[image] Death and valor on a warship doomed by its own Navy. - ProPublica A very good article, what happened on the Fitzgerald, hard to read in places. How We Investigated the Navy’s Twin Disasters in the Pacific The USS John S. McCain was brought to Yokosuka, Japan, in December 2017. (The Asahi Shimbun via Getty Images) We set out to reconstruct the accidents in which the USS Fitzgerald and the USS John S. McCain collided with cargo vessels within a few months of each other in 2017, the deadliest accidents at sea in the Navy in four decades. We sent out a team of reporters to interview scores of current and former sailors, officers and commanders, as well as family members and friends. We conducted dozens of interviews with current and former Navy admirals and senior civilian leaders, including the former secretary of the Navy. We attended courts-martial and military hearings. We spoke with experts in ship construction, maritime law and military justice. Many sources were interviewed multiple times. Interviews were conducted in Japan, Virginia, Maryland, California and Washington, D.C. We obtained two confidential reports on the collisions that included more than 13,000 pages of documents, photos and transcripts of sailor interviews. The material included ship logs…,

I’ve read the official documents related to this case. This is the first I’ve had opportunity to read individual experiences and a timeline reproduction. I do understand the issue much better than I did reading the cold investigative work. I believe one of the critical factors was there was no “eyes on” from the bridge both sides of the ship. Had there been eyes on from the critical location the collision may indeed have been avoided. In that respect, conclusions remain valid.

Congress is interested in this piece, and our own leadership is not. [image] Admiral to Congress: Think about the 280-plus ships that didn’t have collisions It was a tense exchange between Adm. Phil Davidson and Sen. Angus King. “These two collisions were a tragedy, there is no doubt about it,” Davidson said. “And all the senior leaders of the Navy feel a tremendous amount of accountability for it. But the fact of the matter is 280-odd other ships weren’t having collisions.” I’m about as Joe Navy as they come, but this “steady as she goes” shit is going to get more sailors killed. Anything you read about is window dressing. This is the real attitude of Big Navy.

Here is another view on the ProPublica articles The Fitzgerald Collision: In Search of the Onus Bryan McGrath The problem with this narrative is that it is incomplete, and it removes from positions of obvious responsibility and culpability the very people most responsible for the accident — the commanding officer and other officers standing watch when the accident occurred. The American people should understand that while there were clear and present systemic issues with how the Navy trained and maintained its Japan-based ships, the Fitzgerald tragedy was the result of profound professional negligence perpetrated by people who either should have known better or did know better and chose to act otherwise. I don’t agree with this at all, McGrath honestly believes people will be reluctant to hold the crew accountable? I don’t see that happening. The way the Navy is set up now officers just have to advance in rank so that they no longer will be in command of an actual ship at sea. Once you advance above that you’re set for life. Until then you just have to never turn down a mission and keep your fingers crossed. Just need a little luck. Two ships collided, 280, for every captain that fails 140 get promoted. Not bad odds.

That piece by Brian McGrath is pathetic. He’s saying that the blame lies with the ship and crew alone, that leadership ashore bares little responsibility for the accident. Let me explain the folly with an analogy: It’s snowing. The roads are icy. A parent give the keys to a corvette to his unlicensed sixteen year old and tells her to drive her siblings to the store. Along the way she looses control of the muscle-car on a patch of black ice and gets into a terriable accident, killing her brothers and sisters. Now, whose fault is it? Would we blame the sixteen year old driving a 300 hp car on icy roads? Or would we blame the parent for being stupid enough to put an unlicensed kid behind the wheel of a powerful car in an ice storm? Legally it’s the kid’s fault. She was behind the wheel. Morally it’s the parents fault. An adult would know better. Should know better. McGrath would be pleased to send the sixteen year old to jail for manslaughter while giving the negligent parent a pat on the back. McGrath is a disgusting apologist who should crawl back into the pocket of whatever lobbyist he crawled out from.

The way that I was used to was the ship was part of a flotilla where my own vessel was commanded by a commander. The lead vessel of the flotilla was commanded by a Captain. All the specialist officers in the lead ship were one rank higher than normal and they conducted periodic inspections of the other ships in the flotilla. The Admiral was at sea in the flagship, normally the carrier, and wasn’t some want to be politician living in a grace and favour mansion with Filipino staff. The management lost control over their oversight in a situation where by its very structure, did not allow those at the bottom to take any effective corrective action.

Dunning-Krueger effect, in summary.

So I finally made it through. That was quite a read, thanks for sharing. Some thoughts and questions in random order: I fully understand how inexperienced and fatigued personnel can succumb to helmet fire and make a bad move in collision avoidance. What I don’t understand is how you can spend your whole working life in front of a radar console without figuring out how it works. If that was me, you’d need an armed guard to keep me from exploring the grey areas of its operational envelope. Just sitting there day after day without taking an interest in the equipment speaks either of a destructively stringent organizational culture, or of disastrous personal qualities in the people manning the station. Who on earth thought it was an acceptable solution to use a hierarchical menu of any kind to perform station hand-over, let alone a drop-down menu on a touch screen?! I get that the universality of a touch screen interface appeals to the bean counters, what with the low cost of rolling out changes and all, but how deep has the disconnect gotten between procurement and ops? The most interesting bit was in part 2, at least for me. It’s yet another example of the soot laden grease of modern corporate culture smudging everything it touches. Such stories are rife throughout the Western world, but this one is particularly jarring both in the scope of the consequences and in how cleanly the persons responsible were able to get away. The damage being done to our defense forces is hard to estimate and probably permanent. If the article was correct in assessing how little consequence this had, we should all be very afraid of what happens when China starts making moves… That article by McGrath was indeed pretty daft. The more thoroughly I looked at it, the less it seemed to say. So despite being set up for failure, the crew is responsible? No shit, that’s how the 100/100 split of responsibility sharing works!

[image] Klaveness: destructively stringent organizational culture, or of disastrous personal qualities in the people manning the station. That is precisely what the Navy wanted and what it got. Can’t have those people thinking for themselves … or even being capable of such behavior.

[image] Navy Promised Changes After Deadly Accidents, but Many Within Doubt It’s... Interviews and an examination of the Navy’s publicly announced reforms raise uncertainty over whether senior leaders have fully followed through on them after the 7th Fleet disasters in 2017.

This is what’s called saying the quiet part out loud. Better I suppose then all the top brass who are saying the opposite. One of Davidson’s stops in November 2017 was in San Diego, and inside the base’s movie theater, he addressed hundreds of concerned commanders and officers. He was met with a series of tough questions, including a particularly sensitive one: If the commanders believed their ships were not ready, could they, as the Navy had promised, actually push back on orders to sail? Davidson, according to an admiral inside the theater, responded with anger. “If you can’t take your ships to sea and accomplish the mission with the resources you have,” he said, “then we’ll find someone who will.” Posted too soon, Davidson is back on script. Davidson, who today is the top military commander in the Pacific, said through a spokesman that his remarks in San Diego might have been misinterpreted, and that he only meant to say that if ships were not fit to sail, they would be replaced by others that were. No one, he said, would be fired or replaced for responsibly raising safety concerns.

Death and valor on a warship doomed by its own Navy

Maritime News Marine Incidents

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Death and valor on a warship doomed by its own Navy

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