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Death and Valor on an American Warship Doomed by Its Own Navy

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Re: Death and Valor on an American Warship Doomed by Its Own Navy

#101

Post by darkpuma »

jjoonathan wrote: post #77
darkpuma wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But never forget that malice does exist, and the clever malicious will often conceal their malice behind a veil of plausible stupidity. For instance, "Oops I accidentally forgot my briefcase full of classified documents on the bus" is as old as spycraft itself.

Even calling it "clever" or attributing it to spycraft is a stretch. Kids learn to "play dumb" before they learn to form complete sentences.

That's right. Even very dumb criminals will often plead that they were dumb, not malicious, even when the circumstances of their capture make such an explanation ludicrous.

"I'm sorry sir, I kicked in your front door and started looking for cash and valuables because I was drunk and thought it was my house! I made a huge mistake!"

Re: Death and Valor on an American Warship Doomed by Its Own Navy

#102

Post by dv_dt »

ambicapter wrote: post #74
dv_dt wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yup, from the article: The Navy inquiries determined that there had been widespread problems with leaders regarding shortfalls in training, manning and equipment in the 7th Fleet. The Navy fired admirals, captains and commanders, punished sailors and criminally prosecuted officers for neglecting their duties. Adm. John Richardson, head of the Navy, called the two collisions “avoidable tragedies.” The ships’ commander…

I'm not seeing the graphics on firefox :(

That's odd, I read this entire article on Firefox.

Re: Death and Valor on an American Warship Doomed by Its Own Navy

#103

Post by dv_dt »

a3n wrote: post #65
dv_dt wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yup, from the article: The Navy inquiries determined that there had been widespread problems with leaders regarding shortfalls in training, manning and equipment in the 7th Fleet. The Navy fired admirals, captains and commanders, punished sailors and criminally prosecuted officers for neglecting their duties. Adm. John Richardson, head of the Navy, called the two collisions “avoidable tragedies.” The ships’ commander…

> But at the end of the day, our commanders make decisions One of the decisions not practically available to the captain is to stay in port because he declares his ship not ready. If a crash happens, like it did, he's legally responsible and his career ends. But if he declares his ship unfit, then he's also declaring himself unfit, because he didn't ensure that his ship was ready. And under the "operational pace" tha…

> But if he declares his ship unfit, then he's also declaring himself unfit

It's on the leadership above the captain to back him up if he declares the ship unfit - or unable to get off-ship support to make it fit. Having a culture where you can't "stop the line", to borrow a Toyota process term, for serious problems - will lead to serious problems accumulating.

Re: Death and Valor on an American Warship Doomed by Its Own Navy

#104

Post by ufmace »

a3n wrote: post #58
pdonis wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> having one person watch both sides of the ship might be marginally possible - if they were only doing that I'm not sure even that is possible, at least not at night in a crowded shipping channel. A lookout under those circumstances should be focused on one field of view, not having to move around. > teaching someone else while on watch might be marginally possible - if you only had one side of the ship to watch As…

> if push comes to shove, having more experienced supervision on the bridge during a challenging transit is more important than getting in some more training that day. Think of any bureaucracy. The training or lack is documented. Paperwork must be done, and the activities backing that paperwork must be done, because that's what gets measured, since the measurers can't be on board to watch. Sloppy procedures you might…

> I would go so far to say that paperwork will increase even more, directly because of these specific incidents, "to make sure it never happens again."

This, I have a feeling that the real root causes of this problem will only get worse in response to the incidents. Based on reading this and a few other articles and posts and no experience at all in any Navy (but some with other bureaucracies), I judge those to be mainly ever-increasing demands on resources and nobody in the chain with the incentives to say "No, we just can't do that", and ever-increasing levels of paperwork, training, documentation, and other types of bureaucratic make-work to ensure that the last dozen Major Problems can't possibly happen again. It's also not very professional or conductive to keeping good people in when you clearly throw those at the bottom under the bus when they're involved in a screwup whose true root causes they had no power to fix.

Re: Death and Valor on an American Warship Doomed by Its Own Navy

#105

Post by velosol »

ForHackernews wrote: post #91
sonnyblarney wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And why are fighting ships using MS Exchange? And not some more hardened linux-based, simple UI/system thing that's easier to admin and keep up?

If I had to speculate, I'd say most likely because there are zero Linux vendors willing to run the gauntlet of a DoD procurement process.

There's at least Red Hat according to: http://www.esi.mil/AgreementList.aspx?type=2

Re: Death and Valor on an American Warship Doomed by Its Own Navy

#106

Post by sonnyblarney »

ForHackernews wrote: post #91
sonnyblarney wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And why are fighting ships using MS Exchange? And not some more hardened linux-based, simple UI/system thing that's easier to admin and keep up?

If I had to speculate, I'd say most likely because there are zero Linux vendors willing to run the gauntlet of a DoD procurement process.

I was in the Canadian Army, and buddies in procurement in Ottawa, so I'm roughly familiar.

And agree with your point.

My question was more rhetorical :)

You know what DARPA should be doing? Instead of trying to make 'smart bullets' maybe they should consider that complexity and security of IT is a goddam problem and support products instead of just technology.

Someone to make a version of Linux, hardended/simplified it, and then did the same for a few other pieces (i.e. networking gear) and then made 'mil grade' versions of a bunch of things.

And then teach every single member of the military how to do basic stuff, i.e. 'know their computer'. Super basic 'MILINUX' skills, so that weapons systems techs could at least fathom what on earth is wrong with their thing and possibly fix it.

Same with mail.

There is no reason in 2018 that e-mail can't be durable and available for relatively low cost in some system.

Also consider now that there should be a lot more IT dudes in the forces.

Re: Death and Valor on an American Warship Doomed by Its Own Navy

#107

Post by jessaustin »

setr wrote: post #85
jessaustin wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The fact that it includes the word "never" was the clue for me...

Which I responded to. Reading never as never is more of a misinterpretation than anything else.

Even if we accept that (even though a maxim that starts out "we should hesitate to" rather than "never" will be much less rhetorically potent), HR claims to observe a fact about the world: that malice is far less common than stupidity, or at least that it's profitable to behave as if that were the case. I've never seen that observation supported, in any discussion about HR. My own experience of the world contradicts that observation much of the time. Probably not most of the time, but enough to make it a mistake to stop thinking, as HR advises us to do.

In fact it's often wise to act as if one sees stupidity, even when one suspects malice. In that way one may tempt the malicious into overstepping. But HR doesn't say anything about actions, only about attributions.

Re: Death and Valor on an American Warship Doomed by Its Own Navy

#108

Post by davidgould »

Tsubasachan wrote: post #87
smacktoward wrote: post #2

A dozen or so [maintenance issues] were considered more serious. They included problems with the ship’s primary navigation system. It was the oldest such system among destroyers based in Japan. It was running on Windows 2000, even though other ships had been upgraded. It could not display information from the AIS. The broken email system had a “major impact” on the ship’s day-to-day operations. Microsoft Outlook did…

Nothing new really. You should read up on the state of the Navy in 1941 just before Pearl Harbour. Or just before Korea in 1950. Armies are in a boom and bust cycle. When the last war is over they lose their funding and priority over other stuff. Until the next war begins.

Except the US military never lost priority after WW2.
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