Recently the the senior naval leadership (read Admirals) decided to strip sailors of their job descriptions in their rank titles creating a furore on the lower deck who are dead against it. The lower deck want their job titles back which is fair enough because it is tradition and it defines who you are on a ship and within the navy. The reasons given by the senior naval leadership are that it will encourage cross trade training, help sailors with promotion within the navy and employment outside of the navy. These seem somewhat spurious reasons and appear to be change for the sake of change at the expense of tradition.
Navy launches far-reaching ratings overhaul despite sailor backlash
The end of ratings: What's next in the Navy's radical enlisted shake-up
It's worse than just admirals here; it's specifically senior civilian leadership (the Secretary), as well as senior enlisted leadership (the Master Chief Petty Officer of the Navy, even more specifically, the one who retired a couple months ago). Everyone gets a turn on this Sit-n-Spin, and there's more than enough failure to go aronud.
The logic and justification varies, as well, from SECNAV's "We started this process to remove the word "man" from our titles and reduce gender differences in the Navy" to what seemed to be MCPON's "This will allow more career flexibility
and a make it easier for people to transition into the civilian world." Which, let's talk about that, because item a) I don't care about, we're not here to make you happy by switching jobs a bunch of time, we're here to build experienced technicians and professionals, and item b) no it doesn't, it merely creates a different term people have to put on resumes when transitioning. It's not like we used VMET numbers or anything else for these numbers, we just made up a bunch of new numbers.
This is what happens when your leadership only seeks to see how much radical change they can impose without caring about costs.