Posted on 08/22/2017 11:38:08 PM PDT by drop 50 and fire for effect
he U.S. Navy will relieve the commander of its 7th Fleet from duty after the fleet suffered its second deadly mishap in less than three months, a U.S. defense official confirmed to Fox News.
An official statement from the Navy regarding the relief of Vice Adm. Joseph Aucoin was expected late Tuesday night. The decision was first reported by the Wall Street Journal.
The 7th Fleet has been involved in three collisions since January, the last two of which have resulted in the deaths of 17 sailors.
(Excerpt) Read more at foxnews.com ...
>> It indicates to me a perception that this is systemic, not individual ship failures.
A widely accepted perception.
I would fire the CNO
I believe it was the other way around, the tanker was the one that hit the Navy ship.
My son serves on a DDG. I will suggest he arranges for a voluntary secondary watch as a back up to the primary watch. 4 eyes are better than 2! Standing an extra watch every week would be better than drowning in your rack.
pour encourager les autres
“To encourage others to higher performance”; The Byng “Protocol”, in less harsh usage it’s been a questionable motivational tool since Adm. John Byng was executed in 1757.
He is next if there is another accident like the last 2..
It appears from my reading that they do not have a lookout system with actual people on lookout. Maybe that’s old school and high tech renders it obsolete, but it would have been a simple, additional layer of warning that couldn’t be hacked or on the fritz.
The tanker may have done so (I’m still waiting for more confirmation on that) but it looks like it was the other way around on the immediately prior collision incident with the freighter.
The thing is, there is no way in hell that either of those collisions should have happened if someone was paying attention on the bridge of the destroyer and keeping a lookout. Reportedly there were no weather conditions degrading visibility and destroyers are fast, highly maneuverable oceangoing vessels.
Both this and the prior incident are like driving around in a go-kart on a giant, perfectly flat parking lot that’s a half mile on a side, with the only other occupant of the parking lot being a large ice cream truck that’s been traveling in a straight line at 2mph. Somehow you manage to hit or be hit by the ice cream truck even though it didn’t deviate from its straightline course and didn’t accelerate.
It speaks to one of the differences between the land and sea services.
Unless at pierside or drydock, Navy ships are operational. The USN has a Chief of Naval Operations rather than a Chief of Staff.
Are Army units ‘operational’ outside of combat? I don’t know.
Since the dawn of the Royal Navy, ships represent expensive extensions of the sovereign. HMS stands for “his majesty’s ship,” and that is exactly what is meant.
The Captain and his ship are one and the same. So intertwined is the Captain with the ship, that when the Captain arrives, he is ‘piped aboard’. A quarterdeck watchstander will notify the crew that the Captain is aboard by sounding on the 1MC (shipwide intercom) “[name of ship] arriving,” rather than saying, “Captain Jones is aboard.”
A peacetime accident is prima facie proof that the Captain is unworthy of command, to be in charge of this floating platform of US sovereignty. It is why the USN’s first reaction is to relieve the Captain and let a court of inquiry figure things out.
Few positions are more precarious than USN Commanding Officers. We hear about personal misconduct in the press, but for every one of those there are probably several men who were relieved for operational mistakes.
On three ships and all of a sudden? I am betting this was cyber hacking terrorism.
I will go on record right here and now. These collisions are not the result of hacking, GPS spoofing or even equipment failure. The investigations will conclude that this situation(multiple collisions) is a failure of human attention to the job and the detail(s) of the job.
The Navy has lost mission focus and needs to snap out of it. Unfortunately that will take time and cost more lives.
The collision by ship tracking software ALNIC MC (at :050 Mark): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vlrA36GzHNs
Depends on how long he was in his billet. Usually a flag officer above the grade of O-8 (2-start) has to successfully complete his/her tour at the higher rank to be allowed to retire at that rank. I don’t know what will actually happen here but don’t be surprised if Aucoin retires as a Rear Admiral.
Just ask Husband E. Kimmel how these things work.
I’ll throw out a theory — information overload. These crews are trained to process that information, or they should be. But Aegis destroyers are very sophisticated with their powerful radars and navigational equipment. It’s easy to imagine an undertrained crew being over-reliant on them.
Story: USAF pilots were actually shot down over Vietnam because the radar because in aerial combat the radios when bonkers with chatter, and the newly installed radar threat receivers would start squawking. Pilot shot down. In those instances where the pilot was recovered, some were asked, “why didn’t you turn when your flight lead called for a break?” The answer was inevitably, “I never heard the call.” Then they’d play the recording and the pilot ‘heard it’ for the first time.
So, the problem is likely not with ships systems, jamming or hacking. It’s probably the watches being undermanned, undertrained and they are failing to confirm what the radars are seeing. The OOD’s conning the ships are hesitating which is bad in a congested sea lane.
Heck, navigating Yokusuka or Singapore would seem to call for extra eyes anyway. The traffic would seem to demand it.
How does one signal interfere with a squid standing lookout watch on deck with a pair of binoculars? How does one signal interfere with the visual reality of a 60,000 ton ship approaching from a mile off on a collision course?
Yep, officers are being held accountable.....and somewhere on this beautiful planet, sitting on some million dollar resort watching tv, is a mysterious, unknown man who goes by the name Barack Hussein Obama, and he’s smugly smiling as he turns on CNN and hears about another deadly incident involving US troops, proud in his accomplishment of severely damaging the US of A in only 8 years.
Deep down in that cold, wicked, evil and ABANDONED heart of his, he is happy when he hears about American failures.
Every once in a while, I just get swept up and wonder how 7 years after 9/11, the USA got completely usurped by him and whoever the hell his handlers are.
If it is cyber hacking, then HE is even more guilty of allowing that attack to succeed. But it isn’t . The crews are not performing because they’re doing hundreds of hours of social services lqbtq sexual awareness and environmental training that HE (the navy and Washington ) required.
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