John McCain: Navy leaders knew about problems years before deadly ship collisions

Reviews in 2010 and 2015 pointed to limited training and growing maintenance backlogs that were degrading ships stationed overseas and potentially raising risk for sailors, McCain said during a Senate Armed Services Committee hearing on the incidents to hear testimony from the service’s top two leaders.

“Many of the issues we are discussing today have been known to Navy leaders for years. How do we explain that?” he asked.

Adm. John Richardson, the chief of naval operations, said the service has been making “steady investments” to close what he called a readiness-effectiveness gap in the fleet.

“Sir, there is no explanation to reconcile those two observations,” he told McCain. “While clearly there is much more to be done … there has been also an effort to address those observations. We have not been sitting idle.”

Richardson and Navy Secretary Richard Spencer testified that the service is working to find the root causes of the two deadly collisions in the Pacific but also acknowledged the service is stretched too thin to meet the global demands of commanders.

Investigations are ongoing into the USS John S. McCain collision near Singapore in August and the USS Fitzgerald collision off Japan in June. Richardson and Spencer have also launched two Navy-wide reviews aimed at improving safety.

A review by the Government Accountability Office found that 37 percent of warfare certifications are expired among ships in the western Pacific where the McCain and Fitzgerald were stationed and that crews were overworked.

“Is it true that some of our sailors are working 100-hour weeks?” McCain asked Richardson.

“Sir, I will not deny that,” Richardson said. “The sailors are working very hard.”

The Navy has conducted studies on the workload of crews on its destroyers and cruisers and tried to add more crew, Richardson said.