Wanted: Advice for a SWO in choosing a ship out of OCS

[lmnop]

The CW on Sweeps when I was a Shoe was that it was a terrible tour for a non-SPECOPS type. A buddy of mine from USNA went because he wanted to transition to EOD and figured it'd be a good way to get an "in" to the communty. Ran into him a year later in Corpus and he was miserable. Since it's a SPECOPS-run community, it was pretty easy for them to dump off the shitty jobs on the straight SWO types.

Of course, I hear SPECOPS has been load-shedding the Sweeping these last few years, so things may have changed. Still, for a new SWOlet you can't go too wrong with CRUDES (DDG/FFG/CG).

All of the CO/XO billets switched back to SWOs a while ago, which left only EOD pipeline JOs on MCMs and MHCs. Within the past couple of years we stopped sending our new Ensigns out to get SWO qualed, so now it's entirely SWO.

I'm not sure if the shift to San Diego will have any impact on MCM quality of life or not. There are certainly more maintenance assets available there as opposed to Ingletucky, but that might be negated by O-4 COs competing with O-6 commands for resources. I've been out of that game for a while, so I really don't know what the answer is.

For the OP....MCMs are maintenance nightmares, and their max speed of 14 knots will make for some reeaallly exciting underway periods. The small crew has a tendency to create fun watch rotations for some positions (I spent a 6 month deployment doing Port/Starboard OOD). You'll learn a mission area which you'll likely never practice again, and you'll learn nothing of weapons systems bigger than a 50 cal or radars more complex than a Furuno. It wasn't a big deal for those of us that were just putting in our SWO purgatory time, but if driving and fighting ships is your chosen profession then I would take CRUDES over MCM regardless of the homeport location.

 

[KCOTT]

Most SWO's I've talkd to who weren't actually excessively bitter about their life seemed to like the Arleigh Burke DDG's and LHD's. As far as which coast, I've heard most people prefer San Diego.

 

[swerdna]

Vincennes never deploys to the Gulf any more, for obvious (political) reasons.

They decommed all of the Track I Aegis cruisers (CG 47-51), I guess they were getting too expensive to maintain. I saw a few in SD back in '04 boarded up and gutted.

 

[Uncle Fester]

They decommed all of the Track I Aegis cruisers (CG 47-51), I guess they were getting too expensive to maintain. I saw a few in SD back in '04 boarded up and gutted.

Huh. Didn't realized they'd decommed all five of them; I thought it was just 47-49. Well, definitely ain't going to the Gulf now, is it?