> For nearly 30 years, all new surface warfare officers spent their first six months in uniform at the Surface Warfare Officer’s School in Newport, Rhode Island, learning the theory behind driving ships and leading sailors as division officers.
> But that changed in 2003. The Navy decided to eliminate the “SWOS Basic” school and simply send surface fleet officers out to sea to learn on the job. The Navy did that mainly to save money, and the fleet has suffered severely for it, said retired Cmdr. Kurt Lippold.
Six months of training vs a box of CD-ROMs. Amazing.
17 sailors down in two months, and much more than that in total since the elimination of the basic training course.
It's penny wise, pound foolish. We're perfectly willing to spend many billions of dollars per large ship, yet we eliminate the basic training programs for the sailors that actually run said large ships to save a few million. It'd be like buying a Ferrari, but skipping the seatbelts to save ten bucks.
Or, in tech, imagine if we eliminated CS educations and just expected all programmers to learn skills on the job. I don't think that'd work out too well.
I don't exactly know the history of these courses, but SWOs now attend BDOC,though sometimes not for a few months after reporting. It's pretty heavy on seamanship.
> For nearly 30 years, all new surface warfare officers spent their first six months in uniform at the Surface Warfare Officer’s School in Newport, Rhode Island, learning the theory behind driving ships and leading sailors as division officers.
> But that changed in 2003. The Navy decided to eliminate the “SWOS Basic” school and simply send surface fleet officers out to sea to learn on the job. The Navy did that mainly to save money, and the fleet has suffered severely for it, said retired Cmdr. Kurt Lippold.
Six months of training vs a box of CD-ROMs. Amazing.