Also, similar damage wasn't immediately repaired in many cases, or temporarily patched by ships company while remaining underway, as WW II era CV's continued combat flight ops.
I am talking about ships forward deployed being repaired, and or repaired by ship's company...or operating for extended periods in spite of the damage.
Though, I think, there's just a general dearth of manpower anywhere in the US. I'm guessing that they will be relying mainly on local manpower for the majority of the repair work.
While it was critical to get the Yorktown in the fight, its arguable that any deficiencies in her emergency repair didn't directly contribute to her loss. Although the 3 inop boilers did result in some less speed available when she really needed it, perhaps she could have retained electrical power a critical time longer, and the welded hull repair did apparently fail due to likely shock and whipping.
But the massive holes blown into her hull by the torpedoes made the hull plating failure, and electrical power loss (for pumps), moot.
But there can be some lessons learned quite wrongly.
Yet again, it appears that the essential importance of Warship Vulnerability Reduction design features is getting seen as dispensable in the name of "Efficiency"...
Protection of vital systems such as wire runs, and electronics.
A big reason why the Ticonderoga was knocked out of the fight off Formosa and sent back to Puget Sound, was because her electronics could not be repaired in theater:
Poorly protected electronics and wire runs in the superstructure of the battleship South Dakota were vulnerable to relatively inconsequential 'splinter' damage, and hobbled her combat performance in the November 42 night battle of Guadalcanal:
How much fragment damage can the SPY-6 take before its inop?
Its obvious no thought about fragment protection was considered in the design.
Can the array be repaired in theater, or will a DDG so damaged have to return to CONUS?
How about the interior wire runs and electronics? What about the chill water system?
In the Fitzgerald collision, there were reports of water cascading from the chill water system. How much more of a complication, and damage, did that cause?
Finally... Yes. Armor does matter. No. That does not mean a ship needs to be constructed like an impervious Death Star.
The armored hangar deck of the Franklin -an important Survivability design priority on the Essex's- was essential in preventing her loss. Also, other Essex's stayed in the fight because the hangar deck armor prevented more serious damage to occur deeper in the ship.
The armored boiler uptakes played a critical role in allowing the engineering spaces to remain viable on the Franklin and Bunker Hill.
(note the port list of the Bunker Hill. The Essex skippers were briefed to immediately initiate a port list to allow firefighting water and floating flames to drain out the port side hangar openings, and away from the uptakes and bomb elevators. Never really explained (anywhere I've found), is why Capt. Gheres didn't do this aboard the Franklin. Her initial and lingering starboard list directly contributed to her travails)
More validation of this, is to contrast the war damage experience of the Independence class CVE's.
The design was severely weight limited, to the point that curtains instead of doors were fitted on JO staterooms. So to were the uptakes not armored, the interior ventilation system was not designed to be isolated for damage (the Essex's also suffered with a vulnerable ventilation system), and the original light cruiser design depended on the cruiser superstructure to help protect the engineering spaces.
When the Princeton took the bomb hit similar in severity to several Essex's, Yorktowns (yes 2 of 3 were sunk), and Saratoga received, DC efforts could not save her. Why?
Because the boiler rooms were immediately rendered uninhabitable and had to be abandoned, she immediately lost power. Her Emergency Power system was not as robust as that of the larger Essex's, and these cascading effects immediately weakened the DC response. They did fight the best they could, but the bombs in the unprotected torpedo space suffered a mass detonation which tore off the aft third of the ship, and killed and wounded hundreds aboard the cruiser Birmingham, alongside fighting the fires.
The loss of the Princeton wasn't the only Independence class CVE to suffer from these inevitable design weaknesses. During the first "Halsey Typhoon" a few months later, the Monterey suffered a severe hangar fire, and because of the same design compromises above, she was very nearly lost as well.
In 1945, Halsey said of the Kamikaze threat at Okinawa:
"We have more ships and bullets than the Japs have planes"
This won't be true for us in the next Big War. With the Truman, the only carrier, that half of the world, took a bit of damage, the navy lost its prime asset to accomplish National Tasking.
Like the Japanese in WWII, we can't afford to lose much before there is no way to win.
So, when embracing the idea that we can build Frigates and Light Carriers, and save money on all this needless protection stuff...
Ask yourself this:
Will ever build enough to even lose a few of those?
We all already know the answer to that is... No.
Even any "simple" or "small" ships will have to built to take punishment if we think we can...
"Afford To Fight"
First off, Operational necessities required her to store bombs in the hangar level -and unprotected due to wight considerations-
For years we’ve had administrations who were more interested in treating the military as a social experiment as opposed to a military force. Furthermore the waste within this system is biblical. It is going to take years (and honest assessment) to fix the problem. Otherwise our national security will continue to suffer.
We don't have years. War is coming. Hopefully SECDEF starts harvesting excess/incompetent flag officers & SES bureaucrats, and deep-selecting CAPTs & CDRs to wear stars and build ships.
(can't get to the details just now...but I bet alot of folks don't know "The Rest of the Story" about the Enterprise (CVAN-65 not CV-6) after her fire in 1969...stay tuned!)
Ulithi is impressive, a truly great place for a fleet anchorage. I was there in 1995, anchored a few hundred yards offshore in BASSWOOD to deliver humanitarian goods. Photos and descriptions do not do that atoll justice.
CDR Sal, boy, are you right. We got real lucky. As you point out, big picture, should things go badly, we're going into what is potentially a big fight with whatever we've got available. Common sense consensus, it's not enough. Our only strategy is to balance diplomacy, economic policy, and judicious use of force with the credible threat of much less discriminate use of force to keep other states behavior within the acceptable "international norms". Pretty much the definition of international relations 101. Here's hoping the new administration does a better job of looking out for U.S. national interests than the last one. Fingers crossed...
A nation with sufficient economic and military power can rewrite the book on International Relations 101 to suit its own needs. That's what Great Britain did in the 18th and 19th Centuries; it is what the United States did in the 20th Century, and it is now what China is doing in the 21st Century.
The new SecNav is a bean counter with no navy experience. He will look at the price of screws and decide we should import them from India. Don’t expect anything from him.
You may be correct, not familiar enough with him to know. Question I have is who in the Navy Department (or DoD for that matter) knows enough about where we are and what we need to do to fix the problem(s) to give him sound advice? When I retired a couple of years ago, DoD officials and flag officers were self-serving careerist politicians little concerned with the health of the force. Asking what to do, because I can't answer the "who".
That is who is currently SECNAV and will be for the foreseeable future.
Hearings on Mr. Phelan (who I am assuming the personal disparagement is directed at) is not even on the Senate schedule for his first committee meeting.
If that were suddenly to change today, best case his final confirmation vote is three weeks out.
My personal opinion on the nomination of Mr. Phelan was made over on This Aint Hell following the November hit piece by Military(dot)com. It would be tasteless to repost that here.
In the near-term, any response to the collision will be directed by Mr. Emmert and I have confidence in him until proven otherwise.
The greatest current threat to national security is the unsustainable federal spending which is the primary driver of inflation. And so it is already a certainty that DOD's budget will be cut. The only question is how far and how fast DOD's budget will be cut.
My perception is that the new SECNAV's assignment is to manage the pain of the spending cuts the Navy will be forced to suffer, and to establish the new program & operational accountability standards and the new program/project performance standards the Navy will be expected to follow.
Program managers who can't make a strong case for their programs will see their programs either cut back substantially or else eliminated altogether. Program managers who aren't on board with these management changes will be quickly fired.
Some level of unwanted collateral damage is a certainty. On the other hand, a cancer can't be cut out from a dying patient without some level of damage to surrounding tissue. With any luck, the patient survives the operation to live another day.
Until active duty senior officers (and not a few senior enlisted) who fostered the culture leading to this and other attendant issues are removed from the equation, business will continue as usual (under the guise of other key words and tricky phrases).
The Houthis are thinking, “man, if we parked an old cargo ship outside Port Said we could ram the next CVN we see and her one or two escorts could do nothing about it.”
Left unsaid, what if the MV Besiktas-M had been loaded with a fertilizer based bomb in the hull? What if Jihadists terrorists were on its bridge and fully in control of direction and speed. Wishing to meet their 72 virgins in paradise, they pull the pin on the grenade so to say. The level of carelessness never mind the rules of the road for navigation, never mind why the vessel is where it is, figure out a way to keep a 1,093 long aircraft carrier with nuclear propulsion systems and likely “special weapons” aboard plus the fuels and conventional ordnance for day to day operations away from Harms Way! .What then? Well even the DEI CNO might have to answer the relatives of the 5,000 plus American Sailors and Marines onboard who are dead and wounded. Sorry this level of incompetence if beyond the pale. Where the Hell is the new SecDef, he needs to start firing these fools before his SecNav shows up. Unreal.
There have not been nuclear (i.e., “special”) weapons onboard USN surface ships (including CVNs) since the early-1990s. This includes the removal of W Divisions on aircraft carriers that had responsibility for these weapons. This is also the reason that marine detachments are no longer assigned to aircraft carriers. This is open source info.
Thanks for the update, I served as a Marine Corps Infantry Officer so long ago that sometimes my observations are not contemporary. But I think we can agree that a lot could have gone wrong and just lucky the damage was pretty limited. None the less this incident points to larger issues all well touched on here and through the comments. We can only hope we can get straightened out.
Tom Clancy laid out a pretty good scenario in Debt of Honor how insufficient CVNs quickly becomes a strategic problem. And in the Sum of All Fears, the Soviet confusion in misinterpreting the intent of an aggressive SSBN sticks with me too. These are all fiction but the public debate is still stuck on past success and completely missing the risk that we are only a few small steps from being pushed into undesired escalation.
Nations are a lot like individuals because individuals make the decisions that drive national actions. Having "not quite enough power" in a sketchy situation often creates a case of nerves and over-reach, where being confidant in your position lets you back away from the sharp edge just a little and avoid an unnecessary fight/war.
The U.S. has CHOSEN to be in the position where we need to have a bunch of CVNs, that is, to be the world’s policeman. Europe and Japan are happy to let us spend the money while they spend it on cradle to grave social services. I’m not sure the new U.S. administration is willing to continue that arrangement, but the alternative is to let China become the new world policeman.
Navy ship driving leadership is composed of multiple unions - aviators, submariners, and surface sailors. We are continuing to to operate on the 1945 model because carrier aviation played such a huge role in defeating the IJN. Submariners will gladly point out all of the tonnage they sank in WW2 and the mine laying community will do the same, but the carrier admirals came out on top, and have stayed on top because we haven't had to actively fight a peer enemy (and his active anti-CVN efforts) in 80 years. Losing a war or coming up from behind, as it were, usually leads to the minor party innovating, as we have seen with the TCG Anadolu (L-400), a drone-carrying amphibious assault ship of the Turkish Navy and the Shahid Bagheri, a drone carrier operated by the Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps Navy.
While I'm waiting for the reports to come out, TRUMAN was lucky in that nothing vital was damaged. At this point, the questions become who was underway, and were there pilots involved if you ask me.
It's good we have forward repair facilities in Souda Bay, but the Mediterranean is a restricted body of water. Are there any others?
I don't believe Souda has ANY repair facilities just a deep enough terminal where a CVN can tie-up. Based upon the above information, a bunch of sheet metal welded into place should suffice and some adjustments to the garbage disposal process is necessary. Her elevator is fine, the damage wasn't to any necessary spaces nor, do they affect engineering or, flight ops. If anything, this is a good refresher into what DC work on a carrier looks like and how to keep things operating.
While there may have been a pilot aboard TRUMAN, he was likely just standing on the Bridge as an observer and was not actually conning or directing ship movements.
Anyone who doesn't see this as nefarious needs to have their head examined, especially after what just happened in the sabotage of the German vessels. Just a little ding is all it takes to put the ship into port where it can be repaired with the assistance of " local contractors." One strategically placed lunchbox bomb is all it would take to make this stay near permanent.
At the time of the collision, it *appears* to have been a starboard to starboard passage. The question, in terms of the International Rules of the Road, is whether that was the orientation of the two ships at the time they had visual contact with one another, or should have if the lookouts were doing their jobs. If that was the orientation of the two ships at that time, then both ships had an obligation to let the other know their intent and to avoid each other. We need to know that initial situation AND all of the conning orders given on both bridges to unravel who shot John.
Considering where the collision occurred, gotta wonder what the comms were like between lookouts and bridge-team. Did they misjudge the speed of the merchant vessel thinking there would be a near-mis versus a collision? Did HST turn to port resulting in a glancing blow to the rest of her rear-quarter?
One of the take aways not mentioned by Sal was that neither the Truman or its lone escort USS Jason Dunham were squawking their AIS system so were essentially cloaked going through a very busy anchorage at night. Dunham began squawking shortly after the collision. Truman did not until after she anchored.
AIS is well after my experience so I don't know what USN policy is on it. However, as there is no way they were going to remain anonymous in a canal transit that was apparently imminent, OPSEC should have been are reasonably secondary issue at that point.
It is my belief that resolution of fault is going to heavily weigh on the details of neither ship squawking AIS in a very crowded seaway. And at this point, it doesn't look good for the USN to me.
Not to say that there may not be other issues in training and watch standing that were seen in the DDG collisions in WestPac some years back. But when it's dangerous waters, and this was, you need every tool in the bag to keep this from happening.
After the FITZGERALD/MCCAIN accidents, the CNO stated that AIS would be mandatory in high-traffic areas (most definitely applicable to HST's position IVO Port Said):
Not sure how the above is captured explicitly in CNSP/CNAP/CNAL/CNSLINST 3530.4G (NAVDORM) dated 28 Oct 2021, but I'd be surprised if AIS was not mandated in the area in which HST and escort were operating.
Could have changed in the recent past, but for sure, it was definitely a SOP at one point. Which all the more makes one wonder.
This is purely supposition: It seems possible that if the HST was about to transit south into the Red Sea that masking that as much as possible for obvious OpSec concerns makes some sense.
OTOH, does anyone really think that passage can be made without falling under the gaze of Houthi/Iranian agents?
With hundreds of crewmen (with cell phones) on the anchored ships at both ends of the canal along with the ships transiting behind her , almost certain leaks in the Egyptian government by folks partial to the Palestinian cause, both Russian and Chinese intel collection, and last but not least, her towering presence in the ditch...
Why even pretend that her movement could be prevented from being plotted every minute?
"The 11 carriers we have now are inadequate for what our nation is asking of them." Absolutely correct. But with it taking almost 15 years to put a new one to sea, fully tested, air wing integrated, and with no major problems like weapons elevators and EMALS, the battle where it was needed will be long over and all we can do is "what if we had .....".
Hey, if we can patch Yorktown up & send her into battle (Midway), we can leave HTS out to complete a 6 month deployment
John T Kuehn
In WWII, that level of damage to Truman wouldn't have stopped flight ops...
It didn't
Was that fixed wing or rotary?
Also, similar damage wasn't immediately repaired in many cases, or temporarily patched by ships company while remaining underway, as WW II era CV's continued combat flight ops.
Fixed. Very little rotary in WWII.
Did the Truman conduct fixed wing ops after the collision, or operate V-22's and helos?
"Very little rotary in WWII."
Big duh on that bub.
I was ...OBVIOUSLY.. talking about sustained fixed wing -COMBAT- ops with that same amount of damage in WW II.
No insult intended. Your question was less than clear. But then again, neither was your response.
Props and Rotors may be the same in a non air wing dictionary but to an Airedale they are worlds apart LOL
In WWII we had a couple orders of magnitude more industrial capacity and skilled manpower.
Not to mention focus on the necessity of the issue at hand.
I.E. USS ROSS. Abandoned 3 times, repaired/refloated 3 times. Saw service in Korea. Not the same level of competence today, sadly.
I am talking about ships forward deployed being repaired, and or repaired by ship's company...or operating for extended periods in spite of the damage.
How many contractors are headed to Soudah Bay?
How much chartered airlift is being used?
True, it's kind of apples and oranges.
Though, I think, there's just a general dearth of manpower anywhere in the US. I'm guessing that they will be relying mainly on local manpower for the majority of the repair work.
What major local repair facilities are at Soudah Bay?
Sounds like it will be these folks in charge at any rate...
https://www.navsea.navy.mil/Home/RMC/FDRMC/Italy/WorkingInItaly/FDRMCNaples/
More here:
https://www.facebook.com/ForwardDeployedRegionalMaintenanceCenter/
When the Yorktown stood into Pearl, her crew manned the rail in whites.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rT33iOGpv9s
A good discussion here of the Yorktown repair...
https://www.usni.org/magazines/naval-history-magazine/2019/december/fighting-survival
I always wondered if a rushed repair was a factor in her subsequent loss, but it doesn't appear so. Here is her War Loss Report:
http://www.cv5yorktown.com/Documents/Reports/Loss/
The Yorktown class was durable. Yorktown and Hornet took quite a pounding before sinking and Enterprise repeatedly survived serious hits.
"Hey, if we can patch Yorktown up & send her into battle (Midway), we can leave HTS out to complete a 6 month deployment"
Unless something happened below the waterline, the damage to the Truman appears to be in areas that don't need significant protection anyway...
https://x.com/sentdefender/status/1891267431978377432
While it was critical to get the Yorktown in the fight, its arguable that any deficiencies in her emergency repair didn't directly contribute to her loss. Although the 3 inop boilers did result in some less speed available when she really needed it, perhaps she could have retained electrical power a critical time longer, and the welded hull repair did apparently fail due to likely shock and whipping.
But the massive holes blown into her hull by the torpedoes made the hull plating failure, and electrical power loss (for pumps), moot.
https://scholarworks.uno.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?params=/context/td/article/3224/&path_info=auto_convert.pdf
But there can be some lessons learned quite wrongly.
Yet again, it appears that the essential importance of Warship Vulnerability Reduction design features is getting seen as dispensable in the name of "Efficiency"...
https://www.usni.org/magazines/proceedings/2025/january/do-not-lower-navys-ship-survivability-standards
Do Not Lower the Navy’s Ship Survivability Standards
By Rear Admiral Leonard Picotte and Captain Maurice Gauthier, U.S. Navy (Retired)
January 2025
Proceedings
Vol. 151/1/1,463
If a ship that is hit is lost anyway... Why bother? Is how the faux logic goes.
Also, the talking points about why Vulnerability Reduction isn't necessary always includes:
"You can't put enough armor on a ship to defeat today's missile warheads"
So why not just save money, and build to commercial standards?
But, the real truth is:
"Not Every Hit is a Kill".
Redundancy of critical components, such as compartmentalization in engineering spaces with bulkhead strength, and permeability.
Something that directly contributed to the quick sinking of the Norwegian Frigate Helge Ingstad:
https://www.twz.com/25218/we-have-the-first-official-report-on-norways-sunken-frigate-and-it-isnt-pretty
Protection of vital systems such as wire runs, and electronics.
A big reason why the Ticonderoga was knocked out of the fight off Formosa and sent back to Puget Sound, was because her electronics could not be repaired in theater:
http://www.researcheratlarge.com/Ships/CV14/Kamikaze/PSNSWarReport.html#VII
Poorly protected electronics and wire runs in the superstructure of the battleship South Dakota were vulnerable to relatively inconsequential 'splinter' damage, and hobbled her combat performance in the November 42 night battle of Guadalcanal:
https://www.history.navy.mil/research/library/online-reading-room/title-list-alphabetically/w/war-damage-reports/uss-south-dakota-bb57-war-damage-report-no57.html
How much fragment damage can the SPY-6 take before its inop?
Its obvious no thought about fragment protection was considered in the design.
Can the array be repaired in theater, or will a DDG so damaged have to return to CONUS?
How about the interior wire runs and electronics? What about the chill water system?
In the Fitzgerald collision, there were reports of water cascading from the chill water system. How much more of a complication, and damage, did that cause?
Finally... Yes. Armor does matter. No. That does not mean a ship needs to be constructed like an impervious Death Star.
The armored hangar deck of the Franklin -an important Survivability design priority on the Essex's- was essential in preventing her loss. Also, other Essex's stayed in the fight because the hangar deck armor prevented more serious damage to occur deeper in the ship.
The armored boiler uptakes played a critical role in allowing the engineering spaces to remain viable on the Franklin and Bunker Hill.
https://ww2ondeadline.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/06/bunker-hill-80-g-274261.jpeg
https://www.history.navy.mil/research/library/online-reading-room/title-list-alphabetically/w/war-damage-reports/uss-franklin-cv-13-war-damage-report-no-56.html
(note the port list of the Bunker Hill. The Essex skippers were briefed to immediately initiate a port list to allow firefighting water and floating flames to drain out the port side hangar openings, and away from the uptakes and bomb elevators. Never really explained (anywhere I've found), is why Capt. Gheres didn't do this aboard the Franklin. Her initial and lingering starboard list directly contributed to her travails)
More validation of this, is to contrast the war damage experience of the Independence class CVE's.
The design was severely weight limited, to the point that curtains instead of doors were fitted on JO staterooms. So to were the uptakes not armored, the interior ventilation system was not designed to be isolated for damage (the Essex's also suffered with a vulnerable ventilation system), and the original light cruiser design depended on the cruiser superstructure to help protect the engineering spaces.
When the Princeton took the bomb hit similar in severity to several Essex's, Yorktowns (yes 2 of 3 were sunk), and Saratoga received, DC efforts could not save her. Why?
Because the boiler rooms were immediately rendered uninhabitable and had to be abandoned, she immediately lost power. Her Emergency Power system was not as robust as that of the larger Essex's, and these cascading effects immediately weakened the DC response. They did fight the best they could, but the bombs in the unprotected torpedo space suffered a mass detonation which tore off the aft third of the ship, and killed and wounded hundreds aboard the cruiser Birmingham, alongside fighting the fires.
https://www.history.navy.mil/research/library/online-reading-room/title-list-alphabetically/w/war-damage-reports/uss-princeton-cvl23-war-damage-report-no-62.html
The loss of the Princeton wasn't the only Independence class CVE to suffer from these inevitable design weaknesses. During the first "Halsey Typhoon" a few months later, the Monterey suffered a severe hangar fire, and because of the same design compromises above, she was very nearly lost as well.
https://www.history.navy.mil/research/library/online-reading-room/title-list-alphabetically/w/war-damage-reports/uss-princeton-cvl23-war-damage-report-no-62.html
In 1945, Halsey said of the Kamikaze threat at Okinawa:
"We have more ships and bullets than the Japs have planes"
This won't be true for us in the next Big War. With the Truman, the only carrier, that half of the world, took a bit of damage, the navy lost its prime asset to accomplish National Tasking.
Like the Japanese in WWII, we can't afford to lose much before there is no way to win.
So, when embracing the idea that we can build Frigates and Light Carriers, and save money on all this needless protection stuff...
Ask yourself this:
Will ever build enough to even lose a few of those?
We all already know the answer to that is... No.
Even any "simple" or "small" ships will have to built to take punishment if we think we can...
"Afford To Fight"
First off, Operational necessities required her to store bombs in the hangar level -and unprotected due to wight considerations-
For years we’ve had administrations who were more interested in treating the military as a social experiment as opposed to a military force. Furthermore the waste within this system is biblical. It is going to take years (and honest assessment) to fix the problem. Otherwise our national security will continue to suffer.
We don't have years. War is coming. Hopefully SECDEF starts harvesting excess/incompetent flag officers & SES bureaucrats, and deep-selecting CAPTs & CDRs to wear stars and build ships.
Need to turn DOGE loose at NAVSEA, stat!
USS Randolph severely damaged by a kamikaze in March. 25 dead. Over 100 wounded. More than a dozen aircraft destroyed.
Repaired at anchor in Ulithi by the USS Jason, and back with the fleet in April...
https://youtu.be/QjZFciIxESE?si=fi6izdvcDOPdVGkZ
(can't get to the details just now...but I bet alot of folks don't know "The Rest of the Story" about the Enterprise (CVAN-65 not CV-6) after her fire in 1969...stay tuned!)
Ulithi is impressive, a truly great place for a fleet anchorage. I was there in 1995, anchored a few hundred yards offshore in BASSWOOD to deliver humanitarian goods. Photos and descriptions do not do that atoll justice.
Truly nice people, too.
CDR Sal, boy, are you right. We got real lucky. As you point out, big picture, should things go badly, we're going into what is potentially a big fight with whatever we've got available. Common sense consensus, it's not enough. Our only strategy is to balance diplomacy, economic policy, and judicious use of force with the credible threat of much less discriminate use of force to keep other states behavior within the acceptable "international norms". Pretty much the definition of international relations 101. Here's hoping the new administration does a better job of looking out for U.S. national interests than the last one. Fingers crossed...
A nation with sufficient economic and military power can rewrite the book on International Relations 101 to suit its own needs. That's what Great Britain did in the 18th and 19th Centuries; it is what the United States did in the 20th Century, and it is now what China is doing in the 21st Century.
The new SecNav is a bean counter with no navy experience. He will look at the price of screws and decide we should import them from India. Don’t expect anything from him.
You may be correct, not familiar enough with him to know. Question I have is who in the Navy Department (or DoD for that matter) knows enough about where we are and what we need to do to fix the problem(s) to give him sound advice? When I retired a couple of years ago, DoD officials and flag officers were self-serving careerist politicians little concerned with the health of the force. Asking what to do, because I can't answer the "who".
Is it time to recall Sal, put stars on his shoulders, and put a presidential "do whatever it takes" memo in his back pocket?
Motion... seconded.
Problem is you'll never get the Senate to sign off on it. Pity.
I personally would not consider Mr. Emmert to be a "bean counter with no navy experience".
https://www.aiaa.org/detail/person/terence-g.-emmert
That is who is currently SECNAV and will be for the foreseeable future.
Hearings on Mr. Phelan (who I am assuming the personal disparagement is directed at) is not even on the Senate schedule for his first committee meeting.
https://www.congress.gov/nomination/119th-congress/12/36
If that were suddenly to change today, best case his final confirmation vote is three weeks out.
My personal opinion on the nomination of Mr. Phelan was made over on This Aint Hell following the November hit piece by Military(dot)com. It would be tasteless to repost that here.
In the near-term, any response to the collision will be directed by Mr. Emmert and I have confidence in him until proven otherwise.
You are correct! I was referring to Phelan.
The greatest current threat to national security is the unsustainable federal spending which is the primary driver of inflation. And so it is already a certainty that DOD's budget will be cut. The only question is how far and how fast DOD's budget will be cut.
My perception is that the new SECNAV's assignment is to manage the pain of the spending cuts the Navy will be forced to suffer, and to establish the new program & operational accountability standards and the new program/project performance standards the Navy will be expected to follow.
Program managers who can't make a strong case for their programs will see their programs either cut back substantially or else eliminated altogether. Program managers who aren't on board with these management changes will be quickly fired.
Some level of unwanted collateral damage is a certainty. On the other hand, a cancer can't be cut out from a dying patient without some level of damage to surrounding tissue. With any luck, the patient survives the operation to live another day.
“Already a certainty that DoD’s budget will be cut. . .”
Probably not:
https://breakingdefense.com/2025/02/house-unveils-budget-plan-with-100b-boost-for-defense/
Until active duty senior officers (and not a few senior enlisted) who fostered the culture leading to this and other attendant issues are removed from the equation, business will continue as usual (under the guise of other key words and tricky phrases).
removed with prejudice, not removed with a medal and a band.
that was, as you know, "Terminate with extreme prejudice", a CIA 1970's term of art made famous in this clip with a young Harrison Ford
https://youtu.be/GjB8z0Bvi14?t=136
I was thinking more about
https://youtu.be/SQujVFXPnVA
https://giphy.com/gifs/harrison-ford-apocalypse-now-terminate-the-colonels-command-l3fQtuI4qruW1JERy
The Houthis are thinking, “man, if we parked an old cargo ship outside Port Said we could ram the next CVN we see and her one or two escorts could do nothing about it.”
Or load one with ammonium nitrate. we already got diesel...
HEY DEI PILOTS, THE FASTER THE BOAT GOES FORWARD, THE FASTER THE TURN!
NO SPEED, NO TURN! 🤦🏼
Turkish Taffy
Left unsaid, what if the MV Besiktas-M had been loaded with a fertilizer based bomb in the hull? What if Jihadists terrorists were on its bridge and fully in control of direction and speed. Wishing to meet their 72 virgins in paradise, they pull the pin on the grenade so to say. The level of carelessness never mind the rules of the road for navigation, never mind why the vessel is where it is, figure out a way to keep a 1,093 long aircraft carrier with nuclear propulsion systems and likely “special weapons” aboard plus the fuels and conventional ordnance for day to day operations away from Harms Way! .What then? Well even the DEI CNO might have to answer the relatives of the 5,000 plus American Sailors and Marines onboard who are dead and wounded. Sorry this level of incompetence if beyond the pale. Where the Hell is the new SecDef, he needs to start firing these fools before his SecNav shows up. Unreal.
There have not been nuclear (i.e., “special”) weapons onboard USN surface ships (including CVNs) since the early-1990s. This includes the removal of W Divisions on aircraft carriers that had responsibility for these weapons. This is also the reason that marine detachments are no longer assigned to aircraft carriers. This is open source info.
Thanks for the update, I served as a Marine Corps Infantry Officer so long ago that sometimes my observations are not contemporary. But I think we can agree that a lot could have gone wrong and just lucky the damage was pretty limited. None the less this incident points to larger issues all well touched on here and through the comments. We can only hope we can get straightened out.
Definitely another symptom of an ongoing issue. At some point good luck runs out.
Tom Clancy laid out a pretty good scenario in Debt of Honor how insufficient CVNs quickly becomes a strategic problem. And in the Sum of All Fears, the Soviet confusion in misinterpreting the intent of an aggressive SSBN sticks with me too. These are all fiction but the public debate is still stuck on past success and completely missing the risk that we are only a few small steps from being pushed into undesired escalation.
Nations are a lot like individuals because individuals make the decisions that drive national actions. Having "not quite enough power" in a sketchy situation often creates a case of nerves and over-reach, where being confidant in your position lets you back away from the sharp edge just a little and avoid an unnecessary fight/war.
The U.S. has CHOSEN to be in the position where we need to have a bunch of CVNs, that is, to be the world’s policeman. Europe and Japan are happy to let us spend the money while they spend it on cradle to grave social services. I’m not sure the new U.S. administration is willing to continue that arrangement, but the alternative is to let China become the new world policeman.
Navy ship driving leadership is composed of multiple unions - aviators, submariners, and surface sailors. We are continuing to to operate on the 1945 model because carrier aviation played such a huge role in defeating the IJN. Submariners will gladly point out all of the tonnage they sank in WW2 and the mine laying community will do the same, but the carrier admirals came out on top, and have stayed on top because we haven't had to actively fight a peer enemy (and his active anti-CVN efforts) in 80 years. Losing a war or coming up from behind, as it were, usually leads to the minor party innovating, as we have seen with the TCG Anadolu (L-400), a drone-carrying amphibious assault ship of the Turkish Navy and the Shahid Bagheri, a drone carrier operated by the Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps Navy.
The hubris has reached a war losing level.
…and I wonder how THAT might go…
While I'm waiting for the reports to come out, TRUMAN was lucky in that nothing vital was damaged. At this point, the questions become who was underway, and were there pilots involved if you ask me.
It's good we have forward repair facilities in Souda Bay, but the Mediterranean is a restricted body of water. Are there any others?
I don't believe Souda has ANY repair facilities just a deep enough terminal where a CVN can tie-up. Based upon the above information, a bunch of sheet metal welded into place should suffice and some adjustments to the garbage disposal process is necessary. Her elevator is fine, the damage wasn't to any necessary spaces nor, do they affect engineering or, flight ops. If anything, this is a good refresher into what DC work on a carrier looks like and how to keep things operating.
While there may have been a pilot aboard TRUMAN, he was likely just standing on the Bridge as an observer and was not actually conning or directing ship movements.
But what about the merchant?
Tough to say without the final report of the investigation
Anyone who doesn't see this as nefarious needs to have their head examined, especially after what just happened in the sabotage of the German vessels. Just a little ding is all it takes to put the ship into port where it can be repaired with the assistance of " local contractors." One strategically placed lunchbox bomb is all it would take to make this stay near permanent.
I'm still unclear on this. Which ship had the right of way and which ship hit the other ship?
Thanks!
That is 100% why I’m waiting on the investigation. Crowded waters, and all that.
At the time of the collision, it *appears* to have been a starboard to starboard passage. The question, in terms of the International Rules of the Road, is whether that was the orientation of the two ships at the time they had visual contact with one another, or should have if the lookouts were doing their jobs. If that was the orientation of the two ships at that time, then both ships had an obligation to let the other know their intent and to avoid each other. We need to know that initial situation AND all of the conning orders given on both bridges to unravel who shot John.
Considering where the collision occurred, gotta wonder what the comms were like between lookouts and bridge-team. Did they misjudge the speed of the merchant vessel thinking there would be a near-mis versus a collision? Did HST turn to port resulting in a glancing blow to the rest of her rear-quarter?
It is worth watch what Sal Mercagliano over at What's Going On With Shipping has to say on the subject:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OqRe-ouavjw
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZBGytkUyZGY
One of the take aways not mentioned by Sal was that neither the Truman or its lone escort USS Jason Dunham were squawking their AIS system so were essentially cloaked going through a very busy anchorage at night. Dunham began squawking shortly after the collision. Truman did not until after she anchored.
AIS is well after my experience so I don't know what USN policy is on it. However, as there is no way they were going to remain anonymous in a canal transit that was apparently imminent, OPSEC should have been are reasonably secondary issue at that point.
It is my belief that resolution of fault is going to heavily weigh on the details of neither ship squawking AIS in a very crowded seaway. And at this point, it doesn't look good for the USN to me.
Not to say that there may not be other issues in training and watch standing that were seen in the DDG collisions in WestPac some years back. But when it's dangerous waters, and this was, you need every tool in the bag to keep this from happening.
After the FITZGERALD/MCCAIN accidents, the CNO stated that AIS would be mandatory in high-traffic areas (most definitely applicable to HST's position IVO Port Said):
https://gcaptain.com/u-s-navy-ships-to-turn-ais-transmitting-on-in-high-traffic-areas/#:~:text=Under%20U.S.%20and%20international%20regulations,info%20can%20be%20picked%20up
Not sure how the above is captured explicitly in CNSP/CNAP/CNAL/CNSLINST 3530.4G (NAVDORM) dated 28 Oct 2021, but I'd be surprised if AIS was not mandated in the area in which HST and escort were operating.
Thanks for that info.
Could have changed in the recent past, but for sure, it was definitely a SOP at one point. Which all the more makes one wonder.
This is purely supposition: It seems possible that if the HST was about to transit south into the Red Sea that masking that as much as possible for obvious OpSec concerns makes some sense.
OTOH, does anyone really think that passage can be made without falling under the gaze of Houthi/Iranian agents?
With hundreds of crewmen (with cell phones) on the anchored ships at both ends of the canal along with the ships transiting behind her , almost certain leaks in the Egyptian government by folks partial to the Palestinian cause, both Russian and Chinese intel collection, and last but not least, her towering presence in the ditch...
Why even pretend that her movement could be prevented from being plotted every minute?
"The 11 carriers we have now are inadequate for what our nation is asking of them." Absolutely correct. But with it taking almost 15 years to put a new one to sea, fully tested, air wing integrated, and with no major problems like weapons elevators and EMALS, the battle where it was needed will be long over and all we can do is "what if we had .....".