Admiral defends Navy after disasters at sea: ‘Other ships weren’t having collisions’

Adm. Phil Davidson defended the service in a hearing that also focused on North Korea and China.

By Dan Lamothe February 12 at 3:11 PM

The top U.S. military official in the Pacific defended the Navy on Tuesday concerning two embarrassing collisions at sea that combined killed 17 sailors, saying that “the fact of the matter is 280-odd other ships weren’t having collisions.”

The comments by Adm. Phil Davidson came during questioning at a Senate Armed Services Committee hearing after he said the Navy’s senior leadership feels “an immense amount of accountability” for disasters involving the USS Fitzgerald and USS John S. McCain. The ships collided with commercial vessels about two months apart in the summer of 2017, with the sailors drowning inside flooded compartments.

Sen. Angus King (I-Maine) asked Davidson, who oversaw the Navy’s investigation of the disasters, about the recent publication of investigative reports by ProPublica in which former senior defense officials said Navy leaders had ignored pleas for help to make sure sailors were appropriately trained and ships were well maintained. The senator appeared to take exception to Davidson’s remarks.

“Airplanes are landing all over America, and just because they aren’t all crashing doesn’t mean they don’t need a high level of maintenance,” King said. “To tell me that isn’t very convincing. I think it had been 40 years since we’ve had collisions of this nature? Are you saying that there were failures that led to these collisions because there were 280 ships that didn’t have collisions? Isn’t that the standard? No collisions?"

King called the collisions “avoidable tragedies” and asked for specific data about the certification of sailors to deploy, maintenance aboard ships, training and staffing levels.

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