FWIW, I caught up with a SWO buddy the other day and his take on this was that there are two ultimate culprits for the recent collisions: 1) A "check-the-box-a

FWIW, I caught up with a SWO buddy the other day and his take on this was that there are two ultimate culprits for the recent collisions: 1) A "check-the-box-and-cover-your-ass" mentality with regard to the implementation of annual training. The basic gist is that the (very necessary to some extent) training designed to get young sailors to not get DUIs, manage their finances properly, not beat their spouses, etc has gotten more and more onerous every year, with more mission-focused training being sacrificed in order to make hours available. By my friend's telling, there has been something of an arms race in that every fleet-level commander has to do something quantifiable to put as a fitness report accomplishment (eg, "restructured and implemented DUI awareness training; liberty incidents fell 13% during tenure in billet"). 2) The tracking systems that Navy ships have turned on in peacetime started getting turned off 10-15 years ago and the original impetus was the IGRC using this data to antagonize Navy ships (ie get position/speed/bearing of a destroyer over horizon, then send a couple of speedboats to cross its bow 300 meters ahead at 40 kts). This was briefly mentioned in article as something that is getting reinstated following recent collisions. Interestingly he said that the end of the SWO course had little to do with the accidents and that the main reason the Navy ended it was that junior SWO feedback was saying that they would learn more just being on the ship for that amount of time (analogous to the concept of learning much more in your first 4 months as a junior engineer than you did during your senior spring semester as a CS student).