Casey,
The lack of talent isn't limited to the civilian world. I used to to perform component level repair on P-3 avionics back in the 80's and early 90's and I'd say that only one out of every five techs were keepers. One day I was in the soldering shop and a petty officer came in and needed 22 transistors replaced. I asked him if they fried the box and he said, "No, the Huntron Tracker says they're bad." After coming down off the ceiling, I set his dumb a-- down right next to me and he watched as I took each one out and checked it with... TA-DA a Simpson 260 VOM! I was still giving him the benefit of the doubt thinking that maybe there was one shorted transistor in the bunch until we found the culprit- an OPEN transistor. Needless to say, he got a good lecture on troubleshooting with power on rather than rely on static measurements. The Huntron is a useful instrument, but not in the hands of most technicians. I'm sure things haven't improved much given the caliber of high school graduates these days.
BTW, more Navy wisdom enabled me to take home FIVE Simpson 260's that I found in the dumpster one day. They were discarding the analog meters in favor of Fluke digital meters. Nothing wrong with digital, mind you, but the analog meter has many uses, especially when checking forward and reverse bias, capacitors, etc. I've only had to use one of them, they never break.
Then there was the Philippines...
Grover
