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Years of Warnings, Then Death and Disaster: How the Navy Failed Its Sailors [1]
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Date: 2023-01
Three-star Adm. Thomas Copeman wore a smile as he approached the lectern at an annual Navy symposium at the Hyatt hotel in Arlington, Virginia. A stack of notecards in hand, he cracked a few jokes about the Navy officials in attendance being distracted by their dinner plans or their BlackBerrys.
It was January 2013, and it had been almost three years since the Balisle report. Copeman had been nursing a host of frustrations.
Officers on the decks of ships were telling him they needed more sailors, and better trained ones, to operate and maintain their equipment, he told the crowd. Commanders were robbing specialists from some ships to make the crews of other ships whole, a Band-Aid solution. The workweek had been extended, vessels were degraded, parts were breaking and increasingly ships lacked the spares to replace them.
Readiness was supposed to be his job, but he’d had trouble getting it done. Echoing the words of Balisle three years earlier, he said, the Navy was headed toward a “downward spiral.”
The Navy’s surface forces needed $3.5 billion, he said, just to fix what was wrong with training alone.
Copeman raised the specter of a “hollow” Navy.
“I can’t tell you whether we’ve gotten to that point,” he said. “But I will tell you that we’re getting closer to it.”
The path forward was for the Navy’s civilian leadership to determine, Copeman told the assembled Navy officers. He would salute and follow orders no matter what. But the obvious solution was to stop building new ships and start taking care of the current fleet.
Copeman knew as he said it that his solution stood in stark contrast to the agenda set out by Mabus.
“I heard him and his immediate staff state more than once that they can ‘catch up with readiness in a year or two, but you couldn’t do the same with ships,’” Copeman told ProPublica.
The blowback to Copeman’s public airing was swift.
Within hours of leaving the stage, the calls began. Within a few days, he was contacted by four different representatives for Mabus and for Chief of Naval Operations Jonathan Greenert. A Mabus representative told Copeman it was extremely disappointing he was not supporting the secretary’s shipbuilding agenda. A Greenert aide asked how he could have betrayed Greenert.
Mabus and Greenert said they had no knowledge of the calls.
Greenert later summoned Copeman and asked him to submit his retirement papers early. The decision, Greenert told ProPublica, wasn’t due to Copeman’s public criticisms but “was associated with the availability of the best and fully qualified successor for the position.”
Copeman said in an interview he didn’t second-guess his decision to be frank.
“It'd be tough to look in a mirror if I'd stayed silent,” Copeman said.
Still, he believes the order to retire may have had a chilling effect on other top commanders speaking out.
“I think that many flag officers took notice,” he said.
A third-generation Navy officer, Copeman fired off a couple more memos before retiring, hoping he might at last get the leadership’s attention.
The first warned of the fleet’s increasing “configuration variance” problem: The same systems operated in dozens of different ways on different ships, confusing sailors as the Navy shifted them from one vessel to another.
“I liken it to this,” Copeman told ProPublica. “You have a car with a steering wheel and a gas pedal and one day you walk out and get in your car and an iPad sits were your steering wheel used to be and the gas pedal is no longer there.”
Copeman enlisted a four-star admiral, Bill Gortney, to sign the memo and distribute it in the upper echelons of the Navy. His memo would prove prescient. Four years later, confusion over the McCain’s new steering system caused the ship to turn in front of an oil tanker.
Finally, three months before retiring, Copeman issued a dire warning about the lack of trained sailors.
“If we continue to invest in the latest and greatest equipment and the most capable weapon systems without making an equivalent investment in our workforce, we will move further away from being a ready force,” the memo read.
A staffer thanked Copeman for his input, but Copeman never saw any changes. (Greenert said both memos contributed to reforms.)
Around that time, Congress compounded the Navy’s problems.
Facing a budget impasse over the conservative Tea Party’s demands for deficit reductions, Democrats and Republicans agreed to allow a supercommittee composed of a dozen members from each party to come up with a compromise. If they failed, more than $1 trillion in cuts would hit military and domestic programs, wonkily known as sequestration. It was a scenario designed to be so catastrophic that it would guarantee a deal got done.
Navy officials warned Congress that the sudden drastic cut would be disastrous — and many lawmakers echoed that concern.
“The feeling was this won't happen,” Greenert said.
It did.
In 2013, the Navy got $9 billion less than it had budgeted for, its penalty under budget sequestration. Even advocates for slashing defense spending considered the cut reckless.
The Navy trimmed its budget in part by cutting software and computer upgrades planned for DDG-class destroyers — including the Fitzgerald, the McCain and several other destroyers based in the 7th Fleet.
“Before we went to sequestration we were planning to do a bunch of stuff for the DDGs. Sequestration happened. Plans changed,” Dave McFarland, the Pentagon’s deputy for surface ship warfare, told a reporter in 2014.
Three years later, the Fitzgerald would set sail with many of its computers and software out of date. For instance, its primary navigation system, known as the Voyage Management System, was running on Windows 2000 — the oldest version among ships based in Japan. Sailors would say that the navigation system would wrongly plot their position or the position of other ships.
After the cuts, Greenert warned Congress, “Unless this nation envisions a significantly diminished global security role for its military, we must address the growing mismatch in ends, ways and means.”
The Navy propped up its budget for ship maintenance with special funding designated for the war on terror. This led to unpredictable funding and hasty spending, according to a former Navy official who worked on budgetary matters. And when the anticipated funding fell short, maintenance simply didn’t get done.
Even more damaging was the reliance by Congress on stopgap budget fixes known as continuing resolutions, which kept funding at the level of the previous year until lawmakers passed a new budget. The measures kept the money flowing but restricted how it was used, blocking the Navy from launching new projects and changing spending priorities as its needs changed.
“They were killers for us,” Mabus said.
A former ship captain recalled getting to shore during one continuing resolution with a long list of urgent maintenance needs: “They come back to me and say: ‘There's no way we can afford that. Tell me what you're not going to do.’”
He asked to skip their planned weapons modernizations and instead take care of some of the more pressing maintenance projects. But he was told he couldn't cut the weapons modernizations because they were already in the base budget.
“What you're talking about is analogous to taking a big 55-inch TV,” he said, “and putting it in a leaky shack. How long do you think that's going to last?"
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