[Get the brief version of this interview with all six officials]

Over the course of investigations by the Navy and the National Transportation Safety Board, two formal reviews, and a slew of inquiries related to legal proceedings against sailors and leadership, an enormous amount of information came to light. But did these steps actually bring about change?

Six officials with first-hand knowledge of the surface force then and now spoke to Defense News to discuss the implementation of safety measures over the last five years, and more that must be done to avoid another fatal mishap:

• Vice Adm. Roy Kitchener is the commander of Naval Surface Forces and Naval Surface Force Pacific. He oversees manning, training, maintenance and other readiness-related policies for the force, and has served in that position since August 2020. He previously commanded Naval Surface Force Atlantic and Expeditionary Strike Group 2.
• Retired Rear Adm. Brian Fort led the Navy’s investigation into the Fitzgerald collision in 2017. He commanded Navy Region Hawaii at the time and previously commanded a destroyer and a destroyer squadron. Fort later served as commander of Naval Forces Japan from July 2019 until his retirement in July 2021.
• Retired Vice Adm. Rich Brown led the Navy’s investigation into the McCain collision in 2017. He served as the commander of Navy Personnel Command at the time. He previously commanded Surface Warfare Officers School Command and Naval Service Training Command ashore, and commanded a destroyer, a cruiser and a carrier strike group at sea. Brown later served as commander of Naval Surface Forces and Naval Surface Force Pacific until retiring and handing command over to Kitchener in 2020.
• Rep. Rob Wittman, R-Va., is the ranking member of the House Subcommittee on Seapower and Projection Forces. He has focused on military readiness since becoming a congressman in 2007. He represents Virginia’s First District, which includes portions of the military-heavy Hampton Roads area.
• Capt. Chase Sargeant commands Task Force 71 out of Japan, which serves as the sea combat commander for the forward-deployed Ronald Reagan Carrier Strike Group and as the theater surface warfare commander for all combatants assigned to U.S. 7th Fleet. Sargeant previously served as executive officer and then commanding officer of the destroyer McCain from April 2012 to May 2015.
• Retired Fleet Master Chief Petty Officer Paul Kingsbury served as the top enlisted adviser at U.S. Fleet Forces Command from December 2015 to August 2018, and contributed to the strategic readiness review and the comprehensive review. He previously served as the command master chief for the Naval Safety Center (now Naval Safety Command); the region master chief for Naval Forces Japan; and the command master chief for an amphibious ship in the Forward-Deployed Naval Forces Japan.

These interviews were edited for length and clarity.

1. What challenges did the surface navy face five years ago?

Vice Adm. Roy Kitchener: It’s primarily about four things: No. 1 is operational tempo versus readiness generation. Those two were in conflict and out of balance, and the balance tipped toward the operational demand. No. 2, we were under-invested in training as a community. We came out of an era where we went to “SWOS in a Box,” where we disestablished the Surface Warfare Basic Division Officer Course. A new reporting ensign got a box of CDs that they were supposed to use to learn their profession. When the collisions occurred, we were in the buildup phase, and we were buying back and getting back to what we needed to do, but we weren’t quite there. Some of it was attributable to a nonstandard training across the force.

That was further exacerbated by our can-do attitude — “we can still do the mission, we can do it with less, we’ve done this before” — and we didn’t fully understand how to measure cumulative risk. And finally, fatigue management, which was nonexistent. There was no prioritization of it, and we had not made investments in it. When you combine those four things, I see that as the perfect storm.

Rear Adm. Brian Fort (ret.): Culture. Five years ago, the surface navy lacked a positive, defining culture. Culture is not strategy or values or operational concepts. Simply, culture is how an organization thinks and therefore acts. While “can-do attitude” was frequently cited as part of the surface navy culture then and as a contributor to the 2017 collisions, “can-do” is actually the positive side of the coin; the other negative side is “make-do.”

Every commander on the waterfront knew the challenges with manning, training and equipping the surface navy. We routinely swapped sailors, parts and training. It was a well-documented, systemic part of our cultural norm. What hurt the most was how we frequently ripped apart a ship’s training schedule to support another fleet’s training requirement. The ships in my squadron averaged nine major schedule revisions in the basic phase of training, resulting in an average of seven extra weeks of training. Not only did this cause significant rework and adjustment, but the second and third order impacts on other individual and team training, manning and maintenance compounded an already challenging problem.

Vice Adm. Rich Brown (ret.): The command-and-control structure, misalignment of the operational control and administrative control, and the Office of the Chief of Naval Operations’ programmatic priorities did not allow for prioritization of the manning, training and equipping of the surface force. This misalignment was particularly harmful to forward-deployed naval forces and resulted in a “waiver mentality” to keep ships operating past their material readiness and certification periods. [Risks were passed] down the chain to the ship commanding officers, putting them in an impossible position to meet the mission despite not having the resources to do so.

Rep. Rob Wittman: The year 2017 goes back to sequestration in the early 2010s. Sequestration provided a significant challenge for the Navy, but there are still lingering effects today. There are still maintenance backlogs and inconsistency in how maintenance is managed; you have extended maintenance availabilities.

In 2017, the operational tempo was affected by these issues; maintenance availabilities get extended; deployments get extended. Those things happened because of pressure from sequestration that affected maintenance and shipbuilding. The shortfalls in shipbuilding appropriations — we’ve addressed some of that, so we’re in a better place, getting the trajectory on shipbuilding where it needs to be. We need to do an even better job on trajectory of ship maintenance in order to have the ships we need.

Fleet Master Chief Petty Officer Paul Kingsbury (ret.): It was the shift in surface warfare officer training and the divestment of manning. Most decisions in the Navy are shaped by money, involving well-intentioned people having to make trade-offs with the budget. That ultimately led to us having to shift to optimal manning.

Because of budgetary issues, you start to roll back on training, and also you don’t man the fleet where it needs to be. Going back five or 10 years before 2017, we were divesting some amount of Navy talent to support the global war on terror. We took sailors out of traditional training pipelines and sent them to the Middle East as individual augmentees. I don’t think they valued the importance of safety — it was more of a checklist program rather than a safety culture.

2. Where has the surface navy made the most progress in the last five years?

Kitchener: One was in professional competencies, our investments into the mariner skills of not only our junior officers but also our enlisted navigator course. The product we put to sea now and the continuum we have established is first rate. I point to the mariner skills because that’s where we made the most investments post collisions. But we also made improvements in technical skills and engineering schools, and in tactics. There’s a lot more work to do, but it’s going in the right direction.

The other was fatigue management. Now we have a policy — an instruction signed by me — that lays out what to do to manage fatigue. It’s an area that still requires a lot of work. If you look at a ship on deployment, it’s usually pretty good. If you look at one in the basic phase, not so much as we try to train people. But our awareness and our attempts have created really good programs.

The other one was the oversight of readiness. Now, if you want to defer maintenance, that’s our decision — Commander of Naval Surface Force Atlantic Rear Adm. Brendan McLane and myself. That was not the case back then. If you look at 2017 and measured the continuous maintenance in the western Pacific in Japan, we are at about a 19% accomplishment rate. Today, in Yokosuka, we’re at about 90%. If you go to Sasebo, it’s a little bit more challenging because we have infrastructure problems we’re trying to supplement with tenders. But overall, we’re in the 80s percentile for all of Japan, which is good.

Capt. Chase Sargeant: Post collision, one of the main things we learned was the need to standardize and codify our processes in U.S. 7th Fleet. We’ve codified for forces out here three phases: You’re in maintenance; you are in the training phase; or you’re in sustainment, which is deployable, where you could be tasked to missions.

We have a process where the type commander has a conversation with the operational commander, and we brief each other, and we clear ships to move from phase to phase — from maintenance to basic training, and then from training to sustainment. To be a deployable ship means it is certified and ready for missions from a manning, training and equipping perspective. Since I’ve been here (since the summer of 2019), not once have I had any pressure or any requests to violate a ship’s training or maintenance allocations.

Brown: The surface navy has made the most progress in prioritizing the type commander’s man, train and equip functions. As a result of the 2017 destroyer collisions in the Pacific Fleet and the subsequent reviews, the type commander has a much larger, although not formalized, voice in the employment of surface ships. Risk is owned and managed at the appropriate levels. Additionally, significant funding has been allocated to individual and ship training. The revamp of the surface warfare career and training path is remarkable and a sea change to the way we train and assess officers. The revised Surface Force Training and Readiness Manual put the “Big T” in training and the “little a” in assessment. All the other initiatives — check-ins between new commanding officers and the type commander; near-miss reporting; log books; new trainers and a series of assessments; fatigue management; mentorships — have had a such a positive impact on the surface force as well as the individual officer and sailor.

Fort: Training. The surface navy has made significant investments in training for surface warfare sailors across the entire spectrum of rank and rate. Unless this has already occurred and I am unaware, one change I will continue to strongly advocate for is eliminating the use of multiple-choice “Rules of the Road” examinations at Surface Warfare Officers School. While the U.S. Coast Guard’s “Rules of the Road” database is an excellent tool to support learning, it’s a poor substitute for actual learning. Poor “Rules of the Road” knowledge contributed to both the 2012 collision of the destroyer Porter and the 2017 Fitzgerald collision. We are well past time for written essay examinations, which include both routine and challenging ship-handling scenarios. It takes time and effort to write and evaluate exams, but I advocated for this while I was on active duty, and will continue to do so in retirement.

3. What challenges does the surface navy still face?

Kitchener: How to give sailors, crews and ships more time to focus on warfighting. The depot maintenance remains a struggle. We are driving to lower those days of delayed maintenance, which I think we’re doing OK, but we’re not where we need to be. If we could get that right, that’ll give sailors back more time.

All those things that are not related to warfighting — do we really have to do them? That’s been a hard one to get our hands around. We had a good effort right after the collisions to drop it somewhat, but there’s still stuff out there remaining. We signed off on a study to get our hands around it, and it should deliver here later this year.

Standardization is something we need to work on as a community. We have variance: We have lots of really high-performing ships, and then we have ships that need help.

And the other challenge is [determining] the right level of manning. How do we measure that? We went to the 92/95 fit/fill metric after the collisions. I’m convinced that’s not the right metric. We need to be able to measure experience and proficiency, and we need to maintain even levels of experience across the phases of the Optimized Fleet Response Plan. We’re going to look at that this year.

Wittman: The operational demands and the size of the fleet are still in disproportion. When you’re deploying these ships at these rates and extending deployments, that not only wears out the ship, but it wears out the crew. Consistently the Navy keeps around 100 ships deployed at any one time. The current shipbuilding plan shrinks the number of ships from 297 down to 280. So you’re going to put more pressure on fewer ships, which is not a good long-term place to be. In the past 20 years, the Navy has always talked about getting to a larger fleet, and the fleet should by their projection be over 300 ships.

Fort: Manning and maintenance — two critical [factors] to get the Optimized Fleet Response Plan right. The surface navy struggles to complete maintenance availabilities on time because of (1) an inability to truly sequence and synchronize all maintenance activities; (2) [inconsistency in] what is meant by supervision. Show me 10 sailors who identify as supervisors, and I’ll show you 10 methods of supervision; and (3) [an outstanding need for] quality assurance. I’m not talking about check points; I’m talking about the quality assurance of the actual work itself while the work is in progress. All three rest squarely on the shoulders of both the maintenance activity and the ship.

Brown: The surface force is still challenged with a misaligned command-and-control structure and operational control/administrative control assignment. The type commanders should have operational control of the ships in the maintenance and basic phases of the Optimized Fleet Response Plan. The type commanders would then deliver fully certified, materially ready and trained ships to the numbered fleet commands for advanced training, deployments and sustainment operations. The surface readiness squadrons of the 1980s should be reestablished with sequential major commanders to oversee and support ships in the maintenance and basic phases of the OFRP. The current destroyer squadrons or amphibious squadrons would then focus purely on their warfighting missions.

Additionally, the Navy still does not fund ship maintenance accounts to the real requirement. This is shortsighted, transfers risk to the commanding officers and reduces ships’ expected service lives.

Kingsbury: Manning on the enlisted side. How you distribute the workload compared to the people you have is off, and there’s ongoing pressure on the fleet with regard to that. With the 92/95 fit/fill goals for manning, you’re already introducing risk. When you don’t have enough people to do what the manning documents say is necessary to not just meet mission but safely operate that unit, you’re automatically taking risks. This requires advocating to Congress for more money to buy the full manpower requirement.

4. How can the surface navy further reduce its risk of a mishap?

Kitchener: To me, it would be getting that culture of safety more established. The no-blame reporting has been really good, and the debriefings. And every year it gets better — and I know it gets better because the book I get at the end of the year gets bigger. But that’s got to continue to translate down to the deckplate. It’s got to be inclusive. If a sailor feels like they can’t say something, we’re never going to win. That’s the No. 1 thing we have to change.

We’re still challenged there. There are even some officers in the wardroom that are not ready to talk about something bad that may have happened so they could get better. I don’t understand why you wouldn’t, but that remains a challenge. That’s a cultural thing.

So that’s the biggest one, but I also believe in our ability to look at analytics and understand readiness: the hard analytics; the man, train and equip measurement; the people science that we got from our human factors folks that came out of the collisions; afloat safety assessment surveys. Measuring the cumulative risk remains a challenge.

Sargeant: The metrics. We’re working on them for the manning of our ships. Vice Adm. Kitchener is working to ensure we have the right level of expertise on ships with the right sailors, the right trained officers with the right experiences. Where that comes into play for me is lethality, which is about leadership and competency on our ships. The more capable our sailors are, the more they are able to self-sustain underway. That for me is an intangible advantage to our surface fleet in terms of lethality. So (1) get the metric right that tells you what is the right mix and level of expertise you need on ships, and (2) figuring out how to plug that into the system to ensure the demand signal is met by the fleet in terms of manning and training.

Wittman: I’ve been hammering the Navy for years to make sure what they do, especially in the maintenance realm, is data driven. The key is not just gathering the data, or not just putting in place advanced sensors, but the key is figuring out how to incorporate the data in an operational way so it leads to changes in managing the fleet. They’re on the right path to make sure decisions and efforts are all data driven using artificial intelligence and predictive modeling on maintenance. The true test is going to be: Does that result in improved performance?

Fort: When it comes to culture of the surface navy, commanders can never take their foot off the throttle. Until such time that sailors of all ranks and rates can collectively define in positive terms the culture of the surface navy, there will be work to do. I led a culture discussion with Naval Surface Force Atlantic [ship leaders] in 2016. The culture that commanding officers and command master chiefs wanted most was one of warfighting, leadership, tactical excellence, professionalism and technical excellence — in that order. We’ve made good strides on all of these fronts since 2017.

One more I would add: the ability to critically self-assess performance at every opportunity. This has been a key miss for the surface navy and was a root cause leading to the Fitzgerald collision. Fitzgerald had a near-miss collision just five weeks before their tragic collision. As I wrote in the report, they didn’t critique their near miss. A proper critique might have uncovered many of their problems.

The chief of naval operations personally called for improving critical self-assessment at the Surface Navy Association symposium this year. That’s great, and I most certainly applaud this, but this kind of cultural change won’t occur overnight, nor by good intention alone. It must be an all-hands-on-deck change in culture, led by everyone wearing a command pin.

Brown: The Navy must balance maintenance, training and operations in support of maximizing operational readiness and safety. We must always guard against transferring risk down the chain of command. The surface navy needs to continue on the path of establishing a culture of excellence vice a culture of compliance. Continue to implement the various programs established to identify organizational drift. Lastly, ensure sufficient run time of all the new programs so they can achieve the desired effect before changing them for the sake of changing.

Kingsbury: The surface fleet needs to look at what nuclear power does and what naval aviation does, and borrow from the best practices of those communities. Nuclear power is not an easy program to be in, but it’s rigorous for a reason. Look at the investment they’ve made in education, in this constant trust-but-verify approach, with certification requirements, with a solid set of core values, watch-standing principles and a focus on integrity. Look at the school of aviation safety; look at the investment that the commanding officers and executive officers get in safety management education before they go to the first command, specifically in to how to develop, maintain and manage a safety culture, and how to use your safety officer. That’s a best practice the surface navy can borrow from, too.

We need broader officer and enlisted education across the continuum on safety culture and safety leadership. The things you do to manage and mitigate safety from the tactical, operational or strategic levels is different than what you do to manage maintenance, for example. Partner with Naval Safety Command to create an education for naval leaders on safety culture and how to inculcate it.

5. How can the departments of the Navy and Defense help the fleet improve safety? How realistic is it to hope for that help?

Kitchener: What we have to do as a community is identify the resources through the data and show the risk. We can now say: “Here’s your risk, Department of the Navy or Pentagon, and as a corporate forum, let’s figure this out. Is that an acceptable risk? What’s the long-term impact?”

Fort: There are discussions going on about “the mission of the Navy.” This is good discussion. What I would discourage, or change, is leveeing any requirement on the Navy and our sailors which doesn’t contribute to warfighting prowess.

And it’s absolutely realistic, but you would need bold decision-making and the occasional “no” [in response to their proposals].

Brown: There will be future budget pressures that will likely result in the call to reduce the instructor billet base, shutter training facilities, reduce the number of training courses in an officer’s or sailor’s pipeline to their ship, etc. We must never allow this to happen again. If we do, we will absolutely see a repeat of the 2017 destroyer tragedies. We must not only fully fund ship maintenance requirements, but we must resist the urge to cut these accounts in future budget crunches. We must always prioritize current readiness and training. We must also fully fund the manpower accounts so that we fully man the ships to the requirements necessary to fight the ships in battle.

The service thought mishaps were down, but when accounting for a smaller fleet and fewer days at sea, the mishap rate was flat over time, according to Bud Couch, the operational safety officer for Naval Surface Forces.

Couch now helps lead the Human Factors Oversight Council, a group established in 2018 to examine the individual sailor’s readiness and how that can contribute to fleetwide safety.

The council is charged with finding answers to several questions: Is each team member properly rested and in a healthy place to contribute to the day’s operations? Was each team member brought to the ship sufficiently early in order to have enough time to adjust to the new team before performing potentially risky tasks? During the most dangerous evolutions, are the most experienced teammates at the helm, or is someone less experienced filling in?

Rather than continue to invest in readiness in the old ways, the team argues, diving into the specifics of those onboard as well as their experiences and physical readiness will yield better and more predictable results.

Fatigue and personal readiness

The Navy’s culture can push sailors to finish the mission, but medical research increasingly shows the ineffectiveness and even danger of working while exhausted.

“Sleep is critical in being able to make good decisions,” Couch said, noting it was a factor in the two 2017 collisions. On June 17, the destroyer Fitzgerald collided with the container ship ACX Crystal. The merchant ship ripped into the side of the Navy vessel, flooding berthing compartments, mangling the commanding officer’s stateroom and killing seven sailors. Two months later, the destroyer John S. McCain collided with the tanker Alnic MC. That Aug. 21 event killed 10 crew members.

The Human Factors Oversight Council found among sailors a “reluctance to report you’re fatigued because you want to get the job done,” Couch explained.

The Crew Readiness, Endurance and Watchstanding, or CREW, program — still in its pilot phase — gives sailors biological-monitoring devices like fitness watches and rings. Data from the devices are offloaded for medical staff and leadership to review and decide if someone is fatigued to the point of operating at a reduced capacity.

The human factors team has already identified a few devices that work best for this effort, and its members continue to refine how to offload the data to make real-time decisions, Couch said.

At the ship level, the CREW program will help a commanding officer “figure out if somebody is impaired due to fatigue or other factors so that we can make a smart choice about continuing or about replacements.” At the fleet level, Couch said, “we’ll have an impression … of where folks stand with respect to fatigue for potentially operational commanders making decisions about how to employ the ship or when to pull them off the line” to return to port.

A follow-on effort to CREW is Optimal Watchbill Logistics, or OWL, which Couch said would plug fatigue data into a planning tool to help leadership determine “the best combination of folks to build our watch teams. And then if an issue comes up with one member of the team, what’s the most viable option to replace that person while they get rest or attention?”

Couch said the trucking industry in recent years has paid close attention to fatigue management and planning tools based on biometric data, and the Navy has been able to leverage some of that work for CREW and OWL.

“It’s just being aware that a member of the team is not at full capacity, or several members of the team are not at full capacity,” he said. “You could find somebody else who’s closer to full capacity, or you could just acknowledge that and then use better team skills, like making sure you’re checking in with people.”

The human factors team has run CREW pilot programs on several destroyers, littoral combat ships as well as an entire amphibious ready group and Marine expeditionary unit — or nearly 6,000 sailors and Marines across about 10 ships.

Couch said sailors were receptive to participating in the pilots since they got to keep the watches and rings. The team has focused on making sailors aware that fatigue isn’t a sign of weakness, but rather something that affects everyone.

The pilot will continue to run with more ships in the near term to refine algorithms and to start working through what it takes to get data to the right place in a timely manner. The ultimate goal is to establish a secure Bluetooth connection on the ship for automatic data transfer, and then for the data to go into Jupiter, the Navy’s enterprise data environment.

An operational risk alert

Among the recommendations following the 2017 collisions was a lofty goal: Use available data to determine when a ship is at risk of a safety mishap, such as a grounding or a collision. At the time, the Navy didn’t have the data repository or the analytics capability to make this a reality.

It took two years of work, but by the summer of 2020, outgoing Naval Surface Forces Commander Vice Adm. Rich Brown approved seed money to start the Operational Safety Information and Risk Indicator System, also called OSRI. OSRI leverages Jupiter, which launched in the spring of 2020.

“The ultimate goal of OSRI is to come up with this data-driven, risk-modeling effort that will cue us at the ship unit level that there’s a potential risk or vulnerability, and then be able to apply resources based on that cueing,” Couch said.

Though this effort is still a work in progress, the human factors team has spent the past year and a half identifying available data streams, determining which are important, and creating a picture of each ship’s cumulative risk and readiness.

The team has identified six data points that appear to be highly related to whether a ship is at risk of a mishap. Chief among them is a ship’s muster report that shows daily attendance on the job. Reviewing previous mishaps and near-miss events, the team discovered many involved a key billet where the most experienced person typically working on the ship was away, leaving a less experienced crewmate to fill in.

“For example, we had an event where the ship fired a high-explosive round over the top of another ship. And one of the key factors in that was that the gunner’s mate chief, who usually stood this watch in combat, was ashore,” Couch said. “It’s very, very common that some person who usually does something and has a great deal of experience was not present.”

Another data point involved mishaps during a ship’s maintenance phase. Certain types of mishaps during maintenance tend to correlate to mishaps at sea.

Other data points included manning levels — geared at examining the experience and education of individuals, how long they’ve been assigned to the ship, and how regularly they’ve been on the ship versus off the ship — as well as individual readiness factors like fatigue.

OSRI can also incorporate subjective information, including the results of afloat safety climate assessment surveys, which are periodically sent to ships’ crews.

The team now wants to use new artificial intelligence and machine-learning technologies to incorporate more data streams into the ship risk indicator system. For example, one individual casualty report from a ship might not paint much of a picture, but the totality of all the casualty reports over a period of time, combined with internal feedback from surveys as well as external feedback from training and assessment organizations, can help reveal a trend.

The team is also pursuing Project Hermes to apply natural language processing to verbal information and to help incorporate that as data into the risk indicator system. Ships send multiple messages a day about their material condition, fueling and spares status, personnel levels, operational activities, and more. Project Hermes would take these written messages, break them down into data and feed that into the risk matrix.

Better manning policies

Once complete, OSRI and these other efforts are meant to help leaders at all echelons make better decisions so no ship finds itself at risk of a mishap.

At the Naval Surface Forces level, the data will inform personnel policies. In recent years, the Navy has pulled sailors off ships in maintenance to fill empty billets for ships about to deploy. However, early data from the OSRI effort shows adding a new sailor to a crew just before deployment doesn’t drive down risk because it takes 90-180 days for a sailor to adjust to a new crew.

The data also indicates a noticeable uptick in risk when key sailors leave a ship during maintenance — meaning this past practice disadvantaged one ship to marginally improve another.

The human factors team hopes to use OSRI and other insights from its ongoing projects to model potential manning policies that would rule out harmful ideas, replacing them with ideas that raise the safety of the entire fleet. Service leaders can then use that data to craft more convincing budget justifications for the Pentagon and Congress.

At the deckplate level, Couch expects commanding officers to soon have tools to help plan routine and special operations while identifying gaps early, before the ship is in danger.

An individual risk matrix includes factors like fatigue, how long the sailor has been a member of the crew, the environmental conditions in which the ship is operating, the material condition of the ship, what operations the ship will conduct that day and more.

“Commanding officers, when they have the opportunity to brief [the commander of Naval Surface Forces, Vice Adm. Roy] Kitchener, on here’s how we’re going to tackle the basic phase or the maintenance phase, they’re much more granular in talking about exactly what sorts of people they need,” Couch said.

“The biggest outcome for us is that we’re no longer automatically willing to take somebody off a maintenance-phase ship to fix a ship at sea,” Couch added. “We can demonstrate now that’s just kicking a problem down the road, which we’re less willing to do.”

He had commissioned into the surface fleet in the 2000s, a decade when the “struggle bus to competence” was the name of the game, and SWOs were often thrown into life-or-death ship-driving realities with little to no hands-on training, a shortfall on the fundamentals that was grimly acknowledged by Big Navy brass in the wake of the disaster.

“Looking back a decade or more to the state of surface warfare training, it was an abysmal nightmare,” said the SWO, who, like other surface warfare officers interviewed for this report, requested anonymity because he was not authorized to speak publicly.

The Fitz disaster that killed seven sailors in their berthing was followed roughly two months later with the warship John S. McCain’s collision with an oil tanker, which killed 10 shipmates.

“Our chickens came home to roost, and it was bad,” he said. “People died.”

Five years later, the Navy’s surface fleet still has work to do. Fleet members, leadership and watchdog groups cite stubborn problems with operations tempo, SWO retention and manning, among other issues.

But while no Navy community is a monolith, multiple SWOs who spoke with Navy Times say they and many of their peers are feeling cautiously optimistic about the progress the fleet has made since 2017 — not only in training prospective SWOs, but in making sure those further along in their careers stay sharp. Adequate sleep and a sometimes crushing workload, even in homeport, remain concerns.

“Acknowledging a positive trend requires you to acknowledge you’re coming from somewhere negative,” the midgrade SWO said.

He shares this progress perspective with the younger versions of himself just stepping onto a ship.

While they remain skeptical on some matters, the SWO said he’s able to “give them perspective on how good things have gotten.”

“I’m in a place to realize, hey, this is super good,” he said, “because this could be so bad.”

Ship-driving training has “basically tripled” for SWOs during their career since 2017, according to Cary Russell, director of the Government Accountability Office’s Defense Capabilities and Management Team.

Although a 2019 GAO report found that SWO proficiency still needed work, test scores for ship-driving officers have been “trending upward” since then, according to Capt. James Harney, assistant chief of staff for training and readiness for Commander, Naval Surface Force.

“Due to a more rigorous training pipeline, we can say with confidence that our current division officers and future commanding officers are better mariners,” Harney said in an emailed statement to Navy Times.

That rigor comes from deeper and better training for new and prospective SWOs, as well as continued assessments throughout a SWO’s career to ensure their skills don’t atrophy.

That training continuum includes an Advanced Division Office Course, or ADOC, and the Afloat Bridge Resource Management Workshops, which involve a post-major command mentor assessing an officer’s performance at sea.

“The overwhelming feedback we’ve received from these post-Major Command mentors is that SWOs and watch teams are going to sea with increased proficiency and stronger maritime skills,” Harney said, adding that the 140 ships that have completed the workshops have not suffered any Class A or Class B mishaps.

Today, the simulators available to SWOs and the engaged training “is night and day to what guys were doing 15 years ago,” the midgrade SWO said. “It’s a different world.”

“Guys like me, folks in my peer group, are able to give perspective on how far we’ve come,” he added. “And we’re still moving forward.”

‘The right way to do things’

Culturally, the community has always known what it needs to do in order to make officers proficient in ship driving and attendant SWO skills, the midgrade officer said. Tragically, it took two disasters to kick things into action.

“We know the training needs to be intensive, and we’re rolling out on that,” he said.

Before the Fitz and McCain, he said, “there was very much — when I got in — sort of a ‘hey, everything’s on-the-job training, go figure it out.’

“Sure, that’s nice and everything when everybody’s got the time and space to really just flex and treat being a (junior officer) like an educational project, but we’ve got stuff to do and people whose lives depend on us being good watchstanders … it’s not just, go figure it out in your own time.”

Today, the surface warfare officer said, “everything that I could’ve possibly wanted as a junior officer coming into the Navy now exists.”

There’s the basic division officer course, or BDOC, he noted, which has reformed into “a serious investigation of skill sets in a way that we didn’t have coming out of ROTC.”

The advanced division officer course, or ADOC, is less of a rote step and more of a hard assessment before an officer becomes a department head.

Simulators and the littoral combat ship pipeline are also forging a new kind of SWO, according to the officer.

“I imagine the CRUDES guys (cruiser-destroyer units) want something closer to what the LCS guys have, and I think they’re getting there,” he said. “It’s an intimidating investment for a community that hasn’t typically done things that way, but we’re getting there.”

One junior officer arrived to the SWO world following a stint in the merchant marine world.

He recalled not being sure what to expect but has been pleasantly surprised by the rigor and thoroughness of the training he encountered both in the schoolhouse and at sea.

Even with his pre-military time afloat, the junior officer called his bridge resource management training with the Navy the best he’s ever had, and recalled seeing officers moved to other Navy communities if they couldn’t pass challenging bridge scenarios.

“I had to study quite a bit,” he recalled. “The entire pipeline is something students are taking very seriously.”

Between officer of the deck courses and BDOC, the officer said, “it almost felt like I got an abbreviated four-year maritime degree all over again.”

“From a training standpoint, I think we’re doing great,” he said.

While deployed, the officer said he saw a culture that in some respects was a U-turn away from the dysfunctional wardroom dynamics that plagued Fitz before its fatal collision.

“There was no danger, nothing crazy happened, but there was a rules-of-the-road situation that made the captain uncomfortable with the bridge team,” he recalled. “That team was pulled off the watch bill and given remedial training.”

One night, the junior officer recalled, he felt overwhelmed in the darkness.

He needed help and asked for it. And that was okay.

“I experienced one of the most challenging nights of my life up on the bridge,” he said. “I felt totally comfortable calling my captain. He came up in the middle of the night really quickly and helped us out. We weren’t judged, and there was no negative stigma.”

“We got through the scenario, the captain told us we had the watch and went back to bed.”

Staying sharp

A lot can happen between young surface warfare officers’ training and their eventual evolution into old salts.

Deterioration of core skills is one. And five years after the Fitz and McCain, Navy officials say more is being done to ensure that a SWO’s skills don’t atrophy.

One SWO said she is heartened to see department head officers now required to continue training and maintaining their ship handling skills.

“Before, the department heads would have ‘oversight’ or ‘coaching’ of the junior officers driving the ships, but the department heads themselves hadn’t driven any ship in four to five years, so they were rusty at best,” she said, adding that the use of SWO logs is a step toward ensuring skills stay fresh and current.

The midgrade SWO echoed that thought: “We’re tracking to make sure we’re not putting guys who haven’t touched a helm in 12 years in charge of sea and anchor details,” he said.

That new regimen involves 10 “competency checks” across an officer’s career, from ensign to major-command captain, Harney said.

Several “Go/No Go Assessments” throughout a SWO’s career ensure that those who don’t know their job will not proceed to the next career milestone.

Since 2019, according to Harney, “there have been 13 officers who, having selected for command/major command, did not pass their respective Go/No-Go assessment and therefore did not continue to their command tours.”

And since October, two division officers failed their Officer of the Deck Phase 2 assessment and were reassigned out of the community.

“These assessments demonstrate the high bar expected for our surface warfare officers and particularly for those officers in command,” Harney said.

A SWO’s training throughout his or her career is now recorded in virtual logbooks for each officer as well and can be used to assess their skills and pair their talents with the right at-sea billets.

Tracking SWO skills on a ship can be a “pain in the butt,” the midgrade SWO said, but he soon saw how vital it is to improving things.

“I was able to look back three years at all the different stuff the people had done,” the SWO said of tracking sea and anchor detail reps, bridge time and other vital SWO jobs. “I could see where folks were in a gap. What started as an administrative pain became a skills tool for me.”

Challenges remain

Crew fatigue was found to have been a factor in the Fitz collision.

And while the Navy has codified policies to get sailors more consistent and uninterrupted sleep, watchdogs and SWOs say those efforts remain a work in progress.

One junior officer lauded the installation of circadian rhythm practices to try and get sailors better rest, but said such practices sometimes conflict with mission needs.

As such, watches are still stood by people getting three to five hours of sleep a night, the SWO said.

“We have a culture where it’s considered something that looks good to work until 10, 11 o’clock at night, barely get any sleep,” he added. “If you’re not working at least 12 hours a day, people just don’t think you’re working hard enough.”

While the female surface warfare officer welcomed circadian rhythm standards and other measures to mitigate crew fatigue, she said those systems don’t run smoothly during pre-deployment work-up cycles.

“The only ships ‘fully manned’ are those on deployment, but those that are in the work-up cycle are not even close to being fully manned and can’t support the circadian rhythm manning requirements,” she said. “If the ship doesn’t have enough people to rotate properly, then the sleep schedule is null and void.”

She said she has seen work-up cycles get compressed, leading to inspections and drills in the middle of the night.

“The protected sleep hours are thrown out the window,” the SWO said

Big Navy is paying more attention to crew fatigue in the wake of the 2017 collisions, according to the GAO’s Russell.

“You can see some positive things that have occurred in terms of managing fatigue, creating policy directing the use of circadian rhythms,” Russell said. “There’s a lot more attention paid to that.”

Russell’s team conducted a survey last summer and found that 90 percent of ships were following circadian rhythm watch bills, but that 86 percent of surveyed officers weren’t getting the prescribed seven hours of sleep daily, and two-thirds of them were getting by on just five hours of sleep.

“The implementation of that has been inconsistent, or at least a challenge,” Russell said.

That fatigue issue is tied into manning and crew levels. When there aren’t enough sailors to do what needs to be done, others have to pick up the slack.

Finding the right personnel to properly man vessels — while dealing with funding limitations, recruiting and retention issues as well as other requirements — remains a problem, according to Russell.

“Those shortfalls have significant implications with respect to operations and safety of the ship as it relates to fatigue,” he said.

Harney said the command is aware of the flood of duties that officers face, concerns that were reflected in a recent survey of about 2,500 junior officers, from ensign to lieutenant commander.

“Junior officers expressed challenges with balancing administrative work required onboard our ships with their daily regimens at sea and in port,” Harney said. “Based on this feedback, we will continue to explore avenues to reduce non-critical demands and balanced administrative requirements so crews can maximize time spent on warfighting proficiency.”

While the COVID pandemic upended ship deployments, port calls and other parts of surface fleet life in the name of public health, one surface warfare officer who talked to Navy Times questions the community’s operations tempo, even as he welcomed the changes to how his community is trained and assessed.

The junior officer recalled that, right after post-deployment leave, everyone had to come in at 6 a.m. or 7 a.m. and work 12-hour days, often to prepare for inspections that were redundant and duplicative of other checks

“It’s manageable, but when you come back from an eight-month deployment and you now have to sleep on the ship every three days … I think we’re fatiguing our force as a whole, so much so that it’s really hurting our readiness to go out and do those missions,” he said. “At an individual level, it’s creating so much stress and burnout.”

While he considers the job a privilege and an honor, the junior officer wonders about the sustainability of such a career path.

“We do sign on the dotted line to be called for our country, but I think the Navy has a serious problem where we’re asking too much of people for things that aren’t worth the pressure it’s putting on people,” he said. “The Navy has made a lot of great changes, but what we need to work on is our culture in our workforce. … Not to say you join the Navy expecting a cruise, or a port call every weekend, but a straight eight-month (deployment), work every day, really without many breaks at all, just wears on you.”

At times, the SWO said, it seems Big Navy is asking for wartime sacrifices from its sailors during peacetime.

“If we go to war, everyone can forget about port calls, liberty time, Facebook and cell phones and Wi-Fi on ships,” he said. “But we’re not going to be ready for that if we’re asking very similar sacrifices and challenges in peacetime.”

As the director of operational safety at Naval Surface Force Pacific, Couch helped generate 117 recommendations after two U.S. Navy destroyers were involved in separate fatal collisions in summer 2017. But that wasn’t enough.

He knew those recommendations would help, but they wouldn’t fundamentally change how the Navy looked at readiness and safety. So Couch set off to reframe the conversation.

“Given the billions of dollars we’ve dumped into the readiness accounts, and literally the thousands of mishap report recommendations we’ve accomplished, why aren’t we getting measurably better?” he wondered aloud during an interview with Defense News.

Past efforts sought to avoid a repeat of a specific mishap — a recommendation might deal with a particular command-and-control issue that went awry or alter how a piece of gear should be used under certain conditions — but Couch said the Navy needed an entirely new mindset.

So he went to work.

In 2018, Naval Surface Force Pacific established the Human Factors Oversight Council and since then has relied on the group to measure a broad range of sailor-related data, from how much sleep each individual sailor gets each night, and therefore how fit one is to stand watch, to how much training a sailor received and how a sailor scored on proficiency tests, which informs ship assignments. The group looks at a ship’s mishaps during maintenance to determine how likely they are — statistically speaking — to have a certain type of mishap during at-sea operations.

If recommendations alone won’t stop fatal collisions, data might, the argument went.

“We ended up coming up with this thing we call the six common traits of a mishap ship,” said Couch, a former Navy helicopter pilot and amphibious ship captain. “The traits themselves are interesting — it’s kind of a cool checklist to walk around as a leader and say: ‘Are these things happening on my ship?’

“But perhaps more important than the traits themselves is using those variables to ground ourselves in this theory of organizational drift into failure, and then using that theory to go back and think about how we would combat that drift at the [fleet] level and at the [ship] level.”

This data-centric focus on how sailor readiness contributes to surface fleet safety comes as the commander of Naval Surface Forces, Vice Adm. Roy Kitchener, works to make the fatal collisions of destroyers Fitzgerald and John S. McCain a course-altering moment for the surface warfare community.

“It was an inflection point for us,” Kitchener said. “We reset our community.”

That, the admiral explained, was done by making changes to organization, training, manning policies and maintenance prioritization — and the Navy isn’t done yet.

“We want to be defined by all the good things sailors are doing every day, not these events that we’re talking about today.”

‘The perfect storm’

In early 2017, the Navy couldn’t see the abundant warning signs that the surface force, and in particular the surface ships based in Japan, was overworked and underprepared. The cruiser Antietam ran aground in Tokyo Bay, causing $4.2 million in repairs and a 1,100-gallon oil spill. An investigation released that spring found the incident “was preventable” and “[t]he primary cause of grounding was human error” — specifically poor seamanship skills and mission planning.

In May, the cruiser Lake Champlain collided with a South Korean fishing vessel, an incident blamed on an inexperienced crew, poor seamanship and unreliable equipment.

Still, U.S. 7th Fleet faced high demand from theater commanders despite not having enough ships. And so ships continued to skip training and maintenance to take on new work.

Then on June 17, the destroyer Fitzgerald collided with the container ship ACX Crystal. The massive merchant ship ripped into the side of the Navy vessel, flooding berthing compartments, mangling the commanding officer’s stateroom and killing seven sailors. Investigators found the collision was precipitated by an inexplicable course change that put the destroyer on track to a clear collision with ACX Crystal, And they reported evidence of poor seamanship, shiphandling, risk management and leadership skills.

Two months later, it happened again: The destroyer John S. McCain collided with the tanker Alnic MC on Aug. 21, killing 10 crew members as the ship tried to navigate the crowded Strait of Malacca with a poor understanding of the rules of the road and confusion about how to use the ship’s new steering system.

The Navy conducted a strategic readiness review and a comprehensive review of recent surface force incidents, which led to 117 recommendations for the service in regard to establishing minimum safety standards; increasing fleet effectiveness by boosting crew size and training; and building a stronger “culture of operational excellence.”

Kitchener said several root problems existed in the surface force, and particularly the high-demand, low-density 7th Fleet surface forces that operate out of Yokosuka and Sasebo in Japan.

“No. 1, clearly the operational tempo versus the readiness generation [was] out of balance, and the balance tipped towards the operational demand,” he said. “No. 2 … we were underinvested in training as a community.”

Previously, schoolhouses for surface warfare officers had been shuttered in favor of a so-called SWOS in a Box, featuring self-guided training CDs. While that was ultimately reversed, the service hadn’t made enough progress in rebuilding training at the Surface Warfare Officers School.

Another root problem, Kitchener said, was the Navy’s can-do attitude without “a full appreciation or understanding of measuring cumulative risk” that comes with operating at any cost.

“Then the final one … was fatigue management. It was really nonexistent,” Kitchener said. “There was no prioritization of it, and we had not made investments in it.”

Kitchener said these factors came together as “the perfect storm,” though the Navy was blindsided by it. Today’s data-driven efforts are meant to give the Navy the tripwires and warning lights to avoid returning to such a risky scenario.

Addressing the basics

The comprehensive review of recent surface force incidents, released in early November 2017, highlighted the root problems Kitchener outlined. A quick scan of the table of contents makes clear there’s a long list of problems: poor seamanship and failure to follow safe navigational practices; erosion of crew readiness; headquarters processes that inadequately identified, assessed and managed operational risks; “can-do” culture that undermined basic watchstanding and safety practices.

The Navy has spent the past five years not just addressing these issues, Kitchener said, but doing so in a data-driven way meant to prevent the Navy from backsliding.

Operational tempo drove many of the problems outlined in the review. Japan-based ships in particular faced such demand that they were constantly too busy, which came at the expense of training and maintenance time. Personnel were yanked from one ship crew to fill in for others, meaning sailors didn’t get downtime and the crews didn’t gel as a unit.

Today, Kitchener can point to maintenance as an area that’s drastically different than five years ago.

When a system goes down on a ship that’s preparing for deployment, “they’re not going to go until we fix it,” he said. That choice of whether to stay for maintenance or go on deployment is now made at the four-star level — either U.S. Fleet Forces Command head Adm. Daryl Caudle or U.S. Fleet Forces Commander Adm. Samuel Paparo.

During his time leading East Coast surface ships and now the entire surface fleet, Kitchener said, the four-star officers have always agreed to delay the deployment to complete maintenance.

In fact, for all ships in the Pacific — both 7th Fleet in Japan and U.S. 3rd Fleet in San Diego, California — all requests from fiscal 2019 to fiscal 2021 to extend a depot-level repair period — despite potentially delaying a ship’s deployment — were approved. This included 29 extensions in FY19; 27 in FY20; and 30 in FY21, according to data provided by Naval Surface Forces.

There’s a second process in place for ships already deployed. A redline instruction from Naval Surface Forces states a ship cannot remain at sea if certain systems go down, unless it receives a waiver from the operational commander. Even then, the approval must be accompanied by a mitigation plan approved by Kitchener or his East Coast counterpart, Rear Adm. Brendan McLane, who commands Naval Surface Force Atlantic.

Consider this example from Kitchener: one of the redline items included is the fluxgate digital magnetic compass, a redundant backup system. For an outage like that, a ship may continue the mission and come back to port as soon as it’s practical for repairs. For a broken shaft, on the other hand, there may be more restrictions, such as an inability to sail alongside another ship or undertake complex evolutions until it’s repaired. And some other items require an immediate return to port.

According to data from Naval Surface Forces, the 7th and 3rd fleets approved 30 of 31 waiver requests since October from ships that crossed a redline — meaning the ships worked with their respective fleet commander and type commander to develop a short-term mitigation plan, remaining underway only until they could get back to port for repairs.

Additionally, ships are entitled to a certain number of continuous maintenance availability days throughout the year — the type of routine care done pierside to keep ships at peak readiness for operations, as opposed to the major upgrades and repairs done at a depot.

Kitchener said 19% of that work was executed in 2017, as opposed to nearly 90% today.

This prioritization of ship readiness over ship deployment is drastically different from 2017, when sailors reported the destroyer Fitzgerald skipped a maintenance period the month before its collision in favor of conducting operations, despite having key sensors and communications systems in degraded condition.

Rep. Rob Wittman, the top Republican on the House Armed Services’ sea power and projection forces panel, said he worries operational tempo is one challenge the Navy hasn’t fixed because the demand for surface forces remains high.

“The operational demands and the size of the fleet are still in disproportion. So when you’re deploying these ships at these rates and you are extending deployments, it not only wears out that the ship but it wears out the crew,” the Virginia lawmaker said.

Capt. Chase Sargeant leads surface ships in 7th Fleet as commander of Task Force 71. He also knows how things used to be, having served as executive officer and then commanding officer of the destroyer McCain from April 2012 to May 2015.

Sargeant acknowledged the operating tempo remains high in 7th Fleet, but said there’s an important difference from 2017: an ability to prioritize missions so that his task force can honestly assess how many ready ships are available and which missions it should focus on, instead of trying to urgently meet all requests.

The data-informed prioritization “allows us to then rework schedules, postpone or find more opportune places in the schedule when maybe we have more ships available to source those missions, and ensure that we are meeting the most critical and highest-priority missions,” he said.

A new approach to safety

Couch was hired by Naval Surface Forces in 2014 to serve as the operational safety officer. After serving on the group that wrote the comprehensive review, he believed there was still more to do to understand fleetwide safety and risk.

In response, he helped establish in 2018 the Human Factors Oversight Council, which continues to weigh how the Navy can measure and improve human performance to bolster operational safety.

Couch said the council quickly moved to address sailor fatigue — an issue identified as a factor in both the Fitzgerald and McCain collisions. The in-development Crew Readiness, Endurance and Watchstanding program is collecting sleep data from sailors’ wearable devices to determine whether they’re fit to stand watch — going so far as to flag a sailor after one bad night of sleep, Couch said, to make that person’s team aware the sailor may need help staying alert.

Medical research has found fatigued people struggle to pay attention, can make poor or slow decisions, and may fall asleep on the job — which could be catastrophic during at-sea operations. Couch said this was a key starting area for the council as it sought to tie the readiness of individual sailors to the cumulative risk of the fleet.

The Navy has prioritized a circadian rhythm work schedule — where sailors are allotted at least seven hours for sleep at the same time each day — with meetings scheduled around participants’ sleep and meal times.

Couch said data has shown that, although sailors are given time to sleep, they aren’t always as well rested as leadership might assume; sometimes, sailors use sleep time to finish paperwork or communicate with loved ones, or sometimes they can’t sleep well despite the uninterrupted time.

This detailed look has led the human factors group to study improved monitors and nighttime displays, better light-blocking rack curtains, and more comfortable mattresses that can help a sailor get a deeper sleep.

Sargeant said his cruisers and destroyers in 7th Fleet adhere to all these practices, and that Task Force 71 has looked for additional ways to build sailor resiliency, including putting chaplains on all the ships and increasing mental health resources at the task force level.

“Nothing is a magic fix for resiliency, but they all go towards providing tools, providing programs for sailors so that they’re more fit. [We’re] building toughness in them so that they can stay in when we have them out on operations for extended periods of time,” Sargeant said.

The ultimate goal is to develop an Operational Safety Information and Risk Indicator System, or OSRI, that will flag people, crews or task groups operating with too many red flags, drawing leadership attention to the situation before it turns deadly.

But that system will require significant amounts of qualitative and quantitative data, which Kitchener is working to establish.

Several groups — the Afloat Training Group, carrier strike groups 4 and 15 that oversee at-sea training, the Naval Surface and Mine Warfighting Development Center, the Board of Inspection and Survey, Naval Safety Command, and more — have regular touch points with ships and could begin feeding every observation and measurement into the system, Kitchener said.

The surface navy has also started sending so-called Afloat Safety Climate Assessment Surveys to sailors — but not the command triad — for feedback on fatigue issues. Kitchener said that model has been successful in collecting honest feedback, and the approach will be used for other topics.

“The hard analytics — the man, train and equip, where we can measure that — and then [add] the people science that we got from our human factors folks,” the admiral said. “Compare that to the hard analytics, and you can paint a pretty good picture.”

An inflection point

Wittman praised the Navy for making rapid changes to training, for starting to use predictive maintenance and data analytics tools to improve on-time maintenance rates, and for codifying its prioritization of maintenance and training time so future leaders can’t backtrack.

But, he said, the real measure of success will come years down the road.

“The key is not just gathering the data, or not just putting in place advanced sensors to [generate data]. How do you incorporate the data in an operational way … that actually results in change in how you manage the fleet?” he said. “The true test is going to be: Does that result in improved performance?”

Wittman, who led the House Readiness Subcommittee before moving to the sea power panel, said readiness tends to be the bill-payer in tight budgets, which could be the case again if inflation continues to eat into defense spending.

“I like where the Navy is going, trying to cast this in a permanent way organizationally to where it can’t be set aside during tough times. But the only way that you’re really going to measure that is to come up on those tough times, and we haven’t seen that since 2017,” he said. “I am cautiously optimistic that this is an organizational change that is permanent for the Navy.”

Kitchener believes all the changes are codified in a way that his successors will remain equally attentive to readiness. To ensure that’s the case, the Navy last year established the Learning to Action Board to avoid past mistakes.

In the aftermath of the Fitzgerald and McCain collisions, the Navy established a Readiness Reform and Oversight Committee to oversee the implementation of the 117 recommendations from two reviews. Though Rear Adm. Peter Vasely, who leads the Learning to Action Board, said most were implemented, it’s been difficult to measure their impact and to incorporate those new measures into Navy-wide learning.

The 2020 loss of the amphibious assault ship Bonhomme Richard due to a catastrophic fire during a maintenance availability, and the subsequent investigation and review, further proved the Navy continues to experience preventable disasters, Vasely said.

“We’re seeing the same mistakes being repeated time and time again,” he said. The board will aim for not just “taking the implemented corrective actions for that immediate incident, but then how are we taking those lessons learned and applying those … to ensure that we are not repeating those mistakes.”

Vasely said the organization’s goals are to provide high-level visibility into the progress of how post-disaster recommendations are implemented; to provide transparency and accountability for following through with implementations; to turn the actions into Navy-wide learning; and to assess the effectiveness of the measures once implemented.

The Learning to Action Board started with the Bonhomme Richard fire and a major fires review as its proof of concept. Already the team sent out a pulse survey, asking the command triads of 21 ships to answer questions related to risk during their maintenance availabilities. The answers came back within two weeks and highlighted four primary concerns: manning shortfalls; training associated with fire response and safety; equal safety compliance between the ship crew and the contractor; and the mental health of sailors in long maintenance periods.

Vasely said the Learning to Action Board will tackle the Fitzgerald and McCain collisions as its next project, looking to ensure the permanent implementation of the 117 recommendations and the translation of those surface-specific recommendations into broader ideas to make the whole Navy safer.

“One of the key things that we realized as we’ve gone through the Bonhomme Richard and the major fires review iteration is that we’re not getting after … the long-term success of what this will look like, which is: How do we get left of bang?” he said. “How do we look at the data … and identify those negative trends that are posing significant risks that, if unchecked, if we don’t surge on them, that basically will result in a potentially catastrophic event or a pinnacle-level event?”

A fifth goal for the board now, he said, is meant to be more proactive, “looking at negative trends that come up — so think about [inspector general] investigations, area assessments, think Naval Safety Command or hazard reports that come through, think about pulse surveys that go out to the fleet that come back — all provide data that, really, there has not been a repository or a mechanism to look at that data to determine the negative trends, to arrest the negative trends from turning into a pinnacle-level event.”

For Kitchener, turning lessons from the past into forward-looking predictive analytics is a critical endeavor.

“We cannot allow those lives that were lost to be in vain,” he said.

On paper, anyway.

Lt. Cmdr. Ritarsha Furqan feared the crew of the warship wasn’t ready to go out. She figured that up to 70 percent of them had changed over, and all those green shipmates needed to learn about the vessel, and each other.

But they’d never get that time. Superiors in the Japan-based 7th Fleet almost immediately began tasking the warship with assignments at sea.

Everything Furqan thought vital for a crew to thrive – training, achieving crucial certifications for operating in the bustling waters of the Western Pacific – were being jettisoned to make mission.

And then on June 17, 2017 it all unraveled.

The Philippine-flagged commercial cargo vessel ACX Crystal speared into the Fitz off the coast of Japan, killing seven American sailors.

“We didn’t have any time to familiarize new personnel, we didn’t have any time to build relationships and work on strengths and weaknesses, and build unit cohesiveness,” Furqan said at a hearing last year to determine whether two Fitz officers should go to court-martial for their alleged roles in the disaster.

“We didn’t have time to practice doing what we hadn’t done in the past eight months.”

Furqan wasn’t on board the Fitz when the ACX Crystal hit but she had voiced her concerns to then-skipper Cmdr. Robert Shu in March of that year.

“We are not ready to execute,” Furqan recalled telling her commanding officer. “A long (dry dock maintenance session), heavy crew turnover, lack of training time, we’re not ready.”

Furqan said she got the impression that superiors at Destroyer Squadron 15 knew an unready Fitz crew was being dragooned for sea duty before they were ready.

“I asked, ‘have you told them?’” Furqan said. “I was told that, ‘they know.’”

“Despite whether or not we should go, we were going to go because someone wanted a ship, and that’s what we were going to do…whether or not maintenance needed to be done, whether or not equipment was operating properly, we were told to go,” Furqan said.

“So, we had to go.”

The day after

On the day after the Fitzgerald limped back to Yokosuka, a plane carrying Rear Adm. Brian Fort landed in Japan.

A surface warfare officer with a quarter-century in uniform, Fort had been tasked with creating a report the Navy would use, in part, to defend itself against potential negligence lawsuits brought by ACX Crystal’s owners and operators and, indirectly, by the families of the Fitz’s dead sailors.

Completed 41 days after the disaster, it remained secret from the public until it was obtained by Navy Times.

Far more candid than the parade of public pronouncements by senior Navy officials since 2017, Fort’s report details how the the skills of Fitzgerald’s crew had atrophied in the months since it went into dry dock.

For example, after reporting to the Fitz, sailors were supposed to receive instruction on how to escape flooded berthing areas, a crucial course that was to be followed up by retraining every six months.

Of the 38 sailors assigned to Berthing 2, which flooded minutes after the ACX Crystal collision, 36 of 39 “were delinquent in the six-month periodic egress training,” Fort wrote.

Unlike the ships and crew stationed stateside, the needs of 7th Fleet, the Pacific Fleet and Pacific Command meant ships like the Fitz did not have time built into their schedule for training, qualifications and other needs.

The Fitz went into dry dock in mid-2016 and it went out for sea trials in the first month of 2017, according to Fort’s report.

“We went from dry dock to sea trials, then immediately down to Guam do a multinational exercise, and then after I checked off, they were assigned tasking in the South China Sea,” Furqan testified.

The Fitz was only supposed to be out a few weeks for training and the MultiSail 2017 exercise off Guam, but that’s not how the 7th Fleet worked.

“She did not return to port until four months later, on 6 June 2017,” and those “changes in her tasking” meant the Fitzgerald missed a May maintenance session, according to the Fort report.

During that span, the Fitz also suffered “a catastrophic (computer network) failure” that stranded the crew in Sasebo for a week in May, according to Cmdr. Sean Babbitt, who was executive officer of the ship during the collision.

The Fitz finally got back home to Yokosuka, Japan, in early June 2017 after a crew mistake sparked a fire and “a temporary loss of all power throughout the ship,” the report states.

After just 10 days back home, the Fitz returned to sea again on June 16, 2017, without the benefit of a post-patrol maintenance stint.

The Crystal struck the Fitzgerald at 1:30 a.m. the following day.

Chest high and rising

Often overlooked in the Navy’s public accountings of the Fitzgerald tragedy was the state of the crew.

The warship was manned by mostly new arrivals who were short on training, dogged by an often dysfunctional chiefs mess and a command triad that failed to prevent a cataclysmic collision.

Yet after disaster struck, the sailors and their officers fought the ship and the sea and stayed alive to bring the Fitz home.

That wasn’t luck. For all the damning details in Fort’s report and the testimony of a stream of former officers and sailors about the warship’s many failures, the crew scrambling to control the damage performed professionally and bravely.

It all started moments after shipmates in Berthing 2 heard a loud bang and water flooded their living quarters, trapping and drowning sailors Xavier Martin, Dakota Rigsby, Shingo Douglass, Tan Huynh, Noe Hernandez, Carlos Sibayan and Gary Rehm within minutes.

The Fort report describes in excruciating detail the horrors sailors below deck witnessed, to a degree never shared in the Navy’s public pronouncements.

Sonar Technician 2nd Class Rod Felderman leaped from his rack into the dark when “the water was chest high and rising,” the report states.

The emergency lights hadn’t kicked on. Felderman squinted at the sailors escaping toward the exit.

“STG2 Felderman stated he saw blurred heads in a line of people in front of him, exiting the row,” Fort wrote. “Even though they were up to their necks in water by that point, he recalls that they moved forward slowly and no one was trampling the others.”

Waiting to leave through the lounge exit, he remembered someone saying the route was blocked, the water lapping at the overhead deck.

Felderman dove underwater, feeling in front of him, kicking and slapping away debris.

“Unable to find a clear path, he jumped up for air and hit his head on the piping,” the report states. “He pushed his face between piping, finding an air pocket that just fit his nose and lips.”

Felderman recalled spotting another person next to him, near the water fountain, “gasping for air.” He swam for it and miraculously surfaced to safety.

He had “suffered near drowning, seawater aspiration, traumatic brain injury, scalp laceration, and ankle laceration” and was medically evacuated, according to the report.

During Felderman’s escape, “he passed the person located at the water fountain and was unsure whether he was still alive,” Fort wrote.

Fort concluded that Felderman had the grim distinction of being the only sailor to escape from the starboard side of Berthing 2, near the Crystal’s impact point.

The rest who managed to survive got out through a hatch on the port side.

A watery hell

The force of impact from the much larger ACX Crystal felt to the sailors below deck like an explosion, one that was followed by a jet of saltwater.

One sailor told Fort’s investigators that he awoke to find himself “slinky’ed” in his rack.

Another described the force of the seawater flood blasting him into the bathroom. He watched the wave drag another shipmate even deeper into the head’s showers.

Fire Controlman 2nd Class Jackson Schrimsher echoed that, remembering “a wall of water coming at him,” the report states.

By the time he reached the escape ladder, Berthing 2 was under water.

“FC2 Schrimsher stated he was completely under water, stuck his hand up through the scuttle, and (Sonar Technician Surface 1st Class Alexander R.) Vaughn pulled him out,” Fort wrote.

Schrimsher shook it off and served as aft steering helmsman for more than 15 hours as the Fitzgerald limped its way home.

As seawater inched up and out the port side hatch, three sailors “made the exceptionally difficult, but correct decision, to secure the scuttle after they assured themselves that there was no one else who could be saved,” Fort wrote.

Investigators later discovered that the scuttle was never properly locked. Like so many parts of the Fitzgerald, it was broken.

“The scuttle was never actually secured due to significant mechanical binding,” Fort wrote. “Had one of the sailors who drowned in Berthing 2 been able to reach the scuttle after (the three sailors) attempted to secure it, they should have been able to push it up and egress.”

So far, 48 McCain sailors and families of the fallen have filed personal injury and wrongful death claims against the owner of the Alnic MC, a hulking oil tanker that collided with the warship inside the bustling Malacca Straits on Aug. 21, 2017, according to federal court records.

Their claims total “well in excess of $60 million,” attorneys for Alnic’s owner, Energetic Tank, Inc., wrote in court filings.

At the same time, the U.S. government is pursuing its own claim against the Alnic’s owners for the McCain’s damages. The company seeks similar damages from the federal government.

Court filings indicate the Liberian-flagged Alnic suffered about $300,000 in collision damage, but the shipping company’s attorneys predict the costs to mend the McCain could reach $100 million, a figure federal attorneys haven’t repeated in their motions.

Instead, they’ve concentrated on what they say are a long list of seamanship failures by the Alnic’s crew.

They failed to keep proper lookouts, lacked trained mariners on the bridge in congested waters, never communicated with the McCain and at no time sounded a danger signal, veered away from the warship or followed the international rules of maritime transit, filings contend.

Armed with the Navy’s own reports into the collision and information gleaned from ongoing court-martial proceedings against several of the McCain’s crew, Energetic Tank’s attorneys say fault really lies with the Americans.

“We have a pretty good idea of what the arguments are against the McCain and the competence of the crew,” said Lawrence Brennan, a retired Navy captain, military attorney and professor at the Fordham University School of Law in New York. “Those are all locked in the criminal proceedings.”

“We then get into what the Alnic could have done, should have done, to avoid the collision,” he said.

That collision killed Chief Electronics Technician Charles N. Findley, Chief Interior Communications Electrician Abraham Lopez, Electronics Technician 1st Class Kevin S. Bushell, Information Systems 1st Class Corey G. Ingram, Electronics Technician 2nd Class Jacob D. Drake, Information Systems Technician 2nd Class Timothy T. Eckels, Electronics Technician Dustin L. Doyon, Electronics Technician 2nd Class John H. Hoagland, Interior Communications Electrician 2nd Class Logan S. Palmer and Electronics Technician 2nd Class Kenneth A. Smith.

Assessing how to apportion the blame for their deaths and the damages to both vessels will be key to resolving the legal battle, Brennan said.

Attorneys for both the U.S. government and Energetic Tank declined comment.

Court filings analyzed by Navy Times offer new revelations about the harrowing hours inside the McCain after it struck the Alnic.

One complaint filed on behalf of Operations Specialist 1st Class Navin Ramdhun and his wife indicates he was trapped in a vessel compartment for more than two hours and feared he would die.

The filing revealed that Ramdhun suffered injuries to his legs and face, a fractured arm and continues to experience psychological trauma. He and his wife are seeking $5.5 million in damages.

Chief Fire Controlman Brandon York sustained a “concussion, toxic chemical exposure and psychological injury,” according to his filing which seeks at least $1 million in damages.

Another McCain sailor, Operations Specialist 2nd Class Jason Luangco, “was thrown to the deck and was covered with debris,” sustaining injuries to his neck, back, arms and wrist, according to a court filing on behalf of the sailor and his wife.

He continues to confront psychological problems and seeks $2.5 million in damages, the paperwork shows.

Chief Damage Controlman Doyle Ebarb alleges the McCain sailor “was thrown to the deck and sustained injuries to his neck, left elbow, feet, chin, fuel burns and post-traumatic stress disorder…anxiety and depression, due in part to his actions, as part of the damage control team, in attempting to rescue the sailors injured and killed in the collision.”

He seeks $2 million.

Alan Aaron was a “Medical Provider” on the ship and helped rescue several sailors but “he sustained chemical burns and psychological injuries,” the filing states.

The case began in February, when Energetic Tank’s attorneys filed a motion that sought to exonerate or limit the company’s liability in the fatal disaster.

The pre-emptive move was designed to buffer the company against claims that had not yet been filed, according to court records.

Two months later, the U.S. government sued, asserting that Alnic’s owners knew about the deficiencies aboard the tanker.

Energetic Tank’s attorneys fired back that Alnic’s crew never could have avoided a collision caused by the McCain.

The families of the fallen McCain sailors and their injured shipmates cannot sue the armed forces for negligence under a legal concept known as the “Feres doctrine,” Brennan said.

But they can bring claims against Energetic Tank, and the company can then seek compensation from the federal government if it is found that both sides were liable for the collision, Brennan said.

Citing an October report issued by the Navy, Energetic Tank’s attorneys have said in a recent filing that the American government already has admitted “substantial fault for the collision.”

“The public record clearly reflects the vast array of errors — both large and small — which led to this tragic incident, from poor training and a persistent culture of grueling watch cycles and sleep deprivation, to negligent bridge management and faulty navigation practices,” they wrote.

Proving Alnic did nothing wrong “is a high factual threshold,” Brennan said, and collisions rarely result in one side shouldering all the fault.

In fact, if the Alnic is shown to bear even 1 percent of the blame for the incident, the claims against the company can proceed in court, according to Brennan.

Lawyers for Energetic Tank acknowledged in a court filing this month the logistical challenges of a case involving foreign seamen, foreign companies and U.S. sailors dispersed around the globe.

Brennan said these cases are not unusual.

“I can give you hundreds of these cases over the years,” Brennan said. “Probably none as tragic as this.”

Brennan suspects the U.S. government didn’t file its own separate suit for damages against the Alnic’s owners because “there’s a lot of stuff that’s embarrassing.”

“At the end of the day, the United States Navy is going to look bad,” he said.

Before he died aboard the destroyer Fitzgerald last year, Tan Huynh was a proud gaming geek.

The way his family remembers him, when he wasn’t busy working as a Navy sonar technician, the 25-year-old chose to throw down on his trusty Xbox console.

While struggling with the grief of losing him, they decided that Huynh’s final resting place should pay homage to his love of gaming.

They had an Xbox controller inscribed on his tombstone.

“We wanted his tombstone to be a reflection of him,” said his little sister, Mary Huynh. “We wanted it to be distinct and have his first love on it, which was gaming. He was a major gaming geek.”

Huynh also loved Game of Thrones, so his family placed a quote from the HBO show on the grave: “Never forget who you are,” the Tyrion Lannister line reads. “For surely the world will not. Make it your strength. Then it can never be your weakness.”

A Navy probe into the Fitz’s June 17, 2017 collision with the commercial cargo vessel ACX Crystal in the Philippine Sea determined that the Arleigh Burke-class guided-missile destroyer was sailing too fast in waters jammed with shipping traffic. The report documented numerous missteps by radar operators, navigators and the warship’s leadership team that led to the lethal accident.

It also revealed numerous acts of heroism by crew members who kept the destroyer afloat but were unable to save Huynh, Xavier Martin, Gary Rehm, Carlos Sibayan, Dakota Rigsby, Noe Hernandez and Shingo Douglass.

Huynh was the only victim who was born in Vietnam. He and his family came to the United States when he was a child and he grew into a quiet man, his sister Mary recalled.

“Yet at the same time, his soul ached to explore and adventure,” she said.

Huynh joined the Navy in 2015 partly to honor their mother and he never stopped loving his niece Lylah and the rest of his family, she said. He drowned one day after his 25th birthday, the last time his relatives spoke to him.

“Tan was shy, yet when united with someone who had a distinctive personality like himself, there would be a bomb of witty and sarcastic jokes ready to detonate,” his sister said.

She now wishes she’d talked more with her brother about his Navy service and a military life he grew to love.

“The time he spent while he was enlisted was when we saw he was the happiest,” she said.

Like other relatives of the lost Fitzgerald sailors, Mary Huynh continues to grapple with both the loss of her loved one and the Navy’s handling of the accident.

“I have my days where I just want to shut everyone out and just think about my brother, alone,” she said. “Some days I feel guilty if I haven’t thought about him the previous day, because it makes me feel like we are starting to forget about him.”

“I don’t ever want to forget him.”

Editor’s note: This story is part of a series looking at the effects of the Fitzgerald and McCain collisions on sailors, families of the fallen and Big Navy. To read more, go here.

One year after the destroyer Fitzgerald was gouged by a merchant vessel, flooding a living space and killing Noe Hernandez and six of his shipmates, Dora Hernandez walked those quarters.

It was June 17, the first anniversary of the disaster.

The 27-year-old widow joined several Fitz families who gathered in the Mississippi shipyard where the warship is undergoing repairs.

As Hernandez and other families of the Fitz fallen descended into the area, she was struck by how bare everything was.

“It was hard seeing her completely with her insides just out, exposed,” Hernandez said.

She had gone belowdecks before, while the stricken ship was still in Japan, along with her mother-in-law and a priest.

“We put holy water in the areas,” Hernandez recalled recently. “That was the first time I saw the berthing.”

Gone were the exercise bikes and lockers and mattresses that had been thrown about the quarters after the ACX Crystal gouged a 221-square-foot hole in the ship beneath the waterline and allowed the seawater to furiously flood in.

“It was so small,” she said. “I knew the spaces were so small and there were no racks left or lockers, but you could see the outlines of the racks.”

In the Mississippi shipyard this month, seven roses had been laid against the patched-up hole in the Fitz, she said.

They marked the loss of her husband, Tan Huynh, Gary Rehm, Dakota Rigsby, Carlos Sibayan, Shingo Douglass and Xavier Martin.

“All I could think was, this is where my husband was, and this is where Rehm was and this was where Martin was, and this was where Douglass was, and this was where Sibayan was,” Hernandez said.

One year later, back home near the small Texas town where she met her husband and fell in love with him, Hernandez said she still wonders why Noe wasn’t one of the shipmates who made it to the hatch and escaped to higher ground as the water flooded in.

No one had much time. Water hit their berthing’s ceiling in minutes and many sailors were asleep when the collision occurred at 1:30 a.m.

But Noe was a healthy 26-year-old, his wife recalled. He loved to work out “and he could swim for miles.”

“He still didn’t make it out,” Hernandez said. “That was the biggest thing for me. What were his last moments like?”

Noe was vigilant, his wife said. He couldn’t have been asleep.

Something must have slowed his escape.

“Maybe he tried to save his brothers,” Hernandez said. “He had everything except time and air.”

“They worked them hard”

Noe (pronounced “No-ee”) and Hernandez grew up in Weslaco, Texas, a town of about 40,000 not far from the Gulf coast.

They met freshman year of high school in French class.

Noe was part of a JROTC program and walked the halls with a Navy backpack.

He knew he was going to enlist, Hernandez said, “and he was proud of it.”

Eventually, Noe took a shine to his future bride.

“He asked me out on his birthday, so I couldn’t say no,” Hernandez said.

Hernandez wanted to enlist herself, but Noe talked her out of it.

“He said, ‘I want to laugh with you and marry you. I’d rather have you by my side than worry about us being stationed together,’’ Hernandez said.

Eight years before his death, on June 17, 2009, Noe left for boot camp.

He got deployed to Italy and proposed to Hernandez when home on leave.

After he ranked up, Hernandez joined him in Italy.

They arrived in Japan in late 2015, and Hernandez said she loved it there.

“My husband was very proud to be on the Fitz,” she said. “He was proud of his ship and the crew.”

Japanese society was so polite, and the military community was an intimate and protective group, she said.

“He loved to travel and so did I,” Hernandez said. “We didn’t really drink or party or were into video games, we just traveled every time we had a chance.”

Their son was born, and Hernandez said that while she liked being in Japan, she grew to dislike the frenzied work tempo Noe endured with the Fitz.

The tempo in West Pacific’s 7th Fleet came under scrutiny after the Fitz collision, and even more so after the McCain suffered a similar fatal collision that killed 10 more sailors less than two months later.

“You get tired of working, and they worked them hard,” Hernandez said. “That was something he did talk to me about…they were always working, they were always pushing.”

Even when the ship went into drydock shortly after they arrived in Japan, the work did not relent, she said.

“They still had to stay long hours,” Hernandez said. “One of those mentalities was, this is how life is going to be on a ship, so get used to it now.”

Still, Noe loved being at sea and being with his shipmates.

“That’s not my husband”

When the spouse group messages started popping up about the Fitz collision that morning, Hernandez took a train to the base and went to an assembly for spouses.

Those who hadn’t heard from their sailors raised their hands and wrote their names on a list, she said.

One wife who hadn’t heard from her sailor was sobbing.

Hernandez stopped and prayed with her.

“She stopped mid-prayer and she got a phone call,” Hernandez said. “it was her husband calling. I got really excited for her.”

Later, Hernandez was told that Noe was one of the missing sailors.

She went out to the pier, where the crippled ship was moored.

Hernandez waited overnight on that pier, from roughly 6 p.m. until 8 a.m. the next day, walking back and forth along the length of the ship for hours, “wondering if he was okay or not.”

“I was still hopeful they were trapped or had found an air bubble,” she said.

After she found out Noe was gone, Hernandez recalled walking past a copy of Navy Times, and seeing her husband’s face among the fallen on the front page.

Her friends later told her she shook and pulled at the newspaper, but she doesn’t recall doing that.

“I remember thinking, that’s not my husband,” she said.

The community rallied around her, and Hernandez said she never went without in the following weeks and months.

“I never had to worry about whether my son was going to eat or not,” she said of a meal train organized by spouses from the carrier Ronald Reagan. “Water, ink for my printer, coffee, chocolate. It just appeared.”

While Japan was where her husband had died, Hernandez said it was hard to leave last fall and return to the U.S.

“I felt safe in Japan,” she said. “You would think I wouldn’t want to be there or leave, but I was very sheltered and protected.”

Still, life carried on, and Hernandez’s casualty assistance officer helped her make arrangements to move back home, without Noe.

”Nobody ever remembers him”

A year later, Hernandez said that figuring out who was responsible for the collision remains “a really hard topic.”

“This should never have happened,” she said. “They should never have put their training on the backburner and overworked our sailors the way they do.”

Big Navy has been accommodating, but like other families of the fallen, Hernandez said she wishes they could get all the answers to their questions.

“Everybody loved the hero, but when the hero dies, nobody ever remembers him,” she said. “The families remember. They paid the price.’

Hernandez thinks more people should be held accountable and wonders why so many higher-ups escaped discipline.

“A lot of people were just pushed out and retired,” she said. “Where are the people that approved these things and knew the ship was not in a condition to go…people who made budget cuts and our sailors are working twice as hard and we are undermanned…why are they enjoying their retirement?”

She attended recent courts-martial and other legal hearings involving the Fitz sailors accused of causing the collision.

Hernandez said she’s not sure how she feels about those proceedings, or the accused.

“I do have a soft spot for some of the service members,” she said. “My husband was one of them. My husband could easily be in their shoes.”

“Everywhere you go is a memory”

Once she got back to Texas, Hernandez elected to live in town about 20 minutes from Weslaco.

The town they grew up in contained too much pain because Noe is everywhere.

“Everywhere you go is a memory,” Hernandez said. “This is where we met. This is the theater we went to. This is our high school. It’s both comforting and tormenting at the same time.”

She’s going to school, studying psychology and social work.

One day, she would like to become a casualty assistance officer in the military.

Her focus is on their son, now 4-years-old, and preparing herself for the questions he will ask and the sadness he will feel when the enormity of the loss comes into focus over the years.

“I try to be very careful about the way I impact him, so I don’t harm him,” she said. “He’s going to deal with his grief all over again when he gets to a certain age.”

The boy remembers Noe, she said. He remembers the flag-draped coffin.

“When he sees a flag, he says, ‘papa,’” Hernandez said.

When he sees a flag and calls for his father, Hernandez tells him that he’s in heaven and loves them very much.

“I’m very grateful to have met my husband and have had 10 wonderful years with him,” Hernandez said. “I wish I had more time, but I’m lucky to have our son. That’s a part of him that no one can take from me.”

Service officials also announced Tuesday that two of the Fitz’s junior officers will not face a negligent homicide charge in connection to the June 17, 2017, catastrophe.

These developments mark the service’s latest reconsideration of negligent homicide charges in the case of the Fitz and the John S. McCain collision, which happened less than two months later and killed another 10 sailors.

The call was made by Adm. James Caldwell, who was appointed last year to oversee all disciplinary matters regarding the Fitz and the McCain.

Benson’s attorneys said Tuesday that this about-face shows the negligent homicide charge “was not warranted.”

“The evidence now before Admiral Caldwell was the same evidence that initially caused him to bring a negligent homicide charge against Commander Benson,” the attorneys said in a statement. “A fair trial will reveal the remaining charges are likewise unsupported by the facts.”

He has decided that Benson will face negligent dereliction of duty resulting in death, negligent dereliction of duty and negligent hazarding of a vessel charges at a general court-martial, according to a Navy statement.

Benson waived his right last month to a preliminary Article 32 hearing, where an officer would have reviewed the prosecution’s case and recommended to Caldwell whether Benson should be court-martialed.

His attorneys torched leadership at that time, claiming that public comments by Navy brass had imperiled the former skipper’s right to a fair trial.

Navy officials declined to comment, citing the ongoing nature of the proceedings.

Benson was injured when the hulking ACX Crystal plowed into the Fitz’s right side, directly smashing into his quarters while he slept.

Sailors pried open his door and were met by the night sky and Benson clinging to the side of the ship.

The Navy also announced Tuesday that two junior officers will not face negligent homicide charges for their roles in the Fitz collision.

Lt. Natalie Combs will still be court-martialed on negligent dereliction of duty resulting in death and negligent hazarding of a vessel charges, but not for negligent homicide.

She was serving as the tactical action officer, or TAO, at the time of the collision, and oversaw the ship’s weapons, propulsion and sensors.

Her civilian attorney, David Sheldon, said earlier this month that the Article 32 officer had recommended she not go to trial and instead go before an administrative separation board.

Combs “is obviously very disappointed” in Caldwell’s decision to still go forward with a court-martial, Sheldon said in a statement Tuesday.

“She nonetheless is resolute in her belief that when the facts are fully presented, she will be exonerated,” Sheldon said. “The blame in this case is widespread. The FITZGERALD had systemic problems with its equipment and training—to single this young woman, who has served honorably and with distinction, for prosecution is very troubling.”

Lt. Irian Woodley went before an Article 32 alongside Combs last month, but Navy officials said Tuesday that all charges against him were dismissed.

Woodley will still have to go before an administrative board, however, to show why he should be allowed to stay in the Navy, officials said.

Tuesday’s developments marked the Navy’s latest reconsideration of negligent homicide charges in connection to the two collisions.

In January, officials announced the Navy would pursue negligent homicide charges against Benson and the McCain’s skipper at the time of that Aug. 21 collision, Cmdr. Alfredo Sanchez.

Sanchez was court-martialed last month and pleaded guilty to dereliction of duty.

As part of a plea deal, he received a letter of reprimand and will have to forfeit $6,000 in pay over three months.

Sanchez will also put in for retirement as part of the deal.

Lt. j.g. Sarah Coppock was the Fitz’s officer the deck, or OOD, at the time of the collision. She pleaded guilty to a dereliction charge at court-martial last month.

It was 1:30 a.m. on June 17, 2017, and a massive merchant vessel had just ripped a cruel gouge into the right side of the destroyer as it steamed off the Japanese coast.

The sea poured through that massive hole and into his living quarters, hitting the ceiling in about a minute.

Amidst a curse of unwieldy, waterborne debris, the sailor took what might have been his last gulp of air and went under, swimming for about 10 seconds until he reached the safety of the hatch and higher ground.

He took a moment to collect himself, then went to his station and did his part to save the ship.

Most of the sailors on the deck made it out, but seven friends and shipmates could not escape the flood.

Xavier Martin, Dakota Rigsby, Shingo Douglass, Tan Huynh, Noe Hernandez, Carlos Sibayan and Gary Rehm were lost.

Cmdr. Sean Babbitt was the ship’s second in command that day and was grabbing a few hours’ sleep at the time.

He had been on board for less than 100 days.

A year later, he remembers it all in “flashes and moments.”

The collision shook everything, and “I woke up with my television in my lap,” he said recently.

Other random memories come to mind. A barefooted sailor tending to the wounded and asking for boots. A group of midshipmen on their first underway, huddled on the deck in their life jackets.

“I remember the stark scene of looking over the starboard bridgewing for the first time, seeing the twisted metal and spraying water,” Babbitt said.

But he mostly recalls the quiet capability of the crew, men and women from the engineers to the bucket brigade who shook off the shock, remembered their training and got the ship back to land.

The Fighting Fitz’s most tragic hour also became one of its finest.

A year later, the disaster has shaken Big Navy to its institutional core and dropped family members in a fog of grief that will never fully lift.

It has also left lingering trauma among some of the crew who survived that day, hundreds of sailors who have since been scattered to other commands and left without the close-hold support of shipmates who had been there.

“The crew is still hurting,” Babbitt said.

‘The same as it’s always been’

The sailor who swam for it asked to remain anonymous because the Navy has not authorized him to discuss his experience.

He mourns his shipmates, yet still loves the sea, his job and the Fitz. But sleep is rare, and he feels “really high levels of anxiety” around his new ship on some days.

“It’s not helping much since June 17 is around the corner,” he told Navy Times recently.

Babbitt said the sailor is not alone in his post-traumatic stress and that the crew will need help for some time.

“Long-term mental health care is needed for everyone who was there that day, even if they are showing no signs of trauma,” he said. “I hope the Navy recognizes this and puts a system in place to track all of us and follow up years down the road.”

The Fitz fell under the Yokosuka, Japan-based 7th Fleet, a command that has come under fire for a bruising operational tempo that left little time for training and maintenance.

The sailor said shipmates started informal support groups after the collision.

“We try to maintain, and we tend to gravitate back to our Fitz crowd when we get together,” the sailor said. “The Fitz is still very much alive and well in Yokosuka, even if our ship isn’t here with us.”

Fitz sailors have since been scattered across the service.

About 85 percent of the ship’s 267 surviving crew members were reassigned after the collision, scattering them to other commands that had not shared the same harrowing experience.

The sailor said he wanted to stay with the Fitz and even volunteered.

“But that decision was made way above our heads and we got cross-decked and hull-swapped to different platforms in 7th Fleet,” he said.

Babbitt fears it could hurt their ability to recover.

In a piece this year for Proceedings magazine, he accused the Navy of reassigning the crew to help fix “a spiraling manning deficit” in 7th Fleet.

“Breaking them up to fill holes on the 7th Fleet waterfront was wrong,” he said in an interview. “We had a strong crew who became very tight in the aftermath and who relied on each other to pull them through daily.”

Navy officials said earlier this year that the reassignments were not limited to 7th Fleet waters and that the Fitz did not need as many sailors as it underwent repairs in Mississippi.

The Navy sent a team last fall to help crew members assess their needs and plot the next steps.

“Nothing is more important to us than the health and well-being of our people,” spokesman Cmdr. William Speaks said in March. “Providing the appropriate resources, including counseling for mental health needs, has been a top priority from the beginning.”

But in the sailor’s opinion, all that talk from on high didn’t always trickle down to the waterfront.

“Big Navy says they’re helping and they put on a face and say things will change or X and Y will happen,” he said. “But it doesn’t and then it falls back to the ships and the ships say, ‘We can’t support/doesn’t fit the op tempo’ ― the same as it’s always been in 7th Fleet.”

‘I’m a sailor’

Despite the traumatic memories and the anxiety, the sailor said he can’t wait to get out there again.

It was his first ship. A great crew and other good things outweighed the bad things, like BBQ beef cubes for dinner.

Life in berthing was crowded, but they horsed around when off duty and watched “Pitch Perfect 2” over and over.

He learned that a good berthing life requires certain things.

“Making sure everyone showers up and does their laundry,” he said. “Febreze is a lifesaver.”

This is what the sailor does.

“I’ll be a little nervous and might not sleep the same, but I’m a sailor,” he said. “I didn’t join the Navy to sit on my ass. I joined to get out on the ocean and do my job.”

Babbitt was reassigned to a 7th Fleet staff position after he and the rest of the command triad were fired.

He later received non-judicial punishment on a dereliction of duty charge and was transferred out of 7th Fleet in May.

The Fitz’s skipper, Cmdr. Bryce Benson, was sleeping when the ACX Crystal container ship plowed into his room.

Crew pried his door open and were greeted by the night sky as Benson hung off the ship’s side.

The Navy plans to court-martial him on charges that include negligent homicide.

Babbitt called the past year “the most difficult, agonizing, and rewarding in my life.”

“Being exposed to the aftermath of the collision every day in staff meetings and my job (I built a lot of briefs for the Admiral to give on post collision actions) was agonizing,” he said in an email.

Still, he was grateful to be in a position where he could try and aid his former crew.

Thirty-six Fitz shipmates received the Navy and Marine Corps Commendation Medal in October after putting the ship before shipmate and self that day.

“I am immensely proud to have led them on that day and the weeks after, as we struggled to understand what happened,” Babbitt said. “I am also immensely proud of the crew for how they have handled the rough seas around them.”