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

https://www.navytimes.com/news/your-navy/2019/01/14/worse-than-you-thought-inside-the-secret-fitzgerald-probe-the-navy-doesnt-want-you-to-read/#.XEFOvOop_SM.twitter

by rmason • 8 years ago

157 128 8 years ago

navytimes.com

nowarninglabel• 8 years ago

They should get Captain Marquet of "Turn the Ship Around!" to go get them ship shape. The book has some really good lessons on how shifting leadership style and culture can produce dramatically better results.

doodliego• 8 years ago

After reading the article, no, the Navy probably does not need more overpaid business consultants with powerpoints full of easy answers. It needs to do something about inexperienced, undertrained, overworked crews in its ships.

The CO and XO shouldn't be sleeping while their ship is crossing a busy sealane full of behemoth freighters driving on autopilot in the dark.

cjcenizal• 8 years ago

The author of the book commanded a US Navy nuclear sub. At the time he assumed command, it was one of the worst performing subs in the fleet. The book is about the organizational and management lessons he learned as he transformed it into a top performing sub.

PhantomGremlin• 8 years ago

The CO and XO shouldn't be sleeping while their ship is crossing a busy sealane

Why aren't these people "the best of the best", to quote the trite line from Top Gun?

According to Wikipedia, the US Navy has 282 deployable combat vessels. It employs a total of 325,673 active duty personnel plus 270,265 civilian employees.

So out of those 600,000 people, they can't find a few thousand who are willing, able, and capable of commanding a destroyer? The US Naval Academy alone graduates 1000 people a year. Where do they all go? What do they all do?

Really? I'm serious. My understanding is that the absolutely most prestigious military assignments are in "command" positions. Those assignments are the key to climbing the promotion ladder.

This whole thing makes no sense to me.

rectang2• 8 years ago

The CO and XO shouldn't be sleeping

The Navy deliberately understaffs their vessels to meet unrealistic budgets. Overwork, fatigue, mistakes, and catastrophe are the inevitable consequence.

The only thing more predictable is the scapegoating of ship personnel and the untouchability of those who create the conditions which guarantee eventual disaster.

dctoedt3• 8 years ago

The CO and XO shouldn't be sleeping while their ship is crossing a busy sealane full of behemoth freighters driving on autopilot in the dark.

That was certainly how it worked 40 years ago aboard the USS Enterprise (the aircraft carrier, not the starship). Day or night, the CO would always come to the bridge whenever another ship got to within about two- to four miles and was predicted to come within one mile. And in traffic, e.g., transiting the Strait of Malacca, the skipper would be on the bridge pretty much continuously. (Not the XO; his full-time job was basically running the ship's internal operations.)

gpm• 8 years ago

The CO and XO shouldn't be sleeping ...

If the CO and XO are so critical that the ship needs one of them during normal operations I think there is a bigger problem.

What happens in a conflict that lasts more than 24 hours? They alternate schedules and just don't talk to eachother much?

What happens if one of them is incapacitated? The ship is ineffective for half of every day?

myrandomcomment• 8 years ago

Great book, great lessons on leadership. I gave a copy to my CEO and ask my team read it. Simple summary, enable the people below to make the call and enable and emporwer them to want to own it.

Animats• 8 years ago

"It's Your Ship"[1] is more directly applicable. That's by a captain who turned around a troubled US Navy surface warship.

I'm amazed that serving naval officers flunked a quiz on the Rules of the Road, and even more amazed that the XO of the ship refused to take such a quiz. That's so basic. It's the driver's handbook for ships. See rules 11-19, which are about How Not To Run Into Other Ships. These are simple right of way rules. There's a one-page summary in "Power Boating for Dummies."[3] That anyone on the bridge of a US Navy vessel would not know these is terrifying. That the Navy brass tried to cover that up is worse.

[1] https://www.amazon.com/Its-Your-Ship-Management-Techniques-e...

[2] https://www.navcen.uscg.gov/pdf/navRules/navrules.pdf

[3] https://www.dummies.com/sports/following-right-of-way-boatin...

mattmanser• 8 years ago

To be fair on the captain, he was facing a court-martial, why would you willingly give them more rope?

GeekyBear• 8 years ago

According to retired officers, the issue stems from training cuts.

For nearly 30 years, all new surface warfare officers spent their first six months in uniform at the Surface Warfare Officer’s School in Newport, Rhode Island, learning the theory behind driving ships and leading sailors as division officers.

But that changed in 2003. The Navy decided to eliminate the “SWOS Basic” school and simply send surface fleet officers out to sea to learn on the job. The Navy did that mainly to save money, and the fleet has suffered severely for it, said retired Cmdr. Kurt Lippold.

“The Navy has cut training as a budgetary device and they have done it at the expense of our ability to operate safely at sea,” said Lippold, who commanded the destroyer Cole in 2000 when it was attacked by terrorists in Yemen.

https://www.navytimes.com/news/your-navy/2017/08/27/navy-swo...

jacobush2• 8 years ago

Ok, I don't like these bastards who attacked Cole, but how can they be terrorist? They attacked a military target. Is it because they masqueraded as civilians - didn't follow the laws of war?

cf141q53252• 8 years ago

They were part of a group that is classified as a terrorist organization.

dmurray3• 8 years ago

The word "terrorist" has been reappropriated, possibly because "guerilla warfare", "asymmetric warfare" etc sound too glamorous. In the US it mostly means any military action by non-state actors against the US and its allies.

iooi• 8 years ago

It's pretty simple. Read the definition of terrorism under U.S Law [1]. Keep in mind, while it was a military target, they were not in a state of war. The goal of al Qaeda with this bombing was to coerce the U.S. to leave the peninsula.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Terrorism#U.S._law

Shivetya• 8 years ago

The Navy is still centered around too many overly expensive to build and maintain carrier groups. They had their glory days but tactics pretty force them into only being useful against smaller opponents. They do sure look pretty. Part of this inter service rivalry but part is just its too hard to give up what you are used too. However there was both traction in moving away from that[1] and the old guard coming back for more[2].

They are expensive to put together, twenty billion to thirty billion per task force and hundreds of millions per year just in crew salaries to run.

[1] https://www.defensenews.com/naval/2019/01/15/the-us-navy-mov... [2] https://www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-defense-carriers/u-s-...

dba7dba5• 8 years ago

The probe exposes how personal distrust led the officer of the deck, Lt. j.g. Sarah Coppock, to avoid communicating with the destroyer’s electronic nerve center — the combat information center, or CIC — while the Fitzgerald tried to cross a shipping superhighway.

I was shocked to read above. You don't personally trust someone or people in CIC so you just don't communicate with CIC when you are crossing the most congested patch of ocean on the planet?

What is this? High school??

chopin2• 8 years ago

I was more shocked of the pee-filled bottles on the bridge. This hints to deep cultural problems being present and an utterly incompetent upper management.

kittiepryde2• 8 years ago

That's pretty normal. You get people on watch for 4 to 6 hours at a time. They can't leave. The bottle is sometimes the only option.

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.

jessaustin9• 8 years ago

The officer of the deck is named "Sarah". How does a woman urinate in bottles in a public work setting? If she was the boss, why did she tolerate others doing what she can't? If she wasn't the boss, it seems she has a pretty good case for having been subjected to a toxic work environment.

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

austincheney2• 8 years ago

Distrust of management is extremely common. I cannot stress enough just how common it is both in the military and the corporate world or how potentially toxic this is. Most people outside of management are absolutely incapable of seeing it, even when its excessively rampant, because they don't recognize the symptoms. The common reasons for not recognizing such symptoms, even when immediately apparent and excessive, are due to: self-centered desires, incompetence, and perceptions of hostility.

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.

gaius2• 8 years ago

Most people outside of management are absolutely incapable of seeing it

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

watwut4• 8 years ago

That sort of thing happen in companies a lot. It is certainly not something limited to high school - where it actually happen less as analogical situation never arises.

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.

sevensor• 8 years ago

What is this? High school??

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.

odn86• 8 years ago

Surface Warfare Officers eat their own. It's a constant game to make sure you don't get passed over for promotion.

jessaustin9• 8 years ago

Is "combat information" necessary in order to navigate? Most civilian vessels would not have a CIC. Some vessels don't even have lots of the navigational electronics that container ships have, yet are still safely piloted on the ocean.

dba7dba5• 8 years ago

Since 2015, the Fitz had lacked a quartermaster chief petty officer, a crucial leader who helps safely navigate a warship and trains its sailors — a shortcoming known to both the destroyer’s squadron and Navy officials in the United States, Fort wrote.

The accident took place on June 17, 2017. So for 2 - 3 years, they couldn't find a chief petty officer to accept the assignment?

I wonder, were potential chief petty officers avoiding the ship knowing it was a bad assignment, with crew that had low morale and not enough training?

ams61102• 8 years ago

Couldn't "find" one? Wouldn't they just order someone to fill the position? I didn't realize that postings in the Navy were optional assignments. Maybe they are for enlisted crew positions?

JaimeThompson• 8 years ago

Ordering people to take such positions in peace time is a good way to stop them from reenlisting.

magduf4• 8 years ago

Interesting how the Navy blames the sailors for the accident, but they couldn't even find someone to fill this position that's seemingly so necessary to avoid accidents like this in the first place.

It reminds me of companies failing in the marketplace and blaming their employees instead of their upper management.

boomboomsubban2• 8 years ago

So they're publishing a Navy report on the issue, they withheld publishing until the Pentagon gave them the OK, and the report seems to place as much blame as possible on the sailors. But it's not blatant propaganda because the Navy really doesn't want this public!

If the Navy feels understaffed and overworked, they can stop illegally blockading countries.

dba7dba5• 8 years ago

Umm, the Navy has do what they are told, even if they feel they don't have enough people/equipment.

Also, which countries is US actively blockading illegally?

eesmith• 8 years ago

I think the OP refers to the (de facto) blockade of Yemen - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blockade_of_Yemen .

Quoting from that link, "The United States had joined the blockade in October 2016" and "According to the international law of naval blockade the naval measures conducted by the coalition led by Saudi Arabia do not amount to a naval blockade in the legal sense" and "Due to the devastating famine in Yemen and supply shortage of essetinal goods, which are caused by the enforcement measures, the naval operations off the coast of Yemen are criticized as a violation of international humanitarian law."

boomboomsubban2• 8 years ago

Umm, the Navy has do what they are told, even if they feel they don't have enough people/equipment.

They are supposed to require a deceleration of war going through Congress, but that has largely been circumvented. They are not just some puppet, the ballooning budget shows their input is considered. If there were some sense that the Navy was resisting the current state of affairs, I'd be more sympathetic.

And the other poster is correct, I was considering the Yemen blockade. Any pretense of legality requires deliberately bending the description of what's taking place, or acknowledging that the US has made itself exempt from prosecution for war crimes.

jayalpha• 8 years ago

Unfortunately, an urban legend:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lighthouse_and_naval_vessel_ur...

naval-gazer• 8 years ago

Root causes for this mess:

* Navy culture where chronic sleep deprivation is used as substitute for battlefield heroics. Navy aviators have enough sleep scheduled. Surface Navy has not seen battle for ages. Being tired is a way to show you are pushing it to the limit. Everybody being so tired that they microsleep in the bridge is the standard condition. People in the bridge start teleporting from one place to another because you keep falling asleep constantly. Driving a car that tired is not allowed, but it's OK in the Navy.

* Lack of basic seamanship skills and experience. Officers are rotated inside the ship and outside the ship to completely unrelated posts. They learn basics of everything but master nothing. Navy officers have less experience in basic ship driving than anyone in the merchant fleet. Other navies specialize officers for different areas. Training is cut because there is no time for it, but that's not the core reason. You would need less training with more specialization.

* 7th fleet leadership continues to be a corrupt mess. Most of the ongoing bad stuff related to Navy happens in the 7th. Fat Leonard scandal, collisions...

cf141q53252• 8 years ago

To the culture of deliberate sleep deprivation, the medical profession had(?) something similar which resulted in the Libby Zion Law .

walrus01• 8 years ago

The most amazing things to me is that all of the non-military vessels in the area at the time were transmitting AIS. Isn't a warship supposed to be able to navigate in a combat environment, with the presence of jammers, based only on its radar data?

Having precise AIS data flowing in for every ship in the area is navigating on "easy mode".

TecoAndJix• 8 years ago

I was stationed on a Destroyer from 2015-2017 and subsequently deployed with them as an IT in the radio shack. CIC looks like something out of a movie (and really the only part of the ship that does) - it's very dark, has lots of glowing monitors covered in charts, surveillance feeds, and a whole lot of people. In the radio shack, we worked 12 on, 12 off, 7 days a week. I cannot remember CIC's watch rotation exactly but it was similar. On that deployment CIC had one sailor who went up to captain's mast for falling asleep at his station. I remember emphasising with him - sitting in a chair, in the dark, for hours on end while monitoring a feed that never changes. That being said, it was our only incident in CIC and our captain "Hammerin Hank" took care of the incident appropriately. There are several things in this article id like to speak on:

He saw kettlebells on the floor and bottles filled with pee.

Peeing in bottles is something i have only heard of engineering doing - in engineering spaces. You will get labeled a nasty-mothafucka if anyone catches you regardless. To fill a bottle in CIC (with the exception of a few curtained off spaces) would require the complicity of several watchstanders. Where was chief? Where was LT? The kettlebells are really not a big deal - we all would "borrow" things from the gym to get a little pump on watch because there is a LOT of downtime. I can imagine sitting at a CIC station just knocking out some curls to stay awake. We did pull-ups on light fixtures in radio.

Some radar controls didn’t work and he soon discovered crew members who didn’t know how to use them anyway.

HA! Most of the equipment on ships is ancient. Things are ALWAYS breaking. How we treat the topside steel is analogous to how we treat equipment - prime and paint over it! When something breaks you submit a casualty report to let Big Navy know. If you need a part you have to wait to hit port or receive it at-sea replenishment. Troubleshooting consists of tribal knowledge and talking over the IP phone to a shore station. Watchstanders not knowing how to use the equipment is completely UNSAT (there is of course an "A" team and a "B" team on every ship, but the basic knowledge should be there). While there are a lot of useless bodies on a ship, you should not be sitting a watch station unless you have completed your personal qualification standard which needs to be signed off by someone who is qualified. Some of them even require you sit a board and get quizzed. That also being said, i have traded dip for signatures before.

We had this poster in our chow line that talked about when the exception becomes the rule (wish i could find the quote). Basically, all the little "exceptions" you make to the rules start to become normal and then new and junior sailors think these exceptions are actually rule. These all build and build until you are so far from baseline you don't even remember what baseline was. The fitz and mccain no doubt were a result of this phenomenon. Failures on every level from junior enlisted to the Captain. It breaks my heart these sailors lost their life as the result. I really loved my time in the Navy (and miss it!) but the operation tempo in the current climate is just not healthy and i imagine this won't be the last tragedy to happen unless something changes.

curveship• 8 years ago

Thanks for your perspective, very interesting.

I'm really surprised that all it takes to be declared qualified is the signature of someone else who's qualified. That leaves lots of room for slippage and social pressure, like the dip you mention. It also leaves no one specifically responsible for the crew's level of qualification. A cynic might say that was the point of the system: we know this is going to fail, so make sure no one is directly in the line of fire when the shit cannon goes off.

_wp3r2• 8 years ago

There is generally written testing involved, along with a multi-person board/interview that is a direct knowledge test under that inherent stress of face to face.

yyrrll• 8 years ago

Technology problems are also people problems, so I am curious about your opinion of the report's comments on the lack of a quartermaster chief petty officer and a "dysfunctional chief's mess."

And, how could the fleet command be ignorant of the culture problems on this ship?

Seems like those NCO issues should have flagged long-term problems to both the ship's command and to the fleet. I don't understand why they would ignore something like that.

tolien• 8 years ago

We had this poster in our chow line that talked about when the exception becomes the rule (wish i could find the quote).

Sounds like normalisation of deviance [1]. The exception happens so many times that it becomes normal, then the exception to that normal and before you know it you’re way outside the original normal and you’ve blown up a space shuttle [2].

1: https://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/Professionalism/Diane_Vaughan_...

2: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Space_Shuttle_Challenger_disas...

fixermark3• 8 years ago

The boredom is an interesting risk factor, and I'm wondering what could be done to address it.

For software, I'm familiar with a process of intentionally designing and executing a safe breakage as a sort of drill to keep people's heads in the game---no better way to find where you accidentally didn't have redundancy than by turning off a system that should have a fallback and seeing what else breaks. Is that practical for CIC, or is there insufficient redundancy in CIC to do something like that safely?

_wp3r2• 8 years ago

I would also add that a paperwork heavy culture around discipline, can lead to all kinds of unwanted behaviors, especially when combined with exception creep. An example from the article was the reference that numerous events occurred that dictated contacting the CO, were the CIC did not. Administrative/Promotion fear is real and can effect behavior.

While I understand the need to honestly record and fit-rep staff. If leaders are not also teachers and if ALL failure has dire consequence, then how do people learn?

You end up with qualification programs and skill sets like there were on this ship. That culture created an environment where questions were taboo.

jessaustin9• 8 years ago

I'm glad that OP changed the title from the goofy "Worse than you thought" that TFA has. As usual, when USA military keeps secrets, a prudent person assumes the absolute worst. This is actually sort of good news, in that we can probably determine at this point that there wasn't a meth-fueled sex orgy going on the bridge at the time of the collision. (although, those urine bottles...) Now as for the ongoing binge at 7th fleet HQ, that probably continues unabated...

Navy Times should hold its readers in higher esteem. Of course we assumed the worst.

fixermark3• 8 years ago

It's useful to remember that the first instance of the government using "State Secrets" as a defense to withhold evidence was in a civil trial about culpability in the deaths of contractors that were testing Cold War equipment...

... and when the relevant documents were declassified, it was revealed that the secret the government was hiding was that test was run on a plane with a grossly-substandard maintenance history.

https://www.thisamericanlife.org/383/origin-story/act-two-0

cmurf• 8 years ago

In a related article at navytimes.com published two days earlier, the Panamanian owners of the other ship involved, have agreed to pay the U.S. government ~$27 million in a settlement. https://www.navytimes.com/news/your-navy/2019/01/11/ship-own...

Naturally we're not supposed to infer “any liability, negligence, breach of duty, or wrongdoing” by either party as a result of such a settlement.

jessaustin9• 8 years ago

That seems likely to be more related to specifics of law of the controlling jurisdiction than to anything else. I don't blame the Panamanians or their insurance company for wanting to just put this all behind them. Collisions with USN are sort of like "Acts of God" anyway...

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

Related Stories