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Trust me. It is NOT an unlikely cause, as a matter of longstanding history and fact, it is OVERWHELMINGLY (and it isn’t even close) the primary, secondary, and tertiary cause in things like this. Sometimes it is initiated by a minor mechanical failure of some kind, but the human reaction to it often compounds and snowballs things.

Trust me.

I know...I don’t know what you do for a living, and to most civilians, non-maritime or aviation related people, when you look at this as an isolated incident, it seems utterly and completely impossible.

Impossible.

How does this state of the art, billion something dollar vessel, with a highly trained crew, sensors that can spot a ballistic warhead the size of a medicine ball, streaking thorough the stratosphere at ten times the speed of sound, with state of the art SPY-1D radar that can detect surface and air contacts for hundreds of miles, bristling with sensors...how does it run into a ship in the middle of the night.

I am here to tell you it not only happens, but every single time it happens, it is for depressingly the same reasons nearly every, single time.

Procedures not followed. Procedures ignored. Lack of awareness. Fatigue. Simple mental errors. And that is when you get a ship, with all these wonderful, amazing, and capable things, manned by smart people, steaming at speed at 0200, compounding each minor contributing factor, ending up having a collision.

Nobody ever walks out the front door of their house in the morning to go to work and says “Well, today I am going to get T-Boned by a tractor trailer, and this is the last time I am ever going to go out this door.

No Lieutenant in the Navy ever climbs up a ladder to the bridge at 2330 to assume the deck, and thinks “Well, tonight, people are going to be dead because of me, and my career will be over and my life changed...”

Nobody ever thinks these things. It is all routine.

Course...setting...hey...no big deal. We have been doing this for months now, our deployment is over in two months, nothing ever really changes. Same routine...red lights for night vision...hatches open and close...people walk in and out...someone shoves a clipboard in your hand for a signature...your JOOD tells you there is a contact on a parallel course 5000 yards away heading in the same direction...we are overtaking her. What’s her course? Ah...okay. Shouldn’t be a problem, keep an eye on her....the phone rings. It is the engine room. What? What kind of electrical issue? Smoke? Ah. Okay, is the system still functioning? Well...power it down, we don’t need it tonight and we can look at it tomorrow morning. The Captain said what about it? Why would he say that? Do you think we need to wake him up and tell him? I know, I know we got dinged on it during the last engineering inspection...

And so on.

Then someone says something that catches your attention, and you look over. Someone has a puzzled look and their voice is a question. You walk over and agree. Check that for me. A few seconds later, someone says “Sir!” and all the little things, little contributing factors, mishearing a course correction, or thinking the contact is moving at NINE knots, not NINETEEN knots, or thinking her course is FOUR degrees, not FORTY degrees, not picking up on something innocuous while you were engaged in a minor problem, and you now have a 30,000 ton ship close aboard bearing down on you.

Believe me. This happens over, and over, and over again with depressing and predictable regularity.

That is how these things happen. Not just in ships. In aviation...industry...nuclear power plants...when you read them, there is a sameness to them. It is like a seasoned homicide detective who is called to the scene of a murder, and as they walk in, see the blood, the bodies, the first thought they often have is “Yeah. This is typical. I have seen this before, over and over and over again.” And some junior detective says “What do you think?” And they just spit out the narrative, because...they have seen it all before.

In the case of the collision, it could be terrorism, hostile intent. It could have been a major engineering casualty. It could even have been a meteor that hit the ship’s radar putting it out of commission. But we are going to find out, in all likelihood it is none of those things. It is going to be human failing.

Because of all the things that we depend on to be constant, turbines spinning, radars providing information, and computers functioning, the one thing above all others that is ALWAYS constant, and we can ALWAYS depend on, is that people get bored, tired, lazy, distracted, and make mistakes.

Because it is in our nature.