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 that this important stuff suffered.

I considered myself lucky if I got 5 hours of unbroken sleep a night while at sea, and most of the people I worked with were the same way. Walking around functionally drunk doesn't lend itself to good problem solving skills. Do you know after these incidences there was massive effort to train people about the importance of sleep? Guess what, this mandatory training forced people to interrupt their sleep to attend.

All in all 7th fleet suffers badly from undermanning based on the operational requirements. Ask anybody. AMA I guess.

Personally, I'd say that if there's so much work to do that between work and eating everyone is up for 19 hours, then you're undercrewed.

But wait! According to the 3M Navy planned maintenance system you have a spot-check with the Captain in the middle of your 7 hours off. Too bad. But wait! The XO has recently been displeased with the cleanliness level of the ship, so as a result during sweepers all people not on watch have to be sweeping the passageway. Too bad. But wait! The berthing has been dirty lately so when your people are supposed to be sleeping they are being woken up by the cleaning. Too bad. But wait! Half the team is on watch, and conducting flight operations requires us to realign a vital system on the ship. Too bad, looks like the people who are supposed to be sleeping are going to be woken up. But wait! We have to have a division-wide meeting and training for reason X, Y, and Z. Ideally you would schedule this at watch turnover but if it's something involved we can have our watchstanders being distracted so just do it in your offtime.

You get the idea.

It is pretty silly that they didn't seem to realize that the radar wasn't tuned correctly. I wasn't a surface watchstander so I can't comment on the radar aspect in more detail. Normally inputs are taken from a variety of sensors, not just one busted radar.

Repeat every 3-8 weeks randomly with gaps of 6 months every 2-3 years:

    2 hours of leaving port

    1-3 weeks later: 2 hours of entering port

In a main shipping channel near a busy port? Very common.

> It's hard for me to understand how they didn't realize they weren't getting useful data from that radar and switch their primary navigation driver to the other radars, lookouts, the commercial position broadcasting system, or the infrared camera, all of which seemingly worked.

Or the old standby, the Mark One eyeball. As I commented elsewhere upthread, the thing that jumped out at me was not having a lookout on both bridge wings (port and starboard). Even with a ship that's shorthanded, that's the last place you should give up personnel, especially when navigating in a crowded shipping channel at night. They should have made up the shortfall from somewhere else.

Subs are air conditioned, so they can stand either 6 and 6s or less commonly 6 and 12s. Their lives are generally worse in every way. Except they all like smelling each other farts and sharing beds, so it works out.

But I doubt that the culture described in TFA, and this thread evolved in any way but organically.

It's their job to make sure the U.S. military is functioning well, and they're apparently not doing it.

Senior military officers self-select for being the kind of people who say they can do it. The system deselects people who say it can't be done.

Keep going and going until disaster hits to make everything reset; traditionally, a big war does this. At that point, people do start saying when things can't be done and it gets very hard to sweep failure under the rug when it involves being occupied by foreign powers and people's children never coming home.

I think it's tough but doable to sustain it at the 100% level, but that would require a whole overhaul of the way the Navy does business.

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 Fleet commander as “the crew”, you are wrong.

The cluster of 7th Fleet incidents (the Antietam grounding and the Fitzgerald and McCain collisions) resulted in at least the dismissal of the 7th Fleet commander, the Task Force 70 commander, and the Destroyer Squadron 15 commander, and the early retirement of the head of Naval Surface Forces.

At least some heads rolled for it. But based on what I'm reading here, the problem is systemic.

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.

One of the decisions not practically available to the captain is to stay in port because he declares his ship not ready.

If a crash happens, like it did, he's legally responsible and his career ends.

But if he declares his ship unfit, then he's also declaring himself unfit, because he didn't ensure that his ship was ready. And under the "operational pace" that's been described in all the articles about these incidents, you can easily imagine the unspoken order that "you will not take your ship out of service." Even though that also is his legal responsibility, if appropriate.

We've all seen or experienced "get it done, just don't tell me how you do it."

My assumption is if all ships in the 7th fleet took themselves offline until training and resources were merely acceptable, there'd be no 7th fleet.

And we're not even at effing war! At least not in the Western Pacific. Imagine the shitshow that will be a shooting war in the Western Pacific.

It's on the leadership above the captain to back him up if he declares the ship unfit - or unable to get off-ship support to make it fit. Having a culture where you can't "stop the line", to borrow a Toyota process term, for serious problems - will lead to serious problems accumulating.

This is good to hear, thank you! I'm glad that accountability for these kinds of systemic problems doesn't stop at the captain's chair.

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.

The navy as a whole might want to save money, but the parts that make it up want to spend as much money as possible; if they don't, their budget will get cut since they don't "need" the resources allocated to them.

What people sometimes forget about crude Russian engineering is that bubblegum and toothpicks are enough to get the thing operational.

Simplicity was always the Russian priority because even in the Soviet days they were broke, and even if they had the money to buy parts getting them to a frozen or muddy air(literal)field in the middle of the middle of nowhere was a feat in itself.

The US military-industrial complex has functionally unlimited resources, so the things they build require unlimited resources to operate and function.

Armies are in a boom and bust cycle. When the last war is over they lose their funding and priority over other stuff. Until the next war begins.

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.

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.

1. Toner not in order system.

2. Previous orders of toner found to be incompatible with printer.

etc.

"Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity"

For instance, "Oops I accidentally forgot my briefcase full of classified documents on the bus" is as old as spycraft itself.

"I'm sorry sir, I kicked in your front door and started looking for cash and valuables because I was drunk and thought it was my house! I made a huge mistake!"

The reality is that big military bureaucracy is among the dumbest of organizations and is capable of feats of illogic almost impossible to appreciate.

Would it be ok for me to say that Theranos failed because of stupidity because halons razor? All i know is the company failed and i don't have time to read any articles so aren't i justified in saying it was stupidity not malice?

So many people are involved in the decision making process it’s nearly impossible to make a decision about anything. When I hear speculation about a conspiracy involving printer toner in Iraq, that sounds like nonsense without evidence.

Theranos is the opposite. A naive young founder pretending to be the reincarnation of Steve Jobs with a manipulative guru/mentor/lover pulling the strings is like a Petri dish for corruption.

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.

In fact it's often wise to act as if one sees stupidity, even when one suspects malice. In that way one may tempt the malicious into overstepping. But HR doesn't say anything about actions, only about attributions.

And agree with your point.

My question was more rhetorical :)

You know what DARPA should be doing? Instead of trying to make 'smart bullets' maybe they should consider that complexity and security of IT is a goddam problem and support products instead of just technology.

Someone to make a version of Linux, hardended/simplified it, and then did the same for a few other pieces (i.e. networking gear) and then made 'mil grade' versions of a bunch of things.

And then teach every single member of the military how to do basic stuff, i.e. 'know their computer'. Super basic 'MILINUX' skills, so that weapons systems techs could at least fathom what on earth is wrong with their thing and possibly fix it.

Same with mail.

There is no reason in 2018 that e-mail can't be durable and available for relatively low cost in some system.

Also consider now that there should be a lot more IT dudes in the forces.

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 would be better to receive regular software updates, but in their absence the system shouldn't just shit the bed.

No, it really isn't. For two decades all across the world people have kept Outlook running well enough to function in all sorts of scenarios, including those more difficult than a military ship at sea.

It's not like Thunderbird and Alpine are magically immune to having corrupted data stores and invalid configurations. This is entirely due to lack of proper maintenance.

And yes, postfix or Exim or qmail, once set up, in a fixed configuration like boat only email, could easily run for decades automatically.

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.