The Navy’s woke training undermines readiness

[Boats]

The Navy’s woke training undermines readiness
By: Michael Rubin - Washington Exmainer Foreign & Def. News - 03-10-22
Re: https://www.aei.org/op-eds/the-navys...nes-readiness/

The U.S. Navy believes we are now entering a period of peak risk for a Chinese invasion of Taiwan. In testimony last week, the vice chief of naval operations said that the question of “current readiness versus future overmatch” overshadows every budget request.

Ensuring that the Navy has the resources to fight future battles is important, but money alone does not equal readiness.

Deployed sailors might be at sea for nine to 12 months. Outside of their daily watch, their free time is hardly free. For almost a half-century, many sailors took college courses at sea, sometimes with professors deployed and rotating among ships and at other times via online instruction. Under former President Donald Trump, the Navy ended the education program’s live instruction. That was a counterproductive move: Online learning for the Navy compares to live instruction as well as it did for millions of students during COVID-19 shutdowns — that is, not at all.

Naval education goes far beyond basic college courses, however. To win promotions, sailors must pass regular tests. In their free time, nuclear engineers might be found hunched over textbooks and manuals studying nuclear physics; surface warfare officers might quiz each other in the wardroom as they study maritime science and advanced ship systems. Aviators, sonar operators, intelligence officers, lawyers, and others must likewise pass ever more comprehensive and rigorous exams.

Every military branch has an education component, but studying at sea comes with certain complications. Bandwidth is limited onboard ships, even at the best of times. Complicating the situation further: Ships often undertake training scenarios in which they limit any electronic emissions to practice hiding from satellites and other prospective enemies. That means days or weeks without getting an email off a ship or a new module onto it. When internet access resumes, there can be a mad rush for terminals and backlogs of hundreds of thousands of emails waiting to download.

That does not even begin to account for existing training requirements. Planning to get off the ship in Spain? It’s necessary to take a multihour, graphics-intensive online Survival, Evasion, Resistance, and Escape course, a computer program about as relevant to the real thing as an online root canal would be to the actual surgery. The SERE course barely works with ships’ computers even with full bandwidth. There’s more: annual Information Awareness training that, again, uses maximum bandwidth since the Navy designed it with unnecessary and annoying animation. Many sailors then have to take Personally Identifiable Information training that takes what might be a five-minute lesson about protecting passwords and not emailing others’ health information and stretches it online to an hour or more.

What the Navy now does is take already limited bandwidth, internet access, and classroom space to throw an ever-increasing array of mandatory social training at sailors. In recent years, the Navy has added further mandatory training covering everything from racism to sexual harassment to sensitivity about transgenderism. Many of these miss the mark. Take racism, for example. Training misses the reality that for historical reasons onboard ships, racism might be Filipino vs. non-Filipino rather than between other groups.

To make time, the Biden administration’s Navy has curtailed instruction about world affairs (full disclosure: a program in which I worked for a decade), culture, and language opportunities. There are limited hours in a day. The Pentagon created bureaucracy to create training and now feeds the beast at the expense of our service members and readiness.

It is time to go back to the future.

In the past, the Navy understood that officers and enlistees had agency and held them accountable for their actions regardless of the absence of online training modules or mind-numbing PowerPoint presentations. Let the nuclear engineers focus on reactors, pilots and mechanics focus on avionics, and surface warfare officers learn the ship systems in detail. While at sea, their singular focus should be on defeating America’s adversaries, not playing out Washington’s culture wars.

Tags: Military, US Military, US Navy (USN)

About this writer: Michael Rubin - Senior Fellow