Trust issues can occur from top down as well as bottom up. I have observed management not trusting their people far more commonly than opposed to people not trusting their management. When management does not trust their staff the staff will not be used or properly developed. It may be that the leadership believes it takes less effort to do the job themselves than watch their staff struggle and fail. This is a benign form of toxic leadership. Staff must be made to do their jobs and properly mentored to just before the point where the incompetence is likely to result in criminal/policy violations or immediate harms.

Isn’t it the opposite - that management/officers are oblivious to their own toxic behaviour that led to the rank-and-file distrusting them?

People occupying positions of management are more capable of seeing trust issues simply because they have the responsibility to talk with subordinates of their own and reason upon the effectiveness of that dialogue. People without managerial experience generally lack the tools to perceive the behaviors driving the decisions thrust upon them. People outside of management also tend to lack the necessary exposure to situations where these behaviors are present.

There is also the power dynamic. A boss can more easily terminate a toxic employee than an employee can terminate a toxic boss. This power distance prevents many toxic employees from establish trust issues against a superior until there exists a pattern of identifiable behavior beyond a single employee.

You can try and get a relief so you can go to the head, but it's generally frowned upon if your that guy that always needs a head break, and in the middle of the night, no one wants to wake up so you can go pee.

Edited to add: Also, what will people do? They will drink less than they should to avoid the humiliation. On top of a tired crew you will get also a dehydrated one. This is a surefire recipe for bad things to happen.

I agree with the need to always keep training in top shape.

There is no naval enemy on earth that is even remotely competitive with the US in any regard.

Iran? North Korea? ISIS? What enemy?

Russia has no global naval projection, it can barely sustainably push beyond the Black Sea with its surface ships. Their sub fleet is a medium threat. The US is also not at war with Russia, they aren't actually an enemy. There is no war coming with the Russians, they're only good for boogeyman status. They've got a perma stagnant economy (Australia will surpass it soon) and melting social-economic position (see: pension cuts making Putin unpopular), crimping their ability to continue to spend on anything military (most of their military is badly dilapidated, so they've taken to focusing very narrowly because they can't field a high quality force across the board any longer; this is also why Putin puts so much effort into screaming about his magic super weapons that are unstoppable, their conventional military is rotting).

Could China one day be a naval enemy? Sure. At some point in the next 20 years there could be a naval conflict near Chinese territory. The US isn't winning that near-shore conflict short of going to a WW2 level output of ships. The dumbest thing the US could do from a navy perspective is get into a naval conflict with China close to their shores 10-20 years from now. It wouldn't matter how well trained the officers are, it's an inherently losing position.

I find this hilarious in the context of the incident,

Who would win: the greatest navel power on earth operating a highly sophisticated and technologically advanced destroyer, or one container ship?

Just because there isn't an enemy now doesn't mean that you can just forgo training. They shouldn't sink to a lowest common denominator, but rather strive for a higher standard. They're hardly in top shape according to the report

It's a good thing the US is still friendly with Europe. Everything I've read about their (admittedly much smaller) navies is that they're far more professional and better run, and look at the Americans as unprofessional and even dangerous when they have to do training exercises with them.

Of course, this shouldn't be too big a surprise; just take a trip to Europe and see how much better day-to-day stuff is run. Public transit is excellent and much larger in scope, unlike America where the subways are falling apart and Amtrak is a joke. Airports are smoothly run, unlike America where they aren't even paying the security people (TSA) to come to work. Bridges in Europe aren't dilapidated and literally falling down like they are in America.

I wouldn't be so sure about that.

Norway managed to sink one of their own frigates.

https://www.navytimes.com/news/your-navy/2018/11/13/norwegia...

Germany doesn't have anything left to sink.

https://www.rt.com/news/418484-german-navy-ships-shortage/

Japan also has a pretty sizable Navy with over 120 ships.

None of Germany's 6 subs were operational at the beginning of last year. That may have changed since, but the underlying reasons, poor planning and lack of spare parts, are still there. Only 9 of 15 Frigates were operational and the lead of their new class of frigates, the F125, failed sea trials. The Navy subsequently refused to commission the ship. Admittedly, these are not necessarily crew training issues, but crews without operational ships are not likely to maintain a desirable level of combat readiness. These issues aren't just limited to the Navy; ground forces are also in a bad state.

France and the UK are in better shape, but the Royal Navy in particular has holes in its capabilities where the US Navy is expected to fill in. They're regaining some capabilities with their new (and only operational) carrier, but it's not even clear if it has a functional air wing yet as the F-35B's they purchased only began carrier operations this past September. Another carrier is under construction, but it may be awhile before their carrier based naval aviation becomes combat effective.

The remaining European Navies are pretty small and pretty limited in what they can do. They tend to focus on ASW with some surface warfare capabilities, but are again dependent upon one of the larger Navies for air defense.

Japan may well be the most combat effective of the bunch, but that's a completely different theater of operations.

This isn't intended to be a rah-rah, USA forever sort of rant. Everyone, including the US, seem to have let things slip to the extent that combat effectiveness is becoming questionable.

https://nationalinterest.org/blog/buzz/germanys-navy-dead-26...

https://www.dw.com/en/no-more-missions-for-germanys-navy-war...

https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2018/02/20/german-armed-for...

Ship to ship maneuverability and tactics, even? How can you be so sure? Do you think that it's impossible for a US ship to lose a "dogfight" at sea in Asia as tensions escalate? If the lack of training is as bad as they say, I have a hard time imagining them winning one.

They have more Admirals now that ships.

Otherwise if there's a war what are these crews going to be doing? Pissing themselves on the bridge, or have a bottle in one hand and their dick in the other while trying to man their station, possibly while undergoing hard maneuvers?

This seems to be some fundamental failure of crew management. Crews should be allocated in such a way that there's time for toilet breaks.

I can't say I have any experience with the military, but from listening to "Life and Work on HMS Enterprise"[1], they are constantly running realistic exercises (in their case, mostly simulating fires and people overboard, since it's a research vessel).

[1] http://omegataupodcast.net/277-life-and-work-on-hms-enterpri...

But yeah it is a failure of crew management certainly - at very least there should be a solid "relief" procedure that can handle it - and even stable in the long odds of a crewman getting killed out of line of sight by say a glancing hit.

Of course this must be balanced against the fact that her poor performance killed sailors.

Also, the answer to "If she was the boss, why did she tolerate others doing what she can't?" assumes a lot about the boss. Tolerating something boss himself cant do by boss is pretty normal. (Not that I think pee bottles are sign of good management.)

The answer to "If she wasn't the boss, it seems she has a pretty good case for having been subjected to a toxic work environment." is that well, that happen and soldiers tolerate a lot. She might have good reasons not to open that can of worms. It is usually better not to.

However, the officer in charge of the CIC - Natalie Combs - was also female.

In a surprise move during a Tuesday hearing in a Washington Navy Yard courtroom, defense attorneys representing Lt. Natalie Combs held up a new piece of evidence that might exonerate her at her upcoming court-martial trial.

It’s a photograph — a still image captured from digital footage recorded by an aft Vertical Launching System camera mounted on the guided-missile destroyer Fitzgerald on June 17, 2017, seconds after it was speared and spun off the coast of Japan by the hulking ACX Crystal, a Philippine-flagged cargo vessel.

What it reveals is something that hasn’t surfaced in any of the Navy’s publicly-released probes or even a secret military “dual-purpose” investigation obtained by Navy Times and completed 41 days after the tragedy.

It shows a string of lights on the ACX Crystal that Coast Guard Lt. Cmdr. Jeff Janaro — an attorney who also commanded vessels at sea — called an “improper lighting configuration,” one that appeared to the defense team to be “recklessly unlawful.”

That’s important because if the ACX Crystal’s lamps were positioned incorrectly, that alignment might’ve fooled the watchstanders on the Fitz’s bridge who were trying to track multiple vessels in one of the world’s busiest maritime superhighways, piecing together a picture of the night through radar readings and visual clues.

Ship travel is governed by the “rules of the road,” a set of guidelines regarding speed, lookouts and other best practices to avoid collisions. Those bylaws include how lights are configured on ships.

The green lights on the side of a vessel should be visible from three miles away, six miles for the bright white lights running from bow to stern.

“This picture tells us it didn’t look right,” Janaro told Navy judge Cmdr. Arthur Gaston. “We think the Crystal was very negligent in this matter.”

Few people have seen the image — maybe only a handful of attorneys in Washington, Lt. Combs and Navy Times — but it “might be worth a thousand words,” as Gaston put it.

It’s unclear if even the Coast Guard investigators working on a National Transportation Safety Board probe into the Fitzgerald collision have a copy of it.

n the night of the collision, Combs never would’ve seen the lights of the ACX Crystal with her own eyes. She was in charge of the Fitz’s electronic nerve center below the bridge, what’s called the Combat Information Center, or "CIC.'

Her team was supposed to use advanced sensors like the Arleigh Burke-class destroyer’s SPS-67 radar to track vessels near the Fitz and relay what they detected to the watchstanders on the bridge.

But the secret probe helmed by Rear Adm. Brian Fort determined that Combs' CIC had "zero communication” with the bridge team before the Crystal loomed seemingly out of nowhere to ram the Fitz’s starboard hull.

Although listed as operational, the CIC’s SPS-67 system actually had fallen into a “degraded status,” according to Fort’s report. Some CIC sailors didn’t appear to know how to use the equipment — much of it in various states of disrepair — and the room itself was heaped in garbage, human waste and exercise equipment.

In the aftermath of the ACX Crystal collision, Fort found a stack of abandoned forms where Combs had been sitting.

“She was most likely consumed and distracted by a review of Operations Department paperwork for the three and a half hours of her watch prior to the collision,” he wrote.

Fort determined that Combs was derelict in her CIC duties, but an investigating officer assigned to her initial Article 32 hearing, Cmdr. Anthony Johnson, sifted through the same evidence and recommended that she skip court-martial proceedings and go instead to a Navy board of inquiry to determine if she should remain on duty.

Adm. James Caldwell, the convening authority in her case, disregarded Johnson and charged Combs with dereliction of duty that negligently resulted in the death of fellow sailors and the negligent and improper hazarding of a vessel.

To Janaro and star military defense attorney David Sheldon, the photo casts into doubt the first charge.

It relies on a “but for” clause — but for Combs' derelict leadership, the mishap would not have occurred. They believe that the ACX Crystal shouldered much of the blame for the accident, and bad Navy practices set her up to fail.

They pointed to the recent settlement between the U.S. Department of Justice and Olympic Steamship Company, S.A., Panama, the owners of the ACX Crystal.

They’re forking over $26.7 million to the United States.

While finding plenty of fault with Combs and other Americans on the Fitzgerald for the collision, Fort’s report also takes aim at the crew of the ACX Crystal, in particular an unnamed second officer.

Among a long list of failures listed in the Fort report, that officer “failed to maintain a proper lookout so as to make a full appraisal of the risk of collision” with the Fitzgerald, "failed to determine if a risk of collision with FTZ existed by using all available means” and “he failed to appreciate, by radar or visual observation, that FTZ was on a constant bearing with a decreasing range, which observation would have led him to deem risk of collision to exist.”

Sheldon and Janaro want to interview two Filipino officers from the ACX Crystal about their vessel’s lights captured in the photo, plus the many other problems raised in Fort’s report.

The attorneys have a series of transcripts from previous interviews the officers did, but their words are marked “indiscernible” 203 times.

The defense team thinks their testimony might free Combs.

Military prosecutor Lt. Cmdr. Kate Shovlin told Gaston that Naval Criminal Investigative Service made a good faith effort to talk to the men, but they avoided the agent who visited their homes and workplace.

Their family members also told NCIS the ACX Crystal crewmen wouldn’t cooperate with American investigators.

Combs' defense team wants to trigger a treaty between Washington and Manila that would prod authorities in the Philippines to compel the ACX Crystal’s officers to testify, but that threatens to push the court-martial trial well past its slated late May opening.

That’s also around the time the highly-anticipated NTSB probe is expected to be released.

We are in the context of CIC being full of bottles of pee and crew members who didn’t know how to use radar controls.

The personal mistrust may mean various things, but likely means something like "they rarely provided something useful and last x times I passed information it caused unnecessary complications, slowdowns and problems". The perception may be true of false of course, may be caused by technical incompetence or by people causing dramas for no reason or whatever. It is just something common in large badly managed groups where you cant rely on other people.

According to most of the ex-Navy people I've met, it's high school part 2. None of them had been officers, and I'm a tiny bit surprised it extends to the officer class, but only a tiny bit.