3 years after the Fitzgerald and McCain collisions, the Navy’s surface warfare community shows few signs of change
Thibaut Delloue
Aug 20, 2020 5:00 AM EDT
Editor's Note: This is an opinion column. The thoughts expressed are those of the author.
The day after the USS John S. McCain collided with a tanker in the Singapore Strait in August of 2017, I began a course at the Navy’s Surface Warfare Officers School, a training hub for naval officers in Newport, Rhode Island. The school’s commanding officer, then-Capt. Scott Robertson, gathered all students and staff into the auditorium to address the elephant in the room: just two months after the USS Fitzgerald collision claimed the lives of seven sailors, ten more from the McCain were dead in a similar tragedy.
“Something is not right in our community,†the captain told us, “something needs to change. We need to shift the rudder.â€
Yet today, three years after two of the most shocking peacetime accidents in the history of the U.S. military, the surface community has seen little substantive change, and surface warfare officers still lack the formal training required of professional mariners. Without serious overhaul of the surface officer corps, the fleet remains in peril.
What is a surface warfare officer, anyway? When I stepped aboard my first ship five years ago, I quickly learned that “SWOs†didn’t quite have a job description. Their role as managers varies immensely: they are in charge of engineers, technicians, or quartermasters; they oversee ships’ legal, cryptographic, or environmental programs; out to sea, they drive and navigate from the bridge, serve as tacticians in the combat information center, and oversee the engineering plant. They are versatile yet interchangeable leaders, potentially responsible for any aspect of the management of surface vessels.
https://taskandpurpose.com/opinion/navy-surface-warfare-officers-fitzgerald-mccain-collisions
