by Joseph P. Farrell, Giza Death Star:
Well, it’s happened yet again folks. The US Navy seems to have either revived the old naval tactic of ramming, or it is becoming a hotbed of nuttery and incompetence, for yet another US Navy warship has collided with yet another merchant ship. All this strangeness with American warships began a few years ago, you might recall, with the USS Donald Cook, an Aegis class missile frigate. When on duty in the Black Sea, it was approached by an obsolescent Russian Sukhoi-22 fighter jet, and then… nothing. No, I’m serious. I mean… nothing. The sophisticated electronics in the Donald Cook just died. Totally. The radar screens? Black. The operations bridge itself? Darkness. THe Sukhoi made a couple more low passes in mock attack runs, then flew away. The Donald Cook’s systems came back up, and the ship limped to the nearby Romanian port of Constanza for what we were told at the time was for the crew to rest.
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Uh huh.
Then, lo and behold, a few months later, the same incident happened again, in almost exactly the same way, to the same ship when it was on patrol in the Baltic Sea. Russian Sukhoi-22 fighter approaches, and then… nothing. Electronic systems failure again. We heard no more about it, and then there was the strange USS Fitzgerald incident in the waters off of Tokyo, some of the busiest waterways in the world. Once again, the Fitzgerald, another missile frigate, collided with a merchant vessel. In this case, according to the story, the merchant vessel swerved and collided with the Fitzgerald, doing significant damage to the vessel. At the time, some of this website’s regular readers who had been naval officers with fairly high responsibility – i.e., they could take command on the bridge in the absence of a vessel’s master – told me that my theories about why the Fitzgerald incident had happened were simply and probably not the case. It was really a failure of training and competence. Shortly after receiving this insight, sure enough, the Navy dismissed the admiral in command of the region, and most of the ship’s officers, and began to make noises about poor training, and even about the idea of getting ride of computerized ship controls on the bridge and returning to more analogue methods: you know, the old unbalanced rudder attached mechanically to a big wheel on the bridge. I thought that a bit strange if the only problem was incompetence and poor training, because my wild high octane speculation at the time was that something had taken control on the bridge of the merchant vessel that collided with the Fitzgerald, either a kind of mind manipulation that interfered with the crew’s mental operations, or an electronic interference of the systems on the ship, perhaps even an cyber attack that literally took control of the systems away from the crew. Perhaps the same thing happened to the Fitzgerald and both ships were commandeered and slammed into each other. My friend assured me this was not the case, and there matters stayed until the next incident…
… the collision of another US Navy frigate, the USS John McCain in the Malacca straits off Singapore (and no, the ships was not named for the then living US Senator from Arizona). Once again, a merchant vessel slammed into the warship, causing significant damage. My this time, my friend’s “poor training and incompetence” scenario was looking more and more likely.
And now, for the piece de resistance in this circus of sloppiness and cacaphony of collisions, a United States aircraft carrier, CVN-75, the USS Harry Truman, one of the US Navy’s latest and biggest super-carriers, has had a collision with a merchant vessel in the Mediterranean Sea. So many of you sent various versions of this story – K.M., V.T., T.M. E.E., and many more (and thank you to all of you who did) – I knew this was the lead story of the week.
So what, exactly, happened? Well, we’ll probably never know because the U.S. Government does only one thing well: lying. But what are we being told happened? Here’s one version of the story:
