So I happened to see this over at USNI.
Navy's Infamous INSURV Reports Set to End This Year Unless Congress Acts - USNI News
Somewhere a Navy legislative affairs officer (I am not sure what their official title is) is groaning.
About what you say? this little thing called INSURV.
For those not familiar this is the drill Sergeant white glove inspection for surface ships.
While you might pass it, you never get a perfect score and failure is a real and terrifying option.
Failure often but not always gets skippers fired. Just depends on how bad big navy made readiness availabilities.
If your ship was skipped for like 10 years you might get a pass
In any case what INSURV does do it give everybody whom can read it a (theoretically ) clear snapshot of the material readiness of a grey hull bought and paid for by the taxpayers.
It also can show you the results of delayed maintenance availabilities and extended deployments
And it is really embarrassing for the navy to have many of its premier assets fail or not perform well.
So a little history (and I am going to date myself a bit here) of INSUV well back in my day driving grey hulls we had some degree of advance warning that we would have an insurv..I think it was about 6 months to a year. And it was something that generated real fear.
As young Ensign hearing a LCDR XO talk about it was like hearing about the boogey monster and the apocalypse all rolled into one. And it was.
The objective was to survive - although you knew they would find lots of things wrong and make you look fairly dumb.
After all the inspectors at INSURV new their stuff well and all the tricks you as a grey hull would try to use to make you look better. They were back in my day terminal O-5's and above whom gave no thought of delivering devastating reports. Because it a ship was jacked up then sailors might die because systems either did not work or sailors did not know how to operate them.
I would love to read the INSURV reports for McCain and Fitzgerald prior to their respective collisions.
Broadside cartoon below says its all.
In any case the old advance notice gave us all the time in the world to essentially game the inspection. In fact if you did fail, you had very little excuse. This is not to say it would be pretty.
The games that were played...missing something - go borrow it from another ship and return it the day after inspection. Don't have someone whom can do x y or z ditto.
At some point in time they reduced the advance warning from months to weeks. Which makes it a lot harder to game the system, and the inspection as well as produce more accurate realistic assessment of the material condition and readiness of a grey hull.
In short I am all for it.
But for big navy (Washington DC Navy) this is not good.
Which means in rough terms if our grey hulls were getting say A and B grades under the old system, they are now getting Cs D's and F's.
The reports have long been a headache for the Navy because they often paint an unfavorable picture of the fleet’s readiness. The assessment for FY 2020 – unveiled last week – found that ship readiness decreased in the last three years. A string of negative INSURV reports prompted the Navy to classify the assessments in 2008, but the service later began producing unclassified versions of the reports.
In short the report card being generated is not very good. So what do you do when your report card sucks, well lets just eliminate the report card. That way mom and dad (in these case Congress) won't know you failed and take away the car keys and your Xbox.
That they classified it, i am on the fence about that one. I am not sure what we are protecting when our ships go out looking like this. I think its pretty clear that there is likely alot of things broken on this ship.
So it looks like (no clue whom did it) some legislative affairs staffer snuck a provision into the 2019 that
While INSURV has existed for 139 years for the purpose of examining the service’s ships, Congress included a provision in the Fiscal Year 2019 National Defense Authorization Act stipulating that a report would no longer be required after Oct. 1, 2021
I am guessing that enterprising staff officer go an EP out of that. However, and thankfully it looks like the gig is up as another enterprising member of some congressional staff discovered the shenanigans and plans to make sure mom and dad get their report card.
So I guess its
