Three Questions Arising From Recent U.S. Navy Collisions

1. Are U.S. Navy seamanship and navigation practices and skills up to the challenge of operations in increasingly busy waters? The Chief of Naval Operations Admiral John Richardson is fond of stating in his public speeches that during his time in the Navy (since 1982), commercial shipping density has increased 400%. Due to the nature of its operations, the U.S. Navy tends to operate extensively proximate to the highest traffic densities in this already dense environment. It is reasonable to inquire as to whether the proficiency of those assigned to safely navigate U.S. Navy ships is sufficient to meet the demands of this more demanding (than in the past) environment.
2. Does the tempo of operations in the Western Pacific and the demand that it places on forces allocated there create situations in which ships sacrifice unit level basic training time to meet high priority operational requirements? Put another way, are there too few ships for too many requirements? The fleet in the Western Pacific is extraordinarily busy, with bilateral and multinational exercises, high-visibility port visits, Freedom of Navigation (FON) operations, and ballistic missile defense operations just some of the demands. Ships home-ported there have an extremely high operational tempo, and with periods of inactivity necessary to perform both preventative and emergent maintenance, time available for “inside the lifelines” training is squeezed. These “forward deployed naval forces” (FDNF), already operate on a much tighter cyclical timeline when compared to ships based in the United States and Hawaii, and if that timeline has been even more compressed, basic skills and readiness may be impacted.
3. Is the Navy making the best use of available technology to aid its watch-standers in making good decisions? Do the various sensors and systems resident in the Navy’s sophisticated warships (radars, sonars, electronics support measures) work to the best advantage of the people operating them? A modern warship is a marvel of engineering, but to a large extent, it remains a kluge of systems that allow it to fight, move, communicate, and contain damage. A staggering amount of data fusion goes on the brains of young men and women standing watch on the bridge or in the ship’s operations room, rather than in some kind of central processing computer. It seems straightforward to assume that data be could better fused and then processed by decision-making algorithms to present watch-standers with decision quality information. This is not artificial intelligence; it is simply more elegant systems engineering. The plain truth, however, is that the Navy acquisition system does not currently have the ability to do this perform this level of systems engineering, and even if it did, several different program offices across widely disparate organizations would have to closely cooperate to acquire it.

Bryan McGrath is the Managing Director of The FerryBridge Group LLC, and is the Assistant Director of the Hudson Institute Center for American Seapower.