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Aw! <3

Like, what books I'd recommend, or just....stuff to do underway that would be in the self-improvement area? The big two that jump out as underway activities are always "save money, and work out."

What platform are you floating on?

So the first thing I do with all my proteges is I hand them the grading sheet for Sailor of the Year/Quarter and a blank evaluation, and I ask them to grade themselves. Not everyone wants to be, or needs to be, Sailor of the Year or a 5.0 sailor, but if that's the standard the Navy has set as "the best," then at least we have a guideline of what we should be working toward, right?

One thing that was pretty big at my last command was the Military Outstanding Volunteer Service Medal. Instruction here. One thing that is a really easy way to gain community service hours while underway is to make blankets for the Navy Marine Corps Relief Society's "Budgeting For Baby" class. You can crochet (that's incredibly easy, I promise) or you can google one of the thousand DIY no-sew blanket tutorials. If you belong to a Bluejacket Association or Enlisted Association or whatever, you may be able to get them to fund the cost of buying the material...or even ask the FCPOA if they'll give $50 to the cause. You can head over to Jo-Ann's or Fabric.com and check out their discount sections too. NMCRS offers 30 hours per blanket. Taking an hour out of your Holiday Routine for the entire float.....most of the DIY no-sew blankets only take an hour or two to make, sooooo. Collect those hours. Add in a COMREL or two, and there's no reason you can't end a float with over a hundred hours of community service. This is particularly great if you have a friend or two to make blankets with you....snag one of the TVs on the messdecks and watch a movie while you crochet. You can also contact a local homeless shelter and see if they need hats and crochet hats for them. Obviously not a good suggestion if you're stuck underway on a submarine with no space, but if you're surface side--good to go.

Books I'd suggest, well, hm, this could get out of control pretty fast, but off the top of my head:

• Personality Plus by Florence Littauer or her work specific version
  
  
• Lean In by Sheryl Sandberg
  
  
• It's Your Ship by Capt Abrashoff
  
  
• Starship Troopers
  
  
• Ender's Game (Ender and Starship are obviously straight scifi but there are some really awesome leadership principles/concepts/ideas that are worth mulling over. They've both been on past CNO's recommended reading lists too....and they're just fun to read.)
  
  
• For money, while, like, 99% of his stuff is "Duh!" I can't discount the practical steps he outlines, so Dave Ramsey's books, particularly Financial Peace is worth reading. His whole book is basically the wiki in r/personalfinance, but if you're wondering how to get your finances straight I recommend picking up this book. Just, in general. Good basic information and a starting point. Not saying you need it, but "saving money" just happens underway by virtue being trapped out on the ocean =)
  
  
• Leaders Eat Last

So I've actually thought this would work super great as a book club thing, but I didn't know if anyone would be interested. The books I'm planning on hitting next are two others in the HBR Emotional Intelligence Series called "Purpose Meaning + Passion" and "Influence + Persuasion". I've linked their Amazon pages, but I'm sure there's a .pdf of them somewhere around as well if anyone's interested.

In addition, I'm super down for other people to share their leadership thoughts, struggles, book reports, or journals as well. I just got done sharing with another user here that I feel we could really create an impact by trying to push more thought out, introspective stuff about what we're missing in the Navy. It'll take all of us though.

I'm not really looking for heroic stories. They're great tho. Actually, if you want to read something awesome, check out Beyond Glory: Medal of Honor Heroes in Their Own Words. It's unreal hearing the stories from MOH winners.

Anyway, I'm looking for stories of ethical successes. Times when life or limb wasn't necessarily on the line. Rather, there was someone doing something for the mere fact that it was correct.

So, this isn't a typical /r/Navy posting, however it has made deployment much easier.

I'm on an ancient hunk of shit with wheezy unreliable A/C plants.

It's Africa hot outside. Trying to sleep in berthing was miserable.

I ordered some random shit off Amazon and whipped this thing up in an afternoon.

For those of you that don't what a peltier cooler does:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thermoelectric_cooling

I have one heatsink/fan combo on each side of the element. One blows hot, one blows cold.

I have the heatsink/fan block in the corner of my rack blowing hot air out and cold air in onto my face. The power supply chills in an angle iron behind my rack.

It's made sleeping at night WAY nicer.

It's a ghetto proof of concept, but it works (well).

The big ticket items are here:

http://www.amazon.com/TEC1-12718-Thermoelectric-Cooler-Peltier-277-2Wmax/dp/B005EZIKLC/ref=sr_1_1?s=electronics&ie=UTF8&qid=1409628269&sr=1-1&keywords=12718

http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B002CT0YQW/ref=oh_aui_detailpage_o00_s00?ie=UTF8&psc=1

That peltier element I used was pretty expensive, but it was the only one available through a merchant that would ship to an FPO while I am deployed.

If I had to do it all over again, I would use this element:

http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B00EQ1X5EC/ref=s9_simh_gw_p147_d0_i1?pf_rd_m=ATVPDKIKX0DER&pf_rd_s=center-2&pf_rd_r=0ZP08SAAJ6Z8ZTG2THYT&pf_rd_t=101&pf_rd_p=1688200382&pf_rd_i=507846

The wattage is much higher (which means more cooling), and it's much cheaper. Unfortunately the vendors for those are in China and they don't ship to FPO's. This element may also be pushing the limits of some el-cheapo ATX power supplies. Double check your wattages before you begin.

The fan controller is a little bling, but it had temperature probes for testing. The heatsink/fan units come with basic potentiometer controls already in the box (I didn't use these). The fan controller was only $20, so for proof of concept it was totally worth it.

All you need in addition to the heatsinks/fans/peltier mat is a +12VDC power supply. The one I'm using puts out 520 watts. Got it for free. The IT's were going to float test a bunch of them. Any +12VDC power supply will work. The ATX unit just happened to be on hand.

Wire up the peltier mat to one of the high wattage +12v outputs and you're good to go. Connect the fans to standard molex connectors. If that's too complicated... you really shouldn't be messing with this stuff, as it's enough wattage to start a decent fire if you fuck up.

NSTM 300 compliance is a grey area(as that forbids fans) however to get technical, it's not really a violation. A fan is never connected to ships power. All that is ever connected to ships power is one half of a transformer for a DC power supply (which passes a MIP/3000 check).

Next step is to make an enclosure for the power supply/fan controller and get the heatsink umbilical in some abrasion resistant conduit/heat shrink.

Like I said, not normal Navy stuff, but I'm sure someone can make use of this idea as there are some smart/handy people around here.

Curious to see what other clever things some of the people here have come up with to make life a little bit easier.

Thanks man,

I'm just an armchair enthusiast inspired by my dad; I was never in the Navy. I read books like Eagle Against the Sun: The American War with Japan (Ronald H. Spector, 1985) and From Pearl Harbor to Hiroshima: The War in the Pacific 1941-1945 (Richard Overy, 2012).

Clearly it would be tons of mind-numbing work to chart the placement of ships across the whole Pacific versus time, under war conditions no less. I'm sure Naval Colleges can show you the movement of major task forces, but who can say just how many ships and people were involved, if you were to try to get down to every little craft like my dad's? Plus he served after WW2 - he was shipping out of Oakland CA when the first A-bomb dropped. (Of course, they still sent him, which let true vets could get home earlier... but I bet most WW2 naval histories gloss over everything after VJ day.)

Maybe some day, AIs will go through all the records and piece a lot of it back together. If that ever happens, thank heaven for the National Archives. Mike Constandy of WestmorelandResearch.org did a great job of digitizing dad's logs; seeing all his ship's movements is what got me wondering.

Here's to future AIs with more time than any of us. Assuming they're beneficial (laugh), they could piece together so much, at both the macro and micro scale.

The U.S. Navy recently established a "Navy Leadership and Ethics Center" at the Naval War College that has some material that might be useful (e.g. a concise 'wheelbook' of desired attributes). The wheelbook is too short to be anything more than a quick distillation though.

To be honest I'm not sure the Navy has anything much more directive in nature about leadership. We have a letter from the last CNO called the "Charge of Command" which all new COs are required to read. But our tradition is that leadership is something too personal to a Sailor (officer or enlisted) to turn into a cookbook recipe or a procedure where we say "follow these steps and we'll assume you must be a good leader".

We also have a little bit of guidance from Navy Regulations (the overarching general regulations for the Navy and Marine Corps). E.g. Chapter 8 talks about what we expect of our commanding officers and their subordinates.

> "0802.4 The commanding officer and his or her subordinates shall exercise leadership through personal example, moral responsibility and judicious attention to the welfare of persons under their control or supervision. Such leadership shall be exercised in order to achieve a positive, dominant influence on the performance of persons in the Department of the Navy."

So leadership is something we care about, something we write and read about and all of that would be useful in discovering what we implicitly want in our leaders. But I think it would be better to read about what we think good leadership is than to look for an official Navy list.

> what's something a newly commissioned officer might want/need?


Respect, a good Chief....


You're her friend right? Why don't you just get her something that lines up with her interests. If you're adamant about getting her something Navy/JO related, you could get her this book