Jim Garamone at the DoD News
offers the below piece:
WASHINGTON, Nov. 2, 2017 —
The chief of Naval Operations said today that the collisions in the Pacific
that killed 10 sailors aboard the USS Fitzgerald and seven sailors aboard the
USS McCain were entirely preventable, and the service is committed to correcting
the actions that led to the accidents.
Navy Adm. John Richardson
told Pentagon reporters that many aspects combined to cause the accidents,
including lack of training, hubris, sleep deprivation, failures in navigation
and failures in leadership.
The guided missile destroyers
USS Fitzgerald and USS McCain sailed when they shouldn’t have, he said, and
that decision falls on the commanders, who are responsible for conducting risk
assessments.
The demand for ships, or any
military capability, is defined by the security environment, Richardson said,
adding that the Pacific has been a very demanding environment of late.
The demand of the security
environment must match against the resources that can be applied.
“When you have a gap between
those two, that’s risk,” the admiral said. “It's all part of that … day-to-day
assessment. Every commander has to wake up each day at their command level and
say, what has changed in my security environment? What is my new risk posture?
And how am I going to accommodate or mitigate that risk?”
Cultural Change
At some point, commanders
cannot mitigate the risk, and they should say no to the mission, he said, but
the present culture is such that commanders will assess the risk to be
acceptable when it is not.
Changing that culture is one
goal for the chief -- he wants commanders to be honest about assessments and
the shortfalls they have.
While the changes are in the
7th Fleet area, the Navy is on all the seas. “A review of your Navy today shows
that this morning there are 100 ships and 64,000 sailors and Navy civilians who
are deployed,” Richardson said.
“This includes three carrier
strike groups and their embarked air wings, three amphibious readiness groups,
and their embarked Marine expeditionary units, six ballistic missile defense
ships on station, 11 attack submarines, five [ballistic missile submarines],”
he said. “The vast majority of these ships are conducting their missions, some
of them extremely difficult, effectively and professionally, protecting America
from attack, promoting our interests and prosperity, and advocating for the
rules that govern the vast commons from the seafloor, to space, and in
cyberspace.”
The Navy and its sailors are
busy, and they have been integral to the wars America has fought since 9/11. “Recent
experience has shown that if we're not careful, we can become overstretched,
overextended. And if we take our eye off the fundamentals, we become vulnerable
to mistakes at all levels of command,” the admiral said.
To address this, the Navy has
taken some immediate actions, including restoring a deliberative scheduling
process in the 7th Fleet, conducting comprehensive ready-for-sea assessments
for all Japan-based ships, establishing a naval service group in the Western
Pacific -- an independent body in Yokosuka, Japan that will keep their eye on
readiness generation and standards for the Pacific Fleet commander --
establishing and using a near-miss program to understand and disseminate
lessons learned, and establishing policies for surface ships to routinely and
actively transmit on their automatic identification system, Richardson said.
Midterm actions will
emphasize training, establishing comprehensive policies on managing fatigue and
accelerating some of the electronic navigation systems upgrades, he said.
“Long-term actions include
improving individual and team training skills, with an emphasis on basic
seamanship, navigation and integrated bridge equipment; evaluating core officer
and enlisted curricula with an emphasis on fundamentals [and] navigation
skills,” the admiral said.
“I have to say that
fundamental to all of this is how we prepare leaders for command,”
Richardson said. “We will
deeply examine the way that we prepare officers for increasing leadership
challenges, culminating in assumption of command with the capability and the
confidence to form, train and assess warfighting teams on the bridge, in the
combat information center, in engineering and throughout their command.”
Note: In the above U.S. Navy photo taken by Petty Officer 2nd Class Christian Senyk the guided missile destroyer
USS Fitzgerald sits in Dry Dock 4 at Fleet Activities Yokosuka, Japan for
repairs and damage assessments on July 13, 2017
