Navy takes a hard look after spate of accidents
Spotlight falls on leadership, training and strained resources at sea
Inadequate training for sailors, poor leadership and high demands for ships at sea in the the Pacific will be key areas for naval investigators as they seek answers for the second deadly collision in two months, experts and officials say.
Meanwhile, recovery of the missing sailors from the USS John S. McCain has been complicated by strong currents and poor visibility.
The possibility of a cyberattack causing the McCain’s collision Sunday with a tanker near Singapore was downplayed by a senior Navy official on Wednesday. The official spoke on condition of anonymity because officials were not authorized to speak publicly on that point.
Recovery on the McCain probably will take significantly longer than the effort involving the USS Fitzgerald in June. Bodies of the seven sailors from that ship were recovered the next day. Some remains of 10 missing sailors have been found on the McCain, but divers were still searching Wednesday.
Since January, there have been four serious accidents involving ships in the Pacific. In January, the USS Antietam ran aground near Japan and was damaged; in May, the USS Lake Champlain was struck by a South Korean fishing boat. Since then, the problems have grown more serious, and more deadly. On June 17, a cargo ship rammed into the USS Fitzgerald, rupturing its hull and drowning seven sailors. Sunday’s collision of the McCain with a
tanker near Singapore gashed the ship’s hull.
On one thing there is widespread agreement: collisions between commercial ships and the most sophisticated warships on the planet are unacceptable. On Tuesday, the Navy relieved Vice Adm. Joseph Aucoin, the commander of the Seventh Fleet based in Japan.
“We’re driving warships that are far more maneuverable and powerful than commercial ships,” said Jerry Hendrix, a retired Navy captain and senior fellow and director of the Defense Strategies and Assessments Program at the Center for a New American Security. “We ought to be able to avoid hitting moving things.”
The accidents, Hendrix said, point to two major shortfalls: leadership and training.
Senior leaders in the Seventh Fleet appear to have failed to emphasize basic ship-handling skills and navigation, Hendrix said.
Last week, the Navy relieved the top two officers on the Fitzgerald and the senior enlisted sailor. Adm. William Moran, the vice chief of naval operations, told reporters at the Pentagon that sailors on the bridge at the time of the crash had lost “situational awareness.”
The team on the bridge, the Fitzgerald’s nerve center, had trouble interpreting data and didn’t act in a coordinated way before the crash.
As the Navy’s fleet has shrunk over the years — more than 400 ships in the early 1990s to 274 today — the pressure to return ships to sea quickly has eroded training time, Hendrix said. Typically, a ship will deploy, return to base for maintenance and be made ready for training before its next deployment.
Demand for Navy ships at sea, particularly with trouble in North Korea and jousting in the South China Sea with China, has not ebbed. Maintenance and training have been found to be wanting.
The Government Accountability Office found in 2015 that the high pace of operations for Navy ships with home ports abroad, like the Seventh Fleet in Japan, limit time dedicated to training and maintenance periods. The result has been difficulty in keeping crews fully trained and ships maintained, accoding to the GAO.
“Something has to give,” Hendrix said. “Training has lost time.”
Yet even well-trained crews find seas in the region challenging, said Rockford Weitz, director of the Fletcher Maritime Studies Program at Tufts University.
“The seas stretching from Japan and China to Singapore are the most congested region of the world’s oceans,” he said.
Training may be a contributing factor to the accidents, Weitz said. But just as crowded roads have car wrecks, busy sea lanes result in more ship collisions.
“Large ships in particular need to be proactive in these busy waterways because they cannot change course quickly,” he said. “Combine this with frequent crew rotations to provide adequate sleep and you have a challenging operating environment.”
The crowded conditions also can put Navy ships behind schedule, said John Schaus, a fellow in the International Security Program at the Center for Strategic and International Studies.
“There can be a focus on the schedule,” Schaus said. “Meet with this ship, meet with the harbor tender. People may be rushing.”
In the crash of the McCain, the crew appears to have been engaged and effective at the time of the accident, the senior Navy official said. They mitigated damage and controlled flooding.
The possibility of a cyberattack appears remote, the official said. Speculation about it probably began because the Navy now makes cyber intrusions a standard part of accident investigations.