Death and Valor on an American Warship Doomed by Its Own Navy
<i>A dozen or so [maintenance issues] were considered more serious. They included problems with the ship’s primary navigation system. It was the oldest such system among destroyers based in Japan. It was running on Windows 2000, even though other ships had been upgraded. It could not display information from the AIS.<p>The broken email system had a “major impact” on the ship’s day-to-day operations. Microsoft Outlook did not work. Nor could commanders communicate over a classified email system...<p>Technicians were constantly fixing the SPS-73, the other main navigational radar on the Fitzgerald. Sometimes, the radar would show the destroyer heading the wrong way. At other times, it simply locked up and would have to be shut down...<p>A third radar, used for warfare, was slow to acquire targets, but technicians had installed a temporary fix that became permanent. “Problem known since 2012. Declared hopeless,” read notes attached to the repair report...<p>Other equipment had been written off, too. The so-called Bright Bridge console was supposed to help the bridge crew by sharing information from the combat room. The console had been scavenged for spare parts, leaving the station unmanned.</i><p>I found this section of the article legitimately infuriating. How the hell does a first-line warship of the United States Navy get into a state like this? I can understand the occasional malfunction, but this sounds less like that and more like some sad-sack Russian ship circa 1995, where the crew is struggling to keep the thing afloat with just duct tape and bubble gum. But at least the Russians in the &#x27;90s had the excuse that the government that had built the ship had collapsed and the replacement hadn&#x27;t bothered spending a dime to maintain it. What&#x27;s <i>our</i> Navy&#x27;s excuse?<p>Based on the article it sounds like the excuse they&#x27;ve settled on is just blaming everything on the crew, which is shameful. Things don&#x27;t get this bad in the absence of some kind of systemic rot. If that rot isn&#x27;t tackled now it&#x27;ll end up having to be tackled after we lose some future war, in which case, God help us all.