The Board of Inspection and Survey
Up to Table of Contents

The Board of Inspection and Survey

My home for several years had been our old conventional (diesel) submarine that had seen action during World War II. It had been modified over the years, and it was stuffed full of modern electronic warfare equipment. But that was like putting a state of the art, 8-track tape player with huge speakers into a '42 Ford. It has its functionality, but does it do anything worthwhile?

The Navy has a Board of Inspection and Survey which acts independently of the chain of command. It consists of a bunch of old-timers who really love ships. They inspect the actual condition of ships and report succinctly and directly back to the Chief of Naval Operations. They don't pay any attention to your paperwork, and they don’t pay any attention to what you or some admiral wants them to say. They just look to see if the machinery really works.

This "Insurv Board" visited us in 1972, and put our boat through its paces. They didn't care how good our crew was, and they clearly did not want to see any of our extensive paperwork. They just wanted to play with another ship. We had worked hard to make sure that all our equipment worked properly, and we were nervous about their visit. Yet it was heartwarming to see how much these guys really cared about our boat. We certainly cared about it.

In the end, they pulled out some blank letterhead, and one of them sat down at our only typewriter, in the yeoman's shack, and made out a report. I don't think they had an office. And they certainly did not care to be a part of a bureaucracy. They just traveled around the various U.S. Navy bases all over the world and they checked out the hull and the machinery on any given ship. Then they announced what they found, and they went off to play with yet another ship.

In our case, their report said that we had no deficiencies that degraded our ability to perform our mission. No one on the Insurv team had ever given such a glowing report before. We should have been quite pleased. However, there was sadness in their faces as they showed the report to the skipper. They also had to say that our boat was obsolete, and it would cost too much to try to update it. They had to recommend that the boat be stricken from the Naval Register.

They had given us two reasons to go out for a drink after work that evening. The first toast was to celebrate our unmatched skill at keeping our boat in repair. The second toast was to acknowledge the passing of an era, when the advancing technology of war had left behind one of the most successful weapons in history.

Up to Table of Contents