Huh? What about WWII when ships would fire their guns at each other? Does that not fall under the category of "surface engagement"?

from the WP this morning:

"The McCain collision was the Navy’s fourth major accident at sea in Asia this year, following the Fitzgerald incident, a collision between the guided-missile cruiser USS Lake Champlain and a South Korean fishing vessel on May 9, and the guided-missile cruiser USS Antietam running aground Jan. 31 in Tokyo Bay, near Yokosuka.

The Navy’s top admiral on Monday ordered a fleetwide review of seamanship and training in the Pacific after the latest collision.

The series of accidents in the Pacific “demands more-forceful action,” Navy Adm. John Richardson, the chief of naval operations, told reporters Monday, adding that there is “great cause for concern that there is something we are not getting at.”

Do we have any Navy recruiters here? Have the requirements to join the Navy gone down recently?

You don't have to go back that far for even that sort of surface engagement, a US destroyer escort (USS Buckley I believe) rammed and then boarded a German U-boat in WWII, there was hand to hand fighting.

Yes but did the ships actually come in physical contact with each other?

There might have been ramming or attempted ramming in the ACW.

Yes F4U examples can be found in WW2 but was the exception not the rule.
PT109 and a Japanese destroyer
British cruiser cut in half by the RMS Queen Mary

Anyways was trying to make a 'funny'.

The requirements to be an officer in the Navy are a GPA of at least 3.2 or above or a 3.0 with a double major. Those requirements are relaxed for in demand majors such as nuclear engineering, etc.

No problem. Sometimes it takes coffee a long time to activate my humor detector.

CNO John Richardson: USS John S. McCain, oil tanker collision may have been intentional




Like I said, I don't take much stock in coincidences.

Link

I have a friend who was 14 years in who just left, mainly due to female superiors making his life impossible in unreasonable ways. He was going to go the full twenty, but, nope, it wasn't worth it. He said the Navy has "changed."

Saw a comment on a "Navy centric" site, the poster was a US Naval Academy graduate who had a female classmate who thought the US fought the Iwo Jimians at the Battle of Iwo Jima. She graduated and became a Surface Warfare Officer.

Wow. Just wow. That is just so absurd that it seems like it just can't be real but it is.

Yes , the hand to hand fight occurred when some Germans boarded the ship !! empty shell casings and mess mugs were used as weapons too !

http://www.uboatarchive.net/U-66A/U-66BuckleyReport.htm

"BUCKLEY suffers only casualty of engagement when man bruises fist knocking one of enemy over the side."

I felt strongly this last ship collision would roll heads and sure enough ....the Commander of the US. Navy 7th Fleet just lost his command

"The US Navy intends to remove Vice Adm. Joseph Aucoin as the commander of the US 7th Fleet, based in Yokosuka, Japan, according to a US official. This follows an incident Monday in which the guided-missile destroyer USS John S. McCain collided with a merchant ship"

http://www.cnn.com/2017/08/22/politics/uss-mccain-7th-fleet-commander-dismissal/index.html

Getting back on topic...

7th Fleet Commander has been sacked over this latest incident.

Yes Haggart had already posted that news.

some reports are saying the ship had navigation or steering problems

coincidentally, according to pprune (pilot forum), aircraft flying over the atlantic experienced GPS jamming south of greenland last month and this month, and ships reported it as well.

so it seems plausible that an enemy of the US has been tampering with GPS - however - it is never an excuse not to have lookouts, an arleigh burke has more than enough power to accelerate out of the way of a ship about to t-bone it.

Search for survivors cancelled, missing/dead identified to public.


http://americanmilitarynews.com/201...ailors-from-uss-john-s-mccain-collision/

Unless there were no lookouts posted or one was asleep/playing on his phone/simply not paying attention. I just can't imagine any other way a big (compared to the McCain) ship could get close enough to ram her. IIRC they were both traveling at 20kt, that's 3 minutes to travel 2000 yards. Even at a distance of 1/3 knot (667 yards) it'd take a minute to hit, and there's no way the tanker could turn sharply enough to catch a Burke that went to flank speed. The Burke would only have to move a few hundred meters for a close but clean miss.

Collisions: Part I—What Are the Root Causes?

"In 1961, the Naval Destroyer Officers School, the forefather of the present Surface Warfare Officers School Command, was established. This was followed in 1970 by the first Surface Warfare Division Officer School (SWOSDOC) class. For the next 30 years, this was how division officers were trained for their first tours at sea.

In 2003, SWOSDOC was shuttered, largely for financial reasons, but also in a mistaken attempt to create efficiencies. SWOSDOC was replaced by computer-based training (CBT). Instead of attending SWOS and associated billet specialty programs for upward of 12-14 months of rigorous training prior to reporting on board their first ships, new officers went directly from commissioning sources to their ships with only a packet of computer disks. Now it was incumbent on the ship’s CO to replace a year’s worth of intensive dawn-to-dusk training, in addition to his or her other considerable responsibilities.

Vice Admiral Timothy LaFleur, who as Commander, Naval Surface Force Pacific Fleet, was the author of this decision described the change as one that would “result in higher professional satisfaction, increase the return on investment during the first division officer tour, and free up more career time downstream.” First-tour division officers would still go to Surface Warfare Officers School Command, but only after six months into their first assignment and then for only four to six weeks (later reduced to three) as a kind of “finishing school.” Mostly CBT saved money, and it was estimated that $15 million would be saved by shutting down SWOSDOC and shifting responsibility to the ships’ COs.

Soon officers who opposed this change were excoriated for not “getting it.” A decision had been made, and it was not to be questioned by the rank and file. Silence and obedience were enforced.

Then, CBT failed and failed badly. Commanding officers simply did not have the capability, capacity, or time to replace basic surface warfare officer training in their respective commands. But the Djini was out of the bottle, and the costs to reestablish SWODOC, both in terms of money and embarrassment, were simply too great to bear. Band-aid solutions were found. Eventually, an element of classroom training was reinstituted with the establishment of a four-week course established to provide “3M, division officer fundamentals, basic watchstanding and leadership” to ensigns en route to their first ships."



Maybe today’s Navy is just not very good at driving ships


"For nearly 30 years, all new surface warfare officers spent their first six months in uniform at the Surface Warfare Officer’s School in Newport, Rhode Island, learning the theory behind driving ships and leading sailors as division officers.

But that changed in 2003. The Navy decided to eliminate the “SWOS Basic” school and simply send surface fleet officers out to sea to learn on the job. The Navy did that mainly to save money, and the fleet has suffered severely for it, said retired Cmdr. Kurt Lippold.

“The Navy has cut training as a budgetary device and they have done it at the expense of our ability to operate safely at sea,” said Lippold, who commanded the destroyer Cole in 2000 when it was attacked by terrorists in Yemen.

After 2003, each young officer was issued a set of 21 CD-ROMs for computer-based training — jokingly called “SWOS in a Box” — to take with them to sea and learn. Young officers were required to complete this instructor-less course in between earning their shipboard qualifications, management of their divisions and collateral duties.

“The elimination of SWOS Basic was the death knell of professional SWO culture in the United States Navy,” Hoffman said. “I’m not suggesting that … the entire surface warfare community is completely barren of professionalism. I’m telling you that there are systemic problems, particularly at the department head level, where they are timid, where they lack resolve and they don’t have the sea time we expect.”"