The Impact of PRK on the Navy
There was recently an interesting article in the New York Times (no, really) about the impact of PRK on the Navy, specifically the Naval Academy. The most favoured spots are those which require good eyes (e.g. aircraft pilots); in the old days excellent candidates with bad eyes (which I should note is a relative term—folks with truly bad eyes don’t get in at all) might go on instead to become submariners. But with the incredible rise in PRK procedures (349 out of the 993 midshipmen of the class out ’06, compared to 50 in the class of ’01), more and more men are qualified to become pilots. This would be cool (more candidates means being able to choose better candidates, right?), except that this means that the best overall candidates (physically, academically & militarily) are becoming pilots, while the other branches are getting less-qualified candidates. As an example, the rate of those washing out of nuke school—a prerequisite for submarine service—has been steadily increasing over the last five years.
I don’t know what they can do to solve the problem. There’s an undeniable romance to flying which is a strong motivator; I don’t think anything else has quite the panache. Very few kids saw Top Gun and wanted to be a SWO—and no-one has ever watched Das Boot and decided that subs are the way to go. The Navy is offering bonuses to those who go into subs, but that just attracts those who like money; it doesn’t do much to grab the truly motivated. Of course, one wonders how motivated someone who wanted to be a pilot but had bad eyes would be either…
The world changes in strange ways!
