I’ve noted this trend in all western navies. It’s a disaster of our own making. We need warriors not wimps.
5 Likes
A retired Master Chief helicopter dude on the failed Iran hostage rescue is my neighbor, another retired senior chief helicopter dude lives about 4 doors down. There were some spooky folks at both of their retirements whom I am sure would agree the focus is a bit misplaced as far as being ready to take on foes of our blessed country and taking care of our shit at home and abroad.
1 Like
I read the article & it matches the accounts of a few books I read written by retired military personnel. But I not buying the argument US Navy sailors can’t steer ships or prevent fires because they been over trained in diversity & inclusion. I don’t see the correlation.
This is a loaded topic & I don’t think it has to be one way or another. A few random thoughts of mine.
1.) Like it or not, toughness usually comes from necessity & training. When it becomes necessary to be tougher we will be. Watch Band of Brothers or read any war biography that includes basic training. They all harp about starting off weak then turning into warriors to fight a war or becoming tough through the experience of fighting.
2.) I heard too many firsthand accounts of women being harassed & assaulted & blacks & Hispanics being mistreated in decades past in the military & maritime field to say get rid of diversity training.
3.) I don’t have much to compare it against but the active duty military & reservists that I sailed with seemed pretty tough to me, especially the ones who served in Iraq & Afghanistan. I have a former neighbor who did 2.5 tours in Afghanistan, he’s a nice guy but is tough as nails. You can tell just by the way he carries himself. I’m sure he had to attend the same diversity training as those sailors who crashed the McCain.
9 Likes
It’s not the troops who do the down and dirty business of warfare that inculcate this stupidity. It’s from the very top. This is not a ‘loaded topic’ at all. It’s serious. There’s no excuse for diverting time and money into fixing a problem that doesn’t exist.
When admirals and generals are advocating the idiocies of radicals, that culture gets passed down the chain. It displaces the core business of the armed forces and turns them into the largest, obedient test grouping in the nation for the experiments of social engineers trying to emasculate them in their vision of a perfect world where armed forces are ‘harm workers’ and eventually eliminated. They don’t understand humans.
I served for 40 years in the RAN and never encountered the racism everybody claims is everywhere today. It’s invented. Years ago I visited US warships including at sea. There was a time when there were ‘no go’ areas of those ship due to racial tensions. That disappeared sometime and on later visits there was none of that. I saw sailors of all ranks proud of their ship and their service. I presume it was solved by leadership.
I see it in Australia’s defence forces. Just read the news magazines of each service and see who’s in the photos or what the articles are about. Major achievements seem to be getting plaudits for participation in the diversity olympics, or wearing the latest ribbon to show solidarity with some cause or other, or lauding the troops marching in the gay madi gras.
I could go on, but this is a cancer. It needs to be cut out.
BTW, my definition of racists are those who forever prattle on about racism.
5 Likes
Agree, but during WW II there was a draft, it was a shared responsibility among all citizens. Young men went off to serve, families were subject to rationing. Now? There is no shared sacrifice. Most citizens of the USA have no idea of how many countries the US military is stationed in or why. They don’t worry about how much it cost or whether their son of daughter will be called to serve. It is a great thing if you are a weapons manufacturer or an officer in the military. You can sell more products and make rank quicker. Just look at the number of generals and admirals the USA had between 1940 and 1946 when a world war was being fought and compare that to the number of generals and admirals today. As Eisenhower said in 1961, “In the councils of government, we must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the military-industrial complex. The potential for the disastrous rise of misplaced power exists and will persist.” It is a threat to democracy and the health of the nation.
5 Likes
Just imagine the Chinese military where you buy your rank, got money start from the top…
Their diversity training is to allow the foot soldiers to understand that the leaders know nothing.
My father, a 30 year Navy vet in missle control, iterated to my son in 2011 before indoc at KP, the navy he entered as a teen is not the same as the one he left after 30 years… A Korean war vet and Nam, he gave that advice the day before his sudden passing on Fathers Day… Thanks Pop, I know that was hard to say, as you said to me a long time ago. I still use his Bubble driver on the course, can’t hit it that well, but makes me feel good when I do.
First let me say congrats to the RAN for not having any of the problems the US Navy had/has.
About the problems & “no-go” areas of the ships that you experienced at first. Do you think the problem magically went away without a trace or an admiral made a command, everyone followed orders & the problem dissapeared to never return? Me neither, I think a concerted effort was put forth to eliminate or reduce such problems. Some of those efforts was probably training & increased punishment for people who broke rules. I’ve worked with racists & heard stories from black guys who have no reason to lie about shit that happened to them back in the day. There’s a trusted, frequent commenter here on gCaptain who never portrayed herself as a victim but has some shit stories about shit she went through in her US Navy days before she started her commercial sailing career. She seems like tough old bird & had no reason to lie about it either.
Mr. Jughead, you got a tough row to hoe if you want to argue that racism, sexism & discrimination never existed or did in some long ago distant past & will never return.
3 Likes
I stopped reading after " The study, commissioned by Senator Tom Cotton"
5 Likes
I didn’t argue those things ‘never existed’, did I? I actually said they existed and they were nasty eg no-go areas aboard ship, and they went away. I wasn’t in a position to observe why they went away but they did. I’m sure there’s a good reason. You can search as well as I can.
They don’t exist in the navy for example now - that’s my point. Racists are trying hard to claim racism exists. I don’t see it. The whole thing seems to be to create problems based on group/race identity so that dissension and division start where none exist and another respected institution, another pillar of western civilisation is discredited and crumbles under stupid woke politics.
Racism, sexism and discrimination will return if commanders invent or magnify those sort of problems where none exist and ram those theories down the throats of their sailors essentially telling them they are a bunch of bigots and they can never eliminate their white privilege or heteronormativity or whatever will be the next fashionable identity crime we’ve never heard about. That will breed distrust and resentment on board.
It seems things we all knew as facts and normal five or ten years ago (and were so for centuries) became unutterable crimes today because some pink-and-purple-haired, body-pierced, overcredentialled professor of marxist trans-feminism or such strung together a thesis which had the wokerati elites hyperventilating at a brand new injustice which needed to be slayed.
Meanwhile, the navy ships collide at sea and kill their sailors because they never thought it important enough to train to look out the window or wonder what all those switches did on the helm console.
2 Likes
How do you know? You haven’t served in the U.S Navy. You don’t live in the U.S.A. You are not an American citizen. You don’t pay taxes to America. You have nothing to do with America, or our institutions. Moreover, you admit you haven’t studied the issue ("…I wasn’t in a position to observe…”).
If you want to tell Americans how to run things, become a citizen. Move over here, spend five years talking to people, and take the citizenship test. Then you’ll have earned the right to debate with us about how we run things.
You’re a foreigner, half a world away, whose knowledge of America comes mostly from a cursory visit to a U.S. ship a lifetime ago, and from the whacky prism of cable news. Your opinion is little more than a knee-jerk reaction from someone admits he has not studied the issue, and who has no skin in the game.
No Americans on this forum are telling Australians how to run the R.A.N. That’s your deal. Stick to it.
Oh dear. I seem to have hit a nerve.
1 Like
I see the Navy do wasteful, stupid shit every day. Diversity training has nothing to do with any of it.
4 Likes
Fully agree, and I do feel like it is a bit much sometimes. But if I or one of my coworkers screw up & blame it on too much time in diversity & inclusion training I’m pretty sure I’d be laughed off the ship & fired. Some of the best Masters & Chief Mates I know are also professional about diversity training & keeping their ducks in order. The ones who weren’t cut corners on other aspects of the profession & were moved along a long time ago. It’s all part of the job, it’s not one or the other.
3 Likes
Diversity causes fire…who knew? I agree we need to harken back to the days before diversity…and drug testing. Bring back the copious amounts of jazz cabbage and sweet sweet China white. For those who don’t get my reference here is an article and a sweet youtube video.
“you get really stoned, then like who cares about the war”
To summarize:
The military today is not the same as the military of old, because you can’t shotgun diversity.
I have my doubts that the officers described here have much of a clue what goes on below deck:
1 Like
What bothers me most is that our Military brass are supposed to be A- political ( by tradition) so that they can more effectively carry out their duties and responsibilities without bias. Clearly they are not.
1 Like
My guess is, they would argue that diversity and race training are not political - I would agree.
5 Likes
And let’s not forget this. When the US Navy never had accidents, US sailors weren’t wimps, no sexual harassment training was needed & females were afraid to attend conventions & walk down hotel hallways. The good 'ol days.
Some diversity and race training is not political it is just pseudoscientific, lots of claims are made without the scientific evidence to back it up.
People are not allowed to ask for scientific evidence to support the claims made, because if you ask for evidence that is gaslighting.
1 Like