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

features.propublica.org

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

#21

Post by crooked-v »

lainga wrote: post #17
genkimind wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I spent 5+ years on a ship in 7th fleet and am all too familiar with what was described above. I would attribute it to a few things. Mostly the over-extension of resources and people. The operational tempo in 7th fleet is absolutely ridiculous, so everything that isn't "mission accomplishment" gets pushed to the wayside. Training, making sure equipment is properly fixed.. our days were so jam packed full of bullshit…

Would you say this is primarily a resource problem? A culture problem with the 7th Fleet? A culture problem in the USN overall?

"Every enlisted man in the Navy only gets 4-5 hours of a sleep a night" seems to be a common anecdote service-wide, including from people I know personally who served.

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

#23

Post by Spooky23 »

crushcrashcrush wrote: post #4
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…

Corruption my friend. Direct from a deployed friend's mouth: "When laser printers would run out of toner on base in Iraq, we wouldn't order more toner (we couldn't) - we'd order another entire printer and use the toner cartridge in the new one, and shoot at the printer on the range." Your tax dollars at work.

That's more systematic incompetence and happens all of the time.

The reason is easy -- capex for new equipment is easier to get and more nebulous. The new printer may have started life on a budget spreadsheet as a truck.

Opex is hard. It usually works like this: Some poor clerk had no fricking idea how many toner cartridges or replacement staplers were needed, so he wrote down a bullshit number. Some upstream beancounter patted himself on the back and zeroed out the supply budget to make his powerpoint look good, because he screwed up and didn't order enough bullets or whatever.

Now you're stuck, and whomever orders stuff orders a printer to get toner, which is ultimately cheaper than getting some sort of special clearance to spend opex money that wasn't budgeted.

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

#24

Post by setr »

arminiusreturns wrote: post #18
module0000 wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hanlon's razor at work... "Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity"

I like to remind people that Hanlons razor is a logical fallacy, and really shouldn't be used nearly as much as it is, especially the way it is (in an isolated context)

>Hanlons razor is a logical fallacy

I'm not see'ing it, and a quick google search isn't finding any support for that idea; it seems to me quite reasonable: Given 2 common possible explanations, prefer one. Perhaps the "Never" is at issue, but I doubt anyone ever actually interprets never as never.

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

#25

Post by pjc50 »

jessaustin wrote: post #3
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…

Microsoft Outlook did not work. Nor could commanders communicate over a classified email system... A functioning local email system requires very little resources. This is really an indictment of M$, that they couldn't set up a server that would just run for a couple of decades. If sendmail had been installed in the mid-90s when DDG-62 was commissioned, it probably would still be functioning. Yes we know that it woul…

Poor choice perhaps, given how many security holes there were in Sendmail.

I have a sneaking suspicion that the failure was something generic like running out of disk space, which nobody had both the authority and time to fix.

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

#26

Post by dv_dt »

dragonwriter wrote: post #7
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…

> How the hell does a first-line warship of the United States Navy get into a state like this? Command negligence at very high levels, a high optempo without adequate attention to readiness and discipline. > Based on the article it sounds like the excuse they've settled on is just blaming everything on the crew Unless you are including the chain of command above the ship's commander up through and including the 7th F…

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’ commanders and their superiors, he said in a written statement to ProPublica, were responsible for the results.

“The tragedies of USS Fitzgerald and USS John S. McCain reminded us that all commanders, from the unit level to the fleet commander, must constantly assess and manage risks and opportunities in a very complex and dynamic environment,” Richardson said. “But at the end of the day, our commanders make decisions and our sailors execute and there is an outcome — a result of that decision. The commander ‘owns’ that outcome.”

As an aside, the use of illustrations in this article are really great, from the collision graphics, to the busy sea routes.

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

#27

Post by Diederich »

genkimind wrote: post #10
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…

I spent 5+ years on a ship in 7th fleet and am all too familiar with what was described above. I would attribute it to a few things. Mostly the over-extension of resources and people. The operational tempo in 7th fleet is absolutely ridiculous, so everything that isn't "mission accomplishment" gets pushed to the wayside. Training, making sure equipment is properly fixed.. our days were so jam packed full of bullshit…

Could you hazard a guess as to what percentage of the 7th fleet's operational work would need to be curtailed to get it back into a more reasonable, sustainable position? Thanks.

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

#28

Post by jessaustin »

Regardless of other problems, TFA makes it clear that LTJG Coppock failed really hard between 0120 and 0130. Although her subordinates probably should have detected the Crystal sooner, she had ten minutes to save the lives of her crew, and she should have done so. Navigating out of danger might not have been possible, but an emergency stop like that executed by LTJG Breau a month earlier would have worked. The really unforgivable (as in, detail a firing squad) offense was not to sound the alarm and get those sailors out of their soon-to-flood bunks.

I'd say that the captain should receive the same punishment that Coppock gets, and the captain of a month before as well. It's difficult to say from the outside whether that should go up the chain, but perhaps it should, just to be safe.

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

#29

Post by joe_the_user »

module0000 wrote: post #9
genkimind wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It has nothing to do with corruption. See my other comment.

Hanlon's razor at work... "Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity"

Hanlon's razor should not be employed with situations where money vanishes.

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

#30

Post by pjc50 »

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…

> Russians in the '90s had the excuse that the government that had built the ship had collapsed and the replacement hadn't bothered spending a dime to maintain it.

It sounds like this is uncomfortably close to the truth about the US situation too; the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan had unlimited money to waste, but this must have been at the cost of other parts of the military. And the political system is increasingly dysfunctional above it.

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