Good on ya. Great maritime experience and significant accomplishments. Senior enlisted standing bridge watches is not common on DD/CG class combatants and generally only when there are not sufficient commissioned officers to stand the watches. Thus you must surely have distinguished yourself, unlike the officers on the Fitzgerald who didn't have an understanding of such fundamental concepts of relative motion and CBDR.
I do not understand the meaning of our last sentence.
I disagree somewhat with your first two assessments of why the Russian ships sat at anchor. Would be a subject for discussion over a campfire and beers. Regardless, they've come a long way since then in both quality, capability, training and logistics support.
On the Russian and Chinese navies today, unlike us, they are designed for defense of the homeland, which has never changed. Ours is world wide power projection and naval dominance.
Imagine 112 surface to surface missiles fired from one Chinese DD at two carrier strike groups and with precision location and guidance. This is the nightmare we face in the western Pacific and the South China Sea.
The Navy you retired from in 1999 is a far cry from the Navy of today.
Edit: I neglected to mention the sorry incident in 2015 when a female Sailor gave birth aboard the USS Dwight D Eisenhower. Nice. As expected, the creepy Public Affairs Officer for Naval Forces Central Command said that the ship's primary focus was now "caring for the health and welfare of the Sailor and the newest member of the Navy family" instead of the primary mission of fighting the ship.
While our adversaries are training their crews on how to send our ships to the bottom of the ocean, we are focusing our efforts on pregnancy aboard our combatants.
The US Navy allows pregnant women to serve on sea duty for up to 20 weeks; longer if they don't even know they are pregnant. They then leave the ship with no replacements.
Feature this. Surface to surface and air to surface missals are slamming into a US Navy ship along with torpedoes hitting below the waterline. Fire and flames are everywhere with crewmen pulling hoses to put out the fire while others are trying to plug the flooding below decks. Meanwhile, the pregnant women are wondering around holding their bellies and looking for someone to take care of them. And let's not even get into the inability of the gals to drag a P250 de-watering pump up two decks unassisted like I had to do during my years at sea as both an enlisted and commissioned officer.