In the darkness of early morning on August 21, the guided-missile destroyer USS John S. McCain collided with a tanker in the Strait of Malacca off Singapore. Ten sailors are believed to have lost their lives in the McCain collision. When added to the seven who died in the June 17 collision of the USS Fitzgerald with the container ship ACX Crystal, this has been the deadliest year at sea for the US Navy's surface fleet since the 1989 turret explosion aboard USS Iowa (in which 47 sailors perished).

The McCain's collision was the fourth this year between a naval vessel and a merchant ship—the third involving a ship of the US Navy's Seventh Fleet. (The other collision involved a Russian intelligence collection ship near the Bosporus Strait in Turkey.) There hasn't been a string of collisions like this since the 1950s.

Collisions are one of the biggest nightmares of those who go to sea. Cmdr. W.B. Hayer famously posted a brass plaque on the bridge of the destroyer USS Buck misquoting Thucydides: "A collision at sea can ruin your entire day" (this quote later found its way to Navy training posters). But few can look at the photos of Berthing 2 or the captain's stateroom aboard the USS Fitzgerald in the Navy's recent supplemental report on its collision and laugh.

US Navy

US Navy

US Navy

US Navy

Collisions involving naval vessels, especially those resulting in a loss of life, have been relatively rare over the last two decades. And they usually happen during risky close maneuvering with other military ships. Before this year, the last collision between a US Navy ship and a civilian vessel was in 2004, when the aircraft carrier USS John F. Kennedy ran over a dhow in the Persian Gulf during night air operations. (A dhow is a traditional Arab sailing vessel.) [Correction: as a reader pointed out, the USS Porter (another Arleigh Burke class destroyer) collided with the Very Large Crude Carrier Otowasan in 2012.]

So, why, with radars that can track targets smaller than a meter in size, satellite navigation-aided collision warning systems, and an array of other sensors and systems to provide "situational awareness," are naval ships colliding with anything? That's the question that the Navy is now investigating.

Initial reports from the organization suggest that a "steering casualty"—a loss of control over steering from the bridge—contributed to the McCain's fatal collision. That, and the nature of the ship's steering and navigation system, has led to speculation that the McCain was "hacked" and that perhaps some sort of malicious electronic attack was also involved in the Fitzgerald's collision.

But so far, available evidence suggests something much less sinister—though potentially more threatening to the overall readiness of the service. There was no hacking, no GPS spoofing or jamming, nor any other deliberate enemy electronic attack on the Navy ships involved in this year's accidents. Instead, much more human factors were at work—and some of them are endemic to the Navy's current management culture and operational readiness.

Target-rich environments

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Each of the collisions this year happened under widely different circumstances, though they have one major thing in common: all of them (the Russian collision included) happened in some of the most congested waters in the world. And unlike naval ships, many of the other vessels traveling through those waters have minimal bridge crews, limited communications, and a lot less maneuverability. Even when merchant ships are in the wrong, navigationally speaking, Navy ships generally are in a better position to maneuver out of the way and can't depend on the other ships to follow the rules of the road.

Watch standers aboard modern warships may have more technology to help them, but they still face a daunting task when they enter high-traffic areas as treacherous as the Strait of Gibraltar—or the Strait of Malacca, the approaches to the Bosporus and Dardanelles, and the approaches to Tokyo Bay. In each, hundreds of other vessels may be visible to the naked eye or on the radar scope. The resulting sea of data points can overwhelm even an experienced bridge crew regardless of how good their technology is.

In the investigation into the collision of the Fitzgerald, according to a statement by a Seventh Fleet spokesperson, Navy investigators found that:

The collision was avoidable and both ships demonstrated poor seamanship. Within Fitzgerald, flawed watch stander teamwork and inadequate leadership contributed to the collision that claimed the lives of seven Fitzgerald Sailors, injured three more, and damaged both ships... Several junior officers were relieved of their duties due to poor seamanship and flawed teamwork as bridge and combat information center watch standers. Additional administrative actions were taken against members of both watch teams.

One of the symptoms of that "flawed teamwork" was that the bridge and CIC (Combat Information Center) watch teams had lost their picture of what was going on around them. "Clearly at some point, the bridge team lost situational awareness," Adm. Bill Moran, the deputy chief of naval operations, told reporters on August 17.

I have some personal experience in losing the bubble. In 1987, I was on my first major deployment aboard the USS Iowa and standing one of my first night bridge watches of the deployment. We just happened to be traversing one of the most heavily trafficked stretches of water in the world—the Strait of Gibraltar.

The Iowa had a decidedly low-tech bridge. The helmsman steered the ship from within an 18-inch armored "citadel" at the center of the bridge. There was a single radar repeater on the bridge to track other shipping traffic, and a backlit board marked with grease pencil listed other vessels being tracked visually or by radar, either by name or by a letter designator.

I was trying to keep track of every fishing boat and merchant ship in my head with well over 40 visual contacts bobbing around us as we steamed east. When the captain came onto the bridge and began to interrogate me about what each contact was, I choked about halfway through the report. He took me to the bridge wing to chew me out and kicked me off the watch team for the night. I spent the rest of the watch standing there, face burning with shame.

At least I knew when I had lost the bubble. Collisions happen because watch crews don't realize what they don't know.