• Lord Wiggle@lemmy.world
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    1 day ago

    I’ve served in the navy for 15 years. Never have I ever seen any navy more incompetent than the US navy. Once I even singlehandedly prevented them from shooting down their own helicopter which returned from Germany back to their ship from a medevac. The helicopter forgot to turn on their IFF transponder and the ship was shouting warnings on the wrong channel. Once I met a navigation officer who didn’t know port was red and starboard was green. How can you be a navigation officer, the standard buoys are red and green. It’s like a baker who has no clue what yeast is. During one of my deployments there was bad weather and a US carrier in the vicinity lost 3 aircraft and had 2 badly damaged because they forgot to tell the deck crew there would be bad weather so the aircraft weren’t properly locked to the deck. Oopsie. Once on the Mediterranean there was an Arleigh Burke demanding all other shipping to stay clear 10 nmi to avoid collision. This was nearly impossible and would disrupt all traffic, because ships were sailing through shipping channels. 10 nmi is ~18.5 km. Once during an exercise they accidentally shot a Turkish ship pretending to be the enemy with real ammo, destroying the bridge and killing everyone on it including their captain and commander. That’s why Turkey now has 4 OHP frigates.

    I can go on and on about how stupid the US navy is. I have loads of stories, can’t even count them.

      • Lord Wiggle@lemmy.world
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        24 hours ago

        Nah, they aren’t stupid. It’s not like they would be engaged in a war for over 20 years with nomads armed with rusted AK’s and still lose or something. It’s not like blue on blue ever happens.