Welcome to the Proceedings Podcast. I'm Bill Hamlet, the Editor-in-Chief at the U.S. Naval Institute. It's Tuesday, the 27th of January, the second in a row snow day up here in the D.C. Annapolis, Baltimore area. Good to have you on board, everyone. Two weeks from now, we'll be in San Diego for the annual Naval Institute AFCEA-sponsored West Conference. That's the 10th through the 12th of February at the San Diego Convention Center. The CNO, Secretary of the Navy, and Commandant of the Marine Corps, and Commandant of the Coast Guard will all be there. To register and find out more, go to westconference.org. If you are active duty in the San Diego area, West is free to you. All right. This episode is brought to you by General Dynamics Electric Boat. GD Electric Boat has a 126-year legacy of delivering the submarines our nation needs to defend our freedoms and those of our allies. To ensure our nation's defense now at this critical time in history, GDEB is investing in the next generation of shipbuilders and infrastructure to answer the call. It was EB then and it's EB now. Learn more at gd.eb.com. Okay, today's topic is sure to stir up a lot of emotion among current and former Navy sailors. In the January issue of Proceedings, we published a professional note titled, Give Navy Crews Painted Ships. The authors are retired Navy Captain John Cordell and Ben Minor, and they are joining me today to talk about their idea. John, Ben, welcome to the show. All right, let's start off with some introductions. Just tell our listeners a bit about your careers and your qualifications, particularly in the area of shipboard corrosion control. I'll start with Ben. Yeah, hi. Thanks for having me on. I appreciate that. So I joined the Navy in April of 2000. I was engine mended at about 10 years of active duty. And at that time, I'd say I pretty frequently deal with corrosion on a regular basis, particularly in the engine room and outside on equipment, touch-up, things like that. And then left there, I actually was a field technician, did a couple odd jobs, before coming back in to the Navy Reserve before I did another 14 years as a chief warrant officer. But I was, like I said, after I'd left active duty, I worked a couple of different odd jobs. I ended up working in a shipyard. I worked for BAE, Hawaii Shipyards, for about five years. And then I worked a couple of different private yards in Texas and then ended up as a Navy port engineer. for about seven years before filling with MSC, where I've taken over as a lifecycle manager. It's a supervisory program engineer for the TO-205 class ships. In the military sea lift command, MSC, got it. Correct. Great, great. All right. So lots of time. I'm here in Navy and private shipyards and engine rooms and corrosion control and now with MSC. So lots and lots. Yeah. So the breadth, I'd say, from private yard to watch them burn off paint with the torch to, you know, using robots, advanced robots on skin to remove, you know, and contain removal and things like that. So lots of various methods and applications and stuff I've seen along the way, for sure. Gotcha. Gotcha. All right, John, back to you. Sir, so retired Navy captain, I was in surface nuke, so my first two DIVO tours, division officer tours, were on nuclear cruiser, steam ships, main propulsion assistant, and damage control assistant, so lots of corrosion in those steam plants at the time. Went on to command a brand new destroyer, Oscar Austin, and a rather old cruiser, San Jacinto. As you've served on a cruiser lately, you realize that there's a lot of corrosion work there. Went to the type commander. I was an N-4, so I was riding the ships for pre-inserve, doing sort of inserve-like inspections. When I retired from the Navy, I went into a job called Maintenance University where it was a Navy contract with HII to basically teach Navy maintenance. So I was dug in pretty deep in shipboard maintenance processes, shipyards, things like that, teaching commanding officers, XOs, department heads about ship maintenance. and then did about five years as a GS in human factors, but got into a lot about the time part of it, sailor time, and that's what sort of led to this article. All right, great. So I'm going to throw the first question to John. Especially our listeners, people who read USNI News or follow any naval topics on social media are very familiar with the last maybe six, seven years, especially since COVID. The Navy's taken a lot of heat for some rusty ships, images of rusty ships showing up, particularly in foreign ports. What seems to be the problem or problems? I think my wife summed it up when I was the chief of staff and people would call me when stuff would break. And she said, you guys crack me up. You build ships out of steel, you put them in hot and in salt water, and then you freak out when they rust. And so, you know, I think there's three parts to that. You know, certainly what they're building, they're design, right? We'll talk about that. We talk about that in the article. And designing out corrosion is a piece of it. We could do a lot better there. The second is op-tempo. You know, in many ways, the ships are sort of a metaphor for the sailors when we run them long and extend deployments and cut maintenance periods short, things like that. uh manning has a piece of it uh written a lot of articles about that and lived that i would be in one at ticom for a while so moving people around you know our ships in the maintenance period are sometimes down to 70 75 of the manning when you like to have it in there doing painting right um but what ben and i kind of came to the conclusion after a while is um it's been that way for a long time you know i got a lot of attention here lately with some nasty pictures on on you know facebook and things like that sort of reaching down to the waterfront but You know, my old boss said once, you can't fix things by yelling louder, right? And so we looked for a fundamental change in the way we approach corrosion. Just to your point about Optempo, a year or two ago, he interviewed former Secretary of the Navy, John Lehman, about a whole bunch of things, a pretty strategic level. But one of the things he said about the buildup to the 600-ship Navy and during his time, his tenure as a little more than six years as the Secretary of the Navy is, he said, I was so disciplined that decisions to extend ships beyond six months, and we had set six months as the absolute maximum that we would deploy ships. And a lot of that had to do with maintenance, because when you go beyond six months, you start to have almost compounding maintenance problems that become more expensive, harder to fix, you know, all those things. And that applies for the, you know, for the painting issue, the corrosion control issue as well. So, Ben, your article mentions chapter 632, and I'm not familiar with this at all, 632 of the Navy Naval Ships Technical Manual, which provides information on installation and maintenance of materials used for covering decks on Navy ships and submarines. It's 275 pages long. So you write, painting is hard, and for sailors, the Tom spent painting ships does not contribute to their warfighting readiness. Elaborate on that, please. Yeah, I'll throw. So if painting were simple, NSTM 632 would not be 275 pages long. Right. We should start with that. So I'd add on to that. So those who work in the Navy Industrial Complex for preservation and life cycle would know also the standard items, NAVC standard items. Maybe you've heard that before. So 00932 is the painting chapter of the NAVC standard items. And if you broke down those standard items, you would find that that particular chapter encompasses line share, the majority of the standard items. It's complex, right? There's no doubt about it. And those who do it professionally will, you know, they can elaborate far and wide about that. So, you know, corrosion control isn't just chip and paint problem. There's a couple of tropes out there that sometimes get thrown out chip, chip, paint, paint. I want to be a bosun mate. Right. But it hilarious but you know the Boson Maze line share job is not solely shipping painting right It preservation upkeep of the ship It also line handling navigation all the other things that encompass that broad rating So I'd say it's technical, it's labor-intensive, and it's an industrial process. And so what we're writing in the article is to kind of take that back and to recognize it as such. You know, sailors are being asked to perform work that requires industrial equipment, that requires specialized equipment, supported material. You're talking scaffolding, you're talking scissorless, you're talking blasting equipment, things to take it down to appropriate profile to actually get the paint to adhere and to maintain life cycle. I don't know how you can ask that. So I've never been on a ship where we had all the appropriate equipment to be able to do that. And even if you did, as you just talked about, when you're underway for six, seven, ten months, I'd challenge you to find a window sufficient to be able to do proper preservation on the stacks. Because when you're radiating, you can't get up there. Yet we're asking them to do that repeatedly, right? And then when we look at pictures, we're kind of taken aback. so I'd also reframe the article to be talking more about resource control because I think resources that's that's really what all of us challenge with right is resource management and John can talk over this you know leaps and bounds even better than I can on this but sailors time is the scarcest resource we have on board he knows that he was a commanding officer he was and one he's been there and had to fight that fight I've been on the deck place and been on the seething into that an engine room of 15 people is down to eight nine right and then um to properly train them to get them rated up you know you wonder why you know a first class petty officer and chief petty officer coming up doesn't fully understand a major engine overhaul you know what they can sure as hell paint the deck plates right or the or the bilges um so i you know i'd challenge that to take a step back and that's all said in jest but i i would i would throw a couple out there I wrote down just from my time in and, you know, 24 years, I'd say, and then having seen it on the different sides there. But what do we want our modern sailors to do? Right. I think that's a fair question. So maintenance, watch standing, training, cyber, admin, technical qualifications. And then and then you also need them to kind of fleet up and move up because through attrition is how we work. So that's where we need our time. So time spent painting. they're not navigating right they're not doing engineering plan operations they're not doing combat systems proficiency they're not doing damage control drills I you know I've literally been on a ship where we were trying to do drills and we couldn't we had a cordon off an area because we're doing preservation there right and that some of you might have experienced that before and so I think you know we're treating sailors as free labor they're not I'd say they're the most constrained resource you have on the ship. And so, you know, that article really addresses that. That's what we're trying to attack. So why is 632 that long? Because preservation is complicated. And if we were able to look at it differently and look at it from an industrial stance and as a design choice, which it is, you can almost shift the mode of how we come at our ships to be able to support that and then free up that time constraint to be able to get the sailors to do the things we need them to do to be you know war fighters on on the waterfront yeah yeah great points um so the big idea in your articles coming up and i feel like i need to provide a warning to all the old sailors listening to this that they might be triggered and they might be like well i was a you know seaman recruit you know okay so warning provided brace yourselves old salts all right so So back to John. Hopefully all the old guys who think chipping and painting build character are now covering your ear. I can hear them through the podcast. You can hear the screams coming, right? So what's the big idea that you guys are recommending? So I think the gist of it is, and you captured it in the article, I think very well, is shifting from painting chips to painted chips. To quote my wife again, we have a guest bathroom that I'm in charge of cleaning. And I'll always say, I cleaned the bathroom. And she'll say, yeah, but the bathroom's not clean. And those are two very different statements. And so we paint ships a lot, but the ships aren't properly painted. And so a couple of things, this all started, Bill, with me and my other job doing some sleep studies, visiting ships last summer as they prepared for deployment. And they'd been out for about six weeks and shooting guns, training like Ben talked about, with no time for preservation. And it showed. And I brought it up with the captain and he goes, well, we have three weeks in port before a deployment, which you know is going to go probably more than six months, like you mentioned, probably eight or nine. And it kind of has. And during those two weeks, if I want to paint the ship, I have to have the sailors here, which I'd want to put them on leave for a little bit of time with their families before we deploy. I need a paint barge. I need a crane. I need paint. I need the supplies. I need the tools. So I would say out of 12 days in port, I got about three days where everything came together to get some painting done and preservation. And on one of those days, we had a massive rainstorm. So you can't paint in the rain. Right. And so I thought when I went back to headquarters and talked about it and the answer was kind of, well, we should just try harder. and uh and uh and so that's kind of the you know kind of set me off to go do what i sometimes do when i get frustrated in my article and i called ben for some ideas and so our big idea is you know what if when ships came in for the short maintenance periods and and it goes beyond this but what if we had a capacity of professional painters not the stevedores that come in you know in the philippines and we give them a brass nozzle and they paint the ship in one day but professional painters that understand the STM, they understand the tools and the requirements, and they come in and they target the areas that the captain needs to get the ship out the door with a good coat of paint. Ben makes a great point that paint is not cosmetic, it's the barrier between salt water and steel, and when that thing goes away, it just takes a little bitty break in that barrier. It's like your own skin, and you've got a huge problem, and so our idea is to really put the burden of painting back on the shore establishment, on the RMC's contractors to some extent. SEMA, the CNO, in his recent note. Yeah. Right. RMC, Regional Maintenance Centers. I'm sorry, Regional Maintenance Centers. The SIPS Intermediate Maintenance Activity, which CNO Caudill called to reinstate, was a standalone organization where sailors went to shore duty and learned how to do that technical of stuff, but also gave them a contribution to the waterfront while they were on shore duty, gave them stability, geographic stability, and then gave them skills to take back to the fleet. And he's called to reinstate that. I don't know where that stands, but what a great opportunity. The other piece is the tools and equipment. Ben mentioned things like laser crawlers. I saw a dry ice machine that could take things off very easily. And the one thing we discovered, so the COs came back with this article with hand claps and thank you and a lot of resounding positive. Thank you very much. Send us people with paintbrushes, not with cameras to take pictures of our rust and beat us up with it. But by the same token, those resources could be reallocated to attack rust just as any other maintenance. You know, when SECNAB talks about welders and electricians, I would hope in the future he'll talk about professional painters as well as part of the maintenance community and the repair community. So those are the kind of things that we're looking to decide and advocate to kind of flip that discussion so that the burden falls less on the sailors. And again, for the old salts out there, we're not saying there will never be a time when sailors don't paint, right? but if you give them back the time to train they should be training how to shoot down missiles how to do damage control and and just have to do touch up on the ship when those deployments get longer and they can't give the shore resources yeah focus on warfighting skills absolutely right you know where do you to your point right resources time you know it's particularly sailor time being the most precious resource i'm reminded just a couple weeks ago we were over at SNA National John I saw you there The Surface Navy Association annual big symposium I saw in some of the booths there were vendors that were showing their wares And there were a couple of booths over from our booth was a robotic crawler that could crawl around ships and decks and up the sides and everything And it could scan to find those micro voids of corrosion underneath layers of paint, which is really cool, right? And some of the other things I heard, Edwin McLean mentioned that they're still working to fill gap billets at sea, right? But there's still more than, it was close to 7,000, I think, gaps billets on the ships in the surface Navy, right? It's about 6,800, 7,000, I think was around the number that he threw out. And so to your point about when the ships are home and in port, that's when those gap billets become, you know, sort of expand, right? Because you're trying to fill the ships that are deploying as close to 100% as you can. And the ships that are home that need to be in the maintenance phase, you know, they fall down to, you know, 80%, 70% maybe in some cases as they start that maintenance phase. So, you know, this is a it's one of those kind of wicked problems. And every time you tweak something, some other problem comes up. So, Ben, I want to ask you to give us because the Navy is doing some things. There are some initiatives ongoing. Right. That seem to be helping. So just give us a quick rundown of those ongoing corrosion initiatives that are kind of happening in the fleet now. The problem is not unknown. Right. So to be clear, the Navy knows that corrosion is a problem. and certainly has taken real steps. I believe that. I think we've cited a couple in the article. You just mentioned a few. So one that's pretty common, I think that they see on the waterfront is something called CCATs, the Corrosion Control Assistance Team. So CCAT goes out, they provide technical expertise. They'll do assessments. They'll give best practice. They'll help give some of the tools. So they tend to help empower the workforce at the waterfront to do the preservation themselves. And I think that's, there's a lot of value in that, right? So there's knowledge transfer. They push standardization. I think they do a great job of that. But to be clear, CCAT are consultants, right? That's consultancy work. That's what they do. They're not the workforce. And to John's point, as what the feedback from the COs, they're looking for assistance at the waterfront, right? They have a lot of people with eyes, and that's very helpful, but they need real production assistance. We also do flyaway teams. So there are some preservation capabilities at the RMCs, the Regional Maintenance Centers. You'll see those at different regions that they operate in. Typically, what you see is the same. So they'll lend tools. That's a really common one. They'll provide some equipment so they can do minor scaffolding and rigging, things like that to help. They're also really great for surge events. So if you surge deploy or you find yourself in a conundrum where you have to take care of something rather quickly, fantastic resource. Very, very helpful. I would say they are pretty limited. And, you know, you just talked about billets gapped at the waterfront. I was the repair officer in SRF Japan for a while. And, you know, when I would ask for billets to backfill, I mean, it was laughable. Like, we're not even on the spectrum. Like, you know, we're not a warfighter. I was in Seventh Fleet at the time, but we're not at the tip of the spear. So our workforce is greatly, greatly diminished. So I could help the waterfront, but in extremely limited capacity. So that was it's difficult to overcome, I think. So it's not a knock on them. It's just the nature of what we work. The workforce. So the work centers is principally where all this goes back to. I think John talked about that a lot. And that's that's usually what it falls back to. And then they kind of leverage those other resources there to help battle the corrosion. John, Ben just told us about some of the initiatives in the fleet now that are helping. But it sounds like those are mostly assist and advise kind of teams. So what are the new proposals that you guys offer in your article? Great, thanks. So a couple of things, they really fall into two categories. One, I would say, is technology, some of the things you saw at S&A. And the other, probably more important, is more of just a fundamental change in velocity of resources. And so on the technology side, there's some great stuff out there. Ben mentioned the Naval Civil Warfare Center is coming up with additive manufacturing with composite materials. We've got a great brief I saw at the MegaRust ASME, American Society of Naval Engineers, display, talking about things like deck trains, things like scutters, cupboards, the overboard discharges for ships, you know. Those materials, ready service lockers for gun magazines topside have like the white shield up there that rust and things like that. All these little corrosion pockets that could be replaced with composites in AM. Unfortunately, we've kind of taken a pull approach to that of, hey, we're going to build them, we're going to put them out there, and ships, you just come and get them, right? When you go down to the ships, the ship says, well, I don't know how to get them. I don't know where they are. I don't know how to put them on. And so working through that, get that technology more of a push. Like let's say a ship goes into maintenance period. Let's replace 30 of the overboard scuppers that are causing that shrieking down the side of the ship. So that's one piece of it. Technology of things like dry ice machines that can take off the paint. I use one on San Jacinto. Why don't we have one of those on every pier? It's like basically a sandblaster uses dry ice, and it vaporizes those, so it doesn't have a lot of residue. There's a laser crawler that actually takes paint off, meaning a laser. It's very, very precise, and it becomes like a 12-inch slot at a time, so you can use that in more industrial environments. When a ship goes in for shipyards, periods, I took San Jacinto in, I asked to have the topside part painted, and it wasn't funded in the package, and you can't paint in the shipyard. A friend of mine coming back from deployment last month said his patches got cut, right? And so back to that painted ships idea is make painting ships part of the baseline package for any maintenance period, whether it's a large one or a small one. And something as simple as interesting, one of the COs came back and said, you know, in Norfolk, I have to fight for a barge, a crane, an operator. And there's only two in Mayport, I think, or 20 ships. in san diego they have paint floats which is basically just a small bar you can pull on you know basically the service can grab it pull it along with scaffolding on it and so you know let's get those in every port resources more cranes more just more people to do it the COs get beat up if they have the crane it's so precious that uh if they're spotted with an empty crane or with a crane sitting hidled during the day guy goes to lunch or takes a break um they get a blast from the waterfront, you know, shore establishment. Why are you not using our crane that we gave you for so precious time, right? So that's a piece of it as well. And so technology, the process, the SEMA, I think, the ship's intermediate maintenance activity, getting those sailors down to the ships to do painting as well as other repairs, I think will be a game changer if that's part of the plan. And then just fundamentally the mindset that we kind of owe our sailors a painted ship, right? Marines don't paint their tanks. Air Force pilots don't paint their claims. Why do we expect our sailors to paint their ships on the con? And I know that's a fundamental change, and it doesn't mean the thing is going away, but that's kind of what we're trying to do now. Got it. Got it. All right. You hinted earlier at some of the reaction from COs to the article that they were very happy with it. What are you hearing from maybe up the chain of command or from the maintenance community in the Navy? Not a whole lot. I mean, I've had a couple of folks reach out with some sort of comments that they've seen this technology. You know, why isn't he coming out to the fleet? A lot of folks have come back from the shore side and said, you know, John, great for writing this. We're already doing that stuff, which is true. We are doing it. But, you know, two things. I was at SNA. I heard the second ask, and two things that he said really resonated with me. One was he was talking about shipbuilding, but he said, we need to get on a wartime footing. And he kind of defined what that would look like and the focus that that would require and the resources that would require. And to me, that's what this is about, right? Let's put ship corrosion in that category. But let get on a wartime footing so when our ships do go out there for eight or nine months they don come back Because corrosion is not just about prettiness right It about do the vertical launch cells open properly because they corroded Does the anchor windlass work Things know things like that kind of large aircraft from the flight deck with the wrath of the recovery system being corroded And so it's a warfighting issue. It's not a preservation. It's not a cosmetic issue. But that's the one thing he said. The other thing he said was you have to take risks. You know, Ben talked about they can place some components on the ship with the average manufacturer or the composite, but that requires departure from specifications, permission from headquarters. Ships don't have their own, very few of them do, have their own additive manufacturing. That was another article that you featured. We could put, today, we could put an AM machine, a 3D printer on every ship with the same tools, the same training, retrain the machinery repairmen, the MRs, to use them. That's sort of in progress, I think. And give them that capacity and then turn them loose, right, and take some risks. and let them report back what they discovered, what they fixed. And, you know, one of my friends on a flight 3DG commanding officer was touring the ship and saw that they're building them with deck trains that screw out rather than being bolted or welded on so you can get inside them to clean them. And they're like, that's fantastic. And the guy's like, really, I have this massive warship with all its capabilities. That's what you're excited about? And they're like, yeah. So change that design. You know, Stephen Phillips, when he interviewed us on that for the ASME podcast, he talked about seeing a French ship or a Dutch ship, I think. There's no holes on the side of the ship to blow water out on the hull. I looked at a picture of a DDG last week. I think I carried 27 holes from, you know, all the way up at the very side of the deck, all the way down. You know, let's not just spray our ship with water so that you have rust streaks on them. Let's put a pipe down there or a scupper. so uh you know those were uh those two things really resonated with me number one let's get on a wartime boarding with this and change the way we approach it and then number two uh what takes some risk and uh and learn from that yeah great points great points all right we got ben back hopefully his uh again uh so i'll go to you ben um any saved rounds um just that uh you know i think we've we've really so to john's point it's not like we're not doing anything and i don't want this to come off as as that right i do think that there's initiatives taking the waterfront i do think that this shift to doing what they can i just think that you know if you look at if you really read in the article i think we've kind of optimized our processes around the wrong workforce right we've kind of directed them to do things that we wouldn't we we spend a inordinate amount of time training um you know operation specialists and sonar techs and you name it right all these people to do these like truly incredible things on the waterfront and then they get on and you have them paint a fan room right and they do a terrible job and it comes up back up because the fan coal unit leaked right and uh and we should have used high solids but we used the two-part you know epoxy that was meant for you know overhead sweating overheads or something so you know i think i just think we could treat it more as an industrial activity, which it is. You know, any painter, any shop out there, any professional workforce will tell you exactly that. And I think if we treat it like that, and I think we can really make leaps and bounds. I'd add one more thing that I'm pretty big on is the additive manufacturing. So it's additive and reductive manufacturing. So a lot of the regional maintenance centers have adopted and some of the public shipyards have adopted both additive and reductive manufacturing capabilities. so when john's talking about being able to replace deck trains it seems small but anyone who's had to remove one where the screws keep stripping and you can't get this stupid thing out and it locks in place um you know how difficult that really is because you're talking um here's industrial activity after that cutting it out having to replace you know uh happen i mean there's all sorts of things that you have to do helicoils right we do all sorts of things to make up for those structural deficiencies and it had we just adopted the mindset of why is it designed like this and what small steps even though it seems minor for a ship but that one ceo that was walking around that that one deck train probably seemed like a minor issue for the person receiving it but anyone who's been on the waterfront knows that that can be a that can be a really a huge time suck i mean how many sailors would you put on that to remove that that deck train then how long what it takes you have to put it into a 380 day plan maintenance package at a base item to get repaired later that's that's absolutely crazy right so we can do better and we do owe our workforce better and i'd i'd hope that uh when people read the article that that that's what they're looking at it from that the navy does understand the problem it's just that we've we've kind of directed it into something we've taken a very classic approach to a very modern problem that I know we can take a much better attack strategy on. So that's what I would say, is that if we give the sailors the painted ships, we can help direct the resources or allow the COs to direct resources as they know they need to be sent. Yeah, well put. That's a great way to kind of wrap this up. Really good points. All right. My guests today have been Ben Minor and John Cordell. Their professional note in the January issue of Proceedings is titled give Navy crews painted ships. What a revolutionary idea. Guys, thanks for writing for proceedings and for being on the show today. Yeah, thanks so much, Bill. Appreciate it. Hey, thanks very much, Bill. I've been writing proceedings now. Thank you to Bill Hamlin and your predecessors for about 20 years. And one of my friends asked me a question the other day. If you could tell your younger self one thing, what would it be? And that sort of inspired me to put together a book. I can hold up a little thing here. You can read it. It's not in print yet, but you can order it. It's called Letters to Myself. And it does write a letter back to that young incident in a fan room about how to learn the technical side and the tactical side of your job. But I think that's important. And if I can just squeeze in one more sea story. Of course. I was on my old ship, San Jacinto, talking about sailors. You know, Adam McLean talked about the manning. And, you know, God bless him, he's trying, right? But you could have said that in 2010, in 2015, 2020, with the CR talked about 7,000 gaps at sea. It's not going to change, right? So we've been trying to ignore the facts that we're always going to have shortages in manning. So let's act like it, right? And when I was on San Jacinto, the type commander goes around once a week and produces this good, bad, and ugly report. They take pictures of the ships, put in a PowerPoint, and they call out the ones that look good and the ones that look bad. and uh there was a 30-day grace period i was on the ship was the day after that great period expired in the xo state room and and the ship is now on the blast uh the ugly slide right um and and a bosun the first class came in the xo state room and saw the slide he's like is that our ship yeah uh xo says that he starts he really started to tear up and he says xo i i i failed you man he's like what do you mean he said i took leave to be with my family um because i thought that grace theory that you would they would expect us to start attacking the bust after we got back from our post-deployment seven like eight month deployment you know 30-day leave period apparently the expectation was we would have the ship painted at the end of that grace period and then we would be you know um and so i should have canceled my leave and stayed here and uh and i'm sorry and uh And the XO was like, no shipmate, this is part of the job. We're going to hit it now. But that really struck me because to me, that encompasses the problem, I think, is we put this burden on the backs of our sailors when we have other options, right? So that's kind of my same ground. Yeah, when we have other options. Great point. Great point. All right. Well, gents, thanks. This was a great conversation. This episode was brought to you by General Dynamics Electric Boat. General Dynamics Electric Boat has a 126-year legacy of delivering submarines our nation needs to defend our freedoms and those of our allies. To ensure our nation's defense now at this critical time in history, GBEB is investing in the next generation of shipbuilders and infrastructure to answer the call. It was EB then and it's EB now. Learn more at gbeb.com slash about slash EB now. If you like the show, ring the bell, subscribe, tell a friend. Until next episode, remember, victory begins at the Naval Institute.
