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> The probe exposes how personal distrust led the officer of the deck, Lt. j.g. Sarah Coppock, to avoid communicating with the destroyer’s electronic nerve cent

> The probe exposes how personal distrust led the officer of the deck, Lt. j.g. Sarah Coppock, to avoid communicating with the destroyer’s electronic nerve center — the combat information center, or CIC — while the Fitzgerald tried to cross a shipping superhighway. I was shocked to read above. You don't personally trust someone or people in CIC so you just don't communicate with CIC when you are crossing the most congested patch of ocean on the planet? What is this? High school??

chopin 8y ago
I was more shocked of the pee-filled bottles on the bridge. This hints to deep cultural problems being present and an utterly incompetent upper management.
- kittiepryde 8y ago
  That's pretty normal. You get people on watch for 4 to 6 hours at a time. They can't leave. The bottle is sometimes the only option. You can try and get a relief so you can go to the head, but it's generally frowned upon if your that guy that always needs a head break, and in the middle of the night, no one wants to wake up so you can go pee.
  - tda 8y ago
    Exactly, the fact that this is apparently considered normal sounds like a pretty big problem
  - unethical_ban 8y ago
    If, in the United States Navy, a peacetime crew on a vessel doesn't have time to use the head without pissing in a bottle, we are doing something wrong.
    - avar 8y ago
      Isn't most of the point of military training and operations to always run an operation as if though it was wartime? Otherwise if there's a war what are these crews going to be doing? Pissing themselves on the bridge, or have a bottle in one hand and their dick in the other while trying to man their station, possibly while undergoing hard maneuvers? This seems to be some fundamental failure of crew management. Crews should be allocated in such a way that there's time for toilet breaks.
      - arethuza 8y ago
        Presumably they don't run realistic exercises all the time - that sounds like a military equivalent of always being in crunch mode and we all know how well that works out!
        icebraining 8y ago
        Wartime can last years, you can't rely on only being able to withstand that for a couple of weeks or months. I can't say I have any experience with the military, but from listening to "Life and Work on HMS Enterprise"[1], they are constantly running realistic exercises (in their case, mostly simulating fires and people overboard, since it's a research vessel). [1] http://omegataupodcast.net/277-life-and-work-on-hms-enterprise/ http://omegataupodcast.net/277-life-and-work-on-hms-enterpri...
      - Nasrudith 8y ago
        Not always - we don't have everyone at a military base going around with rifles 24-7 because the risks of doing so are higher. But yeah it is a failure of crew management certainly - at very least there should be a solid "relief" procedure that can handle it - and even stable in the long odds of a crewman getting killed out of line of sight by say a glancing hit.
  - chopin 8y ago
    As I said, that's poor management. You will loose to an enemy who does it properly. The US was once envied for their officers training and education. Edited to add: Also, what will people do? They will drink less than they should to avoid the humiliation. On top of a tired crew you will get also a dehydrated one. This is a surefire recipe for bad things to happen.
    - adventured 8y ago
      > You will loose to an enemy who does it properly. I agree with the need to always keep training in top shape. There is no naval enemy on earth that is even remotely competitive with the US in any regard. Iran? North Korea? ISIS? What enemy? Russia has no global naval projection, it can barely sustainably push beyond the Black Sea with its surface ships. Their sub fleet is a medium threat. The US is also not at war with Russia, they aren't actually an enemy. There is no war coming with the Russians, they're only good for boogeyman status. They've got a perma stagnant economy (Australia will surpass it soon) and melting social-economic position (see: pension cuts making Putin unpopular), crimping their ability to continue to spend on anything military (most of their military is badly dilapidated, so they've taken to focusing very narrowly because they can't field a high quality force across the board any longer; this is also why Putin puts so much effort into screaming about his magic super weapons that are unstoppable, their conventional military is rotting). Could China one day be a naval enemy? Sure. At some point in the next 20 years there could be a naval conflict near Chinese territory. The US isn't winning that near-shore conflict short of going to a WW2 level output of ships. The dumbest thing the US could do from a navy perspective is get into a naval conflict with China close to their shores 10-20 years from now. It wouldn't matter how well trained the officers are, it's an inherently losing position.
      - dhimes 8y ago
        There is no naval enemy on earth that is even remotely competitive with the US in any regard. Ship to ship maneuverability and tactics, even? How can you be so sure? Do you think that it's impossible for a US ship to lose a "dogfight" at sea in Asia as tensions escalate? If the lack of training is as bad as they say, I have a hard time imagining them winning one.
- jessaustin 8y ago
  The officer of the deck is named "Sarah". How does a woman urinate in bottles in a public work setting? If she was the boss, why did she tolerate others doing what she can't? If she wasn't the boss, it seems she has a pretty good case for having been subjected to a toxic work environment. Of course this must be balanced against the fact that her poor performance killed sailors.
  - watwut 8y ago
    The Sarah officer was not officer in CIC which had pee bottles, Sarah officer was the one who did not contacted CIC. Also, the answer to "If she was the boss, why did she tolerate others doing what she can't?" assumes a lot about the boss. Tolerating something boss himself cant do by boss is pretty normal. (Not that I think pee bottles are sign of good management.) The answer to "If she wasn't the boss, it seems she has a pretty good case for having been subjected to a toxic work environment." is that well, that happen and soldiers tolerate a lot. She might have good reasons not to open that can of worms. It is usually better not to.
  - danielvf 8y ago
    The officer on deck - Sarah Coppock - was responsible for the entire ship while the captain was sleeping. She was on the bridge, not in the CIC where the bottles were. However, the officer in charge of the CIC - Natalie Combs - was also female.
    - phonon 8y ago
      https://www.navytimes.com/news/your-navy/2019/01/16/photo-emerges-that-might-exonerate-fitz-defendant/ https://www.navytimes.com/news/your-navy/2019/01/16/photo-em... In a surprise move during a Tuesday hearing in a Washington Navy Yard courtroom, defense attorneys representing Lt. Natalie Combs held up a new piece of evidence that might exonerate her at her upcoming court-martial trial. It’s a photograph — a still image captured from digital footage recorded by an aft Vertical Launching System camera mounted on the guided-missile destroyer Fitzgerald on June 17, 2017, seconds after it was speared and spun off the coast of Japan by the hulking ACX Crystal, a Philippine-flagged cargo vessel. What it reveals is something that hasn’t surfaced in any of the Navy’s publicly-released probes or even a secret military “dual-purpose” investigation obtained by Navy Times and completed 41 days after the tragedy. It shows a string of lights on the ACX Crystal that Coast Guard Lt. Cmdr. Jeff Janaro — an attorney who also commanded vessels at sea — called an “improper lighting configuration,” one that appeared to the defense team to be “recklessly unlawful.” That’s important because if the ACX Crystal’s lamps were positioned incorrectly, that alignment might’ve fooled the watchstanders on the Fitz’s bridge who were trying to track multiple vessels in one of the world’s busiest maritime superhighways, piecing together a picture of the night through radar readings and visual clues. Ship travel is governed by the “rules of the road,” a set of guidelines regarding speed, lookouts and other best practices to avoid collisions. Those bylaws include how lights are configured on ships. The green lights on the side of a vessel should be visible from three miles away, six miles for the bright white lights running from bow to stern. “This picture tells us it didn’t look right,” Janaro told Navy judge Cmdr. Arthur Gaston. “We think the Crystal was very negligent in this matter.” Few people have seen the image — maybe only a handful of attorneys in Washington, Lt. Combs and Navy Times — but it “might be worth a thousand words,” as Gaston put it. It’s unclear if even the Coast Guard investigators working on a National Transportation Safety Board probe into the Fitzgerald collision have a copy of it. n the night of the collision, Combs never would’ve seen the lights of the ACX Crystal with her own eyes. She was in charge of the Fitz’s electronic nerve center below the bridge, what’s called the Combat Information Center, or "CIC.' Her team was supposed to use advanced sensors like the Arleigh Burke-class destroyer’s SPS-67 radar to track vessels near the Fitz and relay what they detected to the watchstanders on the bridge. But the secret probe helmed by Rear Adm. Brian Fort determined that Combs' CIC had "zero communication” with the bridge team before the Crystal loomed seemingly out of nowhere to ram the Fitz’s starboard hull. Although listed as operational, the CIC’s SPS-67 system actually had fallen into a “degraded status,” according to Fort’s report. Some CIC sailors didn’t appear to know how to use the equipment — much of it in various states of disrepair — and the room itself was heaped in garbage, human waste and exercise equipment. In the aftermath of the ACX Crystal collision, Fort found a stack of abandoned forms where Combs had been sitting. “She was most likely consumed and distracted by a review of Operations Department paperwork for the three and a half hours of her watch prior to the collision,” he wrote. Fort determined that Combs was derelict in her CIC duties, but an investigating officer assigned to her initial Article 32 hearing, Cmdr. Anthony Johnson, sifted through the same evidence and recommended that she skip court-martial proceedings and go instead to a Navy board of inquiry to determine if she should remain on duty. Adm. James Caldwell, the convening authority in her case, disregarded Johnson and charged Combs with dereliction of duty that negligently resulted in the death of fellow sailors and the negligent and improper hazarding of a vessel. To Janaro and star military defense attorney David Sheldon, the photo casts into doubt the first charge. It relies on a “but for” clause — but for Combs' derelict leadership, the mishap would not have occurred. They believe that the ACX Crystal shouldered much of the blame for the accident, and bad Navy practices set her up to fail. They pointed to the recent settlement between the U.S. Department of Justice and Olympic Steamship Company, S.A., Panama, the owners of the ACX Crystal. They’re forking over $26.7 million to the United States. While finding plenty of fault with Combs and other Americans on the Fitzgerald for the collision, Fort’s report also takes aim at the crew of the ACX Crystal, in particular an unnamed second officer. Among a long list of failures listed in the Fort report, that officer “failed to maintain a proper lookout so as to make a full appraisal of the risk of collision” with the Fitzgerald, "failed to determine if a risk of collision with FTZ existed by using all available means” and “he failed to appreciate, by radar or visual observation, that FTZ was on a constant bearing with a decreasing range, which observation would have led him to deem risk of collision to exist.” Sheldon and Janaro want to interview two Filipino officers from the ACX Crystal about their vessel’s lights captured in the photo, plus the many other problems raised in Fort’s report. The attorneys have a series of transcripts from previous interviews the officers did, but their words are marked “indiscernible” 203 times. The defense team thinks their testimony might free Combs. Military prosecutor Lt. Cmdr. Kate Shovlin told Gaston that Naval Criminal Investigative Service made a good faith effort to talk to the men, but they avoided the agent who visited their homes and workplace. Their family members also told NCIS the ACX Crystal crewmen wouldn’t cooperate with American investigators. Combs' defense team wants to trigger a treaty between Washington and Manila that would prod authorities in the Philippines to compel the ACX Crystal’s officers to testify, but that threatens to push the court-martial trial well past its slated late May opening. That’s also around the time the highly-anticipated NTSB probe is expected to be released.
austincheney 8y ago
Distrust of management is extremely common. I cannot stress enough just how common it is both in the military and the corporate world or how potentially toxic this is. Most people outside of management are absolutely incapable of seeing it, even when its excessively rampant, because they don't recognize the symptoms. The common reasons for not recognizing such symptoms, even when immediately apparent and excessive, are due to: self-centered desires, incompetence, and perceptions of hostility. Trust issues can occur from top down as well as bottom up. I have observed management not trusting their people far more commonly than opposed to people not trusting their management. When management does not trust their staff the staff will not be used or properly developed. It may be that the leadership believes it takes less effort to do the job themselves than watch their staff struggle and fail. This is a benign form of toxic leadership. Staff must be made to do their jobs and properly mentored to just before the point where the incompetence is likely to result in criminal/policy violations or immediate harms.
- gaius 8y ago
  Most people outside of management are absolutely incapable of seeing it Isn’t it the opposite - that management/officers are oblivious to their own toxic behaviour that led to the rank-and-file distrusting them?
  - austincheney 8y ago
    Yes, that is also correct. Toxic behavior is present for a variety of unrelated reasons of which many can be cured with a humble dose of self-reflection. Sometimes that lack of self-awareness becomes catastrophic in extreme cases like Bathsheba Syndrome. People occupying positions of management are more capable of seeing trust issues simply because they have the responsibility to talk with subordinates of their own and reason upon the effectiveness of that dialogue. People without managerial experience generally lack the tools to perceive the behaviors driving the decisions thrust upon them. People outside of management also tend to lack the necessary exposure to situations where these behaviors are present. There is also the power dynamic. A boss can more easily terminate a toxic employee than an employee can terminate a toxic boss. This power distance prevents many toxic employees from establish trust issues against a superior until there exists a pattern of identifiable behavior beyond a single employee.
watwut 8y ago
That sort of thing happen in companies a lot. It is certainly not something limited to high school - where it actually happen less as analogical situation never arises. We are in the context of CIC being full of bottles of pee and crew members who didn’t know how to use radar controls. The personal mistrust may mean various things, but likely means something like "they rarely provided something useful and last x times I passed information it caused unnecessary complications, slowdowns and problems". The perception may be true of false of course, may be caused by technical incompetence or by people causing dramas for no reason or whatever. It is just something common in large badly managed groups where you cant rely on other people.
sevensor 8y ago
> What is this? High school?? According to most of the ex-Navy people I've met, it's high school part 2. None of them had been officers, and I'm a tiny bit surprised it extends to the officer class, but only a tiny bit.
- odn86 8y ago
  Surface Warfare Officers eat their own. It's a constant game to make sure you don't get passed over for promotion.
  - pc86 8y ago
    I had a friend who was an SWO, was brilliant in school, extremely physically fit, spoke multiple languages, etc. He got out after the minimum enlistment and couldn't stop talking about how terrible the culture was and how you basically needed to do whatever it took in order to secure your next promotion.
deleted 8y ago
[deleted]
jessaustin 8y ago
Is "combat information" necessary in order to navigate? Most civilian vessels would not have a CIC. Some vessels don't even have lots of the navigational electronics that container ships have, yet are still safely piloted on the ocean.

chopin 8y ago

I was more shocked of the pee-filled bottles on the bridge. This hints to deep cultural problems being present and an utterly incompetent upper management.

kittiepryde 8y ago
That's pretty normal. You get people on watch for 4 to 6 hours at a time. They can't leave. The bottle is sometimes the only option. You can try and get a relief so you can go to the head, but it's generally frowned upon if your that guy that always needs a head break, and in the middle of the night, no one wants to wake up so you can go pee.
- tda 8y ago
  Exactly, the fact that this is apparently considered normal sounds like a pretty big problem
- unethical_ban 8y ago
  If, in the United States Navy, a peacetime crew on a vessel doesn't have time to use the head without pissing in a bottle, we are doing something wrong.
  - avar 8y ago
    Isn't most of the point of military training and operations to always run an operation as if though it was wartime? Otherwise if there's a war what are these crews going to be doing? Pissing themselves on the bridge, or have a bottle in one hand and their dick in the other while trying to man their station, possibly while undergoing hard maneuvers? This seems to be some fundamental failure of crew management. Crews should be allocated in such a way that there's time for toilet breaks.
    - arethuza 8y ago
      Presumably they don't run realistic exercises all the time - that sounds like a military equivalent of always being in crunch mode and we all know how well that works out!
      - icebraining 8y ago
        Wartime can last years, you can't rely on only being able to withstand that for a couple of weeks or months. I can't say I have any experience with the military, but from listening to "Life and Work on HMS Enterprise"[1], they are constantly running realistic exercises (in their case, mostly simulating fires and people overboard, since it's a research vessel). [1] http://omegataupodcast.net/277-life-and-work-on-hms-enterprise/ http://omegataupodcast.net/277-life-and-work-on-hms-enterpri...
    - Nasrudith 8y ago
      Not always - we don't have everyone at a military base going around with rifles 24-7 because the risks of doing so are higher. But yeah it is a failure of crew management certainly - at very least there should be a solid "relief" procedure that can handle it - and even stable in the long odds of a crewman getting killed out of line of sight by say a glancing hit.
- chopin 8y ago
  As I said, that's poor management. You will loose to an enemy who does it properly. The US was once envied for their officers training and education. Edited to add: Also, what will people do? They will drink less than they should to avoid the humiliation. On top of a tired crew you will get also a dehydrated one. This is a surefire recipe for bad things to happen.
  - adventured 8y ago
    > You will loose to an enemy who does it properly. I agree with the need to always keep training in top shape. There is no naval enemy on earth that is even remotely competitive with the US in any regard. Iran? North Korea? ISIS? What enemy? Russia has no global naval projection, it can barely sustainably push beyond the Black Sea with its surface ships. Their sub fleet is a medium threat. The US is also not at war with Russia, they aren't actually an enemy. There is no war coming with the Russians, they're only good for boogeyman status. They've got a perma stagnant economy (Australia will surpass it soon) and melting social-economic position (see: pension cuts making Putin unpopular), crimping their ability to continue to spend on anything military (most of their military is badly dilapidated, so they've taken to focusing very narrowly because they can't field a high quality force across the board any longer; this is also why Putin puts so much effort into screaming about his magic super weapons that are unstoppable, their conventional military is rotting). Could China one day be a naval enemy? Sure. At some point in the next 20 years there could be a naval conflict near Chinese territory. The US isn't winning that near-shore conflict short of going to a WW2 level output of ships. The dumbest thing the US could do from a navy perspective is get into a naval conflict with China close to their shores 10-20 years from now. It wouldn't matter how well trained the officers are, it's an inherently losing position.
    - dhimes 8y ago
      There is no naval enemy on earth that is even remotely competitive with the US in any regard. Ship to ship maneuverability and tactics, even? How can you be so sure? Do you think that it's impossible for a US ship to lose a "dogfight" at sea in Asia as tensions escalate? If the lack of training is as bad as they say, I have a hard time imagining them winning one.
jessaustin 8y ago
The officer of the deck is named "Sarah". How does a woman urinate in bottles in a public work setting? If she was the boss, why did she tolerate others doing what she can't? If she wasn't the boss, it seems she has a pretty good case for having been subjected to a toxic work environment. Of course this must be balanced against the fact that her poor performance killed sailors.
- watwut 8y ago
  The Sarah officer was not officer in CIC which had pee bottles, Sarah officer was the one who did not contacted CIC. Also, the answer to "If she was the boss, why did she tolerate others doing what she can't?" assumes a lot about the boss. Tolerating something boss himself cant do by boss is pretty normal. (Not that I think pee bottles are sign of good management.) The answer to "If she wasn't the boss, it seems she has a pretty good case for having been subjected to a toxic work environment." is that well, that happen and soldiers tolerate a lot. She might have good reasons not to open that can of worms. It is usually better not to.
- danielvf 8y ago
  The officer on deck - Sarah Coppock - was responsible for the entire ship while the captain was sleeping. She was on the bridge, not in the CIC where the bottles were. However, the officer in charge of the CIC - Natalie Combs - was also female.
  - phonon 8y ago
    https://www.navytimes.com/news/your-navy/2019/01/16/photo-emerges-that-might-exonerate-fitz-defendant/ https://www.navytimes.com/news/your-navy/2019/01/16/photo-em... In a surprise move during a Tuesday hearing in a Washington Navy Yard courtroom, defense attorneys representing Lt. Natalie Combs held up a new piece of evidence that might exonerate her at her upcoming court-martial trial. It’s a photograph — a still image captured from digital footage recorded by an aft Vertical Launching System camera mounted on the guided-missile destroyer Fitzgerald on June 17, 2017, seconds after it was speared and spun off the coast of Japan by the hulking ACX Crystal, a Philippine-flagged cargo vessel. What it reveals is something that hasn’t surfaced in any of the Navy’s publicly-released probes or even a secret military “dual-purpose” investigation obtained by Navy Times and completed 41 days after the tragedy. It shows a string of lights on the ACX Crystal that Coast Guard Lt. Cmdr. Jeff Janaro — an attorney who also commanded vessels at sea — called an “improper lighting configuration,” one that appeared to the defense team to be “recklessly unlawful.” That’s important because if the ACX Crystal’s lamps were positioned incorrectly, that alignment might’ve fooled the watchstanders on the Fitz’s bridge who were trying to track multiple vessels in one of the world’s busiest maritime superhighways, piecing together a picture of the night through radar readings and visual clues. Ship travel is governed by the “rules of the road,” a set of guidelines regarding speed, lookouts and other best practices to avoid collisions. Those bylaws include how lights are configured on ships. The green lights on the side of a vessel should be visible from three miles away, six miles for the bright white lights running from bow to stern. “This picture tells us it didn’t look right,” Janaro told Navy judge Cmdr. Arthur Gaston. “We think the Crystal was very negligent in this matter.” Few people have seen the image — maybe only a handful of attorneys in Washington, Lt. Combs and Navy Times — but it “might be worth a thousand words,” as Gaston put it. It’s unclear if even the Coast Guard investigators working on a National Transportation Safety Board probe into the Fitzgerald collision have a copy of it. n the night of the collision, Combs never would’ve seen the lights of the ACX Crystal with her own eyes. She was in charge of the Fitz’s electronic nerve center below the bridge, what’s called the Combat Information Center, or "CIC.' Her team was supposed to use advanced sensors like the Arleigh Burke-class destroyer’s SPS-67 radar to track vessels near the Fitz and relay what they detected to the watchstanders on the bridge. But the secret probe helmed by Rear Adm. Brian Fort determined that Combs' CIC had "zero communication” with the bridge team before the Crystal loomed seemingly out of nowhere to ram the Fitz’s starboard hull. Although listed as operational, the CIC’s SPS-67 system actually had fallen into a “degraded status,” according to Fort’s report. Some CIC sailors didn’t appear to know how to use the equipment — much of it in various states of disrepair — and the room itself was heaped in garbage, human waste and exercise equipment. In the aftermath of the ACX Crystal collision, Fort found a stack of abandoned forms where Combs had been sitting. “She was most likely consumed and distracted by a review of Operations Department paperwork for the three and a half hours of her watch prior to the collision,” he wrote. Fort determined that Combs was derelict in her CIC duties, but an investigating officer assigned to her initial Article 32 hearing, Cmdr. Anthony Johnson, sifted through the same evidence and recommended that she skip court-martial proceedings and go instead to a Navy board of inquiry to determine if she should remain on duty. Adm. James Caldwell, the convening authority in her case, disregarded Johnson and charged Combs with dereliction of duty that negligently resulted in the death of fellow sailors and the negligent and improper hazarding of a vessel. To Janaro and star military defense attorney David Sheldon, the photo casts into doubt the first charge. It relies on a “but for” clause — but for Combs' derelict leadership, the mishap would not have occurred. They believe that the ACX Crystal shouldered much of the blame for the accident, and bad Navy practices set her up to fail. They pointed to the recent settlement between the U.S. Department of Justice and Olympic Steamship Company, S.A., Panama, the owners of the ACX Crystal. They’re forking over $26.7 million to the United States. While finding plenty of fault with Combs and other Americans on the Fitzgerald for the collision, Fort’s report also takes aim at the crew of the ACX Crystal, in particular an unnamed second officer. Among a long list of failures listed in the Fort report, that officer “failed to maintain a proper lookout so as to make a full appraisal of the risk of collision” with the Fitzgerald, "failed to determine if a risk of collision with FTZ existed by using all available means” and “he failed to appreciate, by radar or visual observation, that FTZ was on a constant bearing with a decreasing range, which observation would have led him to deem risk of collision to exist.” Sheldon and Janaro want to interview two Filipino officers from the ACX Crystal about their vessel’s lights captured in the photo, plus the many other problems raised in Fort’s report. The attorneys have a series of transcripts from previous interviews the officers did, but their words are marked “indiscernible” 203 times. The defense team thinks their testimony might free Combs. Military prosecutor Lt. Cmdr. Kate Shovlin told Gaston that Naval Criminal Investigative Service made a good faith effort to talk to the men, but they avoided the agent who visited their homes and workplace. Their family members also told NCIS the ACX Crystal crewmen wouldn’t cooperate with American investigators. Combs' defense team wants to trigger a treaty between Washington and Manila that would prod authorities in the Philippines to compel the ACX Crystal’s officers to testify, but that threatens to push the court-martial trial well past its slated late May opening. That’s also around the time the highly-anticipated NTSB probe is expected to be released.

austincheney 8y ago

Distrust of management is extremely common. I cannot stress enough just how common it is both in the military and the corporate world or how potentially toxic this is. Most people outside of management are absolutely incapable of seeing it, even when its excessively rampant, because they don't recognize the symptoms. The common reasons for not recognizing such symptoms, even when immediately apparent and excessive, are due to: self-centered desires, incompetence, and perceptions of hostility. Trust issues can occur from top down as well as bottom up. I have observed management not trusting their people far more commonly than opposed to people not trusting their management. When management does not trust their staff the staff will not be used or properly developed. It may be that the leadership believes it takes less effort to do the job themselves than watch their staff struggle and fail. This is a benign form of toxic leadership. Staff must be made to do their jobs and properly mentored to just before the point where the incompetence is likely to result in criminal/policy violations or immediate harms.

gaius 8y ago
Most people outside of management are absolutely incapable of seeing it Isn’t it the opposite - that management/officers are oblivious to their own toxic behaviour that led to the rank-and-file distrusting them?
- austincheney 8y ago
  Yes, that is also correct. Toxic behavior is present for a variety of unrelated reasons of which many can be cured with a humble dose of self-reflection. Sometimes that lack of self-awareness becomes catastrophic in extreme cases like Bathsheba Syndrome. People occupying positions of management are more capable of seeing trust issues simply because they have the responsibility to talk with subordinates of their own and reason upon the effectiveness of that dialogue. People without managerial experience generally lack the tools to perceive the behaviors driving the decisions thrust upon them. People outside of management also tend to lack the necessary exposure to situations where these behaviors are present. There is also the power dynamic. A boss can more easily terminate a toxic employee than an employee can terminate a toxic boss. This power distance prevents many toxic employees from establish trust issues against a superior until there exists a pattern of identifiable behavior beyond a single employee.

watwut 8y ago

That sort of thing happen in companies a lot. It is certainly not something limited to high school - where it actually happen less as analogical situation never arises. We are in the context of CIC being full of bottles of pee and crew members who didn’t know how to use radar controls. The personal mistrust may mean various things, but likely means something like "they rarely provided something useful and last x times I passed information it caused unnecessary complications, slowdowns and problems". The perception may be true of false of course, may be caused by technical incompetence or by people causing dramas for no reason or whatever. It is just something common in large badly managed groups where you cant rely on other people.

sevensor 8y ago

> What is this? High school?? According to most of the ex-Navy people I've met, it's high school part 2. None of them had been officers, and I'm a tiny bit surprised it extends to the officer class, but only a tiny bit.

odn86 8y ago
Surface Warfare Officers eat their own. It's a constant game to make sure you don't get passed over for promotion.
- pc86 8y ago
  I had a friend who was an SWO, was brilliant in school, extremely physically fit, spoke multiple languages, etc. He got out after the minimum enlistment and couldn't stop talking about how terrible the culture was and how you basically needed to do whatever it took in order to secure your next promotion.

deleted 8y ago

[deleted]

jessaustin 8y ago

Is "combat information" necessary in order to navigate? Most civilian vessels would not have a CIC. Some vessels don't even have lots of the navigational electronics that container ships have, yet are still safely piloted on the ocean.