Navy brings back pencils and compasses
According to the New York Times, the Navy is turning away from technology and looking at returning to using pencils and compasses to avoid collisions like the two last month which cost 17 sailors their lives;
Collectively, current and former officers said, the new rules mark several significant cultural shifts for the Navy’s tradition-bound fleets. At least for the moment, safety and maintenance are on par with operational security, and commanders are requiring sailors to use old-fashioned compasses, pencils and paper to help track potential hazards, as well as reducing a captain’s discretion to define what rules the watch team follows if the captain is not on the ship’s bridge.
“Rowden is stomping his foot and saying, ‘We’ve got to get back to basics,’” said Vice Adm. William Douglas Crowder, a retired commander of the Seventh Fleet and a former deputy chief of naval operations, who reviewed the four-page directive issued on Sept. 15, a copy of which was obtained by The New York Times. “We ought to be doing this anyhow.”
They’ve also decided that sailors need more rest and more training;
“We found some things about risk that didn’t match what we thought, and we’re making changes in things we discovered,” Vice Adm. Kevin M. Donegan, commander of the Fifth Fleet based in Bahrain, said in a telephone interview.
“When we have something like this happen, we do rigorous homework,” Admiral Donegan said. “We’re not standing fast.”
There is little argument, however, that a shrinking Navy is performing the same duties that a larger fleet did a decade ago, and that constant deployments leave little time to train and maintain ships amid their relentless duties.
Funny how they’re arriving at this conclusion now, but no one had the guts to tell their civilian masters last year, you know, when lives could have been saved.
Category: Navy
Yeah, probably because they read my comments here at TAH about the collisions.
Collisions were caused by a failure of leadership and failure to employ basic principles seamanship and navigation.
Bring back pencil, compass, divider and sexton …
Why did these tools ever leave CIC, the bridge and chart room in the first place?
FAILURE OF LEADERSHIP, over reliance on technology and lack of understanding of the basics!
That is all, carry out the POD!
MCPO, well said and right on the money. Even my limited time as a CG Auxiliary crew then coxswain taught me the value of maintaining a watch and situational awareness when underway. Basis seamanship. I cannot help but wonder when it is going to start occurring with aircraft and now they want to put driverless cars on city streets.
“Bring back pencil, compass, divider and sexton …”
I’d bring along a sextant also. /sarc
A sexton is a navigation tool used to compare and estimate a ships position relative to a fixed land position or the stars.
It has nothing to do with: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1DG0cVUd0pI
ton o’sex? But he is right… the nav instrument is a sextant. Question for you Navy types – is an ensign with a sextant as dangerous as a 2LT with a map and compass?
Not Navy, tho’ my brother and his son are, but I’d venture to guess that an ensign with a sextant is more dangerous than the 2LT with map and compass by virtue of the size of the vehicle (s)he is guiding.
Do I have explain all of my sarcasmic interludes to all you edoits?
Geeze!
sex·ton. [ˈsekstən] NOUN
a person who looks after a church and churchyard, sometimes acting as bell-ringer and formerly as a gravedigger.
You win the prize. See Hondo for disbursement.
It still stuns me to hear how many khakis don’t know how to use a maneuvering board or interpret a time-bearing plot.
I said much the same thing on other blogs and I’m not even a Navy Vet. Glad to see someone with vast experience in that service came to the same conclusion as I did. Now I know I was not just shooting blanks but was on the right track. If even someone like myself with zero Navy experience came up with it then why was it so hard for The Navy to do it????
The Navy, and the other forces, have to do what their Glorious Leader tells them to do, as long as it is not an illegal order, jonp.
Well, there is that….
No one can accurately say how much has been spent on the evolving technologies that were meant to replace our age old navigational tools. They are meant to be both more accurate and free from potential error. They also provide permanent, tamperproof records AND many relay directly back to fleet HQ and Smashington, DC. In the wrong hands a sextant is worthless. Without accurate navigation, so is a five billion dollar frigate.
Seventeen ships will need to be built to make up for this debt.
Still won’t make up for it, but I get yer “drift”.
The Navy has hit the point of diminishing returns from cost savings. Cut the fat (crew), cut more fat (more crew), cut into the muscle (experienced crew), and then cut another 10% of muscle for good measure. Increase workload on the remainder and measure results through an evaluation system that causes strife/concern/conflicts among those few remaining in the crew. Works well in civilian industry; must be okay for national defense.
Doesn’t work in the civilian world either… trim all the cushion from your work force, run as lean as possible with the minimum number of people for day to day operations, and as soon as flu season or vacation season hits, you are understaffed and flailing. Easy way to spot someone who has a lot of school and no practical experience when they say “we can save $X just by cutting staffing to this bare minimum level” and don’t allow for attrition or absence.
Cut some of the politically correct training and “observances”
I swear technology is making us stupid. If one is doing a task, even if it’s routine, the brain is engaged because there is physical action. If one stares at a screen the grey matter turns to mush and overeating is likely.
Trust me.
I drove a tractor trailer for decades, and we used the good old Rand-McNally atlas and trip planned the route beforehand. This is what we get today:
http://www.nj.com/atlantic/index.ssf/2017/09/gps_leads_tractor_trailer_to_drive_on_to_boardwalk.html
I hear you PFM, I used to do that myself and I would use my Rand McNally Trucker’s Atlas every day, GPS is only as good as who made it as well as its programs! I saw that it was a CRST (Completely Reworked Swift Truck or Completely Rebuild Schneider Truck) that drove out on that boardwalk!
Just remember that Jonn’s GPS gave him directions that took him out of state, over the mountains and back, just to get from his driveway to his house.
Reminds me of this:
https://arstechnica.com/cars/2016/05/death-by-gps/
Yeah, but this happened in Jersey.
And the driver filled his tires with helium believing it would improve fuel efficiency too.
Jersey for ya!
Scary part is that GPS will avoid toll roads, but won’t avoid parkways, which if driving a commercial vehicle and getting caught is a HUGE ticket, especially in the northeast corridor around I-95.
I bet it won’t tell you about low clearances as well as bridges with weight Limits which mean a lot when you’re driving a 13’6″ tall big rig with a gross weight near 80,000 pounds!
I have only used Mapfinder, an internet direction provider once, to send me to a cat show, about 10 years ago.
The direct route was by interstate to a turn-off and then follow the street signs.
The internet route was through areas that took my 30 miles out of my way, never went near the interstate, and made me waste a half tank of gas and pay tolls.
I have not followed any electronic instructions since then and never will. I can get better instructions by looking at a Google map, finding the most direct route to something, and then verifying the the route by the satellite image.
I have folded paper maps in my car door. They’re easy to read.
Any time someone says technology is making people stupider, I agree except that I’d amend that to mentally lazy. The people who are depending on those things probably aren’t even aware of their own surroundings, either, and couldn’t find their way out of a paper bag with a map and a compass.
Usedtabe one of the mapping services showed the best route to the closest local highway was via a street that deadended into a creek.
Me, I prefer the 2D GPS folded up int the glovebox.
Remember last year, when Pokemon decided to get people “outdoors” for a healthy bit of exercise? And many of them ended up in very, very bad neighborhoods, walked right in front of buses, paid no attention to where they were going. I think someone even walked right into a railroad crossing – something like that – with a train coming, because he didn’t take his eyes off the stupid tablet for one second.
Darwin
lol, I drive now and have been for over 25yrs. First thing I tell drivers is to get a friggen Rand McNally and learn how to use it. My wife has 70 or so drivers and you’d be surprised how many have gotten stuck, jammed their trucks under low bridges etc because “their GPS told them to go that way” and have no idea how to use a map.
“Hey, genius new driver with the tech savvy. See that really narrow squiggly line on the map? Don’t go their in your truck no matter what the GPS says” (Actual conversation)
Not just any Rand McNally, I always bought the laminated Truckers Version which had an index of low clearances as well, I used the hell out of that whenever I figured my route in Northeastern cities!
Yeah, that was the one I was talking about. I always get one on sale at the end of the year even though I’ve got a Garmin dezl gps/webcam
I keep one in my RV as it is pretty high too and there are tons of videos on YouTube where the A/C units on the top get slid to the back and off the back end.
Here’s some fun for you !!!
Looocy, you got some ‘splainin’ to do !!!
Well, at least, the Marines will *always* have their crayons.
*runs*
Whoa there… what else are we supposed to use to color between the lines on the map?
No kidding, we actually did this on the our maps we used in the FDC. Color coded the altitude intervals every 100 meters (if I remember correctly) so we could get a quicker reading from the map.
One can never go wrong with “charts and darts” and proper safety back up.
When FDC started to go to Computers (BUCS and BCS) in the mid 80s early 90s I always still had my guys running a check-chart.
The computer had a nasty habit of changing the propellant/ charge to the “most efficient” one if you didn’t have it overridden. Since we still gave voice commands to gun line they wouldn’t see the change and a BCS operator may not catch it in subsequent fire commands.
I guess I’m an oldtime artilleryman- I remember when FADAC was (brand) new. 13th Marines, RVN, 1967. Yeah, we still ran charts (and Check Charts).
I was with 1/12 when the BCS came aboard along with the HMMWVs.
My old ops chief told us if the boat ever went down, the BCS would sink, too, but we could always throw the GFTs and RDPs on top of the chart and paddle ashore…
Since we’re likely to lose the GPS network on the first day of a significant conflict (i.e., a war against an enemy who isn’t a bunch of 7th century barbarians in caves), it is high time we start practicing the old-fashioned methods again. Too bad it took the deaths of a bunch of sailors to spur this into action.
We still face a nuclear threat, so what good will all those fancy electronics going to be after a powerful enough EMP?
What good will it be if you don’t know which way is north?
I haven’t been an OOD for about 25 years…back then the SPA-25 radar repeaters on the bridge would do pretty decent relative motion calculations but you always, always were doing stubby pencil moboards when there was any doubt…they were a real bitch too with multiple contacts and you were trying to stick to a tight PIM…but that’s why a bridge team is there to assist and double check results…I’m wondering if they even have moboard pads in the Navy supply system now
One factor to consider is that unless one understands the process behind the automated function then one cannot comprehend what is going on with the automated function.
This can be doing simple or complex math, or navigation. Until one can do it by hand with paper and pencil, or map and compass, then one is unable to properly do it even with an automated tool.
YMMV
Just remember, Graybeard, that when the magnetic fields reverse, north will be south and south will be north and adjust your mental compass accordingly.
what if this time they don’t reverse, but do a 90-degree movement?
Oh, Graybeard! You’ve just blown the whole sci-fi doomed Earth meme to shreds! You sneaky guy, you!!!
you didn’t know his real name is Velikovsky?
No, I did not know that! I have been enlightened!
That is why I always stressed teaching manual computations. With automation, “garbage in garbage out” and if you don’t have a comprehension of how the operation works, you’ll take the garbage coming out as the gospel. Many times this basic knowledge prevented a firing incident…
Still have my first FM 6-40…lol
Some of us in the Navy never got rid of them.
Just Sayin.
We also have a great Luxury the Fleet does not.
Very Few Admirals and even less money.
The NYT story apparently went with the pencil and compass thing as a matter of retro novelty, but seems to be missing a larger point. While its true current GPS might well be augmented by older methods including a sextant, the collisions of both the USS Fitzgerald and USS John S. McCain were likely due to a failure of situational awareness, and not navigation.
Navigation is a matter of knowing where you are on a chart or on the planet. Situational awareness adds the additional elements of, say, also knowing where other vessels are in the vicinity, and how much water you might have under the keel. Such things are a matter of piloting.
I’d be about the last person to second-guess the Navy on this stuff, but it seems to me the fundamental problem wasn’t a lack of pencil and compass. It was not having enough Mil-Spec Mk I eyeballs looking out the window.
Partially true.
But even eyeballs can’t judge distance, speed, and CPA like a moboard or radar can.
Also remember the San Fran was very nearly lost due to bad charts, so even if they knew where they were, the wouldn’t know of the hazards around them.
Every time I see those pics of San Fran in drydock, I keep thinking if they’d been a little more to one side that would have been a head on collision and a little more to the other side and it would have been a miss.
Went hunting with a guy not long ago. He had a gps, cell phone etc. He asked me if I had one.
“nope”
“How you going to know the way out”?
“I looked at a topo before coming” I said as I pulled out my Silva.
When I was the navigator on a frigate in the early 80s, we relied on the sextant for celestial navigation, and on taking bearings from known points on the charts. The DRT was always kept updated and lookouts were always keeping an eye out for trouble. When USNA stopped teaching celestial navigation, I knew bad things would happen if the satellites went down or their data was corrupted. Electronics are no substitute for good old fashioned seamanship.
Bingo!
Hondo give this man extra butter for his bread.
Out!
When I retired back in 2007, I used my GPS to get me down to the gunshine state of Florida and I wondered why the GPS had me detour numerous times at construction sites so after I got to my new abode, I was checking out the GPS and it was on the truck setting mode which I forgot all about as we used it while I was working for Brink’s. the driver who knew how to get to all of the upstate NY stops wanted to see how the GPS would do to get us to the stops.
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About time.
Seems it is tough to navigate in today’s military without batteries or the internet.
Polar plot, intersection, resection, etc.
Common sense.
Drone pilots are going to love this….
In commenting upon the record of the court of inquiry, the Chief of the Bureau of Engineering said: “The Bureau desires to emphasize the fact that such devices as radio compasses, sonic depth finders, etc., are reliable only to the extent that they are operated properly, and recommends that the attention of the forces afloat be directed to the necessity for continuous training in their use.”
That was written in 1931. It was regarding the Honda Point Disaster of September 8, 1923.
https://www.history.navy.mil/research/library/online-reading-room/title-list-alphabetically/h/honda-pedernales-point-california-disaster-8-september-1923.html
Plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose.
Never underestimate the effect of complacency.
Amen
hotel 6 says:
I am a Marine artilleryman. We had computers but ran a paper backup. Caught a bunch of screwups. As XO I used a plotting board and Graphical Firing Tables to check the data going to the guns. The guys we were shooting at deserved to die by our hands; our Marines did not.
I spent a tour on ships of the Seventh Fleet. I stood underway watches. I learned to use the manuvering board. We transited the San Bernadino Strait at night—the Captain was on the bridge, his most competent watch team was there with him, the navigators were navigating, radarmen were on the scopes. It was an all hands effort and you can bet your sweet bippy there was no stray talk or horsing around.
The military is serious business. Everything we use is heavy or explosive and meant to kill people. It takes care to keep it working right and knowing what you are doing to make it work FOR us. Personnel and equipment and units all take continuous extensive care to keep them working right. This is the mission of our military.
It is not a social experiment. Let the Generals run the military; the Admirals run the navy and keep the social legislators and their dumb assed ideas the hell out of it.