Every sailor goes through them, and dreads them. The Division In The Spotlight program is an event where the Commanding Officer does an inspection of an entire division from a from cleanliness to properly managed programs like RPPO and mentorship. It’s a time when everyone’s heads are cut off and you are running around trying to find it because a light bulb is out or that corner of the space is cluttered and plugs aren’t safety checked. The biggest portion of DITS is the zone inspection where the CO walks through all of your spaces and tells you what is wrong. My division just went through ours, and for the third time, it was just as painful as the first.
My first DITS with this command was a complete disaster. It was the last one my division had with our current CO before he turned over a few months after. Weeks and days leading up to our DITS consisted of hours of cleaning, chipping, grinding, and painting followed by replacement of items such as light bulbs or missing tempest caps. The biggest hit we probably took was the mulch room. It was pretty much the storage room for all the crap we moved out of Radio and other spaces we owned, and tossed in there to prepare for the zone inspection. What was even worse was that the day of the zone inspection our mulch room was so full of junk it was in no condition to be inspected and at the last second, I was tossing things to the side just to clear a path to walk through because there is a fan intake room inside as well, and is also inspected. The second the CO walked in, all I heard was a yell “Oh Shit!” I couldn’t help but chuckle because I knew what he was yelling about, but my LCPO knew the fate of that room and what the reaction was going to be.
The last DITS we had with our new CO was still not good. Our mulch room was definitely a turn around in that you could see the deck, but there was still junk in there that we’ve collected and haven’t gotten around to tossing. Plus, this was a new CO, but then again a first impression is always remembered and there was no doubt that however we did, the next inspection would have to have improvements or it would seem to him that the division doesn’t care about raising its standards and its material condition is completely unsat. With an unsat material condition, it reduces the ships ability to do it’s job and when that happens, it all falls on the CO and he wasn’t going to have that.
The inspection did go a lot better than the first, and the hits were pretty evenly spread out through our spaces, but none the less as a CO, it is his or her duty to find everything and anything wrong. If a CO goes through a space and says it’s good, then the division in charge gets into a relaxed mode and eventually the ships is unable to complete an INSURV and is declared “Unfit for Operation”.
This DITS, compared to the previous two, weren’t as bad because everyone knew what had to be done. Unlike the first two, we didn’t have to juggle our jobs while trying to get ready. We were able to prioritize our time to cleaning, painting, entering in jobs for work we can’t do ourselves and need outside assistance. In fact, this was the most prepared we have been for a DITS since I’ve been here and was confident in that we were going to make it through without feeling like we didn’t do enough. Unfortunately that wasn’t the case and we got cut at the legs for things we could have taken care of and didn’t. Our spaces were indeed a lot cleaner than before, deckplates and all, but there were some areas that weren’t taken into account because either we couldn’t reach it, or thought we couldn’t reach it and get it cleaned. We took our common sense hits and in the end we knew we didn’t do enough to get a better outcome.
At the end of the inspection, our Divo told us that we did a hell of a job, though we didn’t feel like it. He said that it is the CO’s job to find these hits or else we’ll just toss them to the side, forget about them and will eventually bite us in the ass, but more importantly bite the CO’s ass. He told us that you have to know your inspector, and since officers are around the CO all the time, they have a better idea of what to expect and better understanding of his comments and reactions. One thing he said was that when our CO is really upset with something, he’ll pull either the Divo or LCPO aside and tell them one on one about something that could have been corrected. That didn’t happen once during this inspection, or so I was told, and it made me feel better.
I still believe there was a lot we could have done, but overall the effort our division put in to getting discrepancies corrected was outstanding. I just hope that with what little time I have left, another DITS is unable to be fit into it.