The Navy is good at training; I assume the other branches are as well. The Navy took both of my grandfathers, one urban, one rural, both very poor, both of very modest education but apparent potential, and in months turned them into electricians. They both made careers of being in the Navy based on that training, one as an electrician and one moving into logistics, both becoming Master Chiefs. They had the 1940s versions of these books and I learned a lot from them.
I have got some rather sad news for you. Joking aside, I was in the Army for 16 years. Almost all of the technical training is complete garbage. In fact, the best part of my training in Satellite Communications (at the time one of the longest and supposedly "toughest" technical courses the Army had) used the Navy's Electronics program from OP. We only used about 20 pages worth of it and that was our introduction to electronics.
The only technical training I did that was actually pretty good was run by the National Guard in Utah. It was a basic Information Technology course. The instructors were all really into what they were doing and had professional careers outside the Army before they volunteered to teach full time.
I got out a couple of years ago. Their Cyber program is much better than most of their other technical training but it was heavily influenced by what other branches were doing. Maybe they changed it but another thing is that their cyber training was mostly SANS courses and the joint course someone else already mentioned. So it was good because it was some of the better training offered by the private sector.
I have met some ex NSA guys from the Army that were amazing. Not really sure what kind of training they got. Their experience isn't really a good representation of IT as a whole in the Army.
There are exceptions to everything. There are small teams/groups within every branch of the military doing really cool stuff. Some of them have many more opportunities for excellent training that the average person in a similar role in the Army will have.
>Other branches send their people to gordon for it.
Also, a lot of the technical schools at Gordon had instructors from the Air Force and the Navy teaching alongside the Army.
I don't think this is true. The gold standard of entry-level infosec training in the US military is the Joint Cyber Analysis Course in Pensacola, FL, taught by the Navy.
I was an Avionics Tech in the USN. I remember my initial electronics training being very accelerated and intense. I still remember much of it and use it from time to time even after not using it for many years - so I guess it worked!
I was an electronics technician in the Navy and concur with their excellent training. The NEETS series is great, I have the entire set in hard copy and still refer to them from time to time.
As a guy that spent a long time in the Army doing telecommunications we interacted with electronics techs in the Navy and they were almost always really really knowledgeable. We didn't have the same level of confidence when talking to our counterparts in other Army units.
There is something about how the military used to be a huge repository of technical talent as we entered WW2 and the incentives were still there for people to build their careers in the military as experts.
Think about all the stories of experts who developed technology for the military, solved interesting problems for the military, public defense, all the aircraft and vehicle/vessel designs, systems that came out of that domain.
And spun off useful companies that created whole industries of their own.
And then over time, we as a country lost the desire to pay for that expertise (and lost an urgent need for it), and just like other areas of government, the expertise that was no longer being rewarded migrated to contractors to the point that the government agencies themselves do not know how to measure what they want to happen -- and have to ask the contractor to do that assessment for them... Just think of the FAA and Boeing lately...
Recommended for people wanting to learn about this subject, I still keep this as my go to reading whenever I want to check something again. Though there is an updated version too which you can find at: https://www.fcctests.com/neets/Neets.htm
These training materials are supremelyyyyy underrated. So much of what people are looking for is training--not education. And there's a difference! The Navy is best-in-class in training.
Excited to see these materials made their way to HackerNews.
Yep, I was trained by the US Navy to perform electronics calibration, and basically learned how to troubleshoot and fix almost any electronic device (given schematics and a manual) in about 9 months of training, total.
My first job out of college was working for the navy as a civilian engineer. At the time I read through all these and found them on par with the education I got at my university. With the training found in these books a sailor could understand and repair almost any analog system on the ship. They did not keep up this training for the digital age, and its a shame because on a modern naval ship almost everything is done via computer control and the current training is swap out the digital parts if anything breaks.
> They did not keep up this training for the digital age, and its a shame because on a modern naval ship almost everything is done via computer control and the current training is swap out the digital parts if anything breaks.
I have a fair bit of experience with this from the civilian contractor side.
The main problem with these modern Line Replaceable Modules (LRMs) and Line Replaceable Units (LRUs)[1] is that they require specialized tooling and equipment to properly troubleshoot, repair/rework, and test. They also each require some parts that are specific to the LRM/LRU. Shipboard technicians could be given the training to do the work (mostly), but there would be no space for all the other physical elements required to actually do it.
At first the DOD pushed all this back on the contractors (any failed LRM/LRU was shipped back to the factory), but when I left that world they were moving towards a model where branch depots could receive the failed LRM/LRU, test it, and perform basic repair/rework without contractor intervention; they would only ship the hairy cases back. That's about as good as they can get, because it just in feasible or cost effective to spread that capability out to every base and ship around the world.
[1] Those are Air Force terms, but the Navy as similar concepts.
Navy CVNs have micro miniature repair shops onboard, and no Depot level repairable leaves the ship without screening by them to see if they can repair it. They have a significant incentive to do so, as the money they save is something they can take credit for, and the ship's budget is significantly helped out by their repairs.
I still list a bullet point on my resume of the approximate dollar value of all the equipment I repaired myself during the ~3 years I was stationed in the calibration lab on a CVN. My favorite is the $20k precision power sensor standard that I troubleshooted down to a single transistor which cost a couple bucks to replace.
I’ll add that on my ship, the “screening” you speak of was most often performed by the cal lab, since we were the only ones trained in component-level repair on general electronics. The 2M shop just did the soldering for us ;-)
Here is what I saw with both this and the Parent's comment about LRU's, and this is in the context of the CVN's where I did my work. Every vendor uses something different ( count how many flat panel computer model's are on a CVN ) so instead of being able to swap the hard drives or PSU on a embedded PC you throw the whole thing out and replace it. Same goes for most control hardware. There may be dozens of independent control systems using pretty much every vendor of controller. I would love to see the IC's be able to rebuild any control system underway and re-program it, like they could do with the old analog based systems.
Oh, nobody would be repairing flat screen monitors (though I replaced CRTs while I was in), but get into radars and fire control systems and servos and such and those definitely get repaired onboard. When the choice is replace a 50 cent resistor or send the module off and wait six months for a spare that costs the ship half a million bucks, you better believe people get the job done.
I owned the 2M shop on a CVN for a while. We repaired millions of dollars worth of equipment.
The manual of basic repair techniques used in these shops has been approved for public release; see Standard Maintenance Practices, Miniature/Microminiature (2M) Electronic Assembly Repair, published here as an Air Force technical order:
My father taught and did some curriculum development for the Navy electronics school in the 1960s.
His prior work out in the fleet was cited for its high quality. His old stories of studying schematics, rebuilding radar repeaters, and performing occult rituals around wave guides seem hard to transplant to a world of synthetic apertures and DSPs. Similarly, I think cryptography tech was then just transitioning from complex piles of discrete components into things more like modern computers full of integrated circuits.
As integrated circuits and software eats the world, I think there is less opportunity for a technician in the field to diagnose and correct a problem in the functional paths of such systems. There might be important field-work remaining in the power electronics and environment of the digital systems, but it isn't surprising to me that larger black boxes become the replaceable units. You replace an entire unit with something in-spec. If the software needs tuning, that is going to happen back in a lab somewhere and come out as a new revision of a system, not happen in the field like someone patching a faulty wiring harness.
Ah but they did! The Data Systems rate covered the digital age up into the late 1990s (there's a series of books for them too -- I was able to find one of them in public view at least[0]). The DS rate did everything from gate level troubleshooting of Navy computers to machine language programming and networking and more conventional IT sorts of things.
Unfortunately, the DS rate was decommissioned in 1998 and the vast majority of their responsibilities were shifted over to the FC and ET rates.
There was also a DP (Data Processing Technician) rate, which eventually combined with the Radioman rate to become the IT (Information Technician) rate. They're now generally in charge of all Navy computing shipboard.
I spent nearly two decades in the Navy as an IT. The "NEETS modules" were always required study material for portions of the IT/ET/IC, etc. advancement exams.
Was in the Navy in the early 90s and concur with everyone on the quality of training being incredible. The NEETS Modules were designed for independent study and were incredibly useful. The last one wasn't on electronics... it was on Blueprint Reading has been outrageously useful in life for me.
My first job out of college with a degree in Physics was electrical officer on a Navy ship in 1999. I remember flipping through these because my guys had them to study for their rating exams and thinking they were surprisingly good.
Maybe from, say, 1950 to 1970 or so, some of that Navy training in electronics was in Millington, TN, in particular at the NATTC, Naval Aviation Technical Training Center, with about 40,000 students at a time?
Dad worked there 1948 to 1964 as the main education theory and organizing guy -- Educational Consultant to the Director of Training. We lived in Memphis. Starting in 1964 he was at the Pentagon for the rest of his career. So, by '79 he was in DC!
