USS Fitzgerald collision in C7F

[nittany03]

From an aviator’s view, how often does CAG visit a squadron’s ready room on the CVN and informally gauge the squadron’s morale/attitude/readiness? Is it a fairly routine occurence, rare, or completely unheard of for CAG to visit a squadron and see what’s going on?

On the CVN? Mine was there quite regularly. Not like camped out there daily, but it also wasn’t unusual to see CAG either talking to the head shed about something, or taking some time to BS with the rest of the ready room. He was incredibly approachable, and I got the feeling he had a pretty good finger on the pulse of each of his squadrons without appearing stifling, at least to a JO.

Of course, my CAG was also a bit of a character. When he was DCAG, his predecessor had a standing joke about there being two ways to find him onboard the boat. You could pound two Red Bulls and start wandering around the ship. Or, the more sedate way was just to stop somewhere and wait, because chances were he’d come flying by in about 15 minutes anyway. It’s like he’d been uploaded to YouTube, and the playback was stuck at 1.25x. ?

 

[Jim123]

I wouldn't get hung up on the piss bottle thing. It's disgusting, sometimes it's a necessity and other times it's completely unnecessary, but regardless it's a fact of life in a lot of deployed places. It varies from "not-unheard-of" to a common thing in the backs of humvees, barracks, tents, cockpits, spaces on a warship, and so on, just as common as spit bottles for dip spit. Piss bottles can quickly disappear after watch turnover (they can get left behind too) but when you have a catastrophic collision at sea then they stay there along with everybody's personal effects.

The kettlebells in CiC thing is kinda strange- good for moral and they provide some variety from impromptu pushup contests (not to mention physical activity helps keep the blood flowing to help people stay alert on the mid watch). The safety people will tell you about them being missile hazards during heavy seas or if the ship gets attacked. So they're maybe not the best idea but I wouldn't get hung up on this one either.

Regardless, piss bottles, kettlebells, and lots of other messes all get scarce before any commodore visit.

 

[Hair Warrior]

Regardless, piss bottles, kettlebells, and lots of other messes all get scarce before any commodore visit.

Copy all. Great context - thanks! I was thinking they’d get swept away before an inspection too, but the broken nav sensors would still be there, and still be broken.

 

[Griz882]

I wouldn't get hung up on the piss bottle thing. It's disgusting, sometimes it's a necessity and other times it's completely unnecessary, but regardless it's a fact of life in a lot of deployed places. It varies from "not-unheard-of" to a common thing in the backs of humvees, barracks, tents, cockpits, spaces on a warship, and so on, just as common as spit bottles for dip spit. Piss bottles can quickly disappear after watch turnover (they can get left behind too) but when you have a catastrophic collision at sea then they stay there along with everybody's personal effects.

The kettlebells in CiC thing is kinda strange- good for moral and they provide some variety from impromptu pushup contests (not to mention physical activity helps keep the blood flowing to help people stay alert on the mid watch). The safety people will tell you about them being missile hazards during heavy seas or if the ship gets attacked. So they're maybe not the best idea but I wouldn't get hung up on this one either.

Regardless, piss bottles, kettlebells, and lots of other messes all get scarce before any commodore visit.

Agreed, but a filthy CIC even during a busy watch is a very bad sign. On the ships I served on CIC was the about only place you couldn’t bring food. That said, I am far more disturbed by the implication that the C.O. and exec were rarely on the bridge. That lack of leadership stuns me.

 

[Pags]

Copy all. Great context - thanks! I was thinking they’d get swept away before an inspection too, but the broken nav sensors would still be there, and still be broken.

I'd argue that this is less about ISIC inspections and more about readiness reporting. From an aviation background the surface Navy is befuddling in how they report material status. Systems can be broken and not CASREPd and whether or not something is CASREPd seems to be CO driven. On the aviation side the material condition of an airplane is determined by a Minimum Equipment Subsystem Matrix (MESM) that tells the maintenance department what missions an airplane is up or down for. Based on the MESM the Squadron then tells the world about how many of their airplanes are up or down. At least during my time on a ship there wasn't something similar that the Shoes did to give a transparent view of the ships material condition. In addition, aircrew log gripes on each aircraft with maintenance control after they fly (or before in some cases) and then maintenance tracks and fixes the gripes. Again, 6yrs ago, there wasn't a central maintenance control that tracked all the shipboard gripes to completion. Maintenance responsibility was delegated to the departmental level.

 

[IRfly]

Minor point, but both the Fitz and the McCain were independent deployers and did not usually operate in conjunction with a CSG.

Not sure this is a minor point--the lack of "ownership" over these ships was a major point that VADM Aucoin made in his objection to Big Navy's handling of the incident. C7F was held responsible for ships over which C3F held authority.

 

[Jim123]

Copy all. Great context - thanks! I was thinking they’d get swept away before an inspection too, but the broken nav sensors would still be there, and still be broken.

The broken major equipment—radar, comm gear, weapon systems, engines, and all kinds of other stuff like ammo expenditure—gets reported up the chain of command (not only the surface navy, subs and aviation have to do it to, so do the other military branches). The commodore's staff has a few people who keep track of all that readiness and the good ones have the information at their fingertips.

(@Pags , the shoes have to do SORTS, or whatever it's called now, send to the ISIC and TYCOM just like aviation... the last time I was around any of this, aviation used AMRR and the shoes used CASREPs for a lot of the same reasons, even though those two programs are different. The big difference is the surface navy just seems to put up with sailing with a lot more broken stuff than would ever fly, literally, in aviation.)

That doesn't mean the ship's captain isn't tempted to hold off on reporting something broken if it might get fixed in a few hours or they might have a workaround, but if a face-to-face visit yields a lot of surprise broken stuff then that isn't just a case of dishonesty on the party of the junior, it also means the senior person in that relationship is either dishonest too or just plain incompetent.

I'm not sure what to read into how the Navy Times describes investigative visit to the ship and there might be some poetic license in the article. I'd hope the Admiral and his team conducted the approach with a open mind, withhold judgment kind of mindset. I'd also hope that they were surprised by very little that they found. (Nothing they found should have shocked any of them, and if any of it did then the wrong people were on that investigation.)

 

[Pags]

The criteria for what counts as a CASREP always seemed to be a bit grey. I'm sure it was written somewhere but the general rule of thumb seemed to be if there was a backup for the broken system then you didn't need to CASREP it. Smaller equipment or non-mission critical equipment didn't always make the list. I had lots of broken lights and hangar doors that didn't close that would've resulted in a MAF on an airplane but reporting on the boat consisted of bugging the flightdeck electriciannor shrugging at the doors (they required a yard contract to fix and they were low on supe's list). I guess we technically had a"job" in the maintenance system for the doors but there wasn't a CASREP on them. Not sure how broken consoles would fit in to that if there were other consoles working. Because there's so much built in redundancy in ships it's always hard to get a good feel for whether your backup is broken or you're hard down. We went for a long time with a busted stabbed elevator but we didn't care because the hangar side of the elevator was clobbered so even if it did work it wasn't going to be useful. So it was far more useful as a parts lock for the port side and a place to stick a jet.

We could also talk plenty about something that's had a long-standing CASREP on it and acceptance of deviations at all levels as ETRs slide out a month every month.

 

[Jim123]

The criteria for what counts as a CASREP always seemed to be a bit grey. I'm sure it was written somewhere but the general rule of thumb seemed to be if there was a backup for the broken system then you didn't need to CASREP it.

Yep- I remember a type wing instruction telling you what number you had to report in SORTS based on what was broken. It seems there ought to have been an equivalent instruction spelling these things out for SORTS and CASREPs for the shoes (I think that was part of what they were trying to get a better handle on when they came out with the CLASSRONs about ten years ago around the time the LPD-17 trainwreck was going on).

 

[BigRed389]

Agreed, but a filthy CIC even during a busy watch is a very bad sign. On the ships I served on CIC was the about only place you couldn’t bring food. That said, I am far more disturbed by the implication that the C.O. and exec were rarely on the bridge. That lack of leadership stuns me.

Filthy CIC is not a good thing, but arriving on a ship post-collision with its sewage system shut down also isn't a good snapshot of "normal" ops.
Doesn't rule out a fucked up CIC during routine operations, either though.

Not sure this is a minor point--the lack of "ownership" over these ships was a major point that VADM Aucoin made in his objection to Big Navy's handling of the incident. C7F was held responsible for ships over which C3F held authority.

It's a fair point, but neither Fitz or McCain were C3F ships. Both were homeported Yoko.
C7F's chain of command owned the man, train, equip and certifying them as ready to operate.
It's one of the problems that was called out in the following investigations...same organization that was the "demand" for DDG operational tasking also had the authority to waive training or material certification deficiencies. That was unique to Seventh Fleet.

From folks I know who were recently on both the West Coast and Japan waterfronts....the FDNF-J force is in...less than great shape. To be fair, West Coast DDG's are DDG "Triple digits" while the FDNF-J guys are running DDG 50's and 60's.

I'd argue that this is less about ISIC inspections and more about readiness reporting. From an aviation background the surface Navy is befuddling in how they report material status. Systems can be broken and not CASREPd and whether or not something is CASREPd seems to be CO driven. On the aviation side the material condition of an airplane is determined by a Minimum Equipment Subsystem Matrix (MESM) that tells the maintenance department what missions an airplane is up or down for. Based on the MESM the Squadron then tells the world about how many of their airplanes are up or down. At least during my time on a ship there wasn't something similar that the Shoes did to give a transparent view of the ships material condition. In addition, aircrew log gripes on each aircraft with maintenance control after they fly (or before in some cases) and then maintenance tracks and fixes the gripes. Again, 6yrs ago, there wasn't a central maintenance control that tracked all the shipboard gripes to completion. Maintenance responsibility was delegated to the departmental level.

Maybe not ISIC inspections, but ISIC presence is definitely an "opportunity" for everybody to turn to and make things run right. Having said that, that also requires a competent ISIC. Plenty of stories of fucked up ISIC's who show up and proceed to blast good practices while reinforcing outdated/bad ones as well.

The readiness reporting is actually pretty damn clear. If it doesn't work, and it impacts mission readiness, you release a CASREP. Where it can become a problem is that if the crew doesn't understand how a certain degradation affects mission readiness, then they won't report it.
There's also a very "rough" understanding on the technical side of how their equipment works.
To be blunt, I don't give Surface Navy chiefs blanket trust as technical experts any more. There are still many great ones, but way more shitty ones than there should be.
And I don't know how the aviation side is with I/D level maintenance support, but the Fleet's dependence on civilian/contractor troubleshooting support is more, not less.

 

[Recovering LSO]

How much bridge time does a SWO receive?

Who could know? All the shoes I know scoffed at the idea of incorporating bridge logbooks similar to what we use for flight time.

 

[Pags]

Filthy CIC is not a good thing, but arriving on a ship post-collision with its sewage system shut down also isn't a good snapshot of "normal" ops.
Doesn't rule out a fucked up CIC during routine operations, either though.



It's a fair point, but neither Fitz or McCain were C3F ships. Both were homeported Yoko.
C7F's chain of command owned the man, train, equip and certifying them as ready to operate.
It's one of the problems that was called out in the following investigations...same organization that was the "demand" for DDG operational tasking also had the authority to waive training or material certification deficiencies. That was unique to Seventh Fleet.

From folks I know who were recently on both the West Coast and Japan waterfronts....the FDNF-J force is in...less than great shape. To be fair, West Coast DDG's are DDG "Triple digits" while the FDNF-J guys are running DDG 50's and 60's.


Maybe not ISIC inspections, but ISIC presence is definitely an "opportunity" for everybody to turn to and make things run right. Having said that, that also requires a competent ISIC. Plenty of stories of fucked up ISIC's who show up and proceed to blast good practices while reinforcing outdated/bad ones as well.

The readiness reporting is actually pretty damn clear. If it doesn't work, and it impacts mission readiness, you release a CASREP. Where it can become a problem is that if the crew doesn't understand how a certain degradation affects mission readiness, then they won't report it.
There's also a very "rough" understanding on the technical side of how their equipment works.
To be blunt, I don't give Surface Navy chiefs blanket trust as technical experts any more. There are still many great ones, but way more shitty ones than there should be.
And I don't know how the aviation side is with I/D level maintenance support, but the Fleet's dependence on civilian/contractor troubleshooting support is more, not less.

I saw lots of "discussion" as to whether or not a broken piece of equipment affecteded mission readiness and that end of that discussion was usually determined by the Captain's call on whether or not to release the CASREP. The fact that there was discussion was surprising to Aviators. Our MESM says, "if X is broken then you're partial or non mission capable" in black and white. MESM is promulgated by the TYCOM. Even with better up vs down guidance there are still plenty of ways to fudge the numbers on the aviation side but the system seems, to me at least, to be more transpatand rigorous.

 

[ChuckMK23]

What’s a kettlebell?

 

[Recovering LSO]

What’s a kettlebell?

 

[Jim123]

What’s a kettlebell?