US Navy Destroyer Severely Damaged in Collision

[Bobcat]

I am compelled to draw a parallel with air crashes and NTSB investigations.
They don't usually fire the head CEO of an airline after a fatal crash, but if the pilot is found to be criminally negligent, he can be charged with manslaughter.
In the interest of safety, I would hope that a thorough investigation of each of these recent naval incidents happens, even if the results need to be kept classified.
If a Navy guy's only job is to look out for other ships, and he doesn't do his job and people die, sorry, but the weight of the law should hold him accountable.

[SamAdams]

https://www.usni.org/magazines/proce...re-root-causes

[Lester Polfus]

https://www.usni.org/magazines/proce...re-root-causes

Oh wow. If that guy knows what he's talking about, that is damning.

"Proven techniques, including the use of maneuvering boards, lookouts, adherence to the “Rules of the Road,” and, most important, watch-standers actually looking out the bridge window, are mysteriously archaic to officers who have become convinced that technology cannot fail them. "

"Collectively, they don’t understand concepts such as relative motion. "

Wow.

The best metaphor I can come up with is a police department deciding they don't need to teach anybody empty hand because they all have Tasers. Not that any one would ever do that. Oh, wait...

[SamAdams]

Oh wow. If that guy knows what he's talking about, that is damning...

The author . . ." Captain Eyer served in seven cruisers, commanding three Aegis cruisers: the USS Thomas S. Gates (CG-51), Shiloh (CG-67), and Chancellorsville (CG-62)."


It used to take a great deal of time and a lot of taxpayer expense to take a newly commissioned ensign and train him to be a qualified Surface Warfare Officer.

I guess nowadays . . . not so much ?

[Lester Polfus]

The author . . ." Captain Eyer served in seven cruisers, commanding three Aegis cruisers: the USS Thomas S. Gates (CG-51), Shiloh (CG-67), and Chancellorsville (CG-62)."


It used to take a great deal of time and a lot of taxpayer expense to take a newly commissioned ensign and train him to be a qualified Surface Warfare Officer.

I guess nowadays . . . not so much ?

I'm just really agog at CBT thing man. On midwatches when we did box op in the Eastern Pacific, the QMOW, BMOW and OOD would sit there and quiz each other on Rules of The road and such. As an E3, I was encouraged, but not required to learn how to use a mo-board once I was qualified on all the other bridge watch positions. It was just something to do to keep our minds sharp on those boring watches. Sometimes we'd go hours, and even days without a radar contact, and when we'd get one everybody on the bridge and CIC would race to do the TMA on it.

What the fuck do they do now? Watch movies on their phones?

[SamAdams]

Who knows whats going on ? Maybe it comes down to not having a real, challenging major naval rival after the fall of the USSR ? (And not fighting a major naval war for 70 years.) Perhaps over confidence & complacency has set in. Maybe the bean counters carry more weight than the ship drivers.
Like all big government bureaucracies, especially the military, the brass will likely try to go into CYA mode. Thankfully, knowledgeable men like this retired Navy Captain can speak out using publications such as Naval Institute Proceedings.


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[Trooper224]

[QUOTE=SamAdams;642041][url]https://www.usni.org/magazines/proceedings/2017

My God.

[Trooper224]

Who knows whats going on ? Maybe it comes down to not having a real, challenging major naval rival after the fall of the USSR ? (And not fighting a major naval war for 70 years.) Perhaps over confidence & complacency has set in. Maybe the bean counters carry more weight than the ship drivers.
Like all big government bureaucracies, especially the military, the brass will likely try to go into CYA mode. Thankfully, knowledgeable men like this retired Navy Captain can speak out using publications such as Naval Institute Proceedings.


Sent from my iPad using Tapatalk Pro

All of the above I suspect.

[Chance]

Reports are that the McCain suffered a loss of steerage casualty. Rumors are flying that there is potential of the ship's steering having been hacked.

My specific knowledge of the design of Cruisers and Destroyers is limited to ships that were built 25 years before this generation of Tin Can. I can't speak to the hacking being possible or not, but the ramifications if it is possible makes me shudder.

The article SamAdams linked to addresses this. According to that, it's possible to completely remove computers from the system and rely on hydraulics if necessary. Worst case scenario, they could have shut the engines down and advertised they were "not under command."

That article is damning. The Navy tried to cut out a year's worth of thorough, rigorous training, and replace it with computer-based training officers would work with on the job? No wonder no one knows what they're doing.

[Stephanie B]

Who knows whats going on ? Maybe it comes down to not having a real, challenging major naval rival after the fall of the USSR ? (And not fighting a major naval war for 70 years.) Perhaps over confidence & complacency has set in. Maybe the bean counters carry more weight than the ship drivers.

Mostly the bean counters. The Surface Warfare Officers School Division Officer Course, or "Baby SWOS" was a sixteen week school. Ensigns (and LTJGs who washed out of being brown shoes) received a good grounding in the stuff that they had to know to be division officers, including sessions of active firefighting and time in the "USS BUttercup". Most ensigns then went on to specialty training. CIC officers and gunnery officers went to Dam Neck, VA. ASW officers went to a twelve-week course. Engineers had their own courses that might include a weekl-long course in boiler/feedwater chemistry (basically a semester-long college class in ionic chemistry crammed into five days).

After that, the ships got ensigns who could at least do some things. They knew what the PMS system was, how the personnel system functioned. Between simulators and time on the YPs, they got some basic watchstanding skills. They could function, if at least minimally, as a CIC watch officer or Junior Officer of the Deck. Oh, they still needed lots of hands-on training, but they had done all of the book-learning component of qualifying as a Surface Warfare Officer.

The payoff to the Navy was that on a ship that wasn't in the yards, those ensigns could finish qualifying in a year if they were hard-chargers, 14 months or so if not. First sea tours were 24-30 months, so those now-qualified ensigns and LTJGs could get in lots of time as OODs underway and, more importantly, they could help train the new guys. The COs, XOs and Department Heads did a fair amount of the training (especially Sea Detail and underway replenishment), true, but they could oversee the training in normal operations at sea, which was being done by the senior peers of the new ensigns.

This all came about because about fifty years ago, the Navy was not happy with the readiness of junior officers to function when they got to their first ships. In a radical move, the CNO, in essence, asked those officers what they needed to be more ready to do their jobs from the start. Out of that came Baby SWOS.

In short, my suspicion is that the current mess came about because the "experts" at Ft. Fumble (the Pentagon) concluded that raining was expensive and hell, give the kids some CDs and let them train themselves in their copious spare time when they're not doing their main job, standing watch, taking care of a bunch of collateral duties and maybe triying to catch more than three hours of sleep underway each night.

This mess is fixable. But the first staffie in Ft. Fumble who proposes to bring in a team of "outside experts", ie, non-blue suiters, to advise on solutions should be given PCS orders to Adak, fired or shot. I don't care which.