Good article in the NYT about the visibility of navy ships.
Seems like a simple solution would be to order military ships to make themselves more visible in crowded seas. Do they really believe that anyone who cares, doesn’t know exactly where these ships are at all times?
Do the e.g. Russians usually know where most USN ships are most of the time? Sure. Does some local group intending to pull a USS Cole-style attack know where or when a USN ship is coming by? Not even a little bit. But they do have internet access and can subscribe to the same feeds everyone else is watching to know where all the participating ships are.
In today’s world, we’d have lots of warning of impending hostilities with the e.g. Russians. We have essentially no warning of hostilities with the other groups. Said another way, we’re already engaged in hostilities with the other groups. They’re just pretty low intensity hostilities until they flare up whenever & wherever the groups can muster an attack.
So, perhaps paradoxically, we’re more interested in hiding USN ships from goofs in skiffs than we are from the near-peer powers.
Agree that if you’re going to skulk around sneakily in the presence of lots of other traffic behaving as expected by international rules, you’ve got a super-duper obligation to stay out of everybody else’s way. You must assume nobody knows you’re there. But that introduces problems in that if you maneuver to avoid somebody who does know you’re there, you may well be maneuvering contrary to their rules-based expectations of your behavior.
We have a similar issue in aviation. There is long history of military aircraft operating in international airspace out of contact with or control by any ATC agency. This is enshrined in various longstanding international agreements on air operations.
Which works OK in the parts of the world with little or no traffic. Of which there are fewer every year. Crazy-assed Russian fighters or bombers wandering around the very busy Baltics talking to nobody will cause a midair collision soon enough.
There’s another good article from ArsTechnica, going into the human factors that likely contributed to these kinds of accidents. This one happens to be written by a former Navy officer, and there’s a bit of editorial cynicism that seeps in…
I wonder if part of the problem might be a culture that discourages lower-ranking sailors from speaking up. It seems like most of the fancy navigation systems on a destroyer are manned by junior personnel that have to know when to speak up. If they’ve been berated for false alarms or irrelevant details, they might remain silent even when they shouldn’t.
Isn’t that another area which has been identified in aviation*? The 2nd in command notices a problem, but doesn’t bring it up because they assume the much more experienced captain already knows about.
*I might only be thinking of an episode of Cabin Pressure here…
On the one hand, we have this column from a former sailor about why this wasn’t preventable with technoogy.
On the other, I have my retired Navy sub husband, who said his sub had a proximity alarm that woke the whole damn crew when something got too close.*
Not sure which one to believe. Probably a combination of factors.
*Too close means “still enough time to get out of the way.”
My understanding is that subs can stop much more quickly than surface ships.
One of the things mentioned in the NY Times article was that proximity alarms get turned off when ships go through busy shipping channels. If these alarms are set for any contact within, say, 1 mile, they’ll pretty much always be going off, and would thus be useless. Instead, captains turn off the alarms and put more sailors on deck watch. But if they’re already under-trained and over-worked, an extra couple zombies staring out to sea isn’t much help…
Ideally, I suppose there’d be a special proximity setting for high-traffic situations.
My sense is that the “special proximity setting for high-traffic situations” would produce too little warning time for meaningful reaction. Ships are heavy, and even a quick agile ship like a modern destroyer may not be able to take effective evasion in time. Especially at night, if the watch staff has lost situational awareness enough that they don’t know immediately where the proximity threat is. “All engines emergency astern” is a bad call if you’re being overtaken from astern, for instance.
Oh certainly.
In “spherical [del]cow[/del] warship” world, I can imagine that someone could build a collision warning system that’s based on some sort of probabilistic model of time to possible impact, rather than simply distance. I could probably kludge together a crude algorithm that works in a small set of ideal simulations.
The real world, of course, is far messier. Still, there must be some room to improve the usability of navigation systems, so that they provide the right amount of information to assist the crew, rather than distract or provide a sense of overconfidence. That sort of project might very well be an umpteen billion dollar debacle, however… and to be entirely cynical, it might be cheaper for the Navy to just pay out some death benefits, fire some commanders and admirals, and patch up a few destroyers.
Updating this thread the National Transportation Safety Board came out with its report a couple months ago:
So the basic verdict is that due to an unfortunate set of circumstances, the crew on watch were trying to carry out a procedure that they were not trained for at a time (in close proximity to other ships) when it was really not a good idea. The potential for disaster was compounded by the control systems they were using being unnecessarily complicated.
Add to that their lack of sleep due to badly arranged watches and a hint that alcohol might have been involved (why else did they not look at the display panels and realise what had happened).
And in reaction to this accident:
The US Navy will replace its touchscreen controls with mechanical ones on its destroyers after a deadly 2017 crash between a destroyer and an oil tanker
Where are you getting that from, the alcohol? How about they were tired, untrained, and the control panels were confusing and not intuitive? You know, kind of like what you laid out in the rest of the post. Contrary to your speculation, there is ZERO implication made in the report or any of the Navy’s investigations that alcohol played a role.
Yes, tired, untrained and unsupervised. There was chaos on that bridge. The report states:
So the Alnic crew were tested but not the Navy crew. I wonder why that was?
Likely because alcohol is easily detectable (i.e. on a person’s breath), and there was no suggestion of alcohol use by the Navy bridge crew.
As a former Naval officer, I can tell you that that alcohol use on a Navy ship (especially on a ship at sea) is completely verboten (with very rare exceptions). It’s not allowed on watch or off watch, and simple possession can result in significant penalties (up to and including fines, a bad conduct or dishonorable discharge, or even jail time).
There’s no need to to bring alcohol use into the mix without evidence. A tired, insufficiently trained bridge crew in a complex traffic situation easily explains the accident.
If those two ships had been cars or trucks on a highway, both drivers would have been breathalysed as a matter of course.
But they’re not. One is a commercially owned vessel flagged from where I don’t know off the top of my head, the other is a commissioned warship. It’s not as cut and dry as “police show up and breathalyze the driver.”
I, like robby, was also a US naval officer. US Navy ships are dry. There is no reason to believe the helmsman or any of the officers on the bridge that morning were drunk or otherwise intoxicated. Unfortunately, we managed to plow two billion dollar warships into two commercial vessels in one summer and kill 17 sailors while stone-cold sober.
[editorializing]In a way, I almost wish we COULD point to intoxication as a likely cause. Then at least it would make sense and the corrective actions would be relatively straightforward. No, we just can’t properly maintain or equip out ships, can’t train our sailors to properly operate the equipment they have, can’t provide the necessary manning to keep people from being exhausted, and just all around can’t run a Navy. That’s my opinion as a recently retired surface warfare officer. Others will disagree.[/editorializing]
Everything I’ve read in recent years leads me to believe you are absolutely correct. The multi-year investigation and scandal (Fat Leonard) involving so many high ranking Navy officers leads me to believe there is a major systemic problem with the Navy. Folklore has it that 50% or more of the senior officers in the Navy at the time of Pearl Harbor were dismissed or set aside in favor of new blood after the attack. Maybe a house cleaning on a similar scale is in order now.