[gaijin]

Great post.

Most people don’t know that AFTER the explosion the sailors understandably feared follow-up attack and so for this reason ran to the ship’s ammo stores. Having ammo would permit them to credibly man guns that would permit for credible defense.

The Captain REFUSED to permit the distribution of live ammo to the fearful sailors. Why?

Because he feard an ACCIDENT.

I’m serious.

[OldDeckHand]

The stowing of the ammunition in ready lockers was but one of the MANY mistakes the ship's command made, both before entry into port, and while inport. If you read the JAGMAN report, it's an embarrassing comedy of errors. And, while the ship's Captain deserves his fair share of derision for some of the things he did (or more appropriately didn't do or delegated), there is also plenty of blame to go all around the Navy and DoD, IMHO.

Yemen was then, as it is now, a HOTBED of Islamacism. But, command didn't want to have the ship enter port in a "threatening" manner, so certain accommodations to standard inport security protocols were made. Even while at ThreatCon Bravo and about to enter into what could only be thought of as a quasi-hostile port, the ship's captain waived the mandatory briefing with the inport security and OIC. That alone should have been enough to relieve him.

Lastly, I think the DoD made a HUGE mistake when they began taking the Marines off of ships all in the name of cost-cutting. Marines train to engage the enemy in close-combat. Sailors don't. It's just that simple. And, I don't care how many gun drills you run or live-fire exercises you hold at sea, sailors just don't train for the very real person-to-person combat scenarios that play out when repelling hostile boardings or these kinds of ship-side attacks, whereas that's all that Marines train for.