Now that Chelsea Manning is running for Senate, I’d love to hear what poor judgment and decision made it possible for a Private to download and leak a hard drive worth of classified data. I don’t recall any Army generals being fired or court martialled. I used to work for a company that couldn’t even change the color of the screen saver without submitting a written ticket through the “help” desk.
“These collisions would have never taken place if we weren’t starving our military for funding.”
— Louie Gohmert, God-fearing geo-political guru
I made that up yet it sounded reasonable.
[quote=“tiowally, post:3, topic:67379, full:true”]I made that up yet it sounded reasonable.
[/quote]
Yup, it does sound like Louie the Lamebrain
Pretty astounding that there apparently isn’t a very close chain of command that has to be followed or that can so easily not be followed. I guess there’s a lot of open space out there so maybe that caused complacence on having that chain of command and following it. But it seems like there’s even more space in airplane travel, particularly over water and that seems to be watched very closely, even more so than ground travel. Strange.
A second report called for about 60 recommended changes to address the problems. They ranged from improved training on seamanship, navigation and the use of ship equipment to more basic changes to improve sleep and stress management for sailors.
So while the Navy was chopping off heads, why did they stop at Rear Admiral Williams? Sounds to me like the Navy has serious deficiencies beyond those in Task Force 70 in the 7th Fleet. Why didn’t they go all the way up the chain to Admiral Richardson who has, rather belatedly, in light of “the extensive training and leadership failures,” ordered “all naval commanders around the world to review their staffs and ships to see if they had similar problems.” I mean where were his admonitions between the first collision in May and the third collision in August (not to mention the grounding of a ship?) Why did it take the deaths of 17 sailors for him to wake up and smell the coffee?
Of course now that he’s been sacked, the next thing we know, Rear Admiral Williams will be working at the White House. Obviously he’s eminently qualified.
The fundamental problem is that we don’t really need these ships most of the time. It’s hard for people to take a job seriously when they know that it’s all about digging a big bunch of holes and filling them up again. Remember, same thing in the Air Force missile command, similar stuff in the army…
The truth is out there somewhere.
For what it’s worth, a friend since college with a Regular Navy commission served aboard a destroyer. When these accidents happened he said one word: Sleep. With 4 on 4 off one is perpetually tired and open to gross mistakes.
With this story he says it’s just senior officers covering ass.
Do they drug test navy commanders or is that only reserved for home depot employees?
Remember the Indianapolis
The destroyer USS Fitzgerald struck a commercial ship off the waters of Japan in June, killing seven U.S. sailors. The destroyer USS John S. McCain collided with an oil tanker in coastal waters off Singapore in August, killing 10 U.S. sailors.
We didn’t have any US Navy ship collisions while Obama was president, did we? I’m just asking for a friend in the Chiselin’ Trump administration.
Thank you for posting that. Terribly sad and infuriating at the same time.
And McVay committed suicide in full uniform.