“If a ship is damaged on its side, then it has been run into by the other ship.”.....
Not necessarily, side collisions could also be a result of the side damaged ship trying to avoid a collision. Ships of this size are not your every day row boat.
For some reason, many people here on Free Republic automatically assume that our Navy ships are totally at fault in these incidents.
It takes two ships to have a crash.
Our Navy ships are very expensive and I’m sure that the Navy takes a dim view of having a ship damaged.
I believe the Navy will look for the “Proximate Cause” of this incident.
If I remember right from my Report of Survey Officer days, proximate cause was the unbroken string of events that caused the crash.
I don’t think that they’ll find the behavior of the sailors on the bridge of the Fitzgerald or McCain to be in that unbroken string of events.
Now, that doesn’t mean that there wasn’t “negligence” on the part of the sailors on the bridge of our Navy ships.
And that is probably why you see Non-Judicial punishment for some of the sailors on the Fitzgerald.
But their “negligence” would not necessarily be the “Proximate Cause” of these incidents.
It’s a lot of legalese, but that’s how it works.