The only way I can see this working is giving the females a depo shot before and during deployment. I toured an LA-class attack sub once (my cousin was the XO) and to call the quarters "intimate" would be an understatement.
I think a sub will end up being quite similar, which is sort of the issue. However, for the women who go to be officers on subs, it's pretty cool because you can find a suitable and intelligent, if autistic, husband, and the command won't do anything because they want to be complicit in the cover up to preserve the watchbill.
I can't speak to destroyers or, really, to boomers. No one will have much first hand experience of frigates for the foreseeable future, considering what a mess Constellation has been.
Well, a US submarine struck an undersea mountain a couple of years ago. The heavily redacted accident report was pretty withering to read. My strong impression is that the overall level of competency isn’t what it was forty years ago.
I’d say that operating a submarine is probably the highest g-loaded occupation in the military, even higher than flying a fast jet. All the enlisted men have to be sharp as hell. We will likely see the first operational loss of a submarine since the Scorpion in the next few years.
I worked for a startup years ago; We hired a guy to be our COO who was previously the captain of a nuclear sub. He told us on several occasions that a nuclear submarine is the most complex machine ever build by earthlings. He probably said "by man", but, you know.
There was also the US submarine that surfaced underneath a Japanese fishing trawler instantly sinking it and killing a number of those aboard the trawler.
While the sub captain and relevant crew were all male AFAIK, the sub did happen to have aboard a bunch of sightseeing VIPs visitors including several women. The presence of said tourists and the distractions they caused contributed to the accident.
Perhaps 20 years ago, when The Atlantic was a real magazine, they had a story about a tugboat that sank off the coast of New Jersey while towing a barge. The tugboat captain was blamed for the wreck. However, upon investigation it was found that the tug had been dragged underwater while going backwards. Further; when the tow cable was examined, smears of titanium were found embedded in it.
Only one country makes submarine hulls out of titanium: The Soviet Union. The article made the case that it was either a Soviet submarine or a Cuban submarine that was sold to them by the Soviets.
My family comes from a place in Ireland not far from the Atlantic and tales of fishing trawlers losing their nets to submarines are legion there.
What's the logic of making subs out of titanium? Titanium's high strength per pound makes it good aircraft metal, but for objects that float on water—or below it—the extra expense of titanium seems wasted.
It's like that OceanGate submersible that was made out of carbon fiber. Carbon fiber is great for applications where weight is an issue, but 12000 feet under the ocean weight is not an issue except how to have enough of it to get down there. It's as if they built it out of carbon fiber just to be "high tech" even though it gave no advantage while creating unnecessary liabilities and expense.
That’s a question I can’t answer. Perhaps titanium submarines aren’t readily discovered using Magnetic Anomaly Detectors.
Russia has huge titanium deposits. I believe the CIA operated a front company during the Cold War the purpose of which was to obtain Russian titanium for our DoD. It may have been to build the SR-71 airframes.
I just looked at the Wiki article on Soviet Alfa-class subs. They had a submerged speed of 41 knots! Almost 50 mph.
There was a US project to remove uranium fuel for these submarines from Kazakhstan after the USSR collapsed. It’s well worth a few minutes of your time to read.
Remember when one photo of enlisted submarine berthing effectively killed Clinton's proposed lifting of the gay ban in '93? If the great film Das Boot could be remastered in Odorama, it would likewise kill the Navy's hopes for dis boat--from the other direction. The US military must now be enjoying a vicious cycle: the more they push DIE, the more they have to have it to fill the ranks, and the less effective the armed forces. Deliberate?
The guy who have us the nuclear submarine had the first name "Hyman"; can't help but think there is a dirty joke in this that could get us all canceled.
Also from wikipedia:
"... was the driving force for shifting the Navy's initial focus from applications on destroyers to submarines.[34] Rickover's vision was not initially shared by his immediate superiors:[6] he was recalled from Oak Ridge and assigned "advisory duties" with an office in an abandoned ladies' room in the Navy Building. He subsequently went around several layers of superior officers, and in 1947 went directly to the Chief of Naval Operations, Fleet Admiral Chester Nimitz, also a former submariner."
"an abandoned ladies room" now that is some pro level foreshadowing!
And really, if the key feature is that they are undetectable, do we even need these subs to exist, let alone have to worry about how competent their crews are or the incidence of rape on board?
A great story I heard once was that all the Navy submarine captains who graduated from the Naval Academy had bad eyesight. Apparently, everyone wanted to be a Navy pilot/aircraft carrier (for the glory, the thrills, the chicks + Top Gun) but if you didn't have perfect vision the Naval Academy did not allow you that track. So all the brilliant guys who needed glasses ended up captaining nuclear submarines. Which worked out ok since the bookworms generally had bad eyesight so they could get up to snuff on everything about nuclear submarines.
Then LASIK vision came in and changed the game. Suddenly all the bookworms could see and were clamoring for all the pilot groupie ass. I don't know if they ever resolved it, but last I heard they were considering offering bonuses to Naval Academy guys to stay on the submarine track.
I once worked with a guy (contract job) who had wanted to join the Air Force but discovered during testing that he was red/green colour blind. He was rejected on that account and joined the army.
They are putting women, who have periods every month leading to more bathroom breaks and use of supplies and water, in the cramped quarters of a submarine. For the Left ideology trumps reality.
It reminds me of female firemen - now "firefighters" in English - all over the West, for which the demands have been lowered, as they can't carry dolls with the weight of adult men out of smoke-filled buildings.
And in the Marines strength requirements for women are lower than for men. A marine soldier also revealed that out on the obstacle course women are given every break, they get to redo obstacles. For men trying again on an obstacle during evaluation is only done if there is serious reason to do so, something that disadvantaged the male soldier when he tried the first time. For women - do it as many times as you want, ideology is all that matters.
Speaking of Taiwan - despite the Chinese government's constant use of Taiwan to make young men focus on a foreign "enemy" like the U.S. does with Iran and divert from all the domestic problems, specifically the lousy work conditions Chinese suffer from, they are not going to attack Taiwan. As they have also said. The following notes come from Taiwan Is Not About China, by Peter van Buren, in The American Conservative, 2022.
-Taiwan has invested $188 billion in China, more than the U.S. has invested. Their businesses are in Beijing, Shanghai and Hong Kong. They are on the Shanghai stock market. And China invests in Taiwan. Cross-strait trade in 2019 was $149.2 billion.
-China has invested more than $145 billion in the U.S., and has allowed the U.S. to invest $1 trillion in their own country. They are betting on American success. This record-high economic involvement would be gone if they attacked Taiwan.
-There are eleven airlines operating between Taipei and Beijing daily, six from China and five from Taiwan.
-2.68 million Chinese visited Taiwan before corona. The two countries are very close.
-China did not invade Hong Kong or Macau under 200 years of colonial rule, even though they had the military with which to do so.
-Chinese leaders always say that Taiwan will eventually return to China, but in a natural way. They have no reason to rush in this issue, and haven't done so for generations.
-China has little capacity to take Taiwan even if they'd try. They'd need to land hundreds of thousands, perhaps even a million soldiers, on the first day, under great time constraints before the far superior U.S. navy arrived to blow their ships out of the water. The Chinese have three modern ships that can carry 1,000 soldiers each.
-Taiwan has long-range anti-ship missiles bought from the U.S. which can reach Chinese ships almost as soon as they leave port. Any Chinese leader who allowed ships to sink and thousands of sailors to die when there was no threat would be forced to resign.
-Taiwan has a labyrinth of mine fields and armed islands the Chinese ships would have to go through, and great air defenses. They could easily hold out until aided.
Furthermore:
-As another writer points out, Solis-Mullen at Antiwar, the weather only allows fifty days per year for crossing the Taiwan Strait with a large force.
-Chinese GDP is $14.7 trillion (2022), but they suffer from $50 trillion in debts and would not survive without the annual $2.6 trillion in export earnings.
-And finally, China has no elections to win, and the Chinese think in centuries. Why take any risks when there's already deep economic cooperation and no threat? Eventually Taiwan will be back with China, even if it's some generations from now. With China and Taiwan looking different from today. Or not. Either way Taiwan is still full of Chinese who work with the Chinese on the mainland. The only reason to worry would be if Taiwan was being swamped by Third World mass immigration , like in Western nations.
I have to say, I am a bit surprised that the commissioning of a new submarine is such a big deal. I know yesterday morning there were planes all over central New Jersey in celebration of this event, which was held at a naval weapons station on Raritan Bay near Sandy Hook.
The Navy likes to get some big fanfare whenever they can drum up some good feelings in the namesake. Also, NJY took a very long time to build, so that may have helped them line it up.
At the risk of terminal contrarianism, women have been in the navy for awhile now, and despite the usual drip-drip of newsy multiple-career-ending USS John McCain-style black eyes I tend to read in full when I encounter them but don’t religiously follow, I don’t clearly recall one where female incompetence was fingered? (By all means dunk on me here.)
The physical competency issue looms less large here than elsewhere. Indeed the sort of “prudent stable vigilant” high-consequence undersea competencies would seem to mirror something more akin to non-surgical-stream life-or-death medicine (pace a male-advantaged dexterity-coordination domain like say, fast jet piloting)
My understanding of the state of the fairly extensive lit on male-female performance differences in high-pressure medicine—again notwithstanding bleeding edge surgical innovation—is that, all else equal, women perform no worse than their male colleagues.
Indeed, in several areas, chiefly tendency to messy, career-and-occasionally-patient-killing personality disorders, the lit is quite clear that women have the edge.
If you died of internal injuries during an MRI because years earlier your hungover surgeon left metal behind during a routine operation, odds are it was a man wot did it. Your radiologist who was too preoccupied being served divorce papers to catch the obvious and preventable dark mass, same deal.
Proposed: In submarines as in medicine, high variance…. usually a bad thing?
Let’s cede that there maybe be some hard-to-moneyball all-male performance intangibles that developments such as this sacrifice, how many IQ points—both boatwide and in critical g-loaded competencies (tho subs are quite g-loaded eveywhere) should you be willing to pay for them? 10? Clearly no. 5? Again nope.
1-2? We’ve entered the realm of taste. I still wouldn’t. As I wouldn’t for most medical specialists. YMMV. Time will tell.
(purely pedantically the New Jersey is a fast attack sub not a boomer, as well)
It was reported after one of the collisions that the female officer of the deck (at the helm) and the female officer in charge of the CIC (sensors) weren't on speaking terms before hand. The Services put a very high value on teamwork, not historically a female strength, nor is their presence among men helpful to it. Shifting officers' duties frequently seems contrary to that value, but it forces everyone to become accustomed to functioning with all types quickly. Plus, no one becomes indispensable (except Rickover).
Subs aren't anything like hospitals. Even doctors get to go home at the end of a shift.
Subs are war boats that stay submerged for months on end. There's no "work-life balance," onboard drama is not tolerated, you can't just catch a ride back home if some medical "issue" comes up.
Say some sailorette gets pregnant and has complications hundreds of feet under the arctic icecap. Our SSBNs are on top secret missions, loaded with hundreds of thermonuclear warheads. National security is at stake.
You want the boat to blow the tanks and surface for the lady so she can get a ride home, immediately exposing its position to Russian and Chinese surveillance satellites?
My impression is not many women choose "high-pressure medicine" e.g. trauma/general surgeon or neurosurgeon.
Data point of one, but I observed a death-minutes-away event in an ER. The female PA's and nurses are fluttering around, the resident has lateraled to the on call and is off to the next crisis. The general surgeon walks in, grabs the chart, looks the patient up and down with utter detachment, listens to a babble of voices at him for about 10 seconds, and erupts with some LOUD and very precise orders. Things get organized and life-saving real quick. Happy ending.
A friend is an orthopedic surgeon. A female family member asks him to do a routine ACL repair. He looks at her with a half-smile and says, "Nope. Cold as ice." I.e., if a patient starts flatlining or convulsing or bleeding for God knows what reason he wants zero baggage and is going into pure Zen mode to save the patient.
In my life experience, very few women have the capacity for QUICK, decisive and DETACHED, authoritative action under fire. The Navy has not fought a real war in 80 years so I'm sure lots of women who can meet certain metrics look just fine.
Are men the only ones showing up hungover or with personal crises? Between a hungover, divorcing, male air traffic controller/surgeon/attorney/high voltage-lineman and the hungover, divorcing, female air traffic controller/surgeon/attorney/high voltage-lineman, I'm choosing the man.
After I posted this, I recalled Federal Express Flight 705, which involved an extreme tail-event, but that really is where men seem to excel as opposed to making sure family members get along or that field hospitals are clean and comfortable under the circumstances.
> Proposed: In submarines as in medicine, high variance…. usually a bad thing?
Greater male variability is about male-to-male variation, not day-to-day variation within the same male. The idea for a job with high requirements is that you set a high threshold and hire above that. Your hirees won't exhibit so much variation, because they're heavily selected.
As a former Army Ranger Infantry officer, I had a similar reaction to the story as you did. While I know Ranger training, infantry training and Marine boot camp have all made training adjustments for women that do not necessarily serve our national interest, I (perhaps wrongly?) assumed there could be duties in subs that women could perform as well as or better than men. I am surrounded by highly competent women in my life and career. But without any submariner experience to base my opinion on, all of these comments have been informative. However, with so few of our young men even being able to pass military entrance physicals these days, we are going to have to think of creative ways to deal with future threats.
I think you might get decent performance if you did all-male and all-female crews, but it's a mess when you mix them.
Surface ships show the reliable occurrence of sex underway. Being, or not being, someone who's getting any for a 6 month deployment makes a difference and causes clashes that really mess up teamwork (which works more against sub crews than against surface ones.)
Men working for women tend to disengage, let the women deal with things, and avoid clashes that involve directly facing off against women. I can scarcely imagine submarine underways without the relief valve of sincerely screaming at one another to unfuck ourselves, etc.
And, as mentioned elsewhere, submarine wives are right to disdain the imposition of women into the crew.
Finally, and most fundamentally, it's uncivilized to send young women to die in battle in a force that historically sustained higher casualty rates than any other. And if you're training your peacetime force without that in mind, you're just not a very serious person/group/country.
> "I think you might get decent performance if you did all-male and all-female crews, but it's a mess when you mix them."
I recall reading a study or maybe just anecdotal accounts a couple of decades ago to this effect. All male crew was best. Evenly matched male/female crew second best. Unevenly matched male/female crew was worst because sexual tension/jealousy/rivalry undermined it.
Needless to say, the Navy (and the rest of the military) has reached for Door #3 with both hands.
There's one thing I left out, which is that being a young woman working for a senior woman generally sucks. Something about mentorship seems to be significantly a male behavior pattern, and that instinct toward mentorship tempers a lot of frustration (abuse?) that otherwise flows from senior to junior for dumb mistakes. Of all the submariner junior officer women whom I've worked with, I never had one let on that she got along with her female department head (while the inverse was readily available) . Too bad, since they're also roommates!
In the 1990's I talked to a Navy captain who had recently served as Executive Officer on an aircraft carrier. When he took over as XO, the outgoing XO told him the facts of life on a carrier: "Every minute of every day, somewhere on the ship there will be an act of sexual intercourse between two sailers who may be married, but not to each other." Women have been serving on US Navy subs for a decade or more, so presumably the "submerged 1000 feet" club has quite a few members in it by now. What's new about the New Jersey is that it was designed for mixed-sex crews, not modified to accept them.
I'm willing to bet there is a USN regulation or ten that restricts the time pregnant sailers can spend on a sub (or any ship on a long deployment).
So... once certain women understand the deep mental, emotional, and physicall challenges of long deployments, getting knocked up beforehand to get (easier) shore duty becomes SOP.
The resulting staff shortages and chaos is borne by those left.
You win your bet. When I spoke with the Navy captain that I wrote about yesterday, he commanded a shore unit in San Diego. He described his typical sailor as a female who got knocked up just before her ship sailed for the Orient and then got an abortion once it was safely over the horizon. - Ken
I'm sure submariners' wives will love this.
The only way I can see this working is giving the females a depo shot before and during deployment. I toured an LA-class attack sub once (my cousin was the XO) and to call the quarters "intimate" would be an understatement.
In feminist calculations, sailor's wives just don't count as women.
Saltpeter in the water.
Women have been on surface ships for a long time. How the sub going to be any different. Compared to a frigate or destroyer, a boomer can be roomy.
Women on surface ships have been problematic for a long time and the sub will not be any different.
"Compared to a frigate or destroyer, a boomer can be roomy."
I very much doubt this.
I think a sub will end up being quite similar, which is sort of the issue. However, for the women who go to be officers on subs, it's pretty cool because you can find a suitable and intelligent, if autistic, husband, and the command won't do anything because they want to be complicit in the cover up to preserve the watchbill.
I can't speak to destroyers or, really, to boomers. No one will have much first hand experience of frigates for the foreseeable future, considering what a mess Constellation has been.
Yeah I remember reading somewhere that on coed naval ships, a lot of the women would end up pregnant after long voyages.
Well, a US submarine struck an undersea mountain a couple of years ago. The heavily redacted accident report was pretty withering to read. My strong impression is that the overall level of competency isn’t what it was forty years ago.
I’d say that operating a submarine is probably the highest g-loaded occupation in the military, even higher than flying a fast jet. All the enlisted men have to be sharp as hell. We will likely see the first operational loss of a submarine since the Scorpion in the next few years.
I worked for a startup years ago; We hired a guy to be our COO who was previously the captain of a nuclear sub. He told us on several occasions that a nuclear submarine is the most complex machine ever build by earthlings. He probably said "by man", but, you know.
There was also the US submarine that surfaced underneath a Japanese fishing trawler instantly sinking it and killing a number of those aboard the trawler.
While the sub captain and relevant crew were all male AFAIK, the sub did happen to have aboard a bunch of sightseeing VIPs visitors including several women. The presence of said tourists and the distractions they caused contributed to the accident.
Perhaps 20 years ago, when The Atlantic was a real magazine, they had a story about a tugboat that sank off the coast of New Jersey while towing a barge. The tugboat captain was blamed for the wreck. However, upon investigation it was found that the tug had been dragged underwater while going backwards. Further; when the tow cable was examined, smears of titanium were found embedded in it.
Only one country makes submarine hulls out of titanium: The Soviet Union. The article made the case that it was either a Soviet submarine or a Cuban submarine that was sold to them by the Soviets.
My family comes from a place in Ireland not far from the Atlantic and tales of fishing trawlers losing their nets to submarines are legion there.
Interesting.
What's the logic of making subs out of titanium? Titanium's high strength per pound makes it good aircraft metal, but for objects that float on water—or below it—the extra expense of titanium seems wasted.
It's like that OceanGate submersible that was made out of carbon fiber. Carbon fiber is great for applications where weight is an issue, but 12000 feet under the ocean weight is not an issue except how to have enough of it to get down there. It's as if they built it out of carbon fiber just to be "high tech" even though it gave no advantage while creating unnecessary liabilities and expense.
That’s a question I can’t answer. Perhaps titanium submarines aren’t readily discovered using Magnetic Anomaly Detectors.
Russia has huge titanium deposits. I believe the CIA operated a front company during the Cold War the purpose of which was to obtain Russian titanium for our DoD. It may have been to build the SR-71 airframes.
I just looked at the Wiki article on Soviet Alfa-class subs. They had a submerged speed of 41 knots! Almost 50 mph.
There was a US project to remove uranium fuel for these submarines from Kazakhstan after the USSR collapsed. It’s well worth a few minutes of your time to read.
Remember when one photo of enlisted submarine berthing effectively killed Clinton's proposed lifting of the gay ban in '93? If the great film Das Boot could be remastered in Odorama, it would likewise kill the Navy's hopes for dis boat--from the other direction. The US military must now be enjoying a vicious cycle: the more they push DIE, the more they have to have it to fill the ranks, and the less effective the armed forces. Deliberate?
The fantasy underlying DIE will come to a very very sad crash.
This is the death of the US Submarine Force.
Thomas Herring
USNA 1971
The guy who have us the nuclear submarine had the first name "Hyman"; can't help but think there is a dirty joke in this that could get us all canceled.
Also from wikipedia:
"... was the driving force for shifting the Navy's initial focus from applications on destroyers to submarines.[34] Rickover's vision was not initially shared by his immediate superiors:[6] he was recalled from Oak Ridge and assigned "advisory duties" with an office in an abandoned ladies' room in the Navy Building. He subsequently went around several layers of superior officers, and in 1947 went directly to the Chief of Naval Operations, Fleet Admiral Chester Nimitz, also a former submariner."
"an abandoned ladies room" now that is some pro level foreshadowing!
And really, if the key feature is that they are undetectable, do we even need these subs to exist, let alone have to worry about how competent their crews are or the incidence of rape on board?
A great story I heard once was that all the Navy submarine captains who graduated from the Naval Academy had bad eyesight. Apparently, everyone wanted to be a Navy pilot/aircraft carrier (for the glory, the thrills, the chicks + Top Gun) but if you didn't have perfect vision the Naval Academy did not allow you that track. So all the brilliant guys who needed glasses ended up captaining nuclear submarines. Which worked out ok since the bookworms generally had bad eyesight so they could get up to snuff on everything about nuclear submarines.
Then LASIK vision came in and changed the game. Suddenly all the bookworms could see and were clamoring for all the pilot groupie ass. I don't know if they ever resolved it, but last I heard they were considering offering bonuses to Naval Academy guys to stay on the submarine track.
I once worked with a guy (contract job) who had wanted to join the Air Force but discovered during testing that he was red/green colour blind. He was rejected on that account and joined the army.
They are putting women, who have periods every month leading to more bathroom breaks and use of supplies and water, in the cramped quarters of a submarine. For the Left ideology trumps reality.
It reminds me of female firemen - now "firefighters" in English - all over the West, for which the demands have been lowered, as they can't carry dolls with the weight of adult men out of smoke-filled buildings.
And in the Marines strength requirements for women are lower than for men. A marine soldier also revealed that out on the obstacle course women are given every break, they get to redo obstacles. For men trying again on an obstacle during evaluation is only done if there is serious reason to do so, something that disadvantaged the male soldier when he tried the first time. For women - do it as many times as you want, ideology is all that matters.
Speaking of Taiwan - despite the Chinese government's constant use of Taiwan to make young men focus on a foreign "enemy" like the U.S. does with Iran and divert from all the domestic problems, specifically the lousy work conditions Chinese suffer from, they are not going to attack Taiwan. As they have also said. The following notes come from Taiwan Is Not About China, by Peter van Buren, in The American Conservative, 2022.
-Taiwan has invested $188 billion in China, more than the U.S. has invested. Their businesses are in Beijing, Shanghai and Hong Kong. They are on the Shanghai stock market. And China invests in Taiwan. Cross-strait trade in 2019 was $149.2 billion.
-China has invested more than $145 billion in the U.S., and has allowed the U.S. to invest $1 trillion in their own country. They are betting on American success. This record-high economic involvement would be gone if they attacked Taiwan.
-There are eleven airlines operating between Taipei and Beijing daily, six from China and five from Taiwan.
-2.68 million Chinese visited Taiwan before corona. The two countries are very close.
-China did not invade Hong Kong or Macau under 200 years of colonial rule, even though they had the military with which to do so.
-Chinese leaders always say that Taiwan will eventually return to China, but in a natural way. They have no reason to rush in this issue, and haven't done so for generations.
-China has little capacity to take Taiwan even if they'd try. They'd need to land hundreds of thousands, perhaps even a million soldiers, on the first day, under great time constraints before the far superior U.S. navy arrived to blow their ships out of the water. The Chinese have three modern ships that can carry 1,000 soldiers each.
-Taiwan has long-range anti-ship missiles bought from the U.S. which can reach Chinese ships almost as soon as they leave port. Any Chinese leader who allowed ships to sink and thousands of sailors to die when there was no threat would be forced to resign.
-Taiwan has a labyrinth of mine fields and armed islands the Chinese ships would have to go through, and great air defenses. They could easily hold out until aided.
Furthermore:
-As another writer points out, Solis-Mullen at Antiwar, the weather only allows fifty days per year for crossing the Taiwan Strait with a large force.
-Chinese GDP is $14.7 trillion (2022), but they suffer from $50 trillion in debts and would not survive without the annual $2.6 trillion in export earnings.
-And finally, China has no elections to win, and the Chinese think in centuries. Why take any risks when there's already deep economic cooperation and no threat? Eventually Taiwan will be back with China, even if it's some generations from now. With China and Taiwan looking different from today. Or not. Either way Taiwan is still full of Chinese who work with the Chinese on the mainland. The only reason to worry would be if Taiwan was being swamped by Third World mass immigration , like in Western nations.
Very informative. Thank you for spelling this out.
Submarines are called "BOATS" and not "ships" or other. So, will this boat be cracked on as a "Lesboat"?
The Love Boat once there's a birth control failure.
the first 'virgin' birth in a berth will be quite the thing.
I have to say, I am a bit surprised that the commissioning of a new submarine is such a big deal. I know yesterday morning there were planes all over central New Jersey in celebration of this event, which was held at a naval weapons station on Raritan Bay near Sandy Hook.
https://archive.is/InNVY
The Navy likes to get some big fanfare whenever they can drum up some good feelings in the namesake. Also, NJY took a very long time to build, so that may have helped them line it up.
China & Russia only have to run out the clock.
They know it, and Israel knows it, which explains the US military's increasingly desperate Hail Mary's.
At the risk of terminal contrarianism, women have been in the navy for awhile now, and despite the usual drip-drip of newsy multiple-career-ending USS John McCain-style black eyes I tend to read in full when I encounter them but don’t religiously follow, I don’t clearly recall one where female incompetence was fingered? (By all means dunk on me here.)
The physical competency issue looms less large here than elsewhere. Indeed the sort of “prudent stable vigilant” high-consequence undersea competencies would seem to mirror something more akin to non-surgical-stream life-or-death medicine (pace a male-advantaged dexterity-coordination domain like say, fast jet piloting)
My understanding of the state of the fairly extensive lit on male-female performance differences in high-pressure medicine—again notwithstanding bleeding edge surgical innovation—is that, all else equal, women perform no worse than their male colleagues.
Indeed, in several areas, chiefly tendency to messy, career-and-occasionally-patient-killing personality disorders, the lit is quite clear that women have the edge.
If you died of internal injuries during an MRI because years earlier your hungover surgeon left metal behind during a routine operation, odds are it was a man wot did it. Your radiologist who was too preoccupied being served divorce papers to catch the obvious and preventable dark mass, same deal.
Proposed: In submarines as in medicine, high variance…. usually a bad thing?
Let’s cede that there maybe be some hard-to-moneyball all-male performance intangibles that developments such as this sacrifice, how many IQ points—both boatwide and in critical g-loaded competencies (tho subs are quite g-loaded eveywhere) should you be willing to pay for them? 10? Clearly no. 5? Again nope.
1-2? We’ve entered the realm of taste. I still wouldn’t. As I wouldn’t for most medical specialists. YMMV. Time will tell.
(purely pedantically the New Jersey is a fast attack sub not a boomer, as well)
It was reported after one of the collisions that the female officer of the deck (at the helm) and the female officer in charge of the CIC (sensors) weren't on speaking terms before hand. The Services put a very high value on teamwork, not historically a female strength, nor is their presence among men helpful to it. Shifting officers' duties frequently seems contrary to that value, but it forces everyone to become accustomed to functioning with all types quickly. Plus, no one becomes indispensable (except Rickover).
Subs aren't anything like hospitals. Even doctors get to go home at the end of a shift.
Subs are war boats that stay submerged for months on end. There's no "work-life balance," onboard drama is not tolerated, you can't just catch a ride back home if some medical "issue" comes up.
Say some sailorette gets pregnant and has complications hundreds of feet under the arctic icecap. Our SSBNs are on top secret missions, loaded with hundreds of thermonuclear warheads. National security is at stake.
You want the boat to blow the tanks and surface for the lady so she can get a ride home, immediately exposing its position to Russian and Chinese surveillance satellites?
My impression is not many women choose "high-pressure medicine" e.g. trauma/general surgeon or neurosurgeon.
Data point of one, but I observed a death-minutes-away event in an ER. The female PA's and nurses are fluttering around, the resident has lateraled to the on call and is off to the next crisis. The general surgeon walks in, grabs the chart, looks the patient up and down with utter detachment, listens to a babble of voices at him for about 10 seconds, and erupts with some LOUD and very precise orders. Things get organized and life-saving real quick. Happy ending.
A friend is an orthopedic surgeon. A female family member asks him to do a routine ACL repair. He looks at her with a half-smile and says, "Nope. Cold as ice." I.e., if a patient starts flatlining or convulsing or bleeding for God knows what reason he wants zero baggage and is going into pure Zen mode to save the patient.
In my life experience, very few women have the capacity for QUICK, decisive and DETACHED, authoritative action under fire. The Navy has not fought a real war in 80 years so I'm sure lots of women who can meet certain metrics look just fine.
Are men the only ones showing up hungover or with personal crises? Between a hungover, divorcing, male air traffic controller/surgeon/attorney/high voltage-lineman and the hungover, divorcing, female air traffic controller/surgeon/attorney/high voltage-lineman, I'm choosing the man.
After I posted this, I recalled Federal Express Flight 705, which involved an extreme tail-event, but that really is where men seem to excel as opposed to making sure family members get along or that field hospitals are clean and comfortable under the circumstances.
> Proposed: In submarines as in medicine, high variance…. usually a bad thing?
Greater male variability is about male-to-male variation, not day-to-day variation within the same male. The idea for a job with high requirements is that you set a high threshold and hire above that. Your hirees won't exhibit so much variation, because they're heavily selected.
As a former Army Ranger Infantry officer, I had a similar reaction to the story as you did. While I know Ranger training, infantry training and Marine boot camp have all made training adjustments for women that do not necessarily serve our national interest, I (perhaps wrongly?) assumed there could be duties in subs that women could perform as well as or better than men. I am surrounded by highly competent women in my life and career. But without any submariner experience to base my opinion on, all of these comments have been informative. However, with so few of our young men even being able to pass military entrance physicals these days, we are going to have to think of creative ways to deal with future threats.
I think you might get decent performance if you did all-male and all-female crews, but it's a mess when you mix them.
Surface ships show the reliable occurrence of sex underway. Being, or not being, someone who's getting any for a 6 month deployment makes a difference and causes clashes that really mess up teamwork (which works more against sub crews than against surface ones.)
Men working for women tend to disengage, let the women deal with things, and avoid clashes that involve directly facing off against women. I can scarcely imagine submarine underways without the relief valve of sincerely screaming at one another to unfuck ourselves, etc.
And, as mentioned elsewhere, submarine wives are right to disdain the imposition of women into the crew.
Finally, and most fundamentally, it's uncivilized to send young women to die in battle in a force that historically sustained higher casualty rates than any other. And if you're training your peacetime force without that in mind, you're just not a very serious person/group/country.
> "I think you might get decent performance if you did all-male and all-female crews, but it's a mess when you mix them."
I recall reading a study or maybe just anecdotal accounts a couple of decades ago to this effect. All male crew was best. Evenly matched male/female crew second best. Unevenly matched male/female crew was worst because sexual tension/jealousy/rivalry undermined it.
Needless to say, the Navy (and the rest of the military) has reached for Door #3 with both hands.
There's one thing I left out, which is that being a young woman working for a senior woman generally sucks. Something about mentorship seems to be significantly a male behavior pattern, and that instinct toward mentorship tempers a lot of frustration (abuse?) that otherwise flows from senior to junior for dumb mistakes. Of all the submariner junior officer women whom I've worked with, I never had one let on that she got along with her female department head (while the inverse was readily available) . Too bad, since they're also roommates!
Thanks.
Does "inverse" here mean that the senior officers said the opposite or that male officers said the opposite?
the female JOs can't stand their female superiors.
In the 1990's I talked to a Navy captain who had recently served as Executive Officer on an aircraft carrier. When he took over as XO, the outgoing XO told him the facts of life on a carrier: "Every minute of every day, somewhere on the ship there will be an act of sexual intercourse between two sailers who may be married, but not to each other." Women have been serving on US Navy subs for a decade or more, so presumably the "submerged 1000 feet" club has quite a few members in it by now. What's new about the New Jersey is that it was designed for mixed-sex crews, not modified to accept them.
Those are sailOrs (but no wonder Steve liked your comment).
What a disaster waiting to happen.
I'm willing to bet there is a USN regulation or ten that restricts the time pregnant sailers can spend on a sub (or any ship on a long deployment).
So... once certain women understand the deep mental, emotional, and physicall challenges of long deployments, getting knocked up beforehand to get (easier) shore duty becomes SOP.
The resulting staff shortages and chaos is borne by those left.
You win your bet. When I spoke with the Navy captain that I wrote about yesterday, he commanded a shore unit in San Diego. He described his typical sailor as a female who got knocked up just before her ship sailed for the Orient and then got an abortion once it was safely over the horizon. - Ken
I used to see women do that in the Army back in the 70s to get a discharge.
"Other modifications include lowering overhead valves and making them easier to turn"
Even at my slightly shrunken 6'-0" height as I push 60, my immediate sympathetic reaction to that modification is "Ouch!!"
Crap.
I once walked in the company of gods at 5'11".