The US Navy has a serious problem.


Report on the FITZGERALD Collision

Wow!

Oh my

A travesty, BOTH of the collisions.

Really not gonna say more here except the SENIOR officers who conceived and approved changing Surface Navigation from a school to a correspondence/video course should be recalled to active duty and punished for gross negligence.

Indeed it does. Hopefully, the Submarine community is not similarly affected.

Maybe today’s Navy is just not very good at driving ships
By: Mark D. Faram   August 27, 2017

We Have Met the Enemy and He is Us ...osted on August 29, 2017 by Rick Spilman

Computer Based Training (CBT) has its benefits, but it cannot totally replace Instructor Led Training (ILT). It is especially insidious that they dumped this CBT approach on to these junior officers, expecting them to fit it in around their other duties at sea. The bean counting admirals and their staff that promulgated it have blood and lost treasure on their hands.

Too bad the Navy Times doesn't publish the report, so we can interpret the document for ourselves instead of believing them on their word. Bad journalism and doesn't make their case stronger.

In any case, if the articles so far are to be believed, it is lack of a full crew roster, with crew doing tasks they were not trained to do, nor specialised in, that was the main culprit. Together with a lot of the equipment on the ship being dysfunctional, and you have an accident waiting to happen. (Have they learned nothing from the crisis that the Soviet/Russian Navy is in for the past 35 years?)

Anyway, it just underscores that the modern western military is a bureaucratic machine filled with people that only think about their own careers. The worst thing is there is nothing we can do about it, and nobody will learn a lesson from the Fitzgerald.

USS Augusta collided with a Delta I while trailing it back towards Soviet Home waters in the 1986 following the loss at sea of the Navaga class SSBN K219.

Numerous submarines have been involved in collision with surface ships, undersea terrain and other submarines. With 10 acknowledged incidents involving one or more USN submarines since 2000.

I am reading some of the articles about the report in the Navy Times now.

No doubt the navy's solution will be extremely complex, while probably piling the blame on relatively junior officers.

One intelligent (tested for such as spatial awareness is a function of intelligence) officer with the authority to command course changes while having constant personal access to a good, off the shelf commercial radar set. Heck they do all the work for you, predict collisions, the works. The simpler ones I used for many years had incredible reliability and having almost zero maintenance requirements.

It boggles my mind this happened. The bridge had to rely on CiC for navigation data????

Maybe they should reconfigure their training program to focus on... important matters, like driving boats and using onboard equipment and international protocols, instead of that other "stuff" they train for. I'm trying really hard to avoid pwec.

This should have not happened. No boat from our Navy should ever be involved in a collision with a civilian vessel short of war. How can we let our boats and crews fall apart like this? This isn't a line issue, this is a problem that comes from the top. I say gut the top of the Navy and go down. Pick the best lower level officers and give them a chance to lead, provided they can prove they can assert themselves like the leadership we once had decades before.

A little more reading done...I had really forgotten about this and other incidents that reflect on the true state of some of our armed forces.

"Much of Fort’s report explores how a state-of-the-art warship outfitted with expensive electronic sensors could go blind, but a key finding soon emerged: It wasn’t merely that they didn’t know they were blind. They didn’t know how to see.

Beyond the human waste and garbage collecting in the CIC, Fort’s investigators found CIC watchstanders who “demonstrated a lack of knowledge about radar functionality and material condition.”

Although the Fitz’s SPS-67 radar was listed as operational on the eve of the collision, it had actually fallen into a “degraded status,” according to the report.

CIC watchstanders couldn’t use their remote control to guide it because it also was broken.

A dead radar control button had been “covered by a piece of masking tape,” but Fort’s investigators couldn’t locate a casualty report chronicling the malfunction.

A work order had been generated to order, install and test new control buttons.

That was 194 days before the collision, Fort found.

And that long delay was far from unusual on board the Fitz.

Fort’s investigators interviewed a watchstander who told them that a SPA-25G radar console had been broken for at least four months before the collision.

Then there was the ship’s Voyage Management System.

Used to navigate the destroyer without relying on paper charts, the Fitz’s VMS was so freighted with problems that technicians cannibalized the set in the skipper’s quarters for parts to keep the system running.

But the Fitz’s VMS had started acting up while the destroyer was in dry dock in 2016 and early 2017, Fort found. The bridge unit would lock up and take several minutes to reset."

Command Failures at ALL levels

Like I said a dedicated, good quality and proven reliable commercial radar on the bridge would seem a no-brainer for a back-up. I am pretty darn sure I could get a super set for well under $100k. Just for navigation purposes only. Just like the Fitz's SPS-67 radar.

Trouble is, the navy payed well over TWO MILLION DOLLARS ($2,000,000) for that broken piece of junk!

Horrible value for tax dollars

I was working with collision detection radars in the early 1970s and those were commercial ones, it was what got me into digital logic as we had to build computers as part of the training course to work on RM series of radars from Decca they had course plotting and anti collision features

Very on point.

@Alicatt: Where did you work? Hollandse Signaalapparaten?

Decca Radar Ltd. from their Scrabster office
I installed, serviced and repaired Radars, Echo sounders/sonar, Decca Navigators MF & VHF radio telephones.

It was a small office but because of it's location we had a large number of larger ships that we had passing that we had to take care of in addition to the local fishing fleet.

A ( maybe dumb ) question from a land lubber. Do they not have people on watch with their eyes and binoculars anymore ?

With the reported culture on board, none of them would have been talking to anyone else anyway.

and the officer of the watch was busy doing their computer based training.

F4U's third link is pretty much what everyone needs to know, especially if you can read between the lines a little..

I loved this line;

The Navy explicitly ruled out problems with any of the ship’s radars

And dat folks, is da name of dat tune.

2 million dollar pieces of crap operated by un-trained lowest common denominators who were supervised by PC selected incompetents, for the most part.

Some real hero's stand out in the rescue and keeping the boat afloat.

I hope they find a real job and GTFO of that circus that our Navy is.

ACO for Sec Nav!

I would suggest reading the blog posts, and especially the comments/discussion contained within, as well. Centuries worth of naval experience among the posters there, great insights.