Lions Led By Donkeys Podcast - *PREVIEW* The Crash of the USS McCain

Episode Date: October 23, 2024

This is a preview. To listen to the full episode support the show on Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/posts/114547653?pr=true

Hey everybody, Lions Head by Donkeys is live in Belfast at the Oye Music Center Saturday, 26th October. Tickets are still available and if you can't make it to Belfast, good news, we are live streaming it and tickets are still available for that as well. You can find both of the links for either of those tickets, or both, in our show notes. So click on those and get your tickets. Our merch store is restocked. So if you missed any of the live shows, specific merch, at wherever date that we went to and you couldn't make it to, it's all on our merch store, LLBDmerch.com.

So get your orders in while they last. We only have certain sizes and certain numbers and whichever one it happens to be. So you want something get your order in once again, that is LLBDmerch.com and the link will also be in the show notes. Thank you. Hey everyone What you're about to listen to is a preview of a bonus episode that is available on our patreon If you like this clip, you can grab the whole episode as well as years of other bonus content at www.patreon.com slash lions led by donkeys. Here's a good thing, sailors if you're listening I know we have a lot of listeners who are in the navy. If you're in the navy much like if you're in the army or the

marine corps or the coast guard you are in fact a nobody to the department you happen to work for. Right. So you do not matter. Yeah, you are. You are very much spare parts, bud. Yeah. In 2008, the Navy signed a contract with Northrop Grumman for seven million dollars. In 2008, military development dollars. This is literally nothing. Seven million. That's it.

Generally, American weapon companies can't even produce a clicky pen with that much money if you gave them 13 years and a staff in the dozens. Within three years, the first destroyer of the USS John Paul Jones was equipped with this new system, and it sailed out ready to go. As far as development goes, this is literally a fucking revolution. And of course, this is the part where I get to say this is literally a fucking revolution and of course this is the part where I get to say this is the last time I'm going to compliment anything to do with this fucking thing. Also you know you have to you know where do like it was probably just a bunch of iPads literally just duct tape to like bulk

heads at different places around the boat. Well you're not too far off I mean it wasn't an iPad but it was shit Yeah, instead of shooting the tomahawks, you're just throwing an angry bird at Huthys in Yemen. The problem was this new system was completely new, meaning the John Paul Jones was effectively an experiment, and it constantly ran into problems with Grumman engineers who were forced to repair, change it around, rebooting the system as they went. And this is also what leads into another problem. The retrofitting of ships was not exactly as easy as the Navy was led to believe. Yeah, as somebody who once owned a house that was built before indoor plumbing, it's hard

to jam new systems into an already created structure. You know, you can't just put some pipe in those walls. Fuck it. Like famously, you know, like as we talked about during the littoral combat chip episode, like, I don't know, like, like that was a ship that was, everything was meant to be modular and it was really fucking difficult. So like, imagine if it's a ship that's not meant to be like, and it's like, also like, you know, it's kind of like a modern car engine bay. These ships aren't built to like have a lot of extra fucking room to put shit in. Yeah, exactly.

They're just not like... You literally have to gut them. Yeah. And it's like, you know, and you know, it's important to have things like, I don't know, watertight spaces in between different parts of the boat. So, you know, you can't... Don't need it. Don't need it.

It's not real easy to like just run some fucking wires from one end to the other. They had to, I mean, it's, can't, it's not real easy to like, just run some fucking wires from one end to the other. They had to, I mean, it's a massive new computerized navigation system that's supposed to streamlines and automate a lot of different things, which meant there had to be sensors all over the ships. All those things had to be connected with wires,

cables, you name it. So, it would require ships to go into dock and effectively get gutted. Yeah. So, so all this could be put in. And obviously this is on top of regularly scheduled maintenance that ships need to have on top of the infamously brutal operations tempo that the US Navy, as far as I'm aware at the time of recording, still refuses to back down from.

Oh yeah, because I mean, A, because they've overcommitted themselves to missions. B, half of the officer corps of the Pacific Fleet in particular got caught up in the fat Leonard thing, which we've also talked about in a prior episode. And like, you know, and like C, like, yeah, they just, you know, in general too, there's just the mindset of like, well, I didn't, you know, it's like doctors. Like I didn't sleep when

I was, you know, when I was a new like ensign, so you don't get to sleep either. And it's like, yeah, bud, but you know, you had like 12 other ensigns and you all doing this job. I'm over here with a fucking universal remote and an iPad trying to figure this shit out. Yeah, now it's just Steve and the iPad trying to figure out how to guide the boat through the Straits of Malacca. You know, and one very angry contractor who refuses to be awake between the hours of like 10 at night and eight in the morning. Yep.

And this retrofitting process is very, very slow. It requires engineers and technicians to string up like three miles of wire and fiber optic cables. And it was not fast on mostly because the reason why this wasn't fast is because the Navy refused to commit to putting a lot of its ship ships up in this these docks for a long period of time. So it could only free up three or four ships per year to go through it out of a fleet of 90. And that doesn't sound too bad, hypothetically, but when things don't sound too bad in this show,

the devil's in the details. Well, you also just kind of figure out three to four ships out of 90, so you figure, best case scenario, you're taking, I don't't know, like half a century to like fucking retrofit everything. Pretty much assuming that nothing gets slowed down, you know it will. Right. Like it's that's it's not a great, you know, not. And, you know, of course, one of those things where then, like, by the time they get to the end of it, then you got to start over

the beginning again. And that's actually it's a good point, because that's exactly what we're about to talk about Remember how I said that Grumman was kind of running a real-life experiment Northup Grumman was fixing the system after it had installed it changing components coming up with new Procedures and stuff so that effectively meant if four ships were worked on in a year, all four could have completely different control systems installed with like four having a newer version than the four before that and so on and so forth.

Right, but don't you update though? Like look I work in IT and like we call that a pilot program where you put it out and you see okay what we put it on one boat and we see what fucks up we you know make changes and then we call it a pilot program where you put it out and you see, okay, what we put it on one boat and we see what fucks up. We you know, make changes and then we put it on the next boat and we make changes there or something like. But you're remembering a key part here that would require the Navy to send these ships back to dock, which they refused to do. So once a ship got installed, the only thing that could really work was like kind of hot fixing it

Which man like then every ship is effectively custom like this every ship is different Every single ship with the system in it is completely and totally different that sound that sounds like a fucking nightmare this is actually this is the thing that the the Coast Guard dealt with because you know captains used to have a lot of leeway to Modify their boats. And so it meant that like, of like 12 boats of the same class, every single one of them would be vaguely different, which was like, meant that you couldn't even transfer sailors... You could even transfer coasties between boats because if you did like, oh, there's famously an example where a captain on a patrol boat got an entire stairwell installed off the

pilot house, which blocked several of the crucial navigation lights and caused a bunch of other issues and is now known as a major engineering flaw. And so they went over time and forced all these ships to standardize because we can't just have bespoke ships that we're just constantly sending out. I'm glad you bring that up because this is exactly the kind of situation we found ourselves in. The Navy, of course, if you're a sailor, you do a specific job. You're assigned to a destroyer. Generally, that means they expect they being the Navy, that they could stick

you on any destroyer and you could do the job, right? Because these are all mostly the same class of destroyer. Why wouldn't you be able to? Well, if you happen to work in navigation on the bridge, that meant every single destroyer that you went to that had the system in place was completely and totally different. There was no cross relation between the two integrated systems, despite the fact, again, they're supposed to be integrated. Right, and then meanwhile, your paperwork probably says,

Ensign Snuffy is qualified to work on this system and this class of boat, whatever else, just send them from one to another. That's exactly it. Yeah, and so they get there and they're like, theoretically, you should know what your job is. You are not actually qualified to work on this system and this class of boat, whatever else, just send them from one to another. That's exactly it. Yeah. And so they get there and they're like, theoretically, you should know what your job is. You are not actually qualified to do it because you don't know how this specific one works.

Yes. And that brings us to another huge problem. When you have all of those different integrated systems and the people that are supposed to run them, how do you feel like these people are being trained? What are they even being trained on? Like, in what school that these bridge crew, these navigators, whatever, are supposed to be learning how to do it? Which one are they learning on? Well, good news, folks. None of them.