Commander takes responsibility for confusion over aircraft carrier

WASHINGTON — The Pentagon’s top commander in the Pacific accepted full responsibility on Wednesday for a confusing chain of events this month that mistakenly left the impression that the aircraft carrier Carl Vinson was rushing to confront an increasingly belligerent North Korea, when it was not.

“That’s my fault,” the officer, Adm. Harry B. Harris Jr., the head of the Pacific Command, told the House Armed Services Committee in a hearing on security challenges in the region. “I’ll take the hit for that.”

Harris ordered the Carl Vinson and three other warships earlier this month to cancel a port call to Australia and “sail north” from Singapore into the western Pacific. An ill-timed news release by the Navy’s Third Fleet created the impression the carrier was headed north immediately, but in reality, it was steaming south to join the Australian navy in a secretive, truncated exercise in the Indian Ocean, 3,500 miles southwest of the Korean Peninsula.

The confusing sequence of events — including a partially erroneous explanation later by the defense secretary, Jim Mattis — were only fully revealed about a week later when the Navy posted photographs of the carrier group steaming off the coast of Indonesia.

The chain of errors surprised Harris’ bosses at the Pentagon, upset edgy allies and caught the White House flat-footed — especially after President Donald Trump asserted an “armada” was racing toward the impending crisis.

By this week, the Carl Vinson had finally headed north and was conducting exercises with the Japanese navy in the Philippine Sea. Harris said the Carl Vinson — a Nimitz-class nuclear-powered carrier and its strike force, two destroyers and one cruiser — would continue steaming north, toward the Korean Peninsula.