I can't help but always be skeptical with these rulings, as if someone's always just being thrown under the bus to protect the higher ranking career military persons.
I think about how easy it would be to have a culture of sloppy, poorly trained sailors, and when something goes wrong, whoever is in the chair at the time takes the punishment for that.
Naturally I could be completely wrong about this or other cases. But it's hard to shake that skepticism.
Looks like several higher fleet officers were fired or 'retired early' in the wake of this, so I'm not certain it's just throwing people under the bus.
Scant details on what made them 'derelict in their duty'. Was it being negligence or was it mistakes caused by lack of training.
> Scant details on what made them 'derelict in their duty'. Was it being negligence or was it mistakes caused by lack of training.
Both. The article doesn't say that, but from my own experience as a Naval officer, I'm pretty sure. Lack of training means higher ups were also at fault, and that's why they're also being punished. But lack of training does not remove your responsibility if you're the officer on watch. Nothing does. Those who don't like that should not become officers.
The US Navy has released a detailed report[1] on the incident in question. They found that lack of training, poor leadership and fatigue all contributed to the collision.
> I can't help but always be skeptical with these rulings, as if someone's always just being thrown under the bus to protect the higher ranking career military persons.
Keep a few things in mind:
(1) By my count from reading the article, at least four admirals have been fired, and one has retired early. That's pretty much the entire chain of command in the Pacific fleet above the ships that had incidents. I don't know if any of them will face courts martial (I would expect not), but their careers are over, and they're not going out in a good light.
(2) The captains of the ships involved are all facing possible courts martial (and I would expect that "possible" will become "actual" within the next few weeks, from the dates given in the article), even though none of them were on the bridge at the time of the incidents. That's standard procedure for a Navy ship: if you're the captain, everything that happens is your responsibility. The executive officer and command master chief of at least one of the ships are also receiving punishment. (The command master chief, btw, is the senior enlisted aboard the ship, whose primary job is to make sure all of the sailors aboard are being properly taken care of by their officers. So it's expected that the CMC will suffer consequences when that doesn't happen.)
(3) I understand the whole "culture" thing, but at the end of the day, if you're a military officer, you're in charge, and it's your job to do what's necessary, culture notwithstanding. The officers who were operating those ships did not do their jobs, and sailors died as a result. That deserves punishment regardless of anything else.
I once drove a Lyft for some army officers... IIRC they mentioned the military publishes a running record of all O5s and above that get court martialed and they noted that the navy takes sacking their O5 and O6 seriously, more than the other services.
Whoever is the officer of the deck at the time is responsible. That's what the position means, if it means anything at all. The sailors could be poorly trained, but the buck has to stop somewhere. How else can a command-structure organization work? At the very least, she'd have to effectively lose her job through loss of confidence in ability to command, even if she weren't court-martialed.
Blaming higher leadership (which has also happened in these navy accident cases) in the military has the same problem. They're just products of their environment, too, put there ultimately by a chain of appointments ending with the President, Congress, and ultimately the voters.
It's much better to focus on process improvement than on assigning blame. But command-authority organizations like the military don't really work that way, and it's difficult to improve the culture of the military when that culture is shaped by unwise demands — excessive operational demands, fiscal constraints, and directives that end up micro-managing and constraining what commanders do — from above. Even navy admirals have their hands tied in many ways, and they're just trying to do the best they can do with a bad hand.
> Even navy admirals have their hands tied in many ways, and they're just trying to do the best they can do with a bad hand.
Trying, but still failing in this case. Playing a bad hand means you have to put more emphasis on the basics, not less. After all, ultimately military units are for fighting wars, and any war is going to be full of bad hands that you still have to play. A military that can't succeed in that kind of environment is not a military worth having.
I'm curious then - how does the culture & process of the military get improved? Wartime, where everything and everyone that's ineffective gets discarded? Defeat, when the whole nation ostensibly being protected goes down?
Except that the systematic aversion to allow any delegation of power that haunts all western military forces, means that the reality is that the OOD ends up with dozens of contradictory tasks all of highest priority.
On a merchent marine ship traveling that kind of waters there would be a team of 2-3 people with the most junior seaman present having more experience at see then the average junior US Navy officer, and no bullshit about having to coordinate with combat centers or signal intelligence in addition to having to navigate. Where as it sounds like several dozen of mostly inexperienced seaman was involved on the Fitzgerald incident.
> The Navy has acknowledged that its forward-deployed 7th Fleet in Japan was stretched too thin – undermanned, overworked and exhausted under an intense operational schedule. To meet the high operational demand, training and ship maintenance were deferred, according to a Navy review.
You can court martial people who have neglected their clearly delineated responsibilities. It's much more difficult to court martial someone for bad command that caused the neglect. Those people are forced out, blacklisted or moved somewhere where they can't damage anything.
You'd think that someone who's being put in charge of helming a billion dollar vessel with over a hundred people onboard would get lots of training for it, but nope, it takes more training to become a cosmetologist in most states than it does to helm a navy ship.
Sometimes problems are multifactored and complex, but sometimes they're also just simple. The Navy simply stopped training people in how to steer ships, in a bid to save money and time. Turns out that maybe that training was good for something after all though.
> A U.S. Navy officer pleaded guilty to dereliction of duty Tuesday in the collision of a U.S. Navy destroyer that killed seven sailors last year. Lt. j.g. Sarah Coppock was sentenced to receive half-pay for three months and a letter of reprimand.
The main significance is that if she stays in, she will get the shittiest assignments in the entire navy until 20 years is reached (pension retirement), and is a pariah forever. And never any promotions.
What I meant is that the chances of her being able to continue past 4 years and make it to 20 are just about nil, if her original intentions were to be career Navy.
That also makes her probationary under 10 U.S.C. § 630. She can be discharged without a Board of Inquiry (BOI), unless there's a desire to give her an Other Than Honorable characterization of service.
And because she won't be selected for promotion, she’ll be discharged fairly soon by the “up or out” policy, which requires discharge of officers at her grade that fail for promotion twice.
Up or out is law, not policy. 10 U.S.C. § 632. It also does not necessarily "require[]" discharge for twice failing of selection for promotion; officers can be continued on active duty. 10 U.S.C. § 637; SECNAVINST 1920.7B.
This definitely falls into the category of "Useless Information that I Happen to Know," but any Navy officer who is punished at court martial or Captain's Mast is also required to face a Board of Inquiry to show cause for retention in the service. Many officers (who don't hire lawyers) decide "Oh, I'll just plead guilty and get a letter of reprimand and move on," only to be separated by the Board of Inquiry.
In this case, it's pretty cut-and-dry that she'll be separated; the BOI will just be a formality or she might even waive it.
Even if we consider that as part of the sentence, isn't that a bit lenient given that 7 people are dead? I am just thinking what would happen to a doctor who freak out, act opposite to training, do not communicate with fellow staff members and as a result 7 patients dies. In that case I would imagine that the person would loose their job, possible their license, the hospital would be liable to the families and likely implement safeguards so that the same thing would not happen again.
The captain is going to take the brunt of this, and is actually facing manslaughter charges, since the ship and crew had oceans of known problems going into that night.
For example the OOD had a habit of not waking the captain when ships were too close, and the captain knew about it and did nothing about it. Thus by navy logic the captain is the one responsible.
The crew on deck at the time had been working hard since 6:00am, and the collision happened at 1:30am the following day. That scheduling was captain's responsibility.
Almost everyone (everyone?) on the bridge and in the combat information center failed at doing their jobs that night. This again by Navy logic is all on the captain, who is responsible for making sure that people know their jobs.
The ship had even lost its certification of seamanship before the accident.
I feel bad for everyone involved. The USS Fitzgerald was utterly overworked and overcommitted, and had not had the time available to train its crew or officers. The fault was a fault of the system, and in another world with more time for training, all of those in command that night may have turned out fine officers with long careers.
I'm curious what hour of her day the deck officer was on and how many hours of sleep she had the night previous. At some point, sleep deprivation can leave you essentially non-functional.
I've heard that female sailors are injected with Depo-Provera, to protect them from getting knocked up... Some women can tolerate this drug, while others are maimed [0].
Progesterone is now known to be a brain hormone. Medroxyprogesterone (brand name: Provera) is a good imposter-progesterone. It's useful for suppressing ovulation, but doesn't function like the endogenous hormone.
Started her day on ship at or before 6:00am and had been working for nineteen and half hours at the time of the collision. That's one of many, many reasons the captain is going to be deep trouble.
>- Gave a late turn order, but then immediately countermanded it, keeping the ship on collision course.
This is the part that everybody shakes their heads over. In that situation, with that geometry between the ships, it's ingrained and almost automatic for the OOD to go right full rudder and all back full: turning the ship astern of the other ship and coming to a complete stop as soon as possible. At that range (2000-3000 yards), there's no way a collision would have happened.
But the OOD actually did the exact opposite: increase speed and turn to the left, which will almost certainly result in a collision, especially if the other ship maneuvers the way it's supposed to. Just thinking about giving those orders in that situation is giving me the shivers...
I think it's pretty obvious what they're implying. Problem is, it's just a lazy argument. From the article:
When tested on mental rotation tasks, men averaged 66 percent correct compared to 53 percent correct for women.
So the average man may be better than the average woman at these tasks, but it's not a dramatic difference to my mind, and individual women can certainly be excellent at this kind of spatial reasoning, just like individual men can be terrible at it.
Not surprisingly, the Navy actually tests people for these skills and gives them extensive initial and ongoing training. If you can't do this job because your brain doesn't work that way, regardless of gender, it's rather unlikely that you'll have the job in the long run.
Stop giving people second chances for stuff like this. There are borderline cases and tricky cases and all sorts of other cases and I understand that, but this isn't one of them. Stop giving people second chances after posting shit like this.
Just one occasion would leave me shaking my head at the chain of failures that must have led up to that collision. But two similar collisions? Now it starts to seem like systematic conspiracy, or an attitude of expecting all other ships to maneuver away. How many commercial ships in the south China sea or sea of Japan have had to change course because of US Navy vessels over the last year? State ought to find out.
Just as an anecdote, I was recently taking the ferry (as a passenger mind you), and the ferry encountered a Burke-class DD (which would be slightly unusual around here, but I later learned it was on its way to a friendly visit to my country). The Burke was ahead of us, to starboard, going in roughly the same direction, although slightly converging (lets say around 45 deg difference in heading, maybe?). When I got up, it was at maybe 1 nm distance, at 2 o'clock. So I go to another area of the ship, and the next time I look out of the window the Burke is on our port side at maybe 300m distance. Which, if my interpretation of events is correct, means the Burke cut in front of the ferry at frickin close range. For no effing reason whatsoever, considering there was plenty of open sea around both ships. This is the kind of macho BS attitude that gets people killed. Sure, nothing happened, but what if they would have had some kind of machinery or bridge communication malfunction? The ferry would have plowed the Burke in half.
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[ 3.5 ms ] story [ 102 ms ] threadI think about how easy it would be to have a culture of sloppy, poorly trained sailors, and when something goes wrong, whoever is in the chair at the time takes the punishment for that.
Naturally I could be completely wrong about this or other cases. But it's hard to shake that skepticism.
Scant details on what made them 'derelict in their duty'. Was it being negligence or was it mistakes caused by lack of training.
Both. The article doesn't say that, but from my own experience as a Naval officer, I'm pretty sure. Lack of training means higher ups were also at fault, and that's why they're also being punished. But lack of training does not remove your responsibility if you're the officer on watch. Nothing does. Those who don't like that should not become officers.
[1] https://news.usni.org/2017/11/01/uss-fitzgerald-uss-john-s-m...
Keep a few things in mind:
(1) By my count from reading the article, at least four admirals have been fired, and one has retired early. That's pretty much the entire chain of command in the Pacific fleet above the ships that had incidents. I don't know if any of them will face courts martial (I would expect not), but their careers are over, and they're not going out in a good light.
(2) The captains of the ships involved are all facing possible courts martial (and I would expect that "possible" will become "actual" within the next few weeks, from the dates given in the article), even though none of them were on the bridge at the time of the incidents. That's standard procedure for a Navy ship: if you're the captain, everything that happens is your responsibility. The executive officer and command master chief of at least one of the ships are also receiving punishment. (The command master chief, btw, is the senior enlisted aboard the ship, whose primary job is to make sure all of the sailors aboard are being properly taken care of by their officers. So it's expected that the CMC will suffer consequences when that doesn't happen.)
(3) I understand the whole "culture" thing, but at the end of the day, if you're a military officer, you're in charge, and it's your job to do what's necessary, culture notwithstanding. The officers who were operating those ships did not do their jobs, and sailors died as a result. That deserves punishment regardless of anything else.
Blaming higher leadership (which has also happened in these navy accident cases) in the military has the same problem. They're just products of their environment, too, put there ultimately by a chain of appointments ending with the President, Congress, and ultimately the voters.
It's much better to focus on process improvement than on assigning blame. But command-authority organizations like the military don't really work that way, and it's difficult to improve the culture of the military when that culture is shaped by unwise demands — excessive operational demands, fiscal constraints, and directives that end up micro-managing and constraining what commanders do — from above. Even navy admirals have their hands tied in many ways, and they're just trying to do the best they can do with a bad hand.
Trying, but still failing in this case. Playing a bad hand means you have to put more emphasis on the basics, not less. After all, ultimately military units are for fighting wars, and any war is going to be full of bad hands that you still have to play. A military that can't succeed in that kind of environment is not a military worth having.
The OOD is the very definition of a "You Had ONE Job!" job, and that one job is "Don't run into other ships or the land."
On a merchent marine ship traveling that kind of waters there would be a team of 2-3 people with the most junior seaman present having more experience at see then the average junior US Navy officer, and no bullshit about having to coordinate with combat centers or signal intelligence in addition to having to navigate. Where as it sounds like several dozen of mostly inexperienced seaman was involved on the Fitzgerald incident.
> The Navy has acknowledged that its forward-deployed 7th Fleet in Japan was stretched too thin – undermanned, overworked and exhausted under an intense operational schedule. To meet the high operational demand, training and ship maintenance were deferred, according to a Navy review.
You'd think that someone who's being put in charge of helming a billion dollar vessel with over a hundred people onboard would get lots of training for it, but nope, it takes more training to become a cosmetologist in most states than it does to helm a navy ship.
Sometimes problems are multifactored and complex, but sometimes they're also just simple. The Navy simply stopped training people in how to steer ships, in a bid to save money and time. Turns out that maybe that training was good for something after all though.
> A U.S. Navy officer pleaded guilty to dereliction of duty Tuesday in the collision of a U.S. Navy destroyer that killed seven sailors last year. Lt. j.g. Sarah Coppock was sentenced to receive half-pay for three months and a letter of reprimand.
(Source - https://www.cbsnews.com/news/lt-jg-sarah-coppock-pleads-guil...)
In this case, it's pretty cut-and-dry that she'll be separated; the BOI will just be a formality or she might even waive it.
The pertinent Navy instruction (page 7), if you're interested. http://www.public.navy.mil/bupers-npc/reference/milpersman/1...
https://doni.documentservices.dla.mil/Directives/01000%20Mil...
For example the OOD had a habit of not waking the captain when ships were too close, and the captain knew about it and did nothing about it. Thus by navy logic the captain is the one responsible.
The crew on deck at the time had been working hard since 6:00am, and the collision happened at 1:30am the following day. That scheduling was captain's responsibility.
Almost everyone (everyone?) on the bridge and in the combat information center failed at doing their jobs that night. This again by Navy logic is all on the captain, who is responsible for making sure that people know their jobs.
The ship had even lost its certification of seamanship before the accident.
I feel bad for everyone involved. The USS Fitzgerald was utterly overworked and overcommitted, and had not had the time available to train its crew or officers. The fault was a fault of the system, and in another world with more time for training, all of those in command that night may have turned out fine officers with long careers.
- Was going too fast for the number of ships in the area
- Did not call the captain when nearish other ships as procedure required.
- Had in fact gotten too close to several other ships that night.
- Gotten confused between which of two ships was where
- Did the calculations wrong on the closest approach of the collision vessel
- Denied a request to change course away from the collision vessel because then she would have to recalculate a new nearest approach distance
- When a collision was clearly in the future, did not contact the other vessel in any way
- Gave a late turn order, but then immediately countermanded it, keeping the ship on collision course
- spent the rest of the time until the collision freaking out (an enlisted man eventually gave the final turn order that saved some lives)
So it was about as bad as could be, and seven men died.
However, I have a feeling the Captain's court martial is going to turn out worse for him than this.
Progesterone is now known to be a brain hormone. Medroxyprogesterone (brand name: Provera) is a good imposter-progesterone. It's useful for suppressing ovulation, but doesn't function like the endogenous hormone.
[0] https://www.ourbodiesourselves.org/2016/08/i-wouldnt-recomme...
edit: They must use all types, not just Provera, but certainly they emphasize the options that don't require a daily pill - the implant, IUD, Depo-Provera, etc. http://www.navy.mil/submit/display.asp?story_id=100091
8.4 Fatigue
The command leadership allowed the schedule of events preceding the collision to fatigue the crew.
The command leadership failed to assess the risks of fatigue and implement mitigation measures to ensure adequate crew rest.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15120369
This is the part that everybody shakes their heads over. In that situation, with that geometry between the ships, it's ingrained and almost automatic for the OOD to go right full rudder and all back full: turning the ship astern of the other ship and coming to a complete stop as soon as possible. At that range (2000-3000 yards), there's no way a collision would have happened.
But the OOD actually did the exact opposite: increase speed and turn to the left, which will almost certainly result in a collision, especially if the other ship maneuvers the way it's supposed to. Just thinking about giving those orders in that situation is giving me the shivers...
When tested on mental rotation tasks, men averaged 66 percent correct compared to 53 percent correct for women.
So the average man may be better than the average woman at these tasks, but it's not a dramatic difference to my mind, and individual women can certainly be excellent at this kind of spatial reasoning, just like individual men can be terrible at it.
Not surprisingly, the Navy actually tests people for these skills and gives them extensive initial and ongoing training. If you can't do this job because your brain doesn't work that way, regardless of gender, it's rather unlikely that you'll have the job in the long run.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
Never thought I'd see reality approach fiction, when a navy is involved. Everybody down!
1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Navy_Lark
The Fitzgerald was hit on the Port side which indicates it should have given way.