Going Rogue? Unlikely

 Someone posed the question online, as to the likelihood of a Navy ship’s captain going rogue. I speculated that it is an unlikely scenario, for the following reasons:

My experience is onboard civilian-operated supply ships for the US Navy. The Captain and other department heads have spent years fully indoctrinated in the Navy way of thinking. From the moment they are hired as Third Officers, they are given extensive training on various tactical and leadership topics. (In contrast, many engineering officers pay for 100% of their own training). Small amounts of responsibility, such as handling small arms or being the Flight Deck Officer, are given early, but can be revoked. That would be a red flag. The Admiral must personally approve promotions of civilian Captains. The more unconventional officers (pacificists, conspiracy theorists) are not placed on critical ships, such as the ammo carriers. And yes, Special Forces practice on how to get from the helicopter deck to the ship’s bridge.

On a combatant ship, as OP notes, all of these precautions, and more, would be utilized very rigorously in the selection of COs and XOs.

Has it happened in recent times? Yes. The privately-managed SS Columbia Eagle was taken over by entry-level crewmembers in a 1970 munity, as protest against the war in Vietnam. As far as government vessels go, the aforementioned measures are an insurance policy against barratry (by a ship's captain) and mutiny (by the crew). 

Wither the Radio Officer?

 

The Radio Officer is one of the shipboard positions no longer found anymore. The responsibilities for that position were shifted to the Deck Officer, and in a bygone era, the Deck Officers would split the Radio Officer’s pay. The Radio Officer was a member of the Deck department, but on government ships that still retain the position, they usually report to the engineering department. 

The Radio Officer was most famous for being an operator of the radiotelegraph, and later, the teletype. But their weight in gold was their ability to tune and maintain equipment.

Most maritime regulation is made on the basis of safety, not convenience of crewmembers. By 1979, satellite-based GMDSS (Global Maritime Distress Signaling System) replaced morse code as the primary method of distress communications on the high seas.

Crucially, modular components- with spare parts carried onboard, and shore-based servicing available in every port, meant that ship’s officers no longer had the maintainer role, just the operator role. By this point, radio officers were helping the Captain with various paperwork responsibilities: there wasn’t much for “Sparky” to do with reliable, self-adjusting equipment.

The US Coast Guard still offers Radio Officer licensure. A closer look at the requirements, such as telegraphy, reveals that this licensure is designed for legacy ships, including some on the Great Lakes, and the WWII-era museum ships. More relevant are the modern-day endorsements for licensed Deck officers, including GMDSS training, a two-week course.

Real World Constraints versus the Ivy Swimming Pool

 A certain college swimmer has been in the news for bending the rules, so it’s said. Not naming names, because anyone could have been the test case, switching from the Men’s to Women’s team without a significant interlude. Unnatural advantages are nothing new: earlier this century, the famous biker Lance Armstrong muddied the waters with his steroid use- apparently taking more than required for his medical condition. But what stands out, if I may say, is the swimmer’s sense of “due”. Sociologist Annette Lareau uses the term "entitlement" as a professional-class sense of belonging in a place, a term which I think has taken a negative connotation recently.

 In the Real World (that is, outside the literal Ivory Tower), prioritization and the acceptance of constraints is a fact of life. Two good things can be mutually exclusive: being a nationally-ranked Men’s Team Swimmer, regardless of gender identity, as this individual was; or receiving treatment for gender dysphoria. In mutual exclusivity, you do one thing first, then the other. The re-established three-year waiting period to switch teams, in the case of transgender players, may hobble a student-athlete’s athletic career, but delaying medical treatment for career or other ambitions is not out of the ordinary in the Real World.  

 For some mariners, including those on the high seas, it is impossible to complete a series of orthodontic treatment, while earning a paycheck: the location and time of shore leave is unpredictable, and not conducive to monthly appointments. For women mariners, the same constraints apply to fertility treatment; and if successful, non-seagoing work would have to be found for the duration of pregnancy. In my case, it took a year to find time to see a nasal specialist: when I was on a high-tempo ship, I relied on walk-in clinics, who could not give specialists’ referrals.  

Forgoing treatment, extending treatment (in the case of government mariners who work year-round), or skipping medication commonly seen as disqualifying for a safety-sensitive position, are all common in the shipping industry. We have come a long way, in some respects. It is no longer expected to work through an injury, or accept chronic pain “like a man”- an irony, as women have higher pain tolerance. Seeking mental health care is no longer a disqualifier for security work. Yet, for quality-of-life care, there remains a question of access, even if these people at sea and in other remote environments can afford it. This is what the Real World sees in the Ivy League swimmer’s case.   

PE Exam: Game Day

 

Most successful exam takers recommend doing nothing but relaxing the day before taking the 8-hour Professional Engineering exam. I ignored their advice. I had finished a practice exam the previous Saturday, but it was only on the day before test-day that I had time to rework missed problems.

Even on test day, between breakfast at the Holiday Inn Express and the test center opening, I ran through my flashcards with important formulae- rules of thumb- not included in the test handbook.  

I prepared snacks and lunch in portioned bags, placing them in my test candidate’s locker. Save brainpower for the test, instead of thinking about what to eat. In previous times, PE exam candidates, like lawyers aiming for the State Bar, would convene at certain convention-like centers around the state on a given day. Now, nearly all tests are offered at Pearson’s Professional Testing Centers, which serve members of various trades and professions, including nurses, EMTs, and dentists.

At least at the center I tested at, order of seating is given on a first-come, first-serve basis, so anxious individuals with a 2-hour exam could be seated ahead of full-day examinees. But there was a silver lining in the wait, as I decided to take my morning break early. If was fortuitous that I could plug-and-chug until lunchtime.

It had been several years since I sat for a major exam, so, like plunging into the cold water of the hotel pool, I remembered to mind my breathing and heart rate (My grad school program in Systems Engineering had no timed tests, just projects and reports).

Unlike most every other academic exam, the NCEES’ PE exam is a test that is about endurance, strategy, and time management. It is a test where perfection is erroneous, and where you are expected to skip questions to better manage time- an average of 6 minutes per question. Indeed, PhD’s are often permitted to skip this exam on the road to state licensure- their work is quite different from the constraints faced by ordinary practitioners of the engineering profession.

 I took the Mechanical- HVAC version, which errs towards the blue-collar side of the PE exams that NCEES offers. In this test, the writers want to ensure that someone long out of college, but dedicated to the industry, can pass the exam. I reviewed refrigeration questions from the US Coast Guard’s Marine Engineering test series, which is heavily focused on practical applications; several questions were direct hits.  

Each half of the test is about the same length in questions. But there is no cutoff clock for the first half, so you could pace 4 hours and 4 hours, or 3 hours and 5 hours between the halves. To reduce stress, I was not going to allot extra time to the first half of the exam, since the second half is traditionally the harder- and time-consuming half.

In the first half, I recall that I spent too much time on one question, then had to shoot-from-the hip on one I could have calculated. It resembled a practice problem, so I chose the answer from memory. It turned out the second half of the exam was the easier one, this cycle. (Four versions of the test are issued each year, and April 1 was the first day of a new test version). I definitely was dragging by question 75, out of 80, yet I had time to rework uncertain problems, and leave the test center 20 minutes ahead of time.

At the end of the exam, I had a high level of confidence, which waned with second-guessing myself the next day. A missed fundamental concept, such as confusing latent heat with sensible heat, could cost 7 questions, and the test-writers know which wrong answers to give as choices. One missed fundamental leaves little room for other errors, for the average-performing test taker. And of the fill-in-the-blank questions, what was the leeway given for rounding errors? The never specified the number of decimal points to give.

 With the computer-based test, I completed the exam on Friday, April 1, and received results on the following Wednesday. I couldn’t bear to see what I might see, but I saw the green bar of success! As I have completed all of the other state prerequisites for licensure (education, references, and an ethics exam), I am just waiting on the official letter to come from Richmond, VA.

As I sat on the tailgate of my car, having completed the test, I wondered at the feeling of having completed “the last test of your life”. For many of my undergraduate classmates at the US Merchant Marine Academy, comprehensive tests for the US Coast Guard Merchant Mariner License were the end of their academic careers. We had a profession for life, if sailing as a mariner is what we wanted.

Middle Managers That Weren't

 The 1940’s to the 1990’s were the golden age of middle management. World War Two was foisted upon a United States that still had a large agricultural population. To ensure quick learning for workers transitioning from farm to industry, it was necessary to break work into small tasks, with rigid supervision of personnel and production of reports. This method won the war.

The high overhead of this kind of supervision meant many jobs for middle managers, who often were picked from liberal arts colleges rather than the assembly line. As foreign countries built their industries along different management systems (such as Japanese quality control or German quality design), high overhead costs and large internal bureaucracy strangulated profits and ingenuity. 

To rework these byzantine processes and procedures, “re-engineering the corporation” meant re-evaluating the hierarchical organizational charts. Work once performed in narrow silos, (for example- clerks who processed one or two lines on a form) now became assigned to functional groups centered on a tangible result (customer satisfaction or widget-making machines repaired). Prospective management, which prevents employees from inducing errors; was replaced with less-costly retrospective management, which trusts the auditing process to find errors.

Middle management stood outside of the “value chain”, as found in Six Sigma theory; or the rolls of “essential workers” in the COVID-19 Pandemic. While the implementation of re-engineering created efficiency and return to profitability; the 1993 namesake book’s author, Michael Hammer, did not discuss what to do about displaced middle managers; or how the nascent internet would many first post-college jobs obsolete. Nor what to do about the continued rate of business and liberal arts majors graduating college each year; as college counsellors were late to the news.

Broken expectations are topics for a different day. Even if these graduates never reach the upper-middle class lifestyle, there is still a baseline consumption of goods and services; think food shelter, and medicine; which must be provided by essential workers. Those large student loans are a millstone on disposable income, whether it is to start a family or small business, or buy a home.

Many essential workers in the oft-forgotten “value chain” proclaim themselves “open to work”. They are commonly credentialed in multiple trades and professions; yet if they’re shipping war matériel to Europe, they aren’t available for offshore oil drilling. If they’re building houses, they aren’t available for over-the-road trucking. They are in-demand, and many are paid handsomely up-front; in contrast to the long-term payout envisioned by future middle managers. For whatever the reasons, vocational-focused colleges tend to be magnitudes more affordable than liberal arts colleges. 

How do you retool those middle-managers to become more essential, and to become part of the value chain? Some might cite the use of vocational aptitude tests, to determine that many people are not suited for manual labor, technical, or field work. But the experience of the military, through its promotion rates of Corporals and Petty Officers, shows that at least half of the population is suited for both labor and supervision; blue-collar and white-collar work (not just in today’s highly-selective military; but in Cold War times, when most volunteers were accepted for service). Occupational elitism is another concern: Would degreed construction managers lend a hand on the worksite?  

When colleges and non-essential businesses were closed during the heart of the Pandemic, I could see with my own eyes that many young adults rolled up their sleeves, and went to work on construction sites, as independent-contract delivery drivers, and as trade apprentices. If it was not just the ennui of boredom, the Invisible Hand of Economics finally did its work. Those college graduates will have some concrete skills to put on their resumes.

A Maritime Strategy for Ukraine

 Russian President Vladimir Putin did the unthinkable: There’s a shooting war in Europe. Fear of isolation from the “international community”, whatever that means to liberal democracies, the Geneva Convention, lessons from the Nuremburg Trials, and economic sanctions, failed to stop total war in Ukraine. NATO and the US was afraid of “poking the bear”, but Putin escalated his war nevertheless.

The news has covered the stories of Ukrainian-American expatriates and mercenaries fighting in the ground war; and I have had peers ask “how do I join the fight?”. To those with maritime experience, I advise staying at sea, with a focus on delivering food and supplies. Odessa, accessed through Istanbul’s Bosporus Strait and through the Black Sea, offers the most daring route. Russian harassment and occasional attacks on vessels today harken back to World War Two’s Murmansk Run. A successful convoy of merchant ships can deliver more goods than airplanes and trucks, the current vehicles of logistics. The merchant marine is a business, however, and in wartime conditions, governments must provide assurance to vessels flying their flag. In the United States, various tools can be activated by the Maritime Administration, under the DOT. These include activation of Second Seaman’s War Risk Insurance, to guarantee life insurance benefits for mariners, and vessel insurance for shipowners. Declaring a Sealift Emergency would allow retired and former mariners to crew ships, with the ability to return to their shore-based jobs after completing a voyage (similar to the USERRA benefit provided to military reservists and draftees).          

Dependency on Oil and Gas is the Achille’s heel of the West. During the first week of Putin’s war in Ukraine, which began on February 22^nd, countries such as Germany and the United Kingdom had no plans to curtail fuel purchases from Russia’s war machine. Given that fuel prices at the gas pump had already increased, I was afraid that the politicians in Washington, DC would be afraid of acting decisively. Initially, I felt that some form of rationing or subsidy (such as government-issued fuel cards to consumers) would be required to ease off Russian fuel imports. This would go hand-in-hand with fuel conservation posters asking motorists “if this trip is necessary”. Citizens would be asked to turn down the thermostat in cold-weather environments, and raise it in warm-weather environments, to save fuel.

The transition was easier than expected. Existing domestic production, the price/demand curve for fuel consumption, and cooperation from other OPEC nations allowed the US to adapt to the cut in Russian fuel imports. Idle offshore oil rigs were already being restored to service, as the price of oil had increased over the key threshold of $80 per barrel. In oil rig layup, the drilling rig roughnecks and brown-water mariners bear the brunt of fluctuations: working on a drillship or supply vessel is high-paying work when it is available.  

In World War Two, construction of the Big Inch Pipeline from Texas to New Jersey was prioritized in order to free oil tankers from the dangerous duty of navigating the Atlantic Coast, infested with Nazi U-Boats. Energy security today demands construction of the Keystone XL Pipeline, while respecting the rights of the Lakota People. This pipeline alone is reported to have the carrying capacity equivalent to fuel imports from Russia. While the conflict in Ukraine will hopefully be resolved before completion of the pipeline, its existence should change Russia’s geopolitical calculations in the longer term. On the greener side, conservatives and war hawks will find clean energy investments, such as solar and wind farms, to be part of a national security strategy.

President Eisenhower correctly assessed the importance of logistics in wartime. This is evident in reports of frontline Russian soldiers begging for MREs, or pre-packaged meals.  Food, Supplies, and Fuel- both how we use them at home, and how we deliver them to Ukraine, are essential parts for victory.

Mama Lenders and Mortgage Lenders

 As it is today, the housing sector is a provider of equal opportunity. People in their respective economic milieus live in somewhat-integrated neighborhoods. Taking Fairfax County, Virginia as an example, Working-Class Whites and Latinos may share one neighborhood; and Upper-Middle Class Whites and Asians may share another neighborhood.

There is one group that is left behind, studies show: middle-class African-Americans, who miss out on the opportunity to purchase in the same neighborhoods that White Americans of similar economic status do. Merely calling it “systemic racism” won’t solve the discrepancy; but dissecting it will.  

Qualification for a traditional mortgage is based on the ability to repay; in addition to making a down payment. Many prospective homebuyers must budget carefully to build the down payment, by cutting out some discretionary spending.  African-American purchasing habits are similar to other Americans, although the community spends slightly more on haircare and barbeque supplies, slightly less on home appliances. Contrary to pervasive stereotypes, spending on discretionary goods (such as shoes and handbags) does not differ from other groups.

How “consumer debt” is handled, does differ culturally. In the African-American community, it is common for family members in middle-class jobs to gift, or loan on flexible terms, significant sums of money to less-fortunate relatives. This could be cash for a nephew to buy a used car for his new job, medical expenses for a parent, or college textbooks for a cousin.

In previous decades, this arrangement was highly beneficial, and even necessary to ensure a family’s security in light of the peonage, or debt-bondage, system common in the Jim Crow South. In the Agricultural South and Industrial North, young and middle-aged men had a short period of time in their prime-earning years. This relative excess would be used to support family members in more vulnerable financial situations, such as grandparents. Today, this informal system of family assurance is much better for the recipient economically than a payday loan, and better than a high-interest credit card. It, however, does not enhance the donor’s credit score; nor is the possibility of receiving mutual assurance counted towards “ability to pay” a mortgage.  

Asian-American families often have a similar practice of family assurance, but with one notable difference among the American-born: bank checks are passed instead of large bills. When financial transfers within a family are significant, traceability makes a large impact on perceived creditworthiness. When cash “disappears” from a bank account, it is assumed by mortgage lenders to have been spent. A check, written out to a relative, carries intrinsic proof as an intra-family gift.

Indeed, many members of the Black Middle Class may fall through the cracks of mortgage lenders; resulting in smaller loan approvals and higher interest rates; and consequently, less choice of neighborhood. What mortgage originators need to do, then, is to recognize this form of family assurance as a legitimate form of insurance and financial security. Community leaders should encourage the use of traceable instruments, such as bank checks or mobile apps, to ‘mainstream’ this mutually-beneficial practice in the eyes of institutional lenders.