The Ministry for the Future

76

I joined the US Navy out of high school. I wanted to get out of town. See the world kind of thing. From Kansas this seemed like a good way. My mom was worried but my dad was proud. The Navy needs more competent women, he said. You’ll show them what for. I love my dad.

So I put in eight years. Parts of those years were messy, mostly relationship stuff, I’m not going to go into that, everyone is the same, we all fuck up until we get lucky, if we do. Then if you’re smart enough to see your luck and act on it, things can work out. They have for me. But this is about the US Navy. When I joined I was paid about 25 grand a year. It doesn’t sound like much, but I was also given free room and board, and educated in a number of different jobs, so I was free to bank most of my salary if I wanted to, and I did. Eventually it adds up. More on that later.

The main thing I want to say is that being Navy was something I was proud of. This was not at all uncommon among my fellow sailors. We had good esprit de corps. I don’t know if it’s the same in the other branches of the military, I wouldn’t be surprised if it was, although we often made fun of them for being stupid compared to us. Not unusual I know. The thing is, the Navy is well-run. I have the impression it’s one of the more widely respected and well-run institutions anywhere. Among other things, we’ve run 83 nuclear-powered ships for 5,700 reactor-years, and 134 million miles of travel, all without nuclear accidents of any kind. I lived within a few feet of a nuclear reactor for three years, no harm no foul. My dosimeter showed just the same as yours would, maybe better. How can that be? Because the system was engineered and built for safety, whatever the cost. No cutting corners to make a buck. Done that way, it can work. Probably the Navy should run the country’s electricity system, I’m just saying.

A couple more things about Navy: now that pebble mob missiles exist, none of our ships could survive an attack by hostiles who have such systems. It just wouldn’t work. Nothing can stop those. You don’t have to have gone to Annapolis to figure this out. The upper brass don’t talk about it, no one talks about it, because it would be too mind-boggling. Would you just throw in the towel, say Whoops, we are now like the cavalry, or flint-tipped spears or a sharp rock in the hand? No, not right away you wouldn’t say that. So what it means is that the submarine fleet is all we’ve got in a real war. Since the threat from submarines is nuclear, as in atomic end of the world kind of stuff, hopefully they won’t ever be used. So in practical terms, until the subs re-arm, maybe with pebble mobs of their own, I wouldn’t doubt that that has even already happened, as a military force the Navy has been taken completely off the table. All navies have. In any real war, the whole surface fleet would soon be on the bottom. Not a happy thought.

But so think of the Navy in peaceful times, and given these pebble mobs, maybe peaceful times are what we’ve got now, very fucked-up peaceful times, low-intensity asymmetric insurgency terroristical climate-refugee peaceful times. And in that kind of world, the surface fleet of the US Navy can serve to deploy protective services, and also emergency relief. Like the Swiss military over the last few centuries, its main function will be to bring disaster relief in coastal areas. A force-for-good, US ambassador to the world kind of organization. You’ll see, I’m not just making this up—if the Navy persists at all, it will be doing these kinds of things. It already has been for quite some time.

Then the last thing I want to say about the US Navy is this. Occasionally our ships would get visited by admirals. Even destroyers and mine-sweepers get visited, like for inspections or courtesy tours or whatever. And as they wander around, they see a female able seaman, they sometimes stop to chat and ask questions. These were usually older men, once a woman, that was fun. They all started at Annapolis and made Navy their life, and no matter how fast they rose through the ranks, they’ve lived on ships and know the drill. So they’re well-informed, and interested in how things are for sailors now. Curious and friendly, I’d say, and surprisingly normal. Like a captain, but less pretentious.

Then later I looked it up and learned that admirals’ salaries top out at $200,000 a year. No one in the Navy gets paid more than that per year. So they call this the pay differential, it’s sometimes expressed as a ratio from lowest pay to highest. That ratio for the Navy is about one to eight. For one of the most respected and well-run organizations on Earth. Sometimes this gets called wage parity or economic democracy, but let’s just call it fairness, effectiveness, esprit de corps. One to eight. No wonder those admirals seemed so normal—they were!

Whereas in the corporate world I’ve read the average wage ratio is like one to five hundred. Actually that was the median; one to 1,500 happens pretty often. The top executives in these companies earn in ten minutes what it takes their starting employees all year to earn.

Ponder that one for a while, fellow citizens. People talk about incentives, for instance. A word from business schools. Who is incentivized to do what in a wage ratio of one to a thousand? Those getting a thousand times more than starting wage earners, what’s their incentive from out of that situation? To hide, I’d say. To hide the fact that they don’t actually do a thousand times more than their employees. Hiding like that, they won’t be normal. They’ll be bullshitters. And for the lowest income folks, what’s their incentive? I’m not coming up with one right off the bat, but the ones that do eventually come to mind sound cynical or beat down or completely delusional. Like, I hope I win the lottery, or, I’m going to shoot up now, or, The world is so fucked. You hear that kind of thing, right? Maybe incentive isn’t the word here. Disincentive, to keep it in that lingo. When you get one pay amount, and someone doing something easier gets a thousand of that pay amount, that’s a disincentive to care about anything. At that point you throw a rock through a window, or vote for some asshole who is going to break everything, which may give you a chance to start over, and if that doesn’t work then at least you have said fuck you to the thousand-getters. And so on.

So, what if the whole world ran more like the US Navy? What if the standard, or even the legally mandated, maximum wage ratio was set at say one to ten, being so easy to calculate? With the lowest level set high enough for life adequacy or decency or however you want to call it. Enough for a decent life. Which then, ten times that? That’s a lot! I mean think about it. Count it on your fingers and thumbs, seeing the enough amount on the tip of each digit, all ten stuck together at the end of your arms looking back at you. Enough times ten is fucking luxurious.

Works for the US Navy. Hooyah!