thank effing God! the Navee brass finally realizes its arrogant ways of operating its vessels at sea amidst thousands of civilian merchant vessels is DANGEROUS!
just love this quote:
"We had, I think, a distorted perception of operational security that we kept that system [turned off] on our warships,” said Chief of Naval Operatons John Richardson in testimony before the Senate Armed Services Committee yesterday. “One of the immediate actions following these incidents – particularly in heavily trafficked areas – we’re just going to turn it on.”
I still will bet anyone that the Navee won’t release the tracks of the FITZGERALD or the McCAIN to the world even with this great revelation on their parts. It is hard to completely expunge hubris when it is so systematically entrenched in a huge bureaucracy as the USN.
Yes he is ordering AIS be turned on in certain location but in the same testimony he also agreed “fully, 100% sir!” With the assinine idea of a certain Senator from Maine that all radar and electronic alarms sound in the captain’s cabin.
Had their been one man in the room who has any real seatime on a bridge the hearing “might” have accomplished a lot more than getting the CNO to make the obvious decision to turn on AIS in heavy traffic.
Good. I see no reason why a navy ship in an area of commercial shipping lanes and traffic needs to have its AIS turned off.
The only time I’ve ever been shot at on a Navy ship was in the Strait of Malacca, and again in the Gulf of Aden near the entrance to the Red Sea.
To be fair, in the second one we were alongside a civilian ship that had been taken by pirates, getting ready to storm her to take her back for the crew, so that makes sense. I’m still a bit salty that the Dubuque CO leaked the story so the Marines got all the credit and we barely got a footnote despite being in command of the whole event, hah.
EDIT to clarify: We were sailing under a Turkish commander as part of the anti-piracy group, but my ship was in charge of the local operation to take the ship back from the Somalian pirates.
I have not been able to find any Navy ships broadcasting AIS on the usual sites. I also haven’t looked too hard. Just saying I’d like to see some proof of this if anyone can help.
I have reached out to our private AIS company contacts but no luck so far.
Yup, I’m pretty sure that when we transmitted on AIS, we used our callsign of NBBP as well, but that was a long time ago, and that involved having sparky install a cutout switch on the transmitter when we went MSC and had to stop transmitting constantly.
