"Lean manning saps morale, puts sailors at risk" - Well, certainly not on boomers

Hat tip to Chap for pointing out this curious NavyTimes article.

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Here's the rub. The title, Lean manning saps morale, puts sailors at risk, tends to encompass all sailors, including submariners. A worthwhile and short read, the article is about surface ships, but it never mentions, quotes, nor makes a reference to one female sailor.

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The NavyTimes author mentions IAs and the fact that their billets remain open. He added, “Navy Secretary Ray Mabus, who tells sailors that ships are going to sea manned at 85 percent, has said he wants to begin to get IAs back to their home crews as soon as possible.”

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Besides submarines, another thing the author NEVER mentions nor quotes in his entire surface ship article is any female sailor.

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Why would submariners find the article's timing (published yesterday, although the cited thesis was dated December 2008) and omission of certain nouns and pronouns (women, females, she, her) curious? Well, this is why: Navy moves to put women on submarines.

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Also omitted are relevant factors, such as:

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Jean Zimmerman (author of Tailspin: Women at War in the Wake of Tailhook -1995) notes that there is a perception in the Navy that women sailors use pregnancy to escape deployed ship duty. “In an example cited by Zimmerman, in 1993 as the USS Cape Cod prepared to depart on a deployment cruise, 25 female sailors, out of a crew of 1,500, reported being pregnant shortly before the scheduled departure and were reassigned to shore duty. Although Zimmerman felt that the number of pregnancies was small and should not be regarded as significant, the senior enlisted person on the ship, Command Master Chief Alice Smith commented, “Just about every division has been decimated by the number of pregnancies. Now tell me that’s not going to hurt a ship.”[1]

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There was "hidden discrimination", whereby superiors failed to give women normal shipboard tasks - most of the time with good intentions, to spare them dirty or dangerous jobs. - from study of FEMALE merchant mariners by Minghua Zhao of the Seafarers' International Research Centre at the University of Wales, Cardiff.

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Is the article a clever story planted just in case a sudden uptick in submarine accident rates correlates with the eventual assignment of females to sub crews? Let’s hope not.

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Submarines are always silent and strange.