David Craig, on November 27th, 2018(Tuesday blog)
The pride of the Norwegian navy
Today I wanted to take a break from all the serious, ‘we’re doomed’ stories and instead bring you the sad tale of the pride of the Norwegian navy – the advanced frigate KNM Helge Ingstad:
You might have seen this story in the news a couple of weeks ago. The warship, one of Norway’s five top modern frigates, was on her way home to Haakonsvern naval base. Unfortunately, on 8 November on the way, the well-equipped modern warship managed to collide with an oil tanker:
The KMN Helge Ingstad is one of five Nansen-class frigates billed as “unsinkable” due to its construction with water-tight zones designed to keep the warship “intact and operable”.
Yet the collision with the oil tanker left a big enough hole in the starboard side of the frigate for the warship to take on water. The crew was forced to abandon the vessel and now the ‘unsinkable’ frigate has sunk:
Oil tankers are quite big – this one was around 250 metres long. So they’re not the kind of ship that could tiptoe past one’s cabin window without you noticing they were there. Moreover, the weather was excellent while the waters in the area offer maritime traffic real-time shipping control. Also, there was radio-contact between the vessels when the accident happened.
So one is left with the nagging question as to why the frigate, with all its radars and sensors and other smart navigational stuff, could not spot the massive oil tanker and change course to avoid the collision.
It’s all a mystery
The big bosses in the Norwegian navy have been remarkable quiet about how they managed to lose their unsinkable frigate on a quiet, calm, peaceful day. However, the selfsame big bosses have not always been so reticent in talking about this particular boat.
In the Norwegian magazine, Armed Forces Forum No. 2 in 2017 it was proudly stated that “Four out of five navigators on frigate KNM Helge Ingstad are women“.
“It is advantageous to have many women on board. It will be a natural thing and a completely different environment, which I look at as positive,” Lieutenant Iselin Emilie Jakobsen Ophus said. She is a navigation officer at KNM Helge Ingstad, according to Defense Forum.
In yet more politically-correct, libtardian guff, the magazine claimed that:
“There has always been a perception that the Armed Forces are characterized by a very masculine environment, and in many ways it is true. It is mostly men in the Armed Forces, but it is important for me to show that you do not have to be ‘one of the guys’ to assume a role in the Armed Forces. Finding one’s place should not be at the expense of being a woman,” said Ophus.
When more women are able to work together, “it becomes easier to discover and to create a more balanced defense,” Armed Forces Forum opined.
In the same magazine where the Norwegians boast about gender equality in their Navy, they also explained that they are looking into every department of their Armed Forces to increase the number of females.
Not only did the sinking of the unsinkable frigate cost the Norwegian Navy its entire annual budget, but the country reportedly lost millions with several oil and gas fields which were temporarily shut down due to the accident.
Perhaps they were holding the map upside down?
At this point one could be tempted to make jokes about women navigators and maps.
One might also wonder whether the good lady navigators were so busy discussing their lipstick or nail varnish or new hairstyles that they forgot to look out the window.
But I’m far too mature and enlightened and feminist to sink so low!
(my thanks to the excellent website zerohedge for this story)
Category: 
My father served in the Royal Navy through the First World War,during the interwar years and through the Second World War.He wasn’t against women serving on board ship but always maintained that they should do so as all women crews.He did not believe that mixed sex crews was in the interest of fighting efficiency and would lead to (and it has)/all kinds of problems unwanted in a focused fighting force.But of course he was just a hardened veteran of the most powerful navy in the world .As a Chief Petty Officer Gunnery he was also quite dismissive of the capabilities of the officer class.Once we had wooden ships and iron men,now we have iron ships and wooden men,was one of his favourite sayings.He died at the age of 93 and was still completing The Daily Telegraph Crossword before lunch till the end.He would have been appalled at the treasonous antics of our present politicians.
Not quite on the point but similar incidents with USS John S McCain and USS Forrestal. Is there some pattern? perhaps GPS spoofing.
We have our female in the military problems as well. How many of us couldn’t believe the idiotic decision to allow female personnel to serve in our submarines. Predictably, the caption no less of one of our nuclear submarines was caught with his trousers down with a female technician. The Sun headlined it – ‘Up periscope!’ On land, I see there is a female n charge of both the Met Police and the London Fire Brigade. The later wants to make the Fire Brigade ‘less macho’ and is undergoing counselling after Grenfell – where lack of leadership was painfully obvious, not least still telling residents to stay in their flats a couple of hours after it became obvious they couldn’t be rescued. I knew quite a few ‘macho’ firemen who had served in London during the Blitz, Doodlebugs and Rockets and they wouldn’t have had a clue as to what counselling was and would be spinning in their graves if told a women was now in charge, not of making the tea, but the whole Brigade!
As an ardent supporter of the rights of women, I nevertheless am in total agreement with the above comments. Men and women are different, and vive la difference! Gender differences are evident almost from birth. Boy babies tend to be intrigued by material things, girl babies focus on faces. Physically the vast majority of women just are not strong enough to do many jobs such as active front-line military duty or firefighting. I know that if I were in immediate peril in a fire, I’d prefer to know that a fit male was scaling the ladder to rescue me! Women are fashioned physically and emotionally to give birth and nurture their young, both extremely demanding, life-long activities. Men are fashioned to go out and risk their lives in order to hunt, slaughter and bring home the woolly mammoth for dinner. Both equally valuable and essential functions, but different. How would all the children have fared in wars had their mothers decided to go off and engage in direct battle? During WW2 the mothers of all the combatant countries knew their place, which was to stay at home and do their best to keep the next generation alive. Of course there’s a place for women in all branches of the military – we’d have been in a sorry plight during WW2 without the WAAFS, WRENS, munitions workers and Land Army girls. These all provided vital roles best suited to the evolutionary, emotional and physical make-up of women.
Baroness Trumpington, whose death has been announced today, was a magnificent example of what women can be and achieve without abandoning their womanhood or becoming aggressive and strident. (Her fleeting 2-finger salute in the Lords to a male colleague was sufficiently appropriate to mitigate any charge of vulgarity.) Many female members of the “gender equality” brigade could do a lot worse than emulate her.
WELL AS FAR AS I AM CONSERED, I TOO BELIEVE THAT LIKE THE ENGLISHMAN THAT FELT TODAY’S SHIPS ARE MADE OUT OF STEEL AND MEN HAVE BEEN WATERDOWN TO BELIEVE THAT IS OK TO ACCEPT WORKING ONBOARD WITH A HOMOSEXUAL, TRANS, LESBIAN ETC. INSTEAD OF JUST STANDING THEIR WROUND AND REFUSE TO SERVE UNDER THOSE CONDITIONS, AFTER ALL TODAYS SERVICE IS VOLUNTEER, FORCING DECITION MAKEING POLITICIANS AND HIGH RENKING OFFICERS TO CHANGE THEIR WAYS, AND SEPARATE ALL OF THEM HOMOSEXUALS SHOULD HAAVE THEIR OWN MILITARY BASES, AS WELL AS LESBIANS ,AND TRANS, AND WHEN TIME OF WAR THEYSHOULD ALL BE SENT IN DIFERENT DIRECTIONS TO SERVE AS UNITES THAT WAY WHEN VICTORY COMES IT WOULD BE GIVEN THE PRICE AND PRACESS TO THE INDIVIDUAL GROUP INSTEAD OF WHAT IS GOING ON RIGHT NOW, WHICH DOING NOTHING MORE THAN CAUSING CHAOS AND FALSE CLAIMS OF RAPE, AND SEXUAL MOLESTATION DESTROYING THE HONOR OF GOOD PEOPLE THAT GO WITH INTENTION OF SERVING THEIR NATION, BUT END UP BEEN KICKED OUT BY FALSE CHARGES, NOW THAT WOULD COVER VICTORIES AS WELL AS DEFEATS, WITHIN EACH GROUP AND NEVER TO SEND A GROUP OF MAN TO SAVE A GROUP OF EITHERONE OF THEM THAT WAY THEY COULD LEARN THE CONSEQUENCESS OF SERVING AS UNITS, OF THE SAME SEX, THAT WOULD STOP ALL PRETENDERS FROM JOINING MILITARY SERVICE I AM SURE OF THAT.