pretty cool, a nice selection of diversity that gives voters real choices. Unfortunately, what has happened instead is this race revealed that the military is truly a partisan organization that hates its conservative members and will go to great lengths to destroy them as a person.

Most people have already read the story about the improper release of the health records of candidate Jennifer Ruth-Green, which revealed she was sexually assaulted by an Iraqi servicemember. Appalled by this, plenty of Congressional members have asked the military how this could happen, and the Air Force came out and said “The Department of the Air Force takes its responsibility to safeguard private information seriously and the matter remains under investigation.”

To which I say…

Yup, the Air Force will definitely hold this person responsible. Just like they held a General William Cooley responsible for sexually assaulting…I mean, aggravating, sorry, forgot to apply the “flag and general officer double standard rule,” please forgive me for that! I mean, come on, the Air Force takes this very seriously. So do the Army and Navy. Why wouldn’t you believe them?

Here’s my prediction: the military never names the person that leaked this information and later provides a statement saying that person was terminated. Nobody goes to jail. Maybe a fine is involved.

But this case is more than sexual assault. It’s about intimidation, specifically of conservatives. Plenty of people over the past few years have complained that the military is increasingly biased against conservatives. Whether its witch hunts for “white supremacists” or mass denial of religious exemptions for a questionable COVID-19 vaccine, there is mounting evidence that this bias is real and has real consequences.

Knowing this, imagine a servicemember genuinely wants to run for Congress, or be President, or donate to a political cause. This servicemember was promised time and again that things like private medical records were sacrosanct, that they had proper controls to protect privacy. After watching those promises evaporate, tell yourself honestly, would you want this information exposed by a partisan hack?

Especially for women, this is pure, raw intimidation. When the leaker walks away free, every single victim of sexual assault is going to seriously consider shelving any thought of running for a high profile office. Some still will, but many will not want to run that gauntlet. And why should they? Why should they be re-victimized? Does the public really need to know this? Did this information help us evaluate Jennifer Ruth-Green as a candidate? If you were inclined to vote for her, did this revelation make you less likely to do so?

She didn’t commit a crime, nor does this show any lack of judgement on her part, so there is no good reason to release this information. None. It was done solely to intimidate and re-victimize her.

Contrast this to John Fetterman, who has an obviously serious medical condition that affects his ability to conduct his job, and yet his medical records are sealed. Yes, people can ask for them, just like they can ask for tax records, but if the candidate doesn’t have to release them. People can and should judge someone for that, but it doesn’t give them a right to violate the law.

The military’s two-tier approach to punishment is finally public enough that we should stop calling it a non-partisan organization. It self-selects the progressively brain dead for its highest ranks and shields them from criticism and punishment, while swiftly sending people to jail that dare question its mission and methods. It especially hates conservative free thinkers that might ask questions like “Where is the money for this weapon system going?” or “Should we really leave US soldiers to fight a proxy war with Russia in Syria?” or especially “The US military is weak.” It really, REALLY doesn’t want these people in Congress, so it will allow blatant intimidation to keep them out.

I seriously hope Jennifer wins her race, and I hope she exercises some real power to change the military before its too late.

This post represents the views of the author and not those of the Department of Defense, Department of the Navy, or any other government organization, because in their view its heresy to call out such obvious problems. If you liked this article, donate to DaTechGuy or purchase one of the author’s books on Amazon.

Inflation finally cuts deep

We have a family tradition of visiting a local restaurant every Sunday after church. It’s all around fun: a nice family outing while supporting a local business that treats us well. The fact that we’ve enjoyed it so much made it extra hard when we chose to cut it, along with many other things, out of our budget.

Despite shopping at Walmart, Sams and Aldi and not changing our lifestyle, its now increasingly more difficult to pay the credit card every month. After this last month, I dug through the last years worth of bills and noticed an ugly trend: the food bills steadily going up. What used to be a 40 or 50 dollar Walmart visit has turned into 100 dollars. Between that and gas, any sort of buffer we normally had is now gone.

So we’re cutting. Biden-flation is now responsible for screwing over our local restaurant because we simply can’t afford to eat there anymore. Most of our friends are simply racking up credit card debt. Long term, I know that’s not going to work, so I move money around and find ways to pay it off, but its becoming harder and harder each month. Forget about planning a vacation, we’re just trying to make each day work. At some point, if it doesn’t stop, we’ll simply be slaves to ever increasing debt.

So yeah, inflation isn’t just some interesting news story to me. Its very real, and I’m watching it gut the hard working middle class, especially those that have large families and can’t just stop expenditures like buying groceries.

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. Please consider donating to DaTech Guy or buying the author’s book, especially with Christmas coming up.

We won’t have quotas in the Navy…oh wait…

It’s no secret that the Navy, like the other military services, has paid attention to race and gender when it comes to promotions. This is captured through a variety of fields in an officer’s official record, as well as through an official photograph of the officer that is presented at any selection board. The picture requirement was originally removed in 2016 but reinstated in 2018 by NAVADMIN 265/18:

This NAVADMIN cancels reference (a) and reinstates the requirement 
to display the Official Photograph for all Officer Selection Boards.  This 
policy change is the result of board feedback received since the removal of 
the photograph requirement that the photographs aid the board’s ability to 
assess the Title 10 requirements of an officer’s ability to perform the 
duties of the next higher grade.

NAVADMIN 265/18

If you are skeptical how a photo helps a board member assess whether Naval Officers can execute Title 10 requirements, you’re not alone. Maybe Navy Officers need to double as Instagram models? Maybe Public Affairs got tired of submitting photos of ugly officers that couldn’t measure up to Taylor Kitsch and Rhianna? Or maybe it was a way of weeding out people that checked “Other” on the ethnicity list? I’ll let you decide.

At least the Navy did this in the background. Truth be told, evaluating your selection results to ensure nobody is discriminated against isn’t a bad thing. But its a slippery slope to quotas, and given the number of people lobbying for such a setup, its no surprise that it finally happened.

Courtesy of MyNavyHR, here are the statistics from the O-6 (Captain) promotion board conducted this year:

This image has an empty alt attribute; its file name is image.png

I’ve only copied the first page here, which covers 1110 (Surface Warfare), 1120 (Submarines), 1130 (SEAL), 1140 (Explosive Ordnance Disposal), and 13XX series (Aviation). Follow the link to get the rest of the 17 pages that cover other specialized communities.

I think the most frustrating part here is that this tells White Males that you have no background that the board cares about. Whether you came from difficult circumstances, are second-generation immigrants from Eastern Europe, or otherwise had some difficulty to overcome, none of that matters. You’re not the right color. Your background and story don’t matter.

I can’t recommend entering the Navy, especially the officer corps, while this nonsense continues. Between reducing the retirement and other benefits, non-stop wars designed to prop-up the military industrial complex paid on the backs of young men and women, or the increasing use of the military for dumb political stunts, its simply not worth it to join. This proves that even if you join with the intention of changing things, you won’t make it to the higher ranks to do so.

The only real chance for change is a change in President and an absolute evisceration of the membership at the top of the Pentagon. You can probably cut the Admiralty it in half without many problems, given the ratio of admirals to ships nowadays. You’ll need to deeply cut and remove a large chunk of the Pentagon and HR staff that pushes these sort of policies. Most importantly, and perhaps the hardest part, will be restoring our nation’s confidence that we select the best officers to place in harm’s way when the nation needs them the most.

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. Please share this story with your friends, especially those considering joining the military, and consider donating to DaTechGuy. If you liked this article, consider purchasing the author’s book to support his writing endeavors.

Could LGBT fit in the GOP?

Well, maybe?

Plenty of talking heads in the media want to paint LGBT voters as a block that all share the same interests and should thus always vote the same way (i.e. Democrat). I previously wrote that LGBT voters have some strong incentives to be pro-life and want less government, which is something we saw when Donald Trump was running for office. I think the talking heads do everyone a disservice when they pretend that all LGBT voters look alike and should vote the same, rather than treating people as individuals. Donald Trump saw this and exploited it, and as we head into the 2022 midterm elections, I think Republicans should be doing the same (which likely means most won’t…).

But pro-life and economics don’t hint at what most GOP voters struggle with when working with potential LGBT voters, and that is the issue of LGBT families and children. I think this is with good reason, because what was sold in the past was the notion that an LGBT family would look very much like a normal family, but in reality, the LGBT lifestyle pushes many ideas contrary to this, such as relationships with significantly more sexual partners. Pointing out that “Well, heterosexual families often have multiple partners and open relationships too!” doesn’t really help, because those families also tend to not do well, especially when raising children.

And lets talk about children, specifically kids at school. Plenty of people probably didn’t care if a teacher was homosexual or transgender, but plenty of parents care about schools instructing their children about sex. Many of these parents don’t want schools instructing kids on sex even if it doesn’t include LGBT materials, so adding LGBT to the mix only throws fuel onto an already burning fire.

The key problem here I think is that the excesses of LGBT culture, with the drag shows, inappropriate books and hiding information from parents are the things that bother most people. I doubt too many parents would care about a homosexual or transgender teacher if they were focused on, you know, teaching kids about science, math, English and the like, just like they wouldn’t care that the kindergarten teacher runs a profitable OnlyFans on her weekends off. When you show up, do your work and leave most of your personal life out of it, it is incredibly easy to please most people.

Yes, there are people out there on a McCarthy-esque witch hunt, but they are becoming fewer and farther in-between. Violence against the LGBT community is becoming less and less tolerated, with even the Daily Wire is running a story about a gay Palestinian beheaded that expresses sympathy for the young man.

So can LGBT voters fit into the GOP? I’d give it a solid maybe. I think someone can be an LGBT voter and want parents rather than schools instruct children on sex, find drag shows for kids inappropriate, and place value on a monogamous relationship and a stable home to raise children. Given those parameters, I think there are plenty of GOP voters that might not care that the wife in the couple next door has XY chromosomes. Whether that person is Christian is a different matter, but that person could be a more conservative voter.

Most importantly, beginning to treat voters as individuals full of competing interests, and thinking about how conservative values satisfy those interests, is far more important if we want a long-term stable country.

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. Liked what you read? Try buying the author’s book to help him out!

LGBT voters benefit from less government and a market economy

Two weeks ago I argued that LGBT voters should be prolife, if nothing else because the prolife movement protects babies from premature abortions based on genetic testing, and it won’t be long before we develop testing good enough to hint that a baby might grow up gay or transgender (despite the fact that genetics don’t always equal outcomes). I’d like to go one step further and say LGBT voters benefit far more from less government and a market economy, especially as a minority.

Let’s start with a real obvious point: government likes people to fall in nice, neat boxes, and those that don’t get treated unfairly. The US government is always primed to pick on minorities. Recent examples include persecution against Japanese-Americans during World War 2, even in Hawaii, or the disproportionate number of black Americans used for drug testing by the CIA. LGBT voters probably feel this right now whenever they travel, get an ID of some kind, or interact with the government in general.

Let’s take ID cards for a second. The government continues to increase the amount of information it demands from people to get an ID. This invasion of privacy hasn’t made a lot of headlines, but the fact that you can basically be denied the ability to fly unless you surrender a lot of information to the government is a bit concerning. Worse though, what if you’re a transgender individual in the middle of hormone treatment? Try explaining that to the “nice” TSA agent, who should be concerned about you carrying a bomb onboard the aircraft, but will instead use their position to hassle you at a checkpoint. Why are you treated like a criminal for non-criminal activities.

Less government equals less interactions equals more freedom to be yourself. Whether you’re a gun-loving firefighter or his transgender wife, you benefit from less government in your life. Unless you’re violating a law, the government doesn’t need to snoop in your affairs.

If the government isn’t sticking its nose where it doesn’t belong, other people are often trying to use it to that end, particularly with hate crime laws and lawsuits. The Masterpiece Cakeshop lawsuits highlighted this weaponization. Despite the fact that there were hundreds of bakeries to get cakes of all shapes and sizes, Charlie Craig and David Mullins went all the way to the Supreme Court, only to lose. The damage was done though, since Masterpiece Cakeshop lost around 40% of its business.

This weaponization isn’t a long term strategy, since it tends to come back around and bite you, because plenty of people will use this tactic to shut down LGBT businesses. We’re far better off with a free market because it automatically promotes an exchange of goods that is inevitably linked to an exchange of ideas. For example, its really hard to say you want to kill all gay people if you regularly interact with the gay owner of a restaurant that has great food. It’s difficult to say you think transgender individuals are all pedophiles when you find out your neighbor is a transgender woman and an upstanding citizen in your community. Just like having a black or Hispanic neighbor makes it harder to hold negative opinions about them (assuming they are good neighbors!), the same goes for interacting with LGBT individuals.

In fact, these regular interactions are far more powerful then any lawsuit. I would argue the Masterpiece lawsuits only further cement the idea that most LGBT individuals want to find ways to punish Christians.

Free association in a market economy and less government interference, by default, makes us all learn to work together. We’re all better served under these models.

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. Please be sure to purchase something from the author’s collection of books, since Christmas is right around the corner.

Transgender safety equipment

The news about the Canadian transgender teacher teaching shop class with ridiculously large, fake breasts has already made the rounds in the news. Plenty of people have expressed outrage, or snickered at the over-the-top photos, or smacked their forehead in disgust.

What hasn’t been discussed is safety equipment. I’ve worked in plenty of industrial environments, from shipyards to metal shops, and have had my share of flying metal objects that cracked safety helmets, broke safety glasses, and in general tried to kill me in a variety of unique and interesting ways. If Tik-Tok is any indication of the trajectory of our society (and one shudders at THAT thought), we should be teaching teenagers how to properly use safety equipment.

And yet, this Canadian teacher is not doing any of that.

Let’s start with the skirt. Unless you are a secretary, nobody in a shop wears a skirt. Even most secretaries in shops wear a long maxi skirt, especially if they have to walk out of the office for any reason. If you’ve ever had a burning piece of metal touch your skin, or brushed up against something sharp, you’ll only do that once or twice before you become best friends with your jeans. Let’s be honest, you can wear some pretty sexy jeans if you want, all while still protecting your legs from being impaled by the splinters flying out from a nearby cutting saw.

The other reason skirts aren’t a good choice is because rotating machinery tends to grab loose items, and having your skirt violently ripped off your body by lathe is just not appealing. Jewelry, especially necklaces and earrings, are also at risk of being forcibly ripped from your body. Hair is the same way. This Canadian teacher should have her hair (wig?) up in a bun, or at least in a ponytail secured with a hat, and most certainly not in her face. Not only is it at risk of being ripped out of her head, but it impedes her ability to see what she is working on.

Speaking of seeing things, I see no gloves or safety glasses.

Seriously, WTF?

Gloves and glasses are an absolute necessity when running a saw. I can’t tell you the number of times my miter saw has kicked up a chunk of wood that smacked me in the hand or the face. It sucks when it happens, but at least I can STILL SEE OUT OF EACH EYEBALL in the end. If you open any user manual, the first section will tell you to wear gloves and eye protection. Heck, the company that provides insurance for the school should be calling and complaining that this teacher is placing them at significant risk for an insurance claim.

All this makes me view this as a dumb, attention-grabbing prank. If this teacher cared about her students and also happened to be transgender, she would be dressing appropriately for class, teaching her students how to properly run saws and other equipment. As a teacher, she should dress appropriately anyway, and if she had large breasts like that (and some women do), she should at least wear a bra.

Which brings up my final point, and that is if the transgender community wants to be taken seriously, they are going to have to divorce themselves from these attention-grabbing idiots. It’s not dissimilar from the Westboro Baptist Church, a very small community that doesn’t represent anything close to mainstream Christian theology. Plenty of transgender individuals want us to believe that they are normal members of society, and truth be told, plenty of them are. But just like the Westboro Baptist Church, people should call out bad behavior when they see it, and most transgender people should join them in saying “This behavior isn’t normal.” Just because a teacher is transgender doesn’t mean we should allow that person to run roughshod over basic safety protocol and dress codes. Until we see more pushback on these people, its going to be harder for most people to normalize transgender individuals in society.

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. If you liked this article, you should purchase a book from the author for you or a friend, or drop a tip for DaTechGuy.

Renaming the MAURY, and how I predicted the future

Well, that didn’t take long. Remember this from way back in…June?

Any human being we’re going to name ships after is going to offend someone. Should we rename the USNS Maury, who despite contributing much to the study of weather and oceanography, fought in the Confederate Navy? Or the USNS Cesar Chavez, who advocated against immigration? Should we look deeper into the Kennedy family, which has plenty of skeletons in the closet and has two ships named after John and Robert Kennedy?
From “Renaming the Stennis is dumb“

Well, it happened

And its officially happening, as part of a larger effort to rename…everything.

All told, according to commission member Lawrence Romo, the list topped out at 1,100 items, from posts and ships to monuments, building names and streets.

Among the monuments recommended for removal in part 3 of the report is a Confederate memorial at Arlington National Cemetery.

“The statue atop of the monument should be removed. All bronze elements on the monument should be deconstructed and removed, preferably leaving the granite base and foundation in place to minimize risk of inadvertent disturbance of graves,” according to a Wednesday release, leaving the Army in charge of disposal.
From The Air Force Times

As I predicted before, anything named after people is destined to become a hot issue. We discover things long after someone dies, and perhaps the person isn’t quite who we thought they were. Or that person was biased against skin color, sexual orientation, or who knows what, which makes them 100% unacceptable now. Now, we could use that as an opportunity to highlight that people are fallible and we’ll have to accept both the good and bad that comes with that. We could highlight how brilliant people can still succumb to everything from the Confederacy to Nazism, and use that to teach our future generations how to not fall into that trap. Or we can simply say those people are evil and scrub them from mention while looking for the next person to cancel.

Never mind that Matthew Maury contributed a lot to our understanding of oceanography. He’ll get scrubbed from existence. And don’t worry, its coming for Abraham Lincoln, George Washington, Cesar Chavez, and many others. Want to bet Donald Trump is on that list? Or what about lesser known people like Kyle Rittenhouse, whose only “crime” was standing up to criminals?

At some point we’ll either learn to accept that historical figures will always have flaws when viewed from the present day, or we’ll risk repeating their mistakes in the future.

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. You ought to buy the author’s book, or listen to it on Audible, to help support his writing efforts.

Why LGBT voters should be prolife

This is part of a short series on why many LGBT voters would be better served under conservative values then far leftist values.

LGBT voters are traditionally associated with voting on left-leaning policies and almost always for Democrat candidates, yet during the last election almost a third of LGBT-identified voters said on exit polling that they voted for Trump.

Despite President Trump’s anti-LGBTQ past, including opposing LGBTQ workplace protections, he was able to attain 28% of the LGBTQ vote improving on his 2016 showing, when he ran against Hillary Clinton, and only won 13% of the LGBTQ vote.

thepridela.com

The article, not surprisingly, is shocked that any LGBT individual would even contemplate voting for a Republican candidate, much less President Trump. Yet I think this site, like so many others, misses the fact that in most cases conservative positions on issues are far more advantageous for LGBT individuals then leftist ones. I actually think that Republican candidates can probably capture more like 40% of the LGBT vote, which would finally start to highlight that LGBT individuals are not in fact one large, homogenous group of people, but rather individual voters that each have very different needs.

(A quick note: For this series I’m leaving of the …QIA+-= alphabet soup of people, which includes the pansexuals, cats and other really odd identities. Honestly, I think these people are overrepresented because they are so strange as to capture immediate attention and have an outsized impact via social media.)

First, lets look at who is considered an LGBT voter. In the case of the exit poll, its whomever happens to tell the pollster they identify as somewhere on the LGBT spectrum. This is somewhere around 1-5% of voters nationwide, by conservative and liberal estimates. However, I actually think its a bit higher, for two reasons. First, lots of people don’t like talking to pollsters, so exit poll sampling is notoriously very skewed liberal. Second, the LGBT people that would openly agree to the label are likely people comfortably out to their families, employer and the world…which is not the majority. There are likely a lot of closeted LGBT voters that simply stay quiet about their homosexual or transsexual inclinations.

That said, the ones most likely to be closeted are also most likely to lean conservative, since conservative voters are less likely to discuss this and other issues with…well, anyone really. This sets up a Harry Truman-esque scenario where traditional polling and thinking concerning LGBT voters and what they care about can be very easily misunderstood.

That doesn’t answer the bigger question of why LGBT voters would benefit from conservative policies. Let’s start with abortion, and over the next few weekends we’ll look at the economy, foreign policy and the military, plus marriage and the nuclear family. I’m leaving out religious discussions on these issues because 1., I’m not a religious scholar and thus not qualified to discuss it, and 2., Religions, especially Christian ones, vary widely on LGBT issues.

LGBT voters should be pro-life for many reasons, the most important being that as technology, and especially genetic testing, becomes easier and cheaper, there will be more people inclined to abort babies that aren’t “perfect.” This has been predicted for years, even appearing in science fiction films like Gattaca, where babies are tested and sorted into “Valids” and “In-valids.” The “Valids” are genetically perfect and given access to the best jobs, while the “in-valids,” if they aren’t euthanized, compose the underclass of citizens.

But that’s science fiction, you might think. One only needs to look across the Atlantic to see Europeans wipe out Down Syndrome kids through testing (which is not perfect, so plenty of otherwise healthy kids are lost to abortion in the process). It’s not a far stretch to assume that as we develop more and more genetic markers for what we consider disorders, it’ll be easier to “justify” aborting more and more babies that don’t line up to our idea of perfect.

Which brings up the LGBT issue, because scientists have been quite happily searching for a genetic link to explain homosexual and transgender individuals. If they find that there is a gene, or set of genes, that would incline an individual to this behavior, could there be an increase in people saying “I don’t want to bring life to this world that would suffer as a transgender individual.”? If abortion is available on demand, I can see a large number of religious mothers making this justification.

Which begs the question: don’t LGBT individuals have a right to life? Don’t babies with these genetic markers deserve a chance in this world? Who is to say that their genetics will ultimately determine how they think on any particular issue? I would argue that they do. Just because someone is genetically inclined towards something doesn’t mean they will take those actions. More importantly, this walks us down the slippery slope of euthanizing people who’s only crime is existing, which never bodes well for any minority group.

LGBT voters are best served with prolife policies, which may one day keep them from being literally aborted out of existence.

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.

No Innuendo Needed

craiyon AI-generated image of Joe Biden, from craiyon.com

Holy crap, if you didn’t get Nazi vibes after watching President Biden’s speech last night, I have to wonder if we watched the same speech. Between the red backdrop, the hand gestures, the timing with the invasion of Poland, and the military personnel…all of it screamed Nazi Germany. The fact that its not photoshopped still baffles me. Innuendo is supposed to be subtle.

Seriously, who did it better?

Trump wasn’t immune to bad speeches, the worst being his speech early on at the Boy Scout Jamboree. But even this speech made me think “Sheesh, is Trump just that full of himself?”, not “Holy crap, we’re descending into an authoritarian government!” Plenty of people have commented online that Joe Biden just might be off his rocker. I thought it was worthwhile asking an AI what image was conjured with the words “Joe Biden,” and well, its probably not far off.

All the internet comments in the world won’t change the simple fact, as I pointed out during the Virginia elections, that unless you get out to vote, volunteer to help a candidate and donate money specifically to the candidates you like, nothing is going to change. Yet conservatives are far more likely to “go with the flow” and continue to not vote, not volunteer and not donate. Remember all the annoying Obama kids that incessantly knocked on doors? I do. I hated those people, but I bet that they helped tilt the election (that and running a crappy candidate in John McCain).

Joe Biden said all the quiet parts out loud on Thursday. There was no innuendo. It wasn’t subtle. It was in your face for all too see. He’s laid it out for you. So, what will you do about it?

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. If you enjoyed this article, please consider donating to DaTechGuy or buying one of the author’s books from Amazon.

MORE Navy manpower woes

I mean seriously, Navy manpower woes are the gift that keeps on giving. There are three (!!!) more NAVADMINs that show the Navy is really struggling to keep its people, especially its technical people, from leaving.

The first is NAVADMIN 186/22, which concerns Special Duty Assignment Pay (SDAP). SDAP is an additional monthly pay for Sailors that are in hard-to-fill jobs or qualify in difficult assignments. The Navy uses SDAP to help incentivize Sailors taking the hard duty assignments, because a few hundred dollars extra a month might motivate someone to fill that position.

SDAP has been changed for nuclear-qualified Sailors in the following manner:

Billet / NEC            Level    Pay              Change 
RDMC/EDMC/CVN DLCPO     7        525.00           +75.00 
N33Z NEC                6        450.00           New 
NPTU W/SUPERVISOR NEC   6        450.00           No change 
SEA W/SUPERVISOR NEC    5        375.00           No change 
SHORE W/SUPERVISOR NEC  3        225.00           -75.00 
SEA W/OPERATOR NEC      2        150.00           No change 
SHORE W/OPERATOR NEC    1         75.00           -75.00

NAVADMIN 186/22

So what does that mean? In a nutshell, shore assignment SDAP was lowered, while at-sea SDAP was either added or increased. The N33Z NEC refers to an at-sea Sailor that qualifies as an Engineering Watch Supervisor (EWS), which is the senior most enlisted watchstander on a nuclear power plant.

Since SDAP is an incentive pay, this is yet more proof that the Navy is trying to push Sailors towards at-sea assignment and to qualify as an EWS at-sea. They wouldn’t bother increasing SDAP if Sailors were already filling those roles without issue.

What about technically-savvy officers? Well, NAVADMIN 188/22 changes the accession rules for the Baccalaureate Degree Completion Program (BDCP), which is a program where civilians or enlisted Sailors that have at least 60 credit hours can apply to get a commission, where they get paid while they finish their degree. It’s not as great a deal because it doesn’t pay for tuition, however it does land you a job as an officer afterwards, with the catch of requiring an 8 year commitment. If that sounds a bit long, it is, because a normal ROTC commitment used to be only 4 years…which was increased to 5 years, and for aviators, to 5 years AFTER you qualified to fly (which ends up becoming 8-10 years).

BDCP eligibility was extended to…you guessed it…the technical fields of cryptology, cyber, intelligence, networks and oceanography. The only reason to extend this program to those fields is because the normal methods of obtaining officers are not working.

The last odd NAVADMIN is 184/22, which simply says that the O-6 continuation board will immediately follow the O-7 selection board. For those not in the know, an O-6 in the Navy is a Captain and an O-7 is a Rear Admiral.

Now, normally this board is one of many that are on a routine schedule without any real attention paid to it. Remember that Captains eligible to be reviewed for selection to admiral are well past the 20 years needed to retire, and are allowed to hang out until 30 years of service. They can hang out longer if a continuation board allows it. Since the board already meets on a schedule, why would someone need a NAVADMIN to change when the board meets, and inform the rest of the Navy?

Simply put, there was a significant uptick in O-6 retirements after the last O-7 selection board. I asked a few people in the know (who asked to remain nameless) and the word was that the Navy Personnel Office apparently didn’t bother to communicate with a lot of O-6s that were not selected for O-7, and a lot of them submitted retirement requests in response to this poor treatment. While nobody is entitled to be selected for O-7, its not hard to communicate with officers to let them know they weren’t picked. Especially for someone that has given over 20 years to the Navy, you would think the Navy could reciprocate and treat them with respect. The number of retirements stung Navy manpower, hence the short NAVADMIN to try and prevent this from happening again this year.

Now, that’s all speculation, but given all the other things happening…is anyone surprised? I sure wasn’t. I am surprised at just how bad recruitment and retention are getting. I had predicted that 2023 would be the breaking point, but that was before the vaccine mandate and terrible withdrawal from Afghanistan. I think those events have accelerated a process that was underway long before this year. I see more and more servicemembers that would otherwise happily stay on a few extra years because they enjoyed the job instead decide to leave for greener pastures. When you go all out to make the Navy a miserable place to work, why would anyone be surprised that you have to increasingly bribe people to stay 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.