Shipboard Sailors Get Barracks

Ex-Navy types will appreciate this report from Navy Times.

Within three years, almost all junior sailors living aboard ships in port will trade their mass berthing, gang heads and daily inspections for two-person barracks rooms with private bathrooms, cable and Wi-Fi.

Those changes mark the final phase of Homeport Ashore, a plan with roots in a 1996 decision to pay housing allowances to single E-6s on sea duty. That trickled down to E-5s and E-4s, and now has been expanded to the more ambitious goal of getting every shipboard sailor a place to stay ashore when his ship is in port.

The program has already made great strides. Four years ago, 24,000 junior enlisted sailors lived on ships, and a generation ago, most enlisted sailors of all ranks called their gray hulls home.

Anybody who has ever been forced to live aboard ship while in port will surely recall what a royal pain in the fantail it was. The Homeport Ashore program is a big improvement.