What the fuck is going on with the Navy. This is surreal.
This should never happen. There are occasionally mitigating circumstances, but they don’t excuse the failure of the ship’s crew and command.
And it’s happened to the 7th Fleet twice in about as many months.
Whoever is commanding that destroyer squadron is about to be relieved of duty.
Former Navy, and I agree with you both. This SHOULD never happen and is embarrassing.
Command should be unfrocked and discharged, and most likely charged if at fault.
Either way, we’re seeing failures of ships watch and JOs on duty here, based on the times. Add to that this has happened more than once recently and we could point to overall training as well.
There is no way a destroyer crashes into a container ship without incompetence being the cause beyond insane weather. Like being in a hurricane level weather.
It’s like hitting a parked car. In an empty parking lot. When you’re on a motorcycle.
That’s too bad. Probably both sides at fault here.
I realize we can’t exactly blame Trump, but it sure is fitting that these accidents started happening when they did.
I dunno. There is absolutely no way that a Burke should be rammed by an oil tanker barring some kind of unique extenuating circumstances. It’s nimbler, faster, and is riddled with sensors. Even if a merchantman was trying to ram a Burke, it should be able to race circles around it.
Isn’t he the ultimate authority over the military though? Not that he’d ever take responsibility, but isn’t it his to bear?
It this had happened a couple years back, there would already be headlines saying “Obama Administration Faces Tough Questions Over Navy Mishaps.” Oh, and the GOP House would be starting up a couple of investigations.
Nowadays, both the press and the House are just praying that Trump forgets that he’s in charge of the military altogether.
Exactly. If both ships were under their own power it should be nearly impossible, even if the container ship was actively trying to cause a collision. The agility of a destroyer in comparison is mind boggling.
Not in day to day operations. Which is a good thing, you wouldn’t want Trump steering around a carrier.
Or Obama. Or Bush. Or Reagan. Or…
I mean you could say he’s responsible, but then the blame shifts to Obama because I’m pretty sure Trump hasn’t changed anything about the Navy or it’s operational details since he took office. It’s not like he passed an order limited the number of people on watch or anything wonky.
I just don’t understand how this is possible unless the entire operations crew is drunk or asleep. Radar, sonar, and lookouts should be working at all times unless the first two are ordered turned off, right?
Responding to a shouted question from a reporter about the incident on Sunday, President Donald Trump said: “That’s too bad.”
“That’s too bad”, said the mother-fucking President of the United States about 10 of our sailors likely being dead.
https://twitter.com/ilovaussiesheps/status/899462424352485378
That said, a human being with eyeballs should be looking out. I doubt the container ship is running dark like it’s trying to sneak across the Atlantic in 42’.
Not sure what GPS would have to do with radar or sonar anyway. Those should give relative contacts.
They would be using radar, with AIS, which presents them as contacts with their bearing, distance, etc and would all be known. Unless things have changed greatly to favor GPS, in which case a hack could indeed be an issue.
Also, to what @ShivaX said, we always had watches on duty as lookout. Always. So there were multiple failures here.
There is a reason collisions at sea end careers. They are almost always preventable by proper diligence. Easy to say as the sub guy hiding under the traffic, I suppose.
Someone on Reddit mentioned the time as 6:40AM, and watch change at 7:00AM. It is indeed looking like poor training or performance, regardless of any steerage problems, people not caring, people not doing a proper turnover, asleep on watch, whatever, will all bring a ship down.
Make that twice now in three months this has happened in the Seventh Fleet and heads are going to roll.
Singapore has a very high tech monitoring system for that straight, but two other countries also keep tabs on it. It sounds like PLENTY of eyes were on this, and there is a LOT of traffic. Multiple people had to fuck up for this to happen.
And now we have a traffic map at the time of the collision. Lanes there are very defined. Though busy, this straight is heavily monitored by pretty sophisticated systems:
Red is Tanker
Green is Cargo
Blue is Passenger
That’s one of the, if not the, busiest pieces of water in the planet, which is even more important to make sure your watches are paying attention.
And, yes, even if there was GPS spoofing going on, there’s absolutely no excuse why the ship’s watch didn’t react.
One article I read suggested they may not even have had AIS turned on, which explains to some extent the commercial ship’s problem in not avoiding the destroyer. Yet more negligence, if true, but it was just speculation because apparently it’s a pattern on warships to leave it off.