About a week ago, I had the chance to read an article in the New York Times about Fleet Week in New York. Fleet Week, for those who don't know, is supposed to be a week where the Navy sends ships into town and they host tours and the city hosts special events. Done properly a good time is had by all and I have fond memories of a couple of fleet weeks where the libations and the scenery ( if you get my drift) were just fine.
Well, good old mother Navy wants you to know that is all changed:
The High Line.
Shake Shack.
The ballet.
Fleet Week is not what it used to be. Once upon a time, sailors on leave on New York’s streets after months at sea went a little wild — liquor and female companionship were the priorities, with barstool-tossing brawls often the unintended result. Now, not so much. “I spent way too much money at the American Girl store,” said Chief Petty Officer Justin Brown, a member of the Navy for 17 years who said he came to the city with a detailed shopping list from his daughters, ages 4 and 7, in Virginia. “I got a bunch of clothes for the dolls, and accessories.” The turn from those drunken sailors of shore leaves past to the American Girl doll-toting sailors of today has been long in coming, with cultural tourism slowly edging out more earthy pursuits.
To see this week’s white-clad visitors exploring New York is to understand not just how sailors have changed, but how significantly the city that welcomes them has changed. Shopping bags, iced coffee, restaurant recommendations, a photo beneath a selfie stick. The writers of “On the Town” would surely have scratched their heads in wonderment.
Complete and utter rubbish.
If judging by any numbers of recent covers of Navy times as a benchmark, there is still plenty of lechery going on in today's Navy. This article, however, represents the Navy's PAO machine at work trying to convince us all that the great experiment was a complete success and that there were absolutely no costs involved to either the service or American society as a whole in the unleashing the great diversity monster.
I as I pointed out clearly , three years ago, the Navy PAO machine is always on the march trying to peddle this message. It would not surprise me one bit if the Navy paid the NYT to print that article.
Of course there were a few parts they conveniently left out. Such as: Getting breathalyzed crossing the quarterdeck returning. Being forced to go ashore with a buddy and making sure you actually named that buddy before you left the ship. or the curfews and liberty limits, expressly illegal in the US I might add.
They also neglected to point out the significant percentage of that 1800 Sailors who at some point in the evening probably ended up in a hotel or bathroom stall f*cking their fellow Sailors.
A deeper and more insightful article would have pointed out the higher adminstrative burden the Navy bears for this "kindler and gentler" Naval Service. But that's not the objective here.
Look, I understand the way the tide of history has turned. I get it. But what still makes me angry is the utter dishonesty that the diversity mafia wants to foist on us in "proving" how essential women are to the service.
Try getting them to release overall pregnancy statistics sometime. Or how many dual service couples there are-and the difficulties in colocation detailing. ( We'll not even point out that the fraternization barriers were inevitably crossed somewhere on the way to the altar.) I won't even try to get into the utter hypocrisy of the whole TIP nonsense.
There is no free lunch. Everything comes at a cost.
They should at least be honest about it.
Are the processes welcome? That depends on your point of view. If the reason for having armed forces is to guarantee national security, then the answer is clearly no. …………
One may also look at the problem in a different way. Over the last few decades people have become accustomed to think of the feminization of the military as if it were some great and mighty step towards women’s liberation. In fact, it is nothing of the kind. For thousands, probably tens of thousands of years, we men have laid down our lives so that the women we love might live. To quote the Trojan hero Hector on this, he preferred going to hell a thousand times to seeing his wife, Andromache, weeping as she was led into captivity by one of the “copper-wearing Greeks.”-Martin Van Creveld.