#sigur-burd

[graf-spectre]

you run a good blog

Thank ya, thank ya.

[asktheboatgoat-blog]

Why does the US navy keep getting rammed?

But for real.  The Navy has been having a disaster coming for a long, long time.

To start with, their officers are not trained well.  They are not seamen.  The typical career of a USN officer typically involves them bouncing around multiple departments and ship/shoreside postings.  End result is that they’re Jack of All Trades:  versed in several fields, but masters of none of them.  The NCOs are the backbone of the Navy, as they spend their own careers in a field  Compare this to merchant officers, for example, who pick a field and stick to it.  A deck officer will spend all of their career on the bridge, and an engineer will spend all their time in the engine room.  By the time the reach the summit of their fields (Captain/Chief Engineer) they have decades of experience in that field alone.  The captain of a destroyer might have just spent 24 months as a bridge watch officer in their Navy career.  They might have even come straight from the Pentagon having not sailed in years.

Add into this is fatigue.  The phrase “You can sleep when you’re dead” is law in the military in general, but it’s dangerously true on the ocean.  You might be getting a max of 6 hours of sleep in a day, and not necessarily in one single block.  This leads to mistakes.  Sloppiness.  Anyone who has ever pulled an all-nighter to finish something in school knows how frustrating it gets near the end of it, when everything just seems to get more difficult and you find yourself making more and more mistakes.

Now, picture this when you’re at the controls of a vessel with a crew of several hundred people.

This is very likely what happened on the Fitzgerald.  Either that or gross incompetence.   It takes a special kind of fuckup to totally disregard a ship with a constant bearing & decreasing range.  Those two factors are the most basic indicators of risk of collision, and the lookouts and officers on watch totally blew it.  ESPECIALLY since the ship that rammed the Fitzgerald was, by all indicators, on autopilot with nobody on the bridge (continued on its original course with little deviation despite fucking hitting someone, no tell-tale wobbling of a helmsman trying to bring a ship back under control despite fucking hitting someone, the fact the captain said he tried to warn the Fitzgerald with his Morse  Code light instead of doing something like calling them on the radio or SOUNDING HIS WHISTLE).  They didn’t even call the captain; he was still in his stateroom when that stateroom got demolished by the ramming incident.  All this indicates that they had a total breakdown on the bridge and didn’t have the skills to extract themselves from it, if they even noticed it before the ADX Crystal’s bow punctured their side.  I am not privy to the Navy’s investigative report, but the fact that they are already admitting how bad it is for the Navy instead of insanely deflecting seems to point to something along those lines.  The Navy is loath to admit when they’ve fucked up and are eager to push the blame when they can.  That they’re taking the blame is very telling.

The John S. McCain is a slightly different story.  Her collision happened in the Straits of Singapore, right off Horsburg Light.  I’ve sailed those waters, and I know just how crowded they are.  Especially in the early morning; that’s when a lot of Westbound traffic goes through.  Take a look at these pictures:

That is a chart from an AIS tracker website showing the track of the Alnic MC, the tanker that hit the McCain.  Notice how many ships are close alongside her?  Since the McCain is a warship, she doesn’t broadcast an AIS signal, but we can see about where she is.  (The Alnic MC hit her on her port side and then turned to port, so assume she’s very close to the starboard side of the tanker.)

This is from my own ship’s electronic chart system showing that same area of ocean.  That’s right, that part of the channel had at least FIVE ships all moving along within half a fucking mile of each other.  Remember when I said how at less than half a mile, it’s terrifying because the margin of error is so low?

Yeah.

Yeeeeeeeeeaaaaaaaaaah.

They had absolutely zero margin for error in this incident, and then they had an error.  I don’t know what that error was; I’ve heard reports that they had a mechanical steering failure (and if they did I’m not surprised, the McCain has had its shipyard time deferred for years forcing them to undertake major repairs while still at sea).  I don’t know if that’s the case, or if the helmsman just kept her rudder over a tiny amount for too long and didn’t notice, or if the conning officer gave a helm order and forgot to check for traffic.  We probably won’t know for months when the Navy concludes its investigation.  Either way, a small mistake that would have been forgivable anywhere else on the ocean happened here and cost the lives of 10 crewmembers.

These two collisions, while being the only ones with loss of life, aren’t the only ones the Seventh Fleet has had in this year.  They’ve had FIVE, counting one incident where a cruiser managed to run herself aground because everyone was too terrified to tell the captain that shit was going wrong.  This is after going years without even a single incident.   All in all, it has been a very bad year for the Navy, and it is reflecting poorly on how they’ve been training their officers.

[graf-spectre]

What kind of music do you like?

Mostly country and rock.