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.
