Trump to visit Navy command in Hawaii

WASHINGTON — Two days after the Navy blamed sloppy seamanship and navigational blunders for two “avoidable” collisions at sea that killed 17 sailors this summer, President Donald Trump flies to Hawaii on Friday to visit the Pentagon’s troubled Pacific Command.

Trump will get a briefing at command headquarters in Honolulu and visit the battleship Arizona memorial at Pearl Harbor before he leaves for his first official visit to Asia, where he will visit Japan, South Korea, China, Vietnam and the Philippines.

Pacific Command oversees U.S. military operations in the Pacific and Indian Oceans, including those near North Korea and China. But it has been the focus of intense concern at the Pentagon and in Congress this year for a series of major failures.

The Obama administration added U.S. Marines and ships to the Pacific fleet as part of what it called a strategic rebalance. Trump has not announced any changes to those policies and has not publicly commented on the problemplagued Pacific Command.

The Navy publicly embarrassed the White House in April when a spokesman said it was sending an aircraft carrier task force into the Sea of Japan as a show of force against North Korea, fanning fears of a potential conflict with the nuclear-armed nation.

It turned out the carrier, the Carl Vinson, and the three other warships in its strike force were actually sailing in the opposite direction to take part in joint exercises with the Australian Navy in the Indian Ocean, 3,500 miles southwest of the Korean Peninsula.