7 ms·

Fitzgerald Officer of the Deck Pleads Guilty at Court-Martial

59 points by montrose 8y ago

deleted 8y ago
[deleted]
Waterluvian 8y ago
I can't help but always be skeptical with these rulings, as if someone's always just being thrown under the bus to protect the higher ranking career military persons. I think about how easy it would be to have a culture of sloppy, poorly trained sailors, and when something goes wrong, whoever is in the chair at the time takes the punishment for that. Naturally I could be completely wrong about this or other cases. But it's hard to shake that skepticism.
- vertis 8y ago
  Looks like several higher fleet officers were fired or 'retired early' in the wake of this, so I'm not certain it's just throwing people under the bus. Scant details on what made them 'derelict in their duty'. Was it being negligence or was it mistakes caused by lack of training.
  - pdonis 8y ago
    > Scant details on what made them 'derelict in their duty'. Was it being negligence or was it mistakes caused by lack of training. Both. The article doesn't say that, but from my own experience as a Naval officer, I'm pretty sure. Lack of training means higher ups were also at fault, and that's why they're also being punished. But lack of training does not remove your responsibility if you're the officer on watch. Nothing does. Those who don't like that should not become officers.
  - eigenvector 8y ago
    The US Navy has released a detailed report[1] on the incident in question. They found that lack of training, poor leadership and fatigue all contributed to the collision. [1] https://news.usni.org/2017/11/01/uss-fitzgerald-uss-john-s-mccain-collision-report https://news.usni.org/2017/11/01/uss-fitzgerald-uss-john-s-m...
- pdonis 8y ago
  > I can't help but always be skeptical with these rulings, as if someone's always just being thrown under the bus to protect the higher ranking career military persons. Keep a few things in mind: (1) By my count from reading the article, at least four admirals have been fired, and one has retired early. That's pretty much the entire chain of command in the Pacific fleet above the ships that had incidents. I don't know if any of them will face courts martial (I would expect not), but their careers are over, and they're not going out in a good light. (2) The captains of the ships involved are all facing possible courts martial (and I would expect that "possible" will become "actual" within the next few weeks, from the dates given in the article), even though none of them were on the bridge at the time of the incidents. That's standard procedure for a Navy ship: if you're the captain, everything that happens is your responsibility. The executive officer and command master chief of at least one of the ships are also receiving punishment. (The command master chief, btw, is the senior enlisted aboard the ship, whose primary job is to make sure all of the sailors aboard are being properly taken care of by their officers. So it's expected that the CMC will suffer consequences when that doesn't happen.) (3) I understand the whole "culture" thing, but at the end of the day, if you're a military officer, you're in charge, and it's your job to do what's necessary, culture notwithstanding. The officers who were operating those ships did not do their jobs, and sailors died as a result. That deserves punishment regardless of anything else.
  - deleted 8y ago
    [deleted]
  - dnautics 8y ago
    I once drove a Lyft for some army officers... IIRC they mentioned the military publishes a running record of all O5s and above that get court martialed and they noted that the navy takes sacking their O5 and O6 seriously, more than the other services.
- harshreality 8y ago
  Whoever is the officer of the deck at the time is responsible. That's what the position means, if it means anything at all. The sailors could be poorly trained, but the buck has to stop somewhere. How else can a command-structure organization work? At the very least, she'd have to effectively lose her job through loss of confidence in ability to command, even if she weren't court-martialed. Blaming higher leadership (which has also happened in these navy accident cases) in the military has the same problem. They're just products of their environment, too, put there ultimately by a chain of appointments ending with the President, Congress, and ultimately the voters. It's much better to focus on process improvement than on assigning blame. But command-authority organizations like the military don't really work that way, and it's difficult to improve the culture of the military when that culture is shaped by unwise demands — excessive operational demands, fiscal constraints, and directives that end up micro-managing and constraining what commanders do — from above. Even navy admirals have their hands tied in many ways, and they're just trying to do the best they can do with a bad hand.
  - pdonis 8y ago
    > Even navy admirals have their hands tied in many ways, and they're just trying to do the best they can do with a bad hand. Trying, but still failing in this case. Playing a bad hand means you have to put more emphasis on the basics, not less. After all, ultimately military units are for fighting wars, and any war is going to be full of bad hands that you still have to play. A military that can't succeed in that kind of environment is not a military worth having.
  - nostrademons 8y ago
    I'm curious then - how does the culture & process of the military get improved? Wartime, where everything and everyone that's ineffective gets discarded? Defeat, when the whole nation ostensibly being protected goes down?
  - hudibras 8y ago
    >Whoever is the officer of the deck at the time is responsible. That's what the position means, if it means anything at all. The OOD is the very definition of a "You Had ONE Job!" job, and that one job is "Don't run into other ships or the land."
- peteretep 8y ago
  From the article: > The Navy has acknowledged that its forward-deployed 7th Fleet in Japan was stretched too thin – undermanned, overworked and exhausted under an intense operational schedule. To meet the high operational demand, training and ship maintenance were deferred, according to a Navy review.
- stefan_ 8y ago
  You can court martial people who have neglected their clearly delineated responsibilities. It's much more difficult to court martial someone for bad command that caused the neglect. Those people are forced out, blacklisted or moved somewhere where they can't damage anything.
- CydeWeys 8y ago
  A good part of the problem is that they substantially curtailed basic seamanship training: https://www.navytimes.com/news/your-navy/2017/08/27/navy-swos-a-culture-in-crisis/ https://www.navytimes.com/news/your-navy/2017/08/27/navy-swo... You'd think that someone who's being put in charge of helming a billion dollar vessel with over a hundred people onboard would get lots of training for it, but nope, it takes more training to become a cosmetologist in most states than it does to helm a navy ship. Sometimes problems are multifactored and complex, but sometimes they're also just simple. The Navy simply stopped training people in how to steer ships, in a bid to save money and time. Turns out that maybe that training was good for something after all though.
hluska 8y ago
A different outlet reported her sentence: > A U.S. Navy officer pleaded guilty to dereliction of duty Tuesday in the collision of a U.S. Navy destroyer that killed seven sailors last year. Lt. j.g. Sarah Coppock was sentenced to receive half-pay for three months and a letter of reprimand. (Source - https://www.cbsnews.com/news/lt-jg-sarah-coppock-pleads-guilty-in-uss-fitzgerald-collision/ https://www.cbsnews.com/news/lt-jg-sarah-coppock-pleads-guil...)
- walrus01 8y ago
  This is effectively a career ender as well, she will never be promoted if she stays in.
  - hluska 8y ago
    Thanks! I don't know a thing about military justice, so I was wondering about the significance of this plea/the punishment.
    - walrus01 8y ago
      The main significance is that if she stays in, she will get the shittiest assignments in the entire navy until 20 years is reached (pension retirement), and is a pariah forever. And never any promotions.
      - metaphor 8y ago
        Nope. She's a junior officer with less than 4 years time in service, not a demoted NCO approaching minimum retirement age...completely different game.
        walrus01 8y ago
        What I meant is that the chances of her being able to continue past 4 years and make it to 20 are just about nil, if her original intentions were to be career Navy.
danielvf 8y ago
From memory (I’ll try to dig up the report) the officer on deck: - Was going too fast for the number of ships in the area - Did not call the captain when nearish other ships as procedure required. - Had in fact gotten too close to several other ships that night. - Gotten confused between which of two ships was where - Did the calculations wrong on the closest approach of the collision vessel - Denied a request to change course away from the collision vessel because then she would have to recalculate a new nearest approach distance - When a collision was clearly in the future, did not contact the other vessel in any way - Gave a late turn order, but then immediately countermanded it, keeping the ship on collision course - spent the rest of the time until the collision freaking out (an enlisted man eventually gave the final turn order that saved some lives) So it was about as bad as could be, and seven men died. However, I have a feeling the Captain's court martial is going to turn out worse for him than this.
- ComradeTaco 8y ago
  I'm curious what hour of her day the deck officer was on and how many hours of sleep she had the night previous. At some point, sleep deprivation can leave you essentially non-functional.
  - tcj_phx 8y ago
    I've heard that female sailors are injected with Depo-Provera, to protect them from getting knocked up... Some women can tolerate this drug, while others are maimed [0]. Progesterone is now known to be a brain hormone. Medroxyprogesterone (brand name: Provera) is a good imposter-progesterone. It's useful for suppressing ovulation, but doesn't function like the endogenous hormone. [0] https://www.ourbodiesourselves.org/2016/08/i-wouldnt-recommend-it-to-anyone-depo-provera/ https://www.ourbodiesourselves.org/2016/08/i-wouldnt-recomme... edit: They must use all types, not just Provera, but certainly they emphasize the options that don't require a daily pill - the implant, IUD, Depo-Provera, etc. http://www.navy.mil/submit/display.asp?story_id=100091 http://www.navy.mil/submit/display.asp?story_id=100091
  - chx 8y ago
    According to official report https://assets.documentcloud.org/documents/4165320/USS-Fitzgerald-and-USS-John-S-McCain-Collision.pdf https://assets.documentcloud.org/documents/4165320/USS-Fitzg... it played a part for sure: 8.4 Fatigue The command leadership allowed the schedule of events preceding the collision to fatigue the crew. The command leadership failed to assess the risks of fatigue and implement mitigation measures to ensure adequate crew rest.
exabrial 8y ago
I can't believe a giant merchant vessel could collide with a modern warship... doesn't establish a lot of confidence. How did you not see that coming?
- toomanybeersies 8y ago
  The problem was more that they did see it coming buy wilfully, through a failure of command, sailed into it.
- bdamm 8y ago
  Just one occasion would leave me shaking my head at the chain of failures that must have led up to that collision. But two similar collisions? Now it starts to seem like systematic conspiracy, or an attitude of expecting all other ships to maneuver away. How many commercial ships in the south China sea or sea of Japan have had to change course because of US Navy vessels over the last year? State ought to find out.
- jabl 8y ago
  Just as an anecdote, I was recently taking the ferry (as a passenger mind you), and the ferry encountered a Burke-class DD (which would be slightly unusual around here, but I later learned it was on its way to a friendly visit to my country). The Burke was ahead of us, to starboard, going in roughly the same direction, although slightly converging (lets say around 45 deg difference in heading, maybe?). When I got up, it was at maybe 1 nm distance, at 2 o'clock. So I go to another area of the ship, and the next time I look out of the window the Burke is on our port side at maybe 300m distance. Which, if my interpretation of events is correct, means the Burke cut in front of the ferry at frickin close range. For no effing reason whatsoever, considering there was plenty of open sea around both ships. This is the kind of macho BS attitude that gets people killed. Sure, nothing happened, but what if they would have had some kind of machinery or bridge communication malfunction? The ferry would have plowed the Burke in half.
  - slededit 8y ago
    If the Burke was starboard then the ferry was the one who had to give way. You should be blaming them in this scenario. The Fitzgerald was hit on the Port side which indicates it should have given way.

59 points by montrose 8y ago

deleted 8y ago

[deleted]

I can't help but always be skeptical with these rulings, as if someone's always just being thrown under the bus to protect the higher ranking career military persons. I think about how easy it would be to have a culture of sloppy, poorly trained sailors, and when something goes wrong, whoever is in the chair at the time takes the punishment for that. Naturally I could be completely wrong about this or other cases. But it's hard to shake that skepticism.

vertis 8y ago
Looks like several higher fleet officers were fired or 'retired early' in the wake of this, so I'm not certain it's just throwing people under the bus. Scant details on what made them 'derelict in their duty'. Was it being negligence or was it mistakes caused by lack of training.
- pdonis 8y ago
  > Scant details on what made them 'derelict in their duty'. Was it being negligence or was it mistakes caused by lack of training. Both. The article doesn't say that, but from my own experience as a Naval officer, I'm pretty sure. Lack of training means higher ups were also at fault, and that's why they're also being punished. But lack of training does not remove your responsibility if you're the officer on watch. Nothing does. Those who don't like that should not become officers.
- eigenvector 8y ago
  The US Navy has released a detailed report[1] on the incident in question. They found that lack of training, poor leadership and fatigue all contributed to the collision. [1] https://news.usni.org/2017/11/01/uss-fitzgerald-uss-john-s-mccain-collision-report https://news.usni.org/2017/11/01/uss-fitzgerald-uss-john-s-m...
pdonis 8y ago
> I can't help but always be skeptical with these rulings, as if someone's always just being thrown under the bus to protect the higher ranking career military persons. Keep a few things in mind: (1) By my count from reading the article, at least four admirals have been fired, and one has retired early. That's pretty much the entire chain of command in the Pacific fleet above the ships that had incidents. I don't know if any of them will face courts martial (I would expect not), but their careers are over, and they're not going out in a good light. (2) The captains of the ships involved are all facing possible courts martial (and I would expect that "possible" will become "actual" within the next few weeks, from the dates given in the article), even though none of them were on the bridge at the time of the incidents. That's standard procedure for a Navy ship: if you're the captain, everything that happens is your responsibility. The executive officer and command master chief of at least one of the ships are also receiving punishment. (The command master chief, btw, is the senior enlisted aboard the ship, whose primary job is to make sure all of the sailors aboard are being properly taken care of by their officers. So it's expected that the CMC will suffer consequences when that doesn't happen.) (3) I understand the whole "culture" thing, but at the end of the day, if you're a military officer, you're in charge, and it's your job to do what's necessary, culture notwithstanding. The officers who were operating those ships did not do their jobs, and sailors died as a result. That deserves punishment regardless of anything else.
- deleted 8y ago
  [deleted]
- dnautics 8y ago
  I once drove a Lyft for some army officers... IIRC they mentioned the military publishes a running record of all O5s and above that get court martialed and they noted that the navy takes sacking their O5 and O6 seriously, more than the other services.
harshreality 8y ago
Whoever is the officer of the deck at the time is responsible. That's what the position means, if it means anything at all. The sailors could be poorly trained, but the buck has to stop somewhere. How else can a command-structure organization work? At the very least, she'd have to effectively lose her job through loss of confidence in ability to command, even if she weren't court-martialed. Blaming higher leadership (which has also happened in these navy accident cases) in the military has the same problem. They're just products of their environment, too, put there ultimately by a chain of appointments ending with the President, Congress, and ultimately the voters. It's much better to focus on process improvement than on assigning blame. But command-authority organizations like the military don't really work that way, and it's difficult to improve the culture of the military when that culture is shaped by unwise demands — excessive operational demands, fiscal constraints, and directives that end up micro-managing and constraining what commanders do — from above. Even navy admirals have their hands tied in many ways, and they're just trying to do the best they can do with a bad hand.
- pdonis 8y ago
  > Even navy admirals have their hands tied in many ways, and they're just trying to do the best they can do with a bad hand. Trying, but still failing in this case. Playing a bad hand means you have to put more emphasis on the basics, not less. After all, ultimately military units are for fighting wars, and any war is going to be full of bad hands that you still have to play. A military that can't succeed in that kind of environment is not a military worth having.
- nostrademons 8y ago
  I'm curious then - how does the culture & process of the military get improved? Wartime, where everything and everyone that's ineffective gets discarded? Defeat, when the whole nation ostensibly being protected goes down?
- hudibras 8y ago
  >Whoever is the officer of the deck at the time is responsible. That's what the position means, if it means anything at all. The OOD is the very definition of a "You Had ONE Job!" job, and that one job is "Don't run into other ships or the land."
peteretep 8y ago
From the article: > The Navy has acknowledged that its forward-deployed 7th Fleet in Japan was stretched too thin – undermanned, overworked and exhausted under an intense operational schedule. To meet the high operational demand, training and ship maintenance were deferred, according to a Navy review.
stefan_ 8y ago
You can court martial people who have neglected their clearly delineated responsibilities. It's much more difficult to court martial someone for bad command that caused the neglect. Those people are forced out, blacklisted or moved somewhere where they can't damage anything.
CydeWeys 8y ago
A good part of the problem is that they substantially curtailed basic seamanship training: https://www.navytimes.com/news/your-navy/2017/08/27/navy-swos-a-culture-in-crisis/ https://www.navytimes.com/news/your-navy/2017/08/27/navy-swo... You'd think that someone who's being put in charge of helming a billion dollar vessel with over a hundred people onboard would get lots of training for it, but nope, it takes more training to become a cosmetologist in most states than it does to helm a navy ship. Sometimes problems are multifactored and complex, but sometimes they're also just simple. The Navy simply stopped training people in how to steer ships, in a bid to save money and time. Turns out that maybe that training was good for something after all though.

hluska 8y ago

A different outlet reported her sentence: > A U.S. Navy officer pleaded guilty to dereliction of duty Tuesday in the collision of a U.S. Navy destroyer that killed seven sailors last year. Lt. j.g. Sarah Coppock was sentenced to receive half-pay for three months and a letter of reprimand. (Source - https://www.cbsnews.com/news/lt-jg-sarah-coppock-pleads-guilty-in-uss-fitzgerald-collision/ https://www.cbsnews.com/news/lt-jg-sarah-coppock-pleads-guil...)

walrus01 8y ago
This is effectively a career ender as well, she will never be promoted if she stays in.
- hluska 8y ago
  Thanks! I don't know a thing about military justice, so I was wondering about the significance of this plea/the punishment.
  - walrus01 8y ago
    The main significance is that if she stays in, she will get the shittiest assignments in the entire navy until 20 years is reached (pension retirement), and is a pariah forever. And never any promotions.
    - metaphor 8y ago
      Nope. She's a junior officer with less than 4 years time in service, not a demoted NCO approaching minimum retirement age...completely different game.
      - walrus01 8y ago
        What I meant is that the chances of her being able to continue past 4 years and make it to 20 are just about nil, if her original intentions were to be career Navy.

danielvf 8y ago

From memory (I’ll try to dig up the report) the officer on deck: - Was going too fast for the number of ships in the area - Did not call the captain when nearish other ships as procedure required. - Had in fact gotten too close to several other ships that night. - Gotten confused between which of two ships was where - Did the calculations wrong on the closest approach of the collision vessel - Denied a request to change course away from the collision vessel because then she would have to recalculate a new nearest approach distance - When a collision was clearly in the future, did not contact the other vessel in any way - Gave a late turn order, but then immediately countermanded it, keeping the ship on collision course - spent the rest of the time until the collision freaking out (an enlisted man eventually gave the final turn order that saved some lives) So it was about as bad as could be, and seven men died. However, I have a feeling the Captain's court martial is going to turn out worse for him than this.

ComradeTaco 8y ago
I'm curious what hour of her day the deck officer was on and how many hours of sleep she had the night previous. At some point, sleep deprivation can leave you essentially non-functional.
- tcj_phx 8y ago
  I've heard that female sailors are injected with Depo-Provera, to protect them from getting knocked up... Some women can tolerate this drug, while others are maimed [0]. Progesterone is now known to be a brain hormone. Medroxyprogesterone (brand name: Provera) is a good imposter-progesterone. It's useful for suppressing ovulation, but doesn't function like the endogenous hormone. [0] https://www.ourbodiesourselves.org/2016/08/i-wouldnt-recommend-it-to-anyone-depo-provera/ https://www.ourbodiesourselves.org/2016/08/i-wouldnt-recomme... edit: They must use all types, not just Provera, but certainly they emphasize the options that don't require a daily pill - the implant, IUD, Depo-Provera, etc. http://www.navy.mil/submit/display.asp?story_id=100091 http://www.navy.mil/submit/display.asp?story_id=100091
- chx 8y ago
  According to official report https://assets.documentcloud.org/documents/4165320/USS-Fitzgerald-and-USS-John-S-McCain-Collision.pdf https://assets.documentcloud.org/documents/4165320/USS-Fitzg... it played a part for sure: 8.4 Fatigue The command leadership allowed the schedule of events preceding the collision to fatigue the crew. The command leadership failed to assess the risks of fatigue and implement mitigation measures to ensure adequate crew rest.

exabrial 8y ago

I can't believe a giant merchant vessel could collide with a modern warship... doesn't establish a lot of confidence. How did you not see that coming?

toomanybeersies 8y ago
The problem was more that they did see it coming buy wilfully, through a failure of command, sailed into it.
bdamm 8y ago
Just one occasion would leave me shaking my head at the chain of failures that must have led up to that collision. But two similar collisions? Now it starts to seem like systematic conspiracy, or an attitude of expecting all other ships to maneuver away. How many commercial ships in the south China sea or sea of Japan have had to change course because of US Navy vessels over the last year? State ought to find out.
jabl 8y ago
Just as an anecdote, I was recently taking the ferry (as a passenger mind you), and the ferry encountered a Burke-class DD (which would be slightly unusual around here, but I later learned it was on its way to a friendly visit to my country). The Burke was ahead of us, to starboard, going in roughly the same direction, although slightly converging (lets say around 45 deg difference in heading, maybe?). When I got up, it was at maybe 1 nm distance, at 2 o'clock. So I go to another area of the ship, and the next time I look out of the window the Burke is on our port side at maybe 300m distance. Which, if my interpretation of events is correct, means the Burke cut in front of the ferry at frickin close range. For no effing reason whatsoever, considering there was plenty of open sea around both ships. This is the kind of macho BS attitude that gets people killed. Sure, nothing happened, but what if they would have had some kind of machinery or bridge communication malfunction? The ferry would have plowed the Burke in half.
- slededit 8y ago
  If the Burke was starboard then the ferry was the one who had to give way. You should be blaming them in this scenario. The Fitzgerald was hit on the Port side which indicates it should have given way.