Why Do U.S. Navy Ships Keep Crashing?
Fewer vessels and insufficient training may be a common theme in four incidents this year.
By Justin Bachman
The déjà vu collision of the guided missile destroyer USS JOHN S MCCAIN with an oil tanker near Singapore was the Navy’s fourth serious incident in the western Pacific this year, and mirrored a similar disaster in June that claimed the lives of seven sailors off the coast of Japan.
In January, the USS ANTIETAM ran aground near Yokosuka, Japan, where the U.S. Seventh Fleet is based. In May, the USS LAKE CHAMPLAIN ran into a South Korean fishing vessel. And just last week, the Navy Distribution : daily to 37.450+ active addresses 24-08-2017 Page 21 relieved the commander of the USS FITZGERALD a guided missile destroyer that on June 17 was hit by a container ship, with deadly consequences.
Now, with 10 sailors dead or missing following the MCCAIN incident Aug. 21, the question of what, if anything, these accidents have in common has become front-of-mind. One distinct possibility is a fleet that’s stretched too thin, forced to combine training with deployments over a vast area teeming with U.S. strategic interests, according to two retired Navy officers. In a Facebook video, the chief of naval operations, Admiral John Richardson, said he has directed “a more comprehensive review to ensure that we get at the contributing factors, the root causes of these incidents.” “This trend demands more forceful action,” said Richardson, who ordered a short “operational pause” for the Navy to assess how the fleet operates.
He said there is no indication of foul play, such as hacking or sabotage, but that all possibilities are being considered.
From 1998 to 2015, the Navy shrank by 20 percent, to 271 ships, while the number of vessels deployed overseas remained at about 100 ships, Bryan Clark, a senior fellow at the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessment, wrote in a 2015 article for The National Interest. Clark concluded that each ship has to work 20 percent more to meet demand.
The current fleet size doesn’t properly support the demand for 85 ships to 105 ships deployed to sea at any given moment—the average for the past 50 years—said retired Navy captain Jerry Hendrix, who also served as director of naval history and is now a senior director at the Center for a New American Security. “When you’re trying to keep that many out to sea … something’s got to give,” he said. “The bucket that gets taken away from is training. I think the training has begun to break down in the fleet.” Bryan McGrath, a retired Navy captain who commanded a destroyer similar to the MCCAIN, the USS BULKELEY, said that what “we’re seeing is a fraying Navy, especially over in the western Pacific.” The Cold War’s end led to a Navy-wide diminution of “basic war-fighting skills,” he said. “We won the war and as a result, we took a big deep breath, and now we are are recovering from that breath,” said McGrath, an analyst with defense consultancy FerryBridge Group LLC.
“Having these two ships taken out of action has a real tactical impact”
The Seventh Fleet has from 40 to 60 ships operating in the region at any given time. Both the McCain and Fitzgerald collisions occurred in darkness, with much larger commercial vessels, in seas with heavy traffic. The ships are two of the Navy’s most-advanced, most-maneuverable Arleigh Burke-class destroyers, which were first commissioned in 1991 and constitute the core of the service’s surface warfare capability. With cruise missiles for striking land-based targets and a complement of undersea weapons to combat submarines, they are also used as part of aircraft carrier strike groups. “Our ships are well maintained, and our sailors are well trained,” a Navy spokeswoman, Captain Elizabeth Zimmermann, said on Monday.
The operational loss of the FITZGERALD and MCCAIN, nicknamed “Big Bad John,” will have “real implications” for air defense in the Pacific arena, said Hendrix. In the western Pacific, the U.S. is determining how best to address missile threats from North Korea while containing Chinese military expansion in the South China Sea. “These incidents are not without problems and strategic implications,” said Hendrix. “Having these two ships taken out of action has a real tactical impact.” The Navy’s overall fleet size, currently at 276 ships, is inadequate, given the size of its workload, Hendrix and McGrath said. In December, the Navy laid out an aspirational benchmark, seeking a 355-ship fleet as part of its “Force Structure Assessment.” That number of vessels is “the level that balanced an acceptable level of war-fighting risk to our equipment and personnel against available resources and achieves a force size that can reasonably achieve success,” the Navy said in the report.
But critics say the focus on bulking up to that many ships risks spending too much on relatively cheaper but less capable vessels such as the troubled Littoral Combat Ship, which is vulnerable to attack.
The Navy “has overemphasized resources used to incrementally increase total ship numbers at the expense of critically needed investments in areas where our adversaries are not standing still, such as strike, ship survivability, electronic warfare and other capabilities,” Obama administration Defense Secretary Ash Carter wrote in a memo to the Navy in 2015. For now, the temporary loss of the MCCAIN and the FITZGERALD has made a complex playing field more difficult to manage.“This nation has global responsibilities and global interests,” McGrath said. “And when you have two emerging competitors in China and Russia, and then two other threats in Iran and North Korea, that makes for a very, very busy Navy.” One, he added, that is “thinly stretched.” Source : Bloomberg — With assistance by David Tweed, Andy Sharp, Larry Liebert, and Nafeesa Syeed
A local towmaster came with the following remarks to this newsclippings about the accident:
I see now that collision took place just west of the Horseburgh lighthouse and the US navy vessel was West bound inbound for Changi Naval Base Just wonder how it got hit on her port side or was she in the wrong side of the fairway and try to get back on the right track We all have been there numerous times and what I can see they where not at the east buoy junction yet VTIS most be wondering as well. See video below.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vlrA36GzHNs
Horsburgh Lighthouse is an active lighthouse which marks the eastern entrance to the Straits of Singapore. It is situated on Pedra Branca island. Singapore's earliest lighthouse by date of completion, it is located approximately 54 kilometres (34 mi) to the east of Singapore and 14 kilometres (8.7 mi) from the Malaysian state of Johor.
Horsburgh Lighthouse Captain James Horsburgh (28 September 1762 – 14 May 1836), a Scottish hydrographer from the East India Company, who mapped many seaways around Singapore in the late 18th and early 19th century.
He was called "the Nautical Oracle of the World". His charts and books allowed ships to navigate through treacherous areas of the ocean, saving many lives and property on the seas between China and India, The lighthouse was built over an outcrop of rocks that for centuries was identified on maps as Pedra Branca ("white rock" in Portuguese).
It was built by John Turnbull Thomson (1821–1884), a government surveyor. In the presence of Governor William John Butterworth and other dignitaries, the lighthouse foundation stone was laid on 24 May 1850 and the lighthouse was completed in 1851.
The lighthouse is also known as Pedra Branca Lighthouse. The sovereignty of Pedra Branca was disputed between Malaysia and Singapore until 2008. On 23 May 2008, the International Court of Justice awarded the island to Singapore.
Serco tug ADEPT turns back to base in Devonport after escorting the Royal Navy’s flagship HMS OCEAN out to sea,Aug 22. The helicopter carrier is having a last short work-up before she goes on a long deployment next week, which sadly will be her final voyage.
Source: DAILY COLLECTION OF MARITIME PRESS CLIPPINGS 2017 – 237