OldAgePensioner said:
I miss being out of the loop.
It's not just "need to know", it's also "care to know". It's too high a price to pay.
The regular intelligence-collection gear worked pretty well, but many times the satellites could get the same info faster or with less risk. However, every once in a while we'd be the dreaded "project boat". For every awesome-looking black box dumped in our sonar or ESM bay by some NSA-wannabes, we knew there'd be endless hours of entertainment trying to get it to come one, helping it to stay on, and keeping it from taking out the rest of the space if it went out in a blaze of glory. If it was so bulky that it had to go in the torpedo room, you knew that it'd take over your whole daily routine. Or it'd seem like such a miracle machine that we'd misplace all our faith on it, disregarding all other warning signs until we had to sound the collision alarm.
Before the deployment (hopefully) we'd get a breathless briefing by some tech rep who'd describe all the wowza things it did for the last boat's deployment. (Confirming that assertion by contacting our counterparts was usually greeted by "Oh, that piece of crap.") We'd have to devote hours of classroom training to learning how to use it (when it worked) and hoping that it could be repaired (because no one would admit that it could break). Then we'd devote more hours of at-sea time trying to get it to work gaining operational familiarity with it only to hear the week before deployment "Uhm, you guys are doing it wrong." Then we'd discover that we were expected to make this box dance someplace where the charted soundings were last provided in 1858 by a British whaling ship.
Later we'd have to give it an entire section of the mission report, spend hours creating punchy PowerPoint slides describing what it was supposed to do and what it actually accomplished, and store hundreds of data modules (tapes, hard drives, dilithium crystals, whatever) for higher authority on our return. Of course you don't talk about having to extinguish a fire, nearly running aground, getting chased by ASW aircraft, or a dozen other night-mare inducing pucker factors. Then six months later we'd be told "Uhm, you guys were doing it wrong and you let the tapes get wet."
Working at the training command or SUBPAC wasn't much better. You knew what the crews were going through and, as the SUBPAC rep, you were also usually in charge of selecting what not to pay for innovative funding techniques for its next deployment.
On the rare occasion (once per career) when the gear worked as advertised, when you were where you were supposed to be, when they were where they were supposed to be, it was daylight, and the weather was clear, you'd get awesome intel. You'd feel like true steely-eyed killers of the deep and gods among mortals-- for about three weeks. Then you'd get a message saying, essentially, "Uhm, you guys are doing it wrong. Don't let the tapes get wet!" and a year later you'd discover that all your carefully-collected intelligence had the image's periscope crosshairs digitally removed in order to disguise the method of collecting the intelligence.
Don't get me started on the various quality- & performance-improvement programs that we were required to collect data for and occasionally be the subject of the special "Don't let this happen to you..." brief.
It's neat to know that stuff. But it's much less testosterone/adrenaline poisoning when you can read about it on the Smoking Gun website.
Hey, I'm not bitter. And I don't have those nightmares anymore, either.
