A House committee announced Wednesday it will hold a hearing to look into collisions involving the USS John S. McCain and USS Fitzgerald following a summer of deadly military mishaps that have raised questions about the readiness of U.S. forces.
The Armed Services hearing on Sept. 7 will look into underlying problems of Navy readiness that might have caused or contributed to the separate collisions, which left seven Fitzgerald sailors dead and as many as 10 dead from the McCain.
Meanwhile, two separate Marine Corps aviation crashes killed 19 service members in July and August, prompting the service to ground all aircraft for 24 hours. Also, an Army Black Hawk helicopter went down in the ocean Aug. 15 during night training and all five crew members were lost.
Rep. Mac Thornberry, R-Texas, the Armed Services chairman, called the incidents “unprecedented” and said they are proof that the military is in crisis after years of constrained budgets and high operations tempo.
“At a time of increasing threats, two military services have now had to take a knee to review safety and training procedures,” he said Monday.
The ship collisions near Singapore this month and off the coast of Japan in June have rocked the Navy and led to the sacking of the U.S. 7th Fleet commander, Vice Adm. Joseph Aucoin, due to a loss of confidence in his ability to lead. They followed a Navy grounding and a more minor Navy collision with a fishing boat earlier this year.
The McCain, a destroyer homeported in Japan, collided Monday with a merchant ship near the Strait of Malacca and 10 sailors went missing. Navy divers had recovered some remains from the ship’s compartments, and the search is still on for the rest. Five sailors who were injured have returned to duty.
Seven sailors were killed June 17 when the Fitzgerald, also a Japan-based destroyer, had a hole punched in its hull by a cargo ship. The commander and two senior officers were relieved of duty over the incident.
“When I see this happening, it is horrific, it is surprising because ships don’t collide, but it is not inexplicable,” said Bryan McGrath, founder and managing director of the FerryBridge Group consulting service. “I think the Navy is simply spread too thin.”
McGrath said a too-small Navy means sailors and their ships are spending more time at sea and less time on maintenance and basic training, which could be a contributing factor in such incidents.
Armed Services has called the Government Accountability Office to testify at the September hearing. In 2015, the agency found that incidents of degraded or out-of-service equipment on Navy ships that are home-ported overseas like the McCain and Fitzgerald had doubled over the previous five years.
The service was also having difficulty keeping the crews of those ships fully trained and the ships themselves maintained, the GAO found in its published report.
The Marine Corps also suffered one of its worst aviation disasters in years when a KC-130 tanker aircraft crashed into a Mississippi field in July, killing 15 Marines and a Navy corpsman. Then on Aug. 5, a Marine tilt-rotor MV-22 Osprey aircraft fell into the sea during a training mission off the coast of Australia and three of the 26 crew members died.
Days later, Marine Commandant Robert Neller ordered all of the service’s aviation units to ground flights for 24 hours for a refresher course on safety. The service now has the highest rate of class-A aviation mishaps — those causing death, complete aircraft loss or more than $2 million in damage — in six years, according to its reported crash data.
Thornberry said earlier his month the Marine grounding was “indisputable evidence that America’s military is in a readiness crisis and that the crisis is costing lives.” His committee and the Senate Armed Services under Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz., are pressing for a big boost in the defense budget this year to improve weapons and equipment as well as increase training across the services.
President Trump and the Pentagon have also requested a defense budget that focuses on shoring up existing forces that have been depleted by years of warfare and budget caps imposed by Congress, choosing to push a promised military buildup off until at least next year.
Still, much remains unknown about the Navy, Marine Corps, and Army incidents and investigations are ongoing in many cases.
Mackenzie Eaglen, a resident fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, said Navy is looking into a variety of factors in the ship collisions, including training and its own internal processes.
“It’s hard to shake the worrisome possibility it is directly related to stress on the force due to over-use and readiness shortfalls — part of which contribute to more stress on the smaller force available for patrol,” she wrote in an email to the Washington Examiner.
But the issues surrounding military mishaps this summer are interlocking and complex, and the findings might not point to any quick fix, according to Eaglen.
“It’s hard to draw stark lines from cause A to effect B when it comes to readiness,” she wrote. “It is measured in different ways by each service and often it is in the eye of the beholder or consumer.”
