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| USS Fitzgerald after colliding with a commercial ship |
By SYDNEY J. FREEDBERG JR.
CAPITOL HILL: Congress’s repeated budget malpractice and the Navy’s flawed policies combined to cause the accidents that killed 17 sailors, the Navy and the GAO say. Legislative dysfunction means budget cuts, caps, and delays have chronically shortchanged training and maintenance across the fleet, forcing sailors to work 100-plus hours a week to try to catch up. But the Navy also made fundamentally flawed assumptions about its Japan-based ships, overworking them even more at the expense of safety – even as it kept assigning more ships to what it considered an exemplary unit.
“I personally have made the assumption for many, many years that our forward-deployed force in Japan was the most proficient, well-trained, most experienced force we have, because they’re operating all the time,” Adm. Bill Moran, vice-Chief of Naval Operations, told the House Armed Services seapower subcommitte yesterday. “It was the wrong assumption.”
In fact, the assumption was exactly backwards. To keep “operating all the time,” the Japan-based ships were cutting corners. This showed up in their proficiency certifications, normally awarded to the crew for demonstrating the requisite skill levels in various areas from basic safety to ballistic missile defense. In January 2015, GAO found, destroyers and cruisers based in Japan had 93 percent of their required certifications, with only 7 percent expired. In June 2017, 37 percent of certifications had expired.
Read the full story at Breaking Defense