Meanwhile we keep promoting the top generals and politicians who back disastrous wars. Failing upwards only applies to the top tier.
What made you lose faith in the military justice system? Given that they tend to err on the side of allowing war crimes, I would have thought they were overly lenient, and predisposed to a coverup than swift to hand down punishments.
I believe there are some modern sensors that could have helped, but it is questionable that they were installed.
This sound far more like saving face and maybe even incompetence by higher officer ranks.
Given this happened in the 7th, my money is on incompetence.
Which ones?
Why not?
And why wasn't the Navigator dismissed?
If it was an unknown seamount, surely the only way they could have known about it to avoid it would be using active sonar, which would almost certainly be a no-no in the area of sea they were in (active sonar from other vessels can be heard passively quite a bit further than the range the active sonar's being emitted for as it only has to go one way, not there and back like it does with the response from active sonar), along with the fact they'd want to stay hidden.
Maybe it was something else they hit which was more embarrising? (don't know what though)
To copy the same excerpt as a comment below: [...] sound judgement, prudent decision-making and adherence to required procedures in navigation planning, watch team execution and risk management could have prevented the incident [...]
>And why wasn't the Navigator dismissed?
That is probably still in the works. There's more due process involved in firing someone further down the chain of command.
>If it was an unknown seamount, surely the only way they could have known about it to avoid it would be using active sonar
While this is true, you don't need to know where the seamounts are to avoid hitting them. When driving on a highway, I can go very fast because there are not people walking around because the environment is pedestrian-hostile to the point of extinction. Driving through a dense urban core, I have to be much slower because there are people everywhere and I might be in a city where crossing mid-block is normal.
No obvious indicators that happened, and we'll probably never know, but it is a possibility.
So "nothing that should happen to an experienced crew" is a pretty strong statement to make given the domain and known facts.
The thing is, this was almost certainly not that case. If you have bad sounding data (which is a thing that the planners know), then you are not on an interstate.
How many companies have you known who threw engineers under the bus when {insert same quote}?
While at the same time the de facto daily operation procedures throughout the entire company were to constantly ignore or skip those same safeguards?
I'm not saying it's not the crew's fault, but I am saying that a statement like that doesn't prove it's reasonably the crew's fault.
Ultimately though, it's leadership's decision who to place in command or particular roles, so it's their right to reassign or remove commands at whim.
When it comes to knowing the terrain beneath them, even astronauts might have it easier than submariners, according to Shugart.
"Basically, the surface of the moon is better charted than the bottom of the ocean is," he said.
Underwater navigation is not that simple (no GPS).
Plus even if this big underwater mountain were on a map, maps are not perfect.