The Fall of the USS Gettysburg.
“Uneasy lies the head that wears a crown.”
At around 0300, on Sunday, 22 December, the Aegis cruiser USS Gettysburg (CG 64) shot down an F/A-18F preparing to land on USS Harry S Truman (CVN 75) while operating in the Red Sea. The Carrier Strike Group to which each of these units was assigned was an element of the U.S.-led Operation Prosperity Guardian, assigned to protect Red Sea merchant traffic from Yemen-based Houthi attacks.
First, we all need to understand that there is only one man who knows what happened on that day, and that is the commanding officer of Gettysburg. Apart from the F/A-18F crew, which possesses a very small but critical piece of the puzzle, everyone else is just an observer, a post-exercise armchair quarterback. Having said that, while Gettysburg’s captain knows what happened in terms of the detailed, incredibly complex sequence of events, unless the failure was the result of discrete, identifiable human error, he may not, in the immediate aftermath, understand why certain things did happen. For example, if systems or off-ship persons failed to operate as advertised, he wouldn’t know exactly why those systems or persons failed. That level of detail may only be revealed in the post-mortem.
Slowly, those pieces are being put together, and each day more is understood as to what happened. That is a good thing, because this was a combat-level laboratory, in which strengths and weaknesses were on real-world display. This was a night which should be closely studied, and learned from, against future nights in which the missiles are flying.
Here’s the problem: By the time that the Navy, writ large, understands all the errors and failures that contributed to this particular chain of events, a standard strategy may well have been enacted, i.e., “Nothing to see here, folks. Move along.” You see, the Navy doesn’t like to discuss “family business” with taxpayers, who may ask awkward, and potentially embarrassing, questions. It is much easier to pin the tail on one specific, commanding officer donkey.
During the first decade of this century, the commanding officer a ship was referred to, by the staff of Commander Naval Surface Forces, as “the sacrificial captain,” and for good reason. Holding one person up to the public, as the single point of failure in any specific disaster, forestalls further, probing questions that often don’t have easy answers.
In the end, this may mean that larger systemic issues remain unresolved. Rather, blame is often placed at the door of the ship in question, and everyone else who might have been, in one way or another, complicit, simply moves out of the blast pattern until it’s safe to go back to exactly what they were doing before.
