Naval Lessons from Ukraine/Russia

[Underway]

Some lessons learned from the Ukraine/Russia conflict discussed... most of the stuff is self evident but confirmatory.

War in Ukraine: Western Navies See Lessons from Strategic to Tactical Levels - Naval News

 

[Kirkhill]

Some lessons learned from the Ukraine/Russia conflict discussed... most of the stuff is self evident but confirmatory.

War in Ukraine: Western Navies See Lessons from Strategic to Tactical Levels - Naval News

This one too? From the same conference.

Navy chiefs stress need to accelerate technology delivery to speed up operator decision making - Naval News

The chiefs of the US Navy, Royal Navy and French Navy discussed technology developments at the inaugural Paris Naval Conference held on January 18, 2022.

www.navalnews.com

“What is decisive are technologies that are relevant to accelerating the OODA loop,” said Admiral Pierre Vandier, French Navy Chief of Staff, referring to the observe/orient/decide/act (OODA) process. “This is one of the biggest lessons […] Between our navies, the core is data interoperability because, if we want to act together, it is the OODA loop that is decisive. So, it is sharing this data, this process, and this software that makes us efficient in warfighting, much more than weapons.”


Illustrating his point with a hypothetical example from the war, he explained:

“You need 1,000 NLAWs to kill 1,000 tanks – but if you have a proper OODA loop, you will send two HIMARS munitions to strike the depot […] This is what Ukraine is [doing], with good success.”


Admiral Pierre Vandier

“Given the fact that we’re going to fight with what we have, it’s important we make investments now in those game-changing technologies and training aids that will make us more capable and more lethal. What’s changed over the past few years is that the problem is not the availability of the platforms […] Everybody has the platforms: the magic is the artificial intelligence (AI) software. AI is what really brings that platform alive, and gives it operational relevance.”



Admiral Michael Gilday, the USN’s Chief of Naval Operations

“What we’re discovering is that the learning is the investment,” said Adm Key.

“How we create that environment within our structures will allow us to leverage the technology at the speed of relevance […] We need to create an environment in which the practitioners feel permission to ‘fail fast’ and move on.”


Admiral Sir Ben Key

LIke spit shining boots - perfection is achieved through thousands of small circles.

 

[Colin Parkinson]

"Stay out of the Black Sea"

 

[lenaitch]

And no smoking on deck.

 

[Navy_Pete]

Fortunately we don't have any issues with compartmentalization, damage control systems or other issues that would impact recoverability from a missile hit, and all the ships we send to the Med for a possible black sea deployment are in good shape and not falling below even SOLAS fire and flood requirements.

/s

 

[Good2Golf]

Fortunately we don't have any issues with compartmentalization, damage control systems or other issues that would impact recoverability from a missile hit, and all the ships we send to the Med for a possible black sea deployment are in good shape and not falling below even SOLAS fire and flood requirements.

/s

And all the valuable lessons like from the PRO and FRE fires have been widely distributed and learned and adjusted for…

/sss

 

[Navy_Pete]

And all the valuable lessons like from the PRO and FRE fires have been widely distributed and learned and adjusted for…

/sss

FRE draft report widely distributed and then ignored by ops side. PRO BOI is still locked down as confidential.

Not sure when the last RCN issue was for wartime battle damage (maybe Korea) but if we can't learn from peacetime accidents we are not doing great. The RCN isn't even following it's own policies on reporting/tracking things, or enforcing the safety standard.

 

[SeaKingTacco]

FRE draft report widely distributed and then ignored by ops side. PRO BOI is still locked down as confidential.

Not sure when the last RCN issue was for wartime battle damage (maybe Korea) but if we can't learn from peacetime accidents we are not doing great. The RCN isn't even following it's own policies on reporting/tracking things, or enforcing the safety standard.

Korea was pretty minimal for battle damage for the RCN- a couple of killed/wounded and some splinter damage to the upper decks.

KOOTENAY and PRO were probably worse than most of the WW2 battle damage to RCN ships, excepting the torpedoings which mostly (but not always) resulted in everyone in the water. That the RCN does not have a learning culture is perhaps axiomatic.

To circle this back to the thread, DC is vital in naval warfare and everyone onboard has a role to play saving the ship.

 

[Colin Parkinson]

To circle this back to the thread, DC is vital in naval warfare and everyone onboard has a role to play saving the ship.

Norwegians shuffle into chat with heads down

 

[dapaterson]

The RCN sounds like NASA in late January 1986.

Rogers Commission Report - Wikipedia

en.wikipedia.org

 

[Navy_Pete]

Korea was pretty minimal for battle damage for the RCN- a couple of killed/wounded and some splinter damage to the upper decks.

KOOTENAY and PRO were probably worse than most of the WW2 battle damage to RCN ships, excepting the torpedoings which mostly (but not always) resulted in everyone in the water. That the RCN does not have a learning culture is perhaps axiomatic.

To circle this back to the thread, DC is vital in naval warfare and everyone onboard has a role to play saving the ship.

For sure, but the flipside of that is having the ship up to par for basic equipment working. We have our minimum standard, which is functionally SOLAS, but doesn't include battle damage recoverability. So ships just meeting our basic standard aren't up to par for war time damage, and could easily go the way of the Moskva.

Doesn't really matter how well trained the crew is if they can't pump out water fast enough to keep up with flooding. The fitted system not working remotely is pretty common, and then trying to tell people the local valve in the bilge (under deck access plates that usually have tool boxes, crates and other things on top) is not up to par for an emergency and still get static.

 

[SeaKingTacco]

For sure, but the flipside of that is having the ship up to par for basic equipment working. We have our minimum standard, which is functionally SOLAS, but doesn't include battle damage recoverability. So ships just meeting our basic standard aren't up to par for war time damage, and could easily go the way of the Moskva.

Doesn't really matter how well trained the crew is if they can't pump out water fast enough to keep up with flooding. The fitted system not working remotely is pretty common, and then trying to tell people the local valve in the bilge (under deck access plates that usually have tool boxes, crates and other things on top) is not up to par for an emergency and still get static.

You are singing to the choir here, sister….

 

[CBH99]

Is it because we are running our crews ragged with back to back deployments, we don’t have time for them to sit, breathe, and reconstitute?

(Classroom stuff, re lessons learned, as part of that reconstitution.)

 

[dapaterson]

Lessons learned, regardless of where, are dependent on leaving egos at the door an acknowledging what went wrong and where mistakes were made. That can be seen as attacks against people, senior people, and therefore CAF LL is often self-congratulatory nonsense that refuses to have hard conversations, so near-fatal errors recur until they become fatal errors... and those who did the same thing but got away with it ("Don't get caught!") use those who failed to get away with it as convenient scapegoats, rather than admitting their own culpability in a culture of silence.

 

[Navy_Pete]

Is it because we are running our crews ragged with back to back deployments, we don’t have time for them to sit, breathe, and reconstitute?

(Classroom stuff, re lessons learned, as part of that reconstitution.)

Yes on the crew, but also on the ships; they don't get enough time in repairs, and there aren't enough people to do maintenance either.

We cleverly tend to schedule it for most of the fleet to try and get repairs at the same time instead of load leveling so it doesn't work.

A lot of corrective maintenance is being done, but preventative is in the low double digits (which leads to more corrective).

Compounds with shortages on 2nd/3rd line, so lack of parts, big loss of knowledge on the LCMM side, and general scramble to try and catch up with all the obsolete gear. If we magically got all the jobs filled and enough resources, would still take a few years to catch up. Takes a while to buy anything generally with he normal milestones, and delivery time is bumped up to a year or more now (some things are in 2, 3 or TBD).

 

[CBH99]

Wowa, so all the talk from the Navy types about ships being driven into the ground (or whatever the navy version of that is…) really is as bad as they say!

Why not just put one ship in for repair at a time, instead of all at once? (Or maybe 2?). Allow all the ship repair resources to focus no one or two hulls, instead of only a few resources spread out across a bunch of ships?

Are there private yards that could help with some of the work, to help get the fleet back in tip top shape?

 

[NavyShooter]

When you contract a company in Halifax for a refit, and you get a ship back that's supposed to require 20,000 person hours to reactivate that actually requires over 80,000, you might have a problem.

When you contract a company to do a major midlife refit, and they run out of time and money to do all the required metal-work, and the solution is to give you back the plate steel (with no heat treat certs) and park it in front of a hangar in Shearwater...and 5+ years on from the refit process the metal-work still isn't done, you might have a problem.

When you've got more ships in refit than you have capable of sailing, but still have to rob crews to get ships off the wall...you might have a problem.

The Navy's got a lot of work ahead of it to get themselves on track.

 

[Navy_Pete]

All the DWPs are offset for exactly that reason, it's more the alongside repairs that get stacked on top of each other.

Normally the 1st line PM gets mostly done at sea, as most resources alongside that aren't taken up by duty watch, leave, courses etc, and the 2nd line PM and CM all need SS support and coordination.

With ships being a skeleton crews unless deployed, they have about enough people to keep the plant running and do minor corrective work so not a lot of PM gets done at sea in that case, and if they are going through work ups or whatever you basically don't really do anything other than workups, and maybe some major 1st line PM checks for safety system (like verify your fire/smoke detectors, 1st line checks on your extinguishers etc).

Our CPFs are up to 2 years in the dock and they are exceeding 1 million hours of repairs, but still not getting to everything due to 30 years of cumulative buildup. For context the last 280 DWP on ATH was about half that, and included some pretty major steel repairs, and a lot of nice to have work (like putting in new tiles in the big mess decks).

FOr some historical context we shifted to 'condition based maintenance' for the CPFs, and then changed the 280s/tankers to that in the mid 90s, as previously we would just replace sections of piping on major systems in the DWP so over a few cycles you would renew the whole thing.

ALl that to say when you hear the stories on the Moskva of what wasn't working, you could find the same thing on all our ships. The big difference is we have a much better trained crew vice conscripts, but still need to give them a fighting chance by making sure things like fitted systems work and compartmentalization works.

 

[daftandbarmy]

The RCN sounds like NASA in late January 1986.

Rogers Commission Report - Wikipedia

en.wikipedia.org

Tangentially, this is a good report/ warning too

The Hubble Space Telescope optical systems failure report

No verification of the reflective null corrector's dimensions was carried out by Perkin-Elmer after the original assembly. There were, however, clear indications of the problem from auxiliary optical tests made at the time. A special optical unit called an inverse null corrector, designed to mimic the reflection from a perfect primary mirror, was built and used to align the apparatus; when so used, it clearly showed the error in the reflective null corrector. A second null corrector was used to measure the vertex radius of the finished primary mirror. It, too, clearly showed the error in the primary mirror. Both indicators of error were discounted at the time as being themselves flawed.

The Hubble Space Telescope optical systems failure report - NASA Technical Reports Server (NTRS)

The findings of the Hubble Space Telescope Optical Systems Board of Investigation are reported. The Board was formed to determine the cause of the flaw in the telescope, how it occurred, and why it was not detected before launch. The Board conducted its investigation to include interviews with...

ntrs.nasa.gov

 

[Underway]

Moskiva is a long way from the condition of our ships. Particularly as they started a refit and never finished it. It was basically sailing without having had a DWP in about 8 years, without propery trained technicians and without a professional crew. And it is older then our ships by about 15 years as well with no midlife refit (that was cancelled).

My opinion of the frigates isn't as nearly negative as some above. I certainly have my issues and frustrations. Hell my current ship is in dry dock because of corrective maintenance, but sailing with other navies I'm aware of how screwed up they all can be. We aren't the only ones with older ships that have challenges.