Originally Posted by
2StgTurbine
Yeah, that's a terrible analysis. Humans have been making mistakes for all of history. War is hard and people make mistakes all the time. The only difference is now we get to see every mistake happen in real-time. In 1950, an Iowa class battleship was beached in its home harbor due to an extremely basic navigation error. It was an engineering miracle that they were able to recover the ship.
Yes these types of ops are hard, they push the limits so as to gain a tactical or strategic advantage against an opponent who might not be willing or able to push quite as hard.
It's not normal civilian ops where safety is always job #1.
Originally Posted by
2StgTurbine
This is not a millennial or gen-z thing. If anything most of the incidents you listed were command mistakes made by gen X.
As someone who lived that era from cold war JO through the end of OEF/GWOT as a senior O, I would say it's complicated...
During the cold war, it was hard work and not at all touchy-feely. Not a lot of BS distractions from the mission and also not a lot of tolerance for weak links.
In the 90's funding and priorities changed, without being engaged in a clear and specific conflict the usual peacetime military diseases manifested. That's what Gen X grew up in.
Post 9/11 we had some clear conflicts, but they were compartmentalized to certain branches and warfare specialities. Additionaly those conflicts (after 2001-2003) were all low intensity COIN activitities.
So many components were distracted by LO/COIN GWOT for a couple decades, at the expense of funding/training/preparing for global security and peer/neer-peer MRC's. We had additional cultural distractions which started in the 90's and continued I guess until about a month ago.
Leadership selection criteria for Gen X and early Z was hit and miss... for some based on combat experience (of a type which didn't correlate to the peer competitor big picture), for others based more on peacetime metrics whic are always hit and miss.
Those leaders were saddled with a lot, and frankly a lot of it was distractions and inconsistency. While juggling all of that, they had to mentor and develop the younger generations... that is objectively more challenging than in the past, due to several things:
1. Significant differences in lived experience and outlook between generations.
2. Recent societal expectations about how people in general get treated, which bleeds over into the mil.
3. Recruiting challenges which have often led to lower standards, to account for a smaller pool of youth who are fit for service by traditional standards.
The good news is that the military tends to get youth who are more on the motivated side, so it's not an issue of slackers in Mom's basement. It's more how they expect to be treated, and also a tendancy to not want to do something just because somebody else said so, if they don't see a good reason for it.
If they stay in long enough they learn and come around, but we rely heavily on first-term members for a lot of where the operational rubber meets the road. On Navy ships, the people doing the actual driving on any given midnight shift are probably all low experience and young... that has led to watch team discipline issues which were found to have contributed to some collisions.
Ultimately the chain of command is responsible, but they can only do so much and juggle so many balls.
Post GWOT, we've definitely been shifting back to focus on peer competitor MRC/MCO. Hopefully they can continue to tighten the focus, culturally and programmatically.