The report of the investigation into the USS Fitzgerald accident has been released. I'm not going to include all the text of the articles, because Navy Times has several, and they're long. I will say that they're filled with comedy gold (of the military schadenfreude variety).
https://www.navytimes.com/news/your...erald-probe-the-navy-doesnt-want-you-to-read/
I imagine that some will make a big deal out of the two main fuck-ups being females who won't talk to each other.
https://www.navytimes.com/news/your...erald-probe-the-navy-doesnt-want-you-to-read/
Obtained by Navy Times, the “dual-purpose investigation” was overseen by Rear Adm. Brian Fort and submitted 41 days after the June 17, 2017, tragedy.
It was kept secret from the public in part because it was designed to prep the Navy for potential lawsuits in the aftermath of the accident.
When Fort walked into the trash-strewn CIC in the wake of the disaster, he was hit with the acrid smell of urine. He saw kettlebells on the floor and bottles filled with pee. Some radar controls didn’t work and he soon discovered crew members who didn’t know how to use them anyway.
https://www.navytimes.com/news/your...rships-crew-never-saw-the-vessel-that-hit-it/About three weeks after the ACX Crystal disaster, Fort’s investigators sprang a rules of the road pop quiz on Fitz’s officers.
It didn’t go well. The 22 who took the test averaged a score of 59 percent, Fort wrote.
“Only 3 of 22 Officers achieved a score over 80%,” he added, with seven officers scoring below 50 percent.
The same exam was administered to the wardroom of another unnamed destroyer as a control group, and those officers scored similarly dismal marks.
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.
A dead radar control button had been “covered by a piece of masking tape,” but Fort’s investigators couldn’t locate a casualty report chronicling the malfunction.
Beyond talking to each other inside the CIC or conversing with the bridge during their watch, the sailors there also had “zero communication” with other onboard departments for vital tasks like turning the radar, Fort later testified.
“Most of these folks we interviewed were not even aware that the radar-set controller was out of commission or what functionality they did or did not have, or what ability they had to even control it,” he said.
While the crew could’ve turned to an auto-track feature on the SPS-67 radar, they didn’t use it “because they ‘don’t want to mess it up,’” the report states.
That's the best line.That’s why a CIC petty officer worked in manual mode, punching a button 1,000 times in an hour just to track four of five vessels, when the radar could’ve auto-tracked 50 contacts for him, Fort testified.
“That’s a lot of activity, but it’s not really what I would call vigilant activity,” Fort said.
Fort’s report found that other sailors barely fathomed the rudiments of radar.
“One watchstander said he has routinely seen the radars poorly adjusted to the point that visible targets would not show up,” Fort wrote. “One watchstander stated seeing other watchstanders seek out (a supervisor) for help on radar tuning, and receiving the response, ‘do it how you like it.’”
https://www.navytimes.com/news/your...ndecision-and-ultimately-panic-on-the-bridge/For example, Navy leaders have publicly stated that the crew was not using the ship’s Automatic Identification System, or AIS, to gather information on nearby vessel traffic.
But Fort determined that Fitz’s sailors avoided the AIS laptop because it constantly crashed. It couldn’t be moved because jostling a cable would short out the array.
Fort found it tucked behind other consoles in the CIC. Onboard technicians had told their shipmates not to budge the laptop “because the cables were sensitive,” he wrote.
Furqan testified that when she served on the Fitz, the AIS had been loaned to the warship so they were limited in the upgrades and maintenance they could perform on it.
“During my tenure, the laptop failed at least once so we had to…wait for a new laptop to be mailed out to us,” Furqan said. “It would periodically lock up, and we would be unable to unlock it even with the correct password, so we’d have to reboot the entire laptop and try again.”
Coppock wasn’t communicating with her CO or his XO but she also wasn’t talking to the ship’s electronic nerve center — the Combat Information Center, or CIC.
Bridge and CIC teams are supposed to constantly share information on what they’re seeing and their sensors detecting, working together to navigate a ship safety through the night.
But Coppock wouldn’t talk with the CIC because her counterparts there “had given her bad information in the past,” according to the report.
The CIC was led by Lt. Natalie Combs. Testifying under oath at a hearing last year to determine if Combs should stand court-martial, Fort said it was “unfathomable” that the bridge didn’t talk to the CIC on the night of the disaster.
But Fort found that was far from the only fissure splitting the warship’s crew, a systemic problem of mistrust that he believed superiors failed to properly address long before the catastrophe.
Another junior officer told Fort’s investigators “she could not trust the person next to her.”
The 2017 survey results “identified continued and significant issues with communication throughout the command, concerns for stress being levied on the crew by the ship’s OPTEMPO, and significant concerns for the leadership and effectiveness of the Command Master Chief,” according to Fort’s investigation.
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The 2017 survey results arrived shortly before Shu handed over command to his XO, Benson.
“Shu stated he was generally happy with the results and did not wish to stand up a Command Assessment Team … to conduct small group discussions with the crew following the survey,” Fort wrote.
Fort’s report faults the Fitz’s command failing to act on the “volume of comments” compiled in the 2017 survey, which “were well articulated and a clear case for change.”
“Although conducted under CDR Shu, CDR Benson was XO during the 2016 and 2017 surveys, and once in command should have been attuned to the fact that command climate had taken a turn for the worse,” Fort added.
I imagine that some will make a big deal out of the two main fuck-ups being females who won't talk to each other.
