The Ford Will Accomplish Its Mission with or without Flushing Toilets

With the Ford Strike Group joining the Lincoln Strike Group in the Middle East, month-old news about the USS Gerald R. Ford‘s toilet issues has been promoted by accounts linked to China, with one video garnering 3 million views.

Let’s start with the most important bit: This is an unsubtle ploy to lower American morale ahead of possible strikes against Chinese proxy Iran (the CCP has no allies, only instruments).

The American public, to its credit, is extremely generous to its service members and expects them to be treated as humanely as possible while in uniform and after service. Consider the ice cream ships of World War II, USO tours, and the private/public beneficence for War on Terror vets (yes, sometimes overflowing from embarrassment for the public’s treatment of the Korean and Vietnam War veterans). So this sort of pity propaganda on behalf of the sailor or Marine can be effective when applied by adversaries.

After all, the idea that sailors, who have been at sea for the better part of a year, have to queue to use heads (bathrooms), fight regurgitating toilets, and mop up human waste is a particularly noisome mental image.

But that’s life at sea.

Ship systems, be they military or civilian, are temperamental at the best of times, and all the more so when on a new class of ship after months at sea. Consider: heat, humidity, corrosive sea air, hard use from thousands of hands, and constant vibration conspire at all times to wear on the ship and her crew. After a while, ship discipline and its material condition diminish — items that don’t belong in the CHT (sewage collection, holding, and transfer) system get flushed with greater frequency, CHT equipment wears out, or its efficiency diminishes, and the shop responsible for repairing that equipment (hull technicians and, against their wishes, a slow-moving damage controlman) gets burned out.

All three of my deployments had CHT issues. Scenes of porcelain-contained horror during cleaning stations each morning were the rule, not the exception. But because I was part of Engineering, our heads were more often operational than others’.  That meant that we’d have randoms wander into our heads from other departments. Each space on a ship, no matter how small, is assigned to a certain department, division, or shop. Nature calls more frequently and rapidly than repair tickets can be handled (good luck doing a proper tag-out procedure in under two hours), so a roaming horde of Monster Energy addicts and their bubble guts takes to stalking the p-ways until a functioning head is found and then desecrated. This is all normal.

An admissible wrinkle when it comes to the Ford is that, from what technical details are available, the ship’s newish efficiency vacuum CHT system can lose an entire head’s functionality because of one clogged toilet. This may bring down any one of the ten loops aboard the ship. Those departments then get annoyed and start banning non-department sailors from their head to keep it operational. It becomes a toilet turf war. Usually, this issue is worse in the maintenance periods because large parts of the ship are offline while work is done, but apparently, the Ford has faced this issue for five years or more in all conditions and port periods, so it’s something its sailors and officers should know how to handle, even if it is frustrating when stationed aboard a $13 billion ship.

Here’s the reality: Warships are some of the most complex pieces of technology man has ever created. They are bespoke systems within systems within systems that have to operate in conditions hostile to man and machine for as long as the U.S. needs them there.

The hull technicians aboard the Ford will do what they need to do, just as the aviation, combat, intel, and nuke types will do what they need to do. To give you some idea of who we’re talking about, I had never seen a man eat a Snickers bar while plunging a toilet until I met HT3 Vasquez. These systems, though fickle, are in the best of hands.

Looking to the future, the sailors aboard the Ford absolutely deserve better than what they have. That will be figured out when the ship accomplishes its mission and gets back to its home port. In the meantime, the U.S. military is a logistical juggernaut. It can deliver a hundred porta-johns to sit on any one of the ship’s four elevators anywhere in the world and swap them out every day if necessary.

America’s enemies want the public’s concern for their men and women in uniform to blind them to Iran’s sins and kneecap the U.S. campaign against Iran. It is a generous reaction from our public, but not substantial enough to warrant abortive measures (though there are certainly constitutional reasons that may warrant a rethink).

China, like the Soviet Union before it, has used the American public’s veto to effect its desired outcome and protect its proxies, e.g., Russia, North Korea, and Iran. May that not be the case this time.

What we do to Iran should be decided by Congress and the White House, not the status of a carrier’s commodes.