yeah, right... 
But they are claiming the DDG did not detect it. And that is 100% pure D bullsh!t.
Ship autopilot systems are at risk of hacking:
If students can do it, hostile nation-states can do it:
I just start going down a checklist of what could be possible when confronted with a seeming mystery like this. Oftentimes it’s helpful.
Either something highly unusual but possible occurred that can’t be fully disclosed, or something highly embarrassing but possible occurred that someone doesn’t want to fully disclose.
Among the highly unusual, what would be possible? Some sort of catastrophic equipment failure that’s very damning of the ship itself? Could a potential catastrophic equipment failure have been some sort of hack, sabotage or introduced externally i.e. a new type of weapon?
Among the highly embarrassing, that’s where quite a few possibilities would appear to lie, not saying that’s what occurred but possible negligence and human error abounds. Do we know for a fact that the commander of the ship was not on the bridge and was in the main cabin intended for use in port? If so that might be an indication of general discipline and lack of procedure onboard that destroyer. Is it possible that all systems functioned correctly and the threat was ignored due to incompetence, neglect or distraction?
There are very few possibilities here:
The freighter colluded with the Klingons and had an operational cloaking device.
The Navy now requires their lookouts to be blind in one eye and unable to see out the other.
The idea of one poster that the freighter lured the destroyer in (promises of naked women?) and then “punched it” is at least creative. I don’t advise that as a legal defense at the courts-martial.
Seriously folks, the destroyer was in the wrong, period. No matter what the condition of any electronics, radar, GPS, or whatever, the sailors on lookout and the bridge watch should easily have seen this freighter, even at night. There was no reported fog.
Any questions? If so, read: The International Regulations for Preventing Collisions but is better know by its acronym “COLREGs”.
The destroyer has AN/SPY-1 three dimensional RADAR, variable pulse width surface RADAR, AIS transceivers and a hull mounted sonar array tied into an Electronic Warfare Suite capable of tracking objects of small size moving at a high speed in real time.
The OOD has some ‘splaining to do.
I haven’t seen much from Bill Gertz in a while. What’s he covering these days?
freighters on autopilot, not a big deal..quite common
that’s what autopilot is for
but the US ship is supposed to have men on watch, plus all kinds of fancy sophisticated detection gear
what was the problem on the US ship that it just “sat there” and let itself get hit? even if the entire crew was asleep, the detection equipment is still supposed to be ‘on duty!” and also there are sirens onboard to wake slumbering watchmen up
As others have commented, it's not unusual for the container ship to be on auto-pilot, but just like commercial aircraft that use auto-pilot frequently, the cockpit is still manned in the even of an emergency. It's not like this was a transit from the West Coast to Hawaii; these were highly-traveled shipping lanes.
yeah, right... If they did not detect a freighter coming towards them, then everyone on duty on that bridge should be cashiered out of the Navy. And the Captain too, for allowing incompetents to conn his ship,
How about the destroyer computers were hacked into and sabotaged? Could be treason or maybe an entity like China was able to hack in remotely? Maybe a flash drive with malicious code was inserted?