Posted on 06/15/2022 7:29:24 PM PDT by artichokegrower
Fancy way of saying dyke fight.
Translation
Our bridge crew was poorly trained and the dyke fight just made it worse.
I am completely in agreement with your post.
It is a travesty. It is a travesty that we have put our military personnel in this position. I understand the issues with extended deployments, low retention, low staffing levels, extended yard times, all of that kind of thing.
The focus should be on good training, watch standing warfighting , semen ship… All those things. And it’s not. The focuses on things that have absolutely nothing to do with warfighting.
God help them, and I mean that, if we get into a shooting war.
I draw analogies to the state of our Navy at the onset of the Battle of Savo Island in 1942. In the span of only a couple of hours, we had almost 1000 sailors killed in action due to our unpreparedness, pigheadedness, and incompetence. We learned from it, but at high cost.
Dammit. I hate to think of a modern day equivalent in lives, material, and money.
“””I believe that was a factor in the collision aboard the USS Fitzgerald, that two female officers were having a personal feud and didn’t want to interact with each other.
In the USS McCain collision, I believe the root cause was not a physical malfunction or equipment causualty, but was the fact that one of the “features” of the ship control for the Arleigh Burke class is that the throttle and the rudder were able to be decoupled from a single navigation station (there were multiple navigation stations, ostensibly for flexibility and redundancy, IIRC) and the Helmsman/OOD did not pick up the fact that the rudder function had been inadvertently decoupled and was enabled at a different navigation station.
The Helmsman was poorly trained and inexperienced, and did not pick up the software cues that indicated that the rudder had been decoupled and was expecting to receive control input from another navigation console on the bridge. (I also believe the software cues were a poor design as well)
So, as the ship drifted, the rudder commands given at one station were not being applied to the rudder, and they didn’t recognize their input was having no effect until it was too late.
It has been a while, but that is how I recall it happened to the USS McCain.
The collision of the USS Fitzgerald was an entirely different kind of stupid in which the watch standers were completely and totally incompetent, coupled with the fact that one of the female officers in the CIC below decks who had the crucial information the other female officer acting as the OOD on the bridge could have used, didn’t communicate that information because she didn’t want to talk to her.
Compounded by the fact that rules of the road, standard notifications to wake the Captain if another ship approaches to within a certain distance, etc.”””
My memory cells got awaken by this story. I am still trying to comprehend how a judge could conclude the slow moving tanker had a partial liability in this accident with the MccAIN.
I’m with you, but...to be fair, as all vessels do have a responsibility, they may have failed on that larger vessel in some key way I cannot remember. (Either they were supposed to give way and didn’t, or what, but it is obvious there is some element that caused them to get that “20%” culpability tacked on to them.
It did make me scratch my head, since I hadn’t looked at that thing since it happened and the report came out.
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