Problems plagued U.S. Navy destroyer Fitzgerald before fatal collision

No, I meant non-state. The US doesn't generally use the T-word for, say, Russia's actions in Crimea or in Syria. Being opposed to US interests is necessary but not sufficient to make you a terrorist in this definition.

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 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.

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.

The question isn't why one person is asleep, it's why there's nobody filling the role.

1. IN WW2, US Navy admirals learned painful lessons to trust captains who manage subordinates well, not the superiors.

When US was suddenly pulled into WW2, the submarines of US navy in WW2 did not achieve much at beginning. For months, US navy submarines failed to sink enemy ships. One big factor was faulty torpedoes. US navy had recently finished developing a new type of torpedo with a magnetic detonator. It was supposed to be a very effective weapon. But due to budget restrictions before WW2 (in the Great Depression), not enough testing was done. If I recall correctly, after spending the precious budget to develop a new type of weapon, not one complete torpedo with live warhead was actually fired in a realistic manner. But I digress.

The real reason US submarines did not achieve much initially at beginning of WW2 in the Pacific theater was the captains on the submarines. A captain in a WW2 submarine disproportionately influences how well or badly the submarine's crew performed. The captain's aggressiveness, skill, carelessness, excessive cautiousness, and etc all directly determined what the crew in the submarine achieved. When the US submarines in Pacific theater finally began to sink Japanese ships at a satisfactory level, it was discovered not a single (or very few) US Navy captain who had reached the rank before the war was still in command of a US submarine. They had failed to achieve results, and were replaced with proven captains who knew how to actually manage the crew below him on the submarine, not manage the higher officers in officers' club.

Basically, before WW2, a US navy officer who was competent enough, projected image fit for a captain, AND managed his superiors well got the promotion. Well ok, previous statement is my own assumption. But the fact is when a shooting war began, it was discovered the officers who got command of a submarine prior to the beginning of WW2 couldn't find the enemy or shoot straight when it really mattered.

US navy finally began promoting officers who knew how to manage the crew below him well and had a killer instinct, not the ones with superior social skills. US navy brass learned that the enemy did not care how good a US Navy officer was at self marketing/promoting.

2. My own managers who moved onto bigger firms.

I've been in US tech scene (IT), about 15 years. Of the managers I had during that time, 2 managers (at separate firm/time) who were above me went on to work at globally well known tech/entertainment firms in tech VP roles. I mean really well known firms. Not Google or Facebook but older, established firms. Top of the heap. Because I worked in small companies with these managers, I got to observe them in close proximity.

What I remember the most of them 2 is how incessantly they visited/chatted/hung-out with the CEO. Sure a lot of it was work I'm sure, but I also know it was a lot of befriending, kissing up, using one's social skill. I as a staff member was given slices of their time, but nothing like the attention given to the CEO.

And sure enough, both firms were closed down. Of course a LOT of it was beyond their control. But it also shows they as managers couldn't find the right project to tackle or manage their subordinates effectively so the company could make $ to survive. Well, maybe or maybe not.

But I do know they spent a lot of time and energy befriending the higher-ups above them. And, I trust the hard lessons US Navy admirals in WW2 learned, that were paid for with lives. The lesson that you should avoid those who spend much energy at self promoting, as they don't actually deliver when it matters.

If you don’t believe a warship needs that many personnel on duty, that is different. Most of the crew aren’t there to sail. Cargo ships, for example, have a dozen crew at most. And their duty is to sail the ship from one port to another.

If that also helps politically that is a bonus.

Source: I once talked to some dude who was both important and in a Navy.

And to be sure, it's not quite apples to apples. An aircraft carrier normally spends most of its time in the open sea: To launch and recover aircraft (other than helos and vertical take-off and -landing aircraft), the carrier needs miles and miles of room to steam at high speed into the wind without having to change course for traffic. (If you're steaming into the wind at, say, 30 knots, the aircraft being launched or recovered get a head start in staying above stall speed.) Depending on the circumstances, even in peacetime a carrier might have one or more weapons-loaded aircraft in alert status, ready for launch on comparatively-short notice as a combat air patrol (CAP). When that's the case, the ship would need to be away from traffic, in case it had to quickly turn into the wind to put up a CAP. That's why, except when entering or leaving port, or transiting, carriers usually stay away from highly-trafficked areas.