Hey everybody, Lions Led By Donkeys is live in Belfast at the OEM 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
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also be in the show notes. Thank you. Hey everyone, but you're about to listen to as 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.patrion.com slash LionsledByDonkeys. Here's a good thing, sailors, if you're listening, I know we have a lot of listeners 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. So you do not matter. Yeah, you are very much spare parts bud. Yeah. In 2008, the Navy Senate contract with North Earth Grumman for $7 million in 2008 military development dollars, this is literally nothing. Right. Seven million. That's it. Generally, American weapon companies can't even produce a
clicky pen with that much money if you give them 13 years and as staff in the dozens. Within three years, the first destroyer 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 the last time I'm going to compliment
to anything to do with this fucking thing. Also, you know, you have to, you know, uh, where do like it was probably just a bunch of iPads literally just duct tape to like bulkheads 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 instead of shooting the Tomahawks, you're just throwing an angry bird at who these. The problem was this new system was completely new, meaning the John Paul Jones was
effectively an experiment. And it constantly ran a 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, we're 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. Fucking like famously, you know, like as we talked about during the lateral combat ship 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, you know, ships aren't built to like have a lot of extra fucking room to put you in.
Exactly. It's 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, don't need it. You can't, you know, it's not, it's not really easy to like just run some fucking wires from one end to the other.
They had to, I mean, it's, it's a massive new computerized navigation system. This is supposed to streamline an automate, a streamline an automate a lot of different things, which meant there 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 the back down from. Oh, yeah. Because I mean, a, because they've over committed this house emissions, b, half of the officer core 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 see like, uh, 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, uh, we 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 Ensign's and you all doing this job. I'm over here with a fucking universal remote and an iPad. Try this. And that was just Steve and
the iPad. I tried to figure out how to guide the boat through the streets of Malacca, you know, in 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 is a, 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 onto mostly because the reason why this wasn't fast is because the Navy refused to commit to putting a lot of its ships ships up in this, these docs for a long period of time. So it could only free up three or four ships per year to go through it. I have a fleet of 90. And that doesn't sound too bad hypothetically. Uh, but you know, when things don't sound too bad in the show, you know, it's, yeah, the devil's in the details. Well, it's also you also just got
to figure like three to four ships out of 90. So you figure, you know, best case scenario you're taking like, I don't know, like half a century to like fucking retrofit everything. Like pretty much assuming that nothing gets slowed down, you know, well, right. Like it's, that's, that's not a great, you know, not a, and you know, which is well, of course, one of those things were then like by the
time they get to the end of it, then you got to start over at 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. Uh, Northrop 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, don't you update though? Like look, I work in IT and like 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 meant that like then every ship is effectively custom. Like this, every ship is different. Every single ship
with the system, but it is completely and totally different. That sounds like a fucking nightmare. This is actually this is a thing that the the coast card 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 know, you could even transfer cohesives
between boats because if you did like, oh, this like there's famously an example where a captain on a patrol boat like got an entire like stairwell installed off the pilot house, which blocked several of the crucial navigation lights and like a bunch and like caused a bunch of other issues and is like now known as like a major engineering flaw. And so like, you know, they they went over time and like force all these ships to standardize because like we can't just
have bespoke ships that were to 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 destroy 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 like, meanwhile, on your paper, where probably says, you know, like Anson, like, you know, Anson's Nuffy is qualified to work on this system in this class of boat, whatever else just send him from one to another. Exactly. 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? Right. 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. No, no, them.