That ship was therefore not fit for duty. Not that that would take a ship out of service, these days. They're probably all more or less unfit for duty, based on this and other articles about the same incidents.

Former enlisted Navy, decades ago, made three Western Pacific deployments in and around the area of the article's concern. Not a subject matter expert, and probably never was.

There were multiple failures that allowed the situation to get this out of hand. Ideally, she would have had forceful backup from the CIC.

Of course it should go up the chain, it should go as high as the people making the tasking to the ship Captains when they know the ships aren't ready to execute. Blaming the crew in this situation is discounting the factors that force the crew to operate like this.

But she was the CO no? Maybe im wrong but isn't it the CO's job to lead? Not just expect the grunts to step and be a leader?

One thing that jumped out at me was not having a lookout on both bridge wings. Yes, I know the ship was shorthanded, but that's the last place that should take a hit, particularly when navigating through a crowded shipping channel at night. Take someone from somewhere else.

I'm not sure even that is possible, at least not at night in a crowded shipping channel. A lookout under those circumstances should be focused on one field of view, not having to move around.

> teaching someone else while on watch might be marginally possible - if you only had one side of the ship to watch

As I understand it, the person doing the "teaching" was the Junior Officer of the Deck, not a lookout. The JOOD is supposed to be doing multiple things, not be focused on just watching. Her staying on the port side teaching too long was a contributing factor, yes, but only because of the prior decision to accept no lookout assigned to the starboard side to begin with.

As for the culture that contributed to that decision, I'm not sure it was what you suggest as much as a simple failure to understand the impact of not having lookouts on both sides under those conditions. The fact that neither the captain nor the XO were even on the bridge during the transit is another indicator of that, IMO. The article says the captain was tired because of all the training that had been done that day and wasn't on the bridge because of that, but that just means more failure to understand the impact of tradeoffs: if push comes to shove, having more experienced supervision on the bridge during a challenging transit is more important than getting in some more training that day.

Think of any bureaucracy. The training or lack is documented. Paperwork must be done, and the activities backing that paperwork must be done, because that's what gets measured, since the measurers can't be on board to watch.

Sloppy procedures you might get away with, but lack of paperwork gets noticed immediately 100% of the time. And we all want to get promoted, officers especially in the military's "up or out" system.

I read another article, probably here, about this same incident. One of the officers on duty in the CIC was doing her paperwork, in addition/instead of her function at the time. I'm certain this is the norm, because the bureaucracy will be served, and it always expands, never contracts.

I would go so far to say that paperwork will increase even more, directly because of these specific incidents, "to make sure it never happens again."

The incentives are pathologically perverse.

This, I have a feeling that the real root causes of this problem will only get worse in response to the incidents. Based on reading this and a few other articles and posts and no experience at all in any Navy (but some with other bureaucracies), I judge those to be mainly ever-increasing demands on resources and nobody in the chain with the incentives to say "No, we just can't do that", and ever-increasing levels of paperwork, training, documentation, and other types of bureaucratic make-work to ensure that the last dozen Major Problems can't possibly happen again. It's also not very professional or conductive to keeping good people in when you clearly throw those at the bottom under the bus when they're involved in a screwup whose true root causes they had no power to fix.

Yes, and that's a higher-up leadership problem. A military unit's primary purpose is to fight, not to do paperwork. The captain of a ship is supposed to understand that, so he can make the right tradeoffs when he has to, and the higher-up leaders over him are supposed to as well, so they can make sure they incentivize ship captains properly.

Based on one single incident, that's a fair comment. But it wasn't one single incident. There was one other collision, plus, as the article notes, a number of near misses that should have been critically analyzed but weren't. That's a pattern for which leaders up the chain are responsible.