So nice to see your respect for our military and those who serve. You’re all heart, Clothy. :dubious:
Enough! He’s been mod noted for his post and one person has gotten warned for insulting him.
Ignore the post or report the post but EVERYONE stop responding to his post.
I will start handing out warnings for this.
For someone completely ignorant of naval operations, it seems unfathomable that the 7th Fleet has had so many incidents in such a short period of time. The 7th Fleet also has officers implicated in the Fat Leonard Scandal (Fat Leonard scandal - Wikipedia). Are these accidents a sign of bad leadership, a sign of how crowded the waterways in which they operate are, or just bad luck? Anyone with experience in naval operations able to chime in?
BBC is reporting that remains have been found. No further details yet.
This may be the case. It may even be a lack of sleep and attention that not even coffee can fix.
On Reddit, I’ve seen accounts of sailors that have served recently on US ships, some even on destroyers in the 7th fleet (this thread has been particularly informative). They all talk about being overworked, and not getting enough sleep. Normal duty rotations might leave 6 hours for sleep, but that can get cut down to 4, which of course means sailors are lucky to get 3 hours of decent quality sleep. Stories of dozing off during a watch, or making stupid mistakes due to lack of attention, are common.
Apparently there is some Navy research on crew endurance pointing out how this is a terrible way to run a ship, but the culture of overwork is entrenched. And on smaller ships like destroyers, there isn’t any room to house enough sailors to keep everything manned with less demanding duty schedules.
There’s also some grumbling about slipping training standards, but that’s harder to evaluate as a layman reading anecdotes like this.
Missed edit:
Here’s an article from Navy researchers, on the radical benefits of letting sailors get regular sleep.
This crazy new idea was first tried only a few years ago…
In the USS Fitzgerald, the remains of all 7 “missing” were found inside the damaged ship, in rooms that were flooded and sealed off.
How common are ship collisions? These two made the headlines because a U.S. warship was involved, but are there lots of other collisions? Or is the U.S. Navy having an unusually bad run?
I wonder what the cause is. Effects lead back to earlier causes and so on, so “poor training” may be the best answer. But then … what has caused the poor training?
I’m a paranoid conspiracy geek and won’t rule out sabotage of some sort. Yes, a trained crew should have recovered from the sabotage but there is a twist involved in redundant systems: If A is “inessential” (due to other independent safety measures) then procedure A might have gotten shabby treatment. Isn’t this why the U.S. sub collided with a Japanese boat several years ago? Sonar showed the boat but sonar technician didn’t care: Captain was making a Go-NoGo decision with the periscope. And the frazzled Captain, showing off for Congresscritters IIRC, took only a perfunctory look via periscope – the sonar operator would warn of any nearby craft. :smack:
Came here just to mention this, and beaten to the punch. Still, when I read that yesterday I was astonished that this is acceptable practice. I once worked at a newspaper in the production department and due to a variety of circumstances, I worked several looong days in a row with maybe 3-4 hours of sleep a night. After a few days I was a wreck that wasn’t safe to operate an Xacto knife, much less a warship. I’m confident if that situation went the length of a tour I would have had some sort of mental breakdown. Dunno how they do it.
Two ships from the same 8 ship Destroyer Squadron having deadly collisions within two months is orders of magnitude more common than even equally ‘kinetically’* serious collisions among merchant ships. Add to that another collision and a grounding among a few cruisers under the same 7th Fleet command and basic management principals would say to assume a systemic problem and try to find and fix it, though there would never be 100% proof a systemic problem is not just an extreme statistical outlier in a well functioning system.
There are a few 10,000’s of oceangoing merchant ships (nailing down one number is sensitive to the lower size cut off), order of 100 times as many as USN ships. The European Maritime Safety Agency’s “Annual Overview of Marine Casualties and Incidents 2014” (the 2015 report graphic is harder to read) counted 22 ‘very serious’ and 103 ‘serious’ collisions involving merchant ships worldwide. So considering the 7th fleet, 1 per month which would probably both qualify as ‘very serious’ even aside from the loss of life, is a huge number. Considering the whole USN for the year and the 7th fleet’s 3 serious or very serious collisions are the only ones, and taking the is USN as around 1/100 the size of the world merchant fleet, it’s not orders of mag but still a higher rate. And one would probably expect warships to avoid collisions better not worse than merchant ships.
But of course deadly collisions involving USN ships are going to get enormously disproportionate attention in the media compared to non-US merchant ships which hit each other as hard. The crews of modern merchant ships sleep above deck in the (usually) aft deck house so aren’t going to be killed in their berthing spaces by flooding from a collision, and unlikely from impact either. A handful at most of engineers are below the waterline on watch. And anyway deaths of non-US merchant seaman in accidents outside the US get virtually no attention in US media.
I’m not surprised to hear that Navy crews are over worked. Our entire military is underfunded and stretched thin.
We’ve been deploying troops ever since 9/11. Our Navy has to contend with China’s Navy that keeps expanding. That’s hard on the men and the equipment.
The McCain was recently deployed to that area because of N Korea. I’m not sure how long they’ve been deployed at sea.
Do you have a cite for this?
Never underestimate chaos theory. It’s unlikely that you will get five heads in a row on a coin flip. It’s also unlikely that you won’t get five heads in a row if you keep flipping long enough. It reaches the point of statistical certainty after not too long.
When something like this happens, everybody goes hunting for meaning in the tea leaves. There may well be absolutely no connection between these two collision events. It is a statistical certainty that every now and again, an unlikely thing will happen for no reason.
It’s a strange thing: when someone flips three heads in a row, dumb people say there must be something magical going on and smart people shrug and just say “it’s a coincidence”. But there isn’t necessarily any difference between flipping three heads in a row and two naval vessels from the same group having a collision within a short period. Yet it’s surprising how many smart people think the situation must be something more than a coincidence.
Random coincidence?
So the crew of one ship in the 7th fleet is negligent, undisciplined and/or badly trained.
The crew of another ship in the 7th fleet is negligent, undisciplined and/or badly trained.
And you think this is pure coincidence? Please! :rolleyes:
The level of efficiency of a ship’s crew isn’t determined by a random die roll. These collisions are due to major human error. It’s like a driver crashing into another car because he was busy texting on his phone.
What it indicates is that there are serious problems with the morale and training of the whole 7th fleet. Admiral Aucoin isn’t being removed for nothing.
Indeed: given that ships are under human command, when a series of incidents arise in the same unit it’s only reasonable to look into what human factors may have contributed, if only to be able to have a process of elimination. Maybe it IS probabilities just catching up in a cluster. But part of the job of commanders (and the purpose of rules of the road) is to try to minimize or mitigate such randomness.
The Admiral may be faultless himself but still it happened on his watch and somebody else has to look into it, and you want to avoid the morale hit of a loss of confidence.
I don’t see chance as playing much part at all. A US Navy warship has sophisticated equipment for tracking and monitoring other vessels, a large crew, and is very much faster and more maneuverable than the tankers and other merchant vessels in the area. It’s their responsibility to avoid such ‘accidents’.
Merchant vessels post courses and destinations and are clearly visible on AIS. US Navy vessels often operate with their AIS transponders off, with few lights, and have small radar profiles, so that they are not clearly visible to other ships, especially at night.
A Navy vessel sailing through a busy shipping lane is like a fast, powerful car merging into heavy traffic at night with its lights switched off.
They’ll need a pretty good excuse to avoid responsibility. If the collision was due to a mechanical failure, or if it was the fault of the tanker, the Navy wouldn’t have ordered an operational pause or replaced the admiral in charge. This is a tacit admission that it was the fault of the crew.
The ship is part of the Seventh Fleet, and its home base is in Japan. It wasn’t “recently deployed,” but rather “almost permanently on station” near there.
As I said before, you typically can’t know for sure if a pattern of bad events that seems very unlikely* is random or not. But if you waited for absolute proof you’d never address systemic deficiencies very likely to exist. In this case I think the conventional first reaction that there’s something wrong in the USN, almost surely in the 7th Fleet it not whole USN, is probably correct, and a shake up is in order.
*see post above. If per EMSA 2014 report that there are 125 ‘serious’ or ‘very serious’ collisions involving merchant ships per year and rough order of magnitude 100 times as many oceangoing merchant ships as USN ships, 3 collisions (including Lake Champlain’s non fatal one) in the whole USN per year is over twice the merchant ship rate. But if considering 2 ‘very serious’ in 2 months in one 8 ship ‘Desron’, then it’s a couple of 1,000 times the merchant ship rate. So the other thing about stats is how you frame it, but looks like a situation where leadership must make sure there isn’t a problem, not just assume there isn’t one.