BREAKING: U.S. Navy relieves senior leadership aboard USS Connecticut citing "loss of confidence" after submarine hit undersea mountain in South China Sea last month. Commanding Officer, Executive Officer and Chief of the Boat all sacked: officials
— Lucas Tomlinson (@LucasFoxNews) November 4, 2021
They ran a submarine into a mountain.
Sure…. why the fuck not.
Marko Ramius, this captain clearly was not.
They ran a fucking submarine into a fucking mountain.
Then the Marines lost a war game on their home turf at Twenty-Nine Palms.
Fuck our military sucks.
Not gonna lie, I’m impressed. I couldn’t run a sub into a mountain if I tried. That’s some skill involved right there.
In their defense, the sea floor isn’t flat, and it’s not completely (or accurately) mapped.
At least they know their pronouns.
I can understand sacking the CO and XO, but why the COB?
Sonar tech rating. Obviously more to the story. How deep, how fast and just how accurate was the underwater/passive navigation?
In their defense, I’m sure they swerved several times before hitting it, and they did honk the horn. And the windshield was fogged up.
But at least they know how to walk in high heels, the importance of using proper pronouns and that all white people are inherently racist.
That’s more important for the military than being able to drive ships or fight battles isn’t it?
By the way, you missed one. The whole thing about letting their ship burn to the waterline while tied to the pier because the damage control teams didn’t know how to fight a fire.
But I bet they knew the proper definitions of all 63 genders (or whatever we’re up to now).
As someone who dedicated 21 years of my life to military service, it disgusts me to see what the Navy specifically, and the military in general, have devolved into.
I follow some of the Marines involved in that desert warfare exercise.
The Marines were supposed to lose.
It was a joint exercise with the UK, the US, and the Australians to see of a small group of commando forces from those three countries could defeat a much larger traditional force. The British troops had to borrow RZRs and radios from the Americans but other than that it was a complete success.
For some reason, this reminds me that the quality of the hardware is secondary to the quality of the people using it. And that expensive hardware isn’t as useful as getting good training.
Usually seen in contexts of newbies buying LarRue, Noveske or Daniel Defense rifles, and then spending not a dime on training.
(And posted with a definite awareness of a kettle-pot thing going on wrt yours truly…)
When you promote @$$-kissing @$$clowns to positions of great trust and responsibility, you get a circus Volkswagen clowncar for a military, pulling a trailer full of monkeys.
I don’t think it’s the Skipper’s fault. The south China sea is shallow and poorly charted. You don’t go running ground mapping sonar when you’re trying to sneak around in our most advanced boat in the enemy’s back yard. This one is on higher echelons. I posted a link to an explanation to the 29 Palms incident. The USMC Regiment lost to another USMC regiment augmented by foreign marines. The winning side consisted of MARSOC troops…
“Shallow and poorly charted”, so what? That means you have charts that are partly blank, and partly contain data only known to loose tolerances. All that is trivially dealt with: don’t sail in the blank areas, and when in areas with loosely known depths, apply that tolerance plus a bit to the chosen depth. If the depth is 500 feet +/- 200, don’t go below 250. Pilots know this sort of thing as “minimum obstruction clearing altitude”. Mechanical engineers know it as tolerance calculation for clearances. It’s elementary arithmetic to get this right.
Also, given the existence of underwater mapping sonar ships, what excuse does the Navy have for not possessing accurate charts of strategically critical waters?
Former submarine guy here- short answer is it’s (plotting a track and following it underwater, why isn’t more stuff charted, why didn’t they have magic sonar on that would warn them, why didn’t someone see it out the front window) is a lot more complicated than it appears. Scratching the surface, this incident appears to have a lot in common with the 2005 grounding (with loss of one sailor) of the USS San Francisco. After the incident, it turned out that the seamount they hit wasn’t on the charts, but there was a notation in the general area about “discolored water” and that was enough to get the CO fired. Tough, but that’s the way it’s generally been and even though the CO wasn’t the quartermaster who did the plotting or who failed to copy that warning over from another chart, and the CO wasn’t the Navigator who looked it over and sent it to the CO for approval, at the end of the day the Captain is responsible for everything that happens onboard and every action taken by every crew member.
Wait and see for more info to come out, and understand that whatever reports of this you hear come from numbnuts journalist who knows even less of how submarines and the military are supposed to work than they know about guns. (And we all here know how little they know about that)
The difference between pilots and sub drivers is that mountains don’t just spontaneously appear. Sea mounts do. The South China sea is geologically active. Land can be mapped very rapidly from space using satellites. The ocean floor can only be mapped in narrow strips by sonar. That takes a large amount of time. The whole area has been mapped before, but the mountains move…
Nothing personal, guys, but until you’ve been on a boat and seen/lived through the shit that they get involved in, in the hot war (it never got cold like above the water) underwater, you should really make an effort to keep your heads out of your collective asses. Carry on.
Have the Wu’zzz commented ??
Not buyin that disinfo.
I would bet my left arm the South China Sea is WELL mapped. Very…Well…..Mapped.
Not just by sonar.
By Multiple Platfroms. Look up.
And if it isn’t.
What purpose does DOD, NRO, Etc etc etc have. Worthless!!
Betcha that sub was where it “shouldn’t” have been.
That would make a grand prize for the Wu’zzzz.
Remember that we know more about the solar system than we do about the sea bottom. There are many places that aren’t completely mapped. If that sub was busy sneaking into places where its presence was not welcome, it needs to stay close to the bottom and can’t use active sonar to plot the bottom. A small ambiguity in the chart, and there you go.