Is the Fleet Steaming Forward…Or Backward?

[JayhawkSD]

1. Nothing new here

Fifty years ago when I served on diesel submarines maintenance was farcial. Everything was about building the new nuclear boats and we made do with what we could beg, borrow or (as often as not) steal. Our standing joke was that our most critical piece of equipment was the bilge pump because our ship leaked so badly that if the bilge pump failed we would sink in eight hours.

USS Thresher sank because of a new shortcut routine for "yard availability" which was a period in the yard for annual maintenance. The Navy experimented with reducing the time allocated for that process to save money. Needless to say, that also reduced the amount of work that was performed as well as requiring work to be performed more hastily, and Thresher was on her first dive following such a period, with two of the yard workers still aboard, when she went down.