Is Your Ship Safe? Help Us Find Out Whether Navy Reforms… — ProPublica
▻https://www.propublica.org/getinvolved/is-your-ship-safe-navy-fleet-reforms
The Navy promised to implement reforms in the wake of two deadly 2017 crashes. We’re trying to find out how it’s doing — and we need to hear from sailors in all six of the numbered fleets that patrol the world’s oceans.
#merci !
intéressant de voir combien #ProPublica obtiendra de réponses et lesquelles. Le rapport de l’Amiral Fort, sorti la semaine dernière, laisse voir (au moins) certaines des unités dans un état véritablement désastreux…
Et, dans la série : TVB vs rien ne bouge, cet article d’hier sur ProPublica :
An Admiral Told a Senator Most Navy Reforms Were… — ProPublica
▻https://www.propublica.org/article/admiral-bill-moran-navy-reforms
Adm. Bill Moran told ProPublica this week that none of the promised reforms had been completed, but that work had started on the pledges.
Sen. Angus King wanted some straight answers. At a Feb. 12 hearing of a panel of the Senate Armed Services Committee, he expressed alarm over recent revelations concerning two deadly collisions of Navy ships in the Pacific in 2017. King, a Maine independent, declared the accidents avoidable and questioned the Navy’s commitment to fixing the problems that had helped cause them. Frustrated, King challenged a top Navy leader to come clean.
“I want real numbers. I don’t want general ‘We’re working on staffing’ or ‘We’re working on more training,’ because these were avoidable tragedies,” King told Adm. Philip Davidson, the top military commander in the Pacific. “I would like to see specific responses from the Navy. Not promises and not good feelings.”
Nine days later, Davidson sought to reassure King, who while an independent caucuses with Democrats, that his worry and frustration were unwarranted. In a letter dated Feb. 21, Davidson told King the Navy counted as “complete” 91 of the more than 100 reforms it had promised to make in the months after 17 sailors died in back-to-back crashes with civilian ships in the summer of 2017.
It is a claim directly contradicted by Adm. Bill Moran, the No. 2 man in charge of the Navy. Moran told ProPublica this week that, in fact, none of the promised reforms had been completed. Moran said work had started on 91 of what he said were 103 pledges to, among other things, provide more sailors to under-manned ships in Japan and stop ships from sailing without complete certifications regarding their navigation and war-fighting abilities — both issues in the two 2017 deadly collisions.
“It doesn’t happen overnight,” Moran said of the reforms.
ProPublica contacted both the Navy and King’s office to inquire about the discrepancy. A spokesman for the Navy said it had “implemented” 91 of its many reforms, pledges that included more sailors for its ships, fixes for its equipment and ending the practice of forcing ships out to sea before they were ready. The spokesman said “implemented” meant “corrective actions, plans or policies are in place.” But they are not yet completed, the spokesman said, correcting Davidson’s claim.
“Many of these recommendations will take time to fully assess their completeness. So even though they may be fully implemented, they won’t be considered complete … until measurable outcomes are achieved,” the spokesman said. “We are not concerned with actions taken but rather on outcomes achieved, and while significant improvements have been made, we are urgently focused on how we can do things better.”
The spokesman said the Navy planned to update its response to King and the Armed Services Committee.
The Navy released a breakdown of the status of every reform Wednesday evening. ProPublica has asked sailors to weigh in on the changes they have seen.
Davidson’s letter to King was first reported on the U.S. Naval Institute’s news website, which posted a copy.
les déclarations de l’amiral Moran à ProPublica, reprises sur gCaptain. Et autres,…
Top US Navy Admiral Says « None Of The Promised Reforms Are Complete » – gCaptain
▻https://gcaptain.com/top-us-navy-admiral-says-none-of-the-promised-reforms-are-complete
Nine days later, Davidson sought to reassure [Sen. Angus] King [Maine, independent], who while an independent caucuses with Democrats, that his worry and frustration were unwarranted. In a letter dated Feb. 21, Davidson told King the Navy counted as “complete” 91 of the more than 100 reforms it had promised to make in the months after 17 sailors died in back-to-back crashes with civilian ships in the summer of 2017.
It is a claim directly contradicted by Adm. Bill Moran, the No. 2 man in charge of the Navy. Moran told ProPublica this week that, in fact, none of the promised reforms had been completed. Moran said work had started on 91 of what he said were 103 pledges to, among other things, provide more sailors to under-manned ships in Japan and stop ships from sailing without complete certifications regarding their navigation and war-fighting abilities — both issues in the two 2017 deadly collisions.
[…]
At the hearing, Davidson defended the Navy by noting that the vast majority of ships were not crashing, a remark that drew widespread derision.
ProPublica also reported that after the crashes, in a talk to ship commanders and other officers, Davidson was asked whether they would be able to push back against orders to sail if they believed their ships were not ready.
Davidson, according to an admiral inside the theater, responded with anger.
“If you can’t take your ships to sea and accomplish the mission with the resources you have,” he said, “then we’ll find someone who will.”
The remark spread across the Navy, stoking fears among commanders about honestly communicating unsafe conditions for fear of losing their jobs.
Davidson’s spokesman told ProPublica that he only meant to say that if ships were not fit to sail, they would be replaced by other ships that were.
#USS_Fitzgerald : le rapport de l’Amiral Fort sur la collision de juin 2017, produit moins de 6 semaines après l’événement et resté secret, fuite dans le Navy Times depuis le 14 janvier. Une succession d’articles décrit une situation catastrophique : des marins non formés, ne sachant pas utiliser les équipements, les équipements qui dysfonctionnent et sont bricolés ou carrément ignorés, absence de communication et de confiance entre les équipes, commandement dépassé dont un commandant absent de la passerelle…
Plusieurs articles, tous aussi effrayants les uns que les autres…
The ghost in the Fitz’s machine : why a doomed warship’s crew never saw the vessel that hit it
▻https://www.navytimes.com/news/your-navy/2019/01/14/the-ghost-in-the-fitzs-machine-why-a-doomed-warships-crew-never-saw-the-v
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When Navy Rear Adm. Brian Fort stepped aboard the guided-missile destroyer Fitzgerald in the aftermath of the 2017 collision with a commercial cargo ship, everything was off.
Any warship would seem a little off after a catastrophe that claimed the lives of seven sailors, but this was different.
“It didn’t look right, smell right, sound right,” Fort said during a hearing last year for a Fitzgerald officer facing court-martial in the wake of the June 17, 2017, disaster.
After gazing at the gash in the hull through which gushed the seawater that drowned the Fitz’s dead, Fort and his team of investigators walked to the destroyer’s electronic nerve center, the combat information center everyone calls the “CIC.”
It hadn’t taken a direct hit from the bow of the Philippine-flagged ACX Crystal, but it was trashed nonetheless and smelled like urine.
He found a pee bottle that had tipped and spilled behind a large-screen display. Fort’s eyes started to take over for his nose, and he took it all in.
“There was debris everywhere,” Fort said under oath. “Food debris, food waste, uneaten food, half-eaten food, personal gear in the form of books, workout gear, workout bands, kettlebells, weightlifting equipment, the status boards had graffiti on them.”
“I’d never seen a CIC like that in my entire time in the Navy,” the surface warfare officer of more than 25 years recollected.
The more Fort looked, the worse it got: broken sensors that were reported for repairs but never fixed, schedule changes ordered by superiors high above the Fitz’s command triad that delayed crucial maintenance, taped-up radar controls and, worse, sailors who had no idea how to use the technology.
About six weeks after the Fitzgerald collision, Fort signed and submitted his damning internal report to superiors.
Designed in part to help federal attorneys defend against a wave of lawsuits from the owners and operators of the ACX Crystal and, indirectly, the families of the Fitz’s injured, traumatized and drowned, the Navy sought to keep Fort’s findings from the public.
But Navy Times obtained a copy of it and began stitching his details to a growing body of court testimony by the crew of the Fitzgerald to reveal just how much worse conditions were on the destroyer than the Navy previously shared with the public.
What it all reveals is that a mostly green crew joined the Fitzgerald shortly after the warship left dry dock maintenance in early 2017.
They learned to make do with broken equipment, a lack of communication between departments and, especially in the CIC, a world in which failure had become “systemic across the board,” as Fort put it at last year’s hearing.
Or as his secret report described it, a lack of training in basic seamanship fatally combined with material deficiencies to create “a culture of complacency, of accepting problems, and a dismissal of the use of some of the most important, modern equipment used for safe navigation.”
A warship doomed by ‘confusion, indecision, and ultimately panic’ on the bridge
▻https://www.navytimes.com/news/your-navy/2019/01/14/a-warship-doomed-by-confusion-indecision-and-ultimately-panic-on-the-brid
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The Navy has paraded out a series of public reports addressing both the Fitzgerald tragedy and the Aug. 21, 2017, collision involving the John S. McCain and the Liberian-flagged tanker Alnic MC that killed 10 more American sailors.
But none of those investigations so starkly blueprinted the cascade of failures at all levels of the Navy that combined to cause the Fitzgerald disaster, especially the way the doomed crew of the destroyer was staffed, trained and led in the months before it the collision.
Fort’s team of investigators described a bridge team that was overworked and exhausted, plagued by low morale, facing a relentless tempo of operations decreed by admirals far above them, distrustful of their superiors and, fatally, each other.
And Navy officials knew all of that at least a year before the tragedy.
[…]
[The Commanding Officer (CO) Commander] Benson was “a little more active” on the bridge than Shu [his predecessor], but “it was not routine for the CO or (executive officer) to come up to the Bridge from (10 p.m. to 6 a.m.),” Fort wrote.
Out of 78 underway days from February to May of that year, the CO was on the bridge just four times between the dark hours of 10 p.m. to 6 a.m., according to the report.
Et donc logiquement, absent de la passerelle quand le navire a croisé le “rail” de nuit…
A watery hell: how a green crew fought the Fitz to save her
▻https://www.navytimes.com/news/your-navy/2019/01/15/a-watery-hell-how-a-green-crew-fought-the-fitz-to-save-her
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On the day after the Fitzgerald limped back to Yokosuka, a plane carrying Rear Adm. Brian Fort landed in Japan.
A surface warfare officer with a quarter-century in uniform, Fort had been tasked with creating a report the Navy would use, in part, to defend itself against potential negligence lawsuits brought by ACX Crystal’s owners and operators and, indirectly, by the families of the Fitz’s dead sailors.
Completed 41 days after the disaster, it remained secret from the public until it was obtained by Navy Times.
Far more candid than the parade of public pronouncements by senior Navy officials since 2017, Fort’s report details how the the skills of Fitzgerald’s crew had atrophied in the months since it went into dry dock.
For example, after reporting to the Fitz, sailors were supposed to receive instruction on how to escape flooded berthing areas, a crucial course that was to be followed up by retraining every six months.
Of the 38 sailors assigned to Berthing 2, which flooded minutes after the ACX Crystal collision, 36 of 39 “were delinquent in the six-month periodic egress training,” Fort wrote.
Et si, le rapport de l’amiral Fort est resté secret, c’est parce qu’"il recouvre très largement les informations fournies dans les rapports publiés" (publiés d’ailleurs, nettement plus tard…
CNO defends hiding scathing internal report on Fitzgerald collision from public
▻https://www.navytimes.com/news/your-navy/2019/02/16/cno-defends-hiding-scathing-internal-report-on-fitzgerald-collision-from-
The Navy’s top officer Friday defended the decision to keep from the public eye a damning internal report on the 2017 warship Fitzgerald collision that killed seven sailors.
Speaking to reporters after his appearance at the U.S. Naval Institute’s West 2019 conference here, Chief of Naval Operations Adm. John Richardson said much of the report overlapped with what the service publicly released.
But much of the probe overseen by Rear Adm. Brian Fort portrayed a far grimmer picture of what the crew of the guided-missile destroyer faced. It also prompted hard questions about the actions taken by the Fitz’s squadron and Navy officials back in the United States.
First revealed by Navy Times, the Fort report chronicled details that Richardson, other Navy leaders and their public reports never mentioned, such as specifics about the destroyer’s brutal operational tempo, officers who didn’t trust each other, radars that didn’t work and sailors who didn’t know how to operate them.
The investigators also portrayed the warship’s chiefs mess as ineffective and their sailors plagued by low morale in the months leading up to the June 17, 2017, collision.
(les 3 expressions en gras sont des liens vers les articles ci-dessus)
This Senseless Government #Shutdown Is Harming Coast Guard Families | U.S. Naval Institute
▻https://www.usni.org/magazines/proceedings/2019-01/senseless-government-shutdown-harming-coast-guard-families
By Admiral Thad Allen, U.S. Coast Guard (Retired)
Today, with the government shutdown in its third week, it is beyond troubling that Coast Guard men and women are being unnecessarily subjected to financial hardship while enduring the operational, mission-related circumstances that are accepted as part of their compact with their country.
[…]
I am the son of a Coast Guard Chief Petty Officer and brother of a Coast Guard spouse. Our family’s life has revolved around the service my parents revered. A part of the “Greatest Generation”, they emerged from the depression and World War II to raise a family that moved frequently and fearlessly. They were tough and resilient.
I will turn 70 shortly and have had 47 addresses in my life. And while my parents and later my wife and I treated each new transfer as an adventure, there were tests and challenges. In the early 1950s my father got a no-notice transfer from Mobile, Alabama to Ketchikan, Alaska after it became clear our family was not a good fit in the segregated South. My father left immediately but it took our family months to catch up. We arrived in Ketchikan from a nearby island that had an airport, making the final leg by Coast Guard small boat with our luggage. Despite these and other challenges my mother and father believed until the day they died that the Coast Guard was the best thing that ever happened to our family.
[…]
I never believed it would be necessary to remind the leaders of all branches of government of their constitutional responsibilities, but it appears they have subordinated the “general welfare” of their fellow citizens to parochial interests. While this political theater ensues, there are junior Coast Guard petty officers, with families, who are already compensated at levels below the national poverty level, who will not be paid during this government shutdown. There is no reasonable answer as to why these families have to endure this hardship in the absence of a national emergency. These leaders should ponder how they would tell a spouse at Arlington that his or her survivor benefits might be at risk—again, for no reason. I’m glad my mother and father are not alive to see it.
Comment and Discussion | U.S. Naval Institute
▻https://www.usni.org/magazines/proceedings/2018-05/comment-and-discussion
Au courrier des lecteurs des USNI Proceedings, cette contribution d’un Captain réserviste en retraite, sous le titre Iran owns the Gray Zone.
(après avoir rappelé l’incident du HSV Swift en octobre 2016…
I predict that the next attack is one that Commander Gilmore doesn’t elaborate too much about (see his footnotes), and that’s the Iranian Sadegh-1 “drones” flying near our carriers and in their air traffic patterns. According to CNN, twice in August 2017 the USS Nimitz (CVN-68) in the Persian Gulf encountered drones flying “within 1,000 ft.” Since that event, crudely made drones with improvised explosive devices on them were used in an attack on the Russian air base at Khmeimim in Syria. The Russians were able to neutralize them either by electronic or kinetic means, but the precedent is there.
It’s time for a different type of plane guard around the carrier. In addition to the plane guard, a “drone CAP” helo should be ready to intercept and down any drone flying too close to the carrier, either kinetically or with a Drone- Defender or similar type of device. We should not wait for an unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) to collide with an F/A-18 in the pattern or hit an aircraft on the deck. The apparent lack of defense against the UAV is something the Iranians or their proxies will exploit.
But Will They Fight China? | U.S. Naval Institute
▻https://www.usni.org/magazines/proceedings/2018-05/will-they-fight-china
In a hypothetical war between the United States and China, a “#Catch-22 ” exists in the Pacific. If the United States is dominant, its Pacific allies will be incentivized to honor their treaty commitments—i.e., bandwagon with the United States. Conversely, if China approaches military parity, U.S. allies will incur greater risks; they will be incentivized to fence-sit or defect. In short, the more reliant the United States is on its Pacific allies in a war against China, the less it can depend on them.
Australia, Japan, the Republic of Korea, Thailand, and the Philippines are sovereign countries that look out for their own self-interests, as does the United States. In a fight between the United States and China, would they rush in, or would they wait to make sure the United States will win before committing? The risk to these allies is high. In a non-nuclear war, China does not pose an existential threat to the United States. To its neighbors, however, China’s conventional capability could prove devastating.
The assumption that U.S. allies in the Pacific would join the United States in a kinetic fight against China is just that—an assumption. While necessary for planning, assumptions are not facts. They need to be continuously revalidated.