Old Salts, New Navy" is a companion piece to Frederic Burr's first novel, "Mutinies." In this story, an older Mitch Payne, along with one of his former shipmates from the USS Scarslund, joins with two retired chief petty officers to go on one of the Navy's 'Tiger Cruises, ' in which relatives of crewmembers are invited to 'ride along' during a transit from Rota, Spain to Norfolk, Virginia. The fictional USS Mulligan is one of the Navy's newest destroyers, complete with every advanced weapon system and technology ever developed. However, the ship is short-handed due to drawdowns of experienced officer and enlisted crew for the Navy's Seventh Fleet units. Although everything seems in order as the ship gets underway, problems show up in some of the ship's electronics systems at the outset. On the second day, the Mulligan is shadowed by a Russian submarine. Then, more than 2, 000 miles from home, the ship suffers a catastrophic and cascading series of hi-tech failures and personnel casualties as the result of an unpredictable event.
Not only pitching in to assist with make-shift repairs, these aged mariners try to show today's sailors how to communicate with the outside world, and navigate, without the crutch of technology, even while assisting the command team with personnel conduct issues unknown in their days in the surface fleet.