My experience in the Navy made me lose all respect for the "leadership" there. It's a place where careers are established by doing everything except that which involves any actual thought or problem solving.

The culture is risk-averse to a fault, but at the same time have nearly zero capability to accurately asses risk or fix problems beyond punishing people when things inevitably go wrong.

Official "risk assessments" are performed before every dangerous undertaking, with numbers that are pulled out of someone's ass, along with additional "risk mitigation" numbers that are also pulled out of someone's ass so that leaders have cover when an accident happens. "We performed all the necessary risk assessments and were still a go."

Let me give you an example. Underway replenishment is when one ship will pull alongside a supply ship and transfer fuel and supplies from the supply ship. It's very dangerous because the ships are within 300 feet of each other for hours on end.

A risk-assessment is done and briefed the night before. Those are a PowerPoint presentation with a grid of things that can go wrong on the Y-axis. There are two columns, "risk" and "mitigation," and in line with each disaster are the probability conflated with the severity of that happening. Not actual numbers, just words like, "severe," "marginal," "likely," etc. Those are color-coded between red and green.

One of those things is always "crew preparedness" or similar. The risk of having an unprepared crew that didn't get a lot of sleep is shown as, for example, "severe" and colored red. The briefer will say, "well this is a severe risk, so we're making an announcement that everyone needs to get plenty of sleep tonight and that mitigates that risk down to "tolerable."

Actually this is more technical than what actually happens most of the time, which is that you'll hear things like, "we've mitigated the yellow risk down to a green." The entire ship's company of NCO's and officers will watch that presentation and nod their heads along. There is never one of these that results in a decision not to do something.

And there you have it. I've taken you through the entire risk mitigation strategy for the Navy, that happens nearly every day.

Does anyone know the actual probabilities of disaster? If so, they're not saying. Are they changing existing procedures or spending additional money to fix problems based on actual numbers? Hell no.

Really severe problems are dealt with in the following manner; a "zero tolerance" policy for that problem existing will be created, and when disaster strikes, it's a career-ending event for whatever scapegoat is standing there. Problem solved!

By the way, don't join the Navy.

EDIT: Also, the "too much technology" portion of the article is laughable. Part of the problem is that technology that the rest of the world uses to avoid these sorts of things is seen as anathema to the luddite SWO community, and rather than embrace anything that could help automate error-prone tasks, they pay lip service to it and continue doing extraordinarily stupid things for tradition's sake.

Aircraft carriers are driven by issuing voice commands to (mostly undertrained) helmsman in an environment where any additional noise could result in a misunderstood command and disaster. Or the helmsman gets tired of standing for a five hour watch every day and accidentally turns left instead of right like she's told. Imagine driving a car by telling the driver what to do from the passenger seat. Not just a "turn left up there," but "turn the wheel 15 degrees to the left, ok, now turn the wheel back to center, ok, now turn it back three degrees to the right because you oversteered..." It's insane.