U.S. Navy fires commander following a series of collisions

The U.S. Navy dismissed the commander of its Seventh Fleet Tuesday, just weeks before he was due to retire. In a statement announcing Vice Admiral Joseph Aucoin’s dismissal, Navy officials cited “a loss of confidence in his ability to command.” The decision was taken after the collision of the USS John S. McCain with an oil tanker earlier this week, which left 10 sailors missing, presumed dead.

The warship collided with the Alnic MC tanker, a vessel three times its size, before dawn Monday. Ten sailors remain officially missing, but the Navy announced Tuesday that the remains of some crew were discovered by divers inside the guided-missile destroyer. Another unidentified body was found at sea by the Malaysian navy.

The sacking of Aucoin is part of a wider investigation by the Navy into its operations, with Admiral John Richardson triggering a rare “operational pause” for the entire 277 Navy vessels, in order to assess if they are getting the “fundamentals” right.

Following four collisions this year, there will also be a longer review to examine the specific problems with the Seventh Fleet, which is the largest forward-­deployed fleet in the U.S. Navy. In June the USS McCain’s sister ship, the USS Fitzgerald, collided with a container ship off the coast of Japan, resulting in the death of seven sailors. A report published last Thursday laid the blame for that collision on poor seamanship. The USS Fitzgerald’s commander and two other senior officers were all relieved of their duties.

Previously a guided missile cruiser collided with a South Korean fishing vessel and another cruiser ran aground near the Seventh Fleet base in Yokosuka.

There is no explanation as yet for how a sophisticated U.S. warship equipped with advanced radar and guidance systems could have collided with a 600 foot tanker, but one expert said a cyberattack could not be ruled out. “There’s something more than just human error going on,” Jeff Stutzman, a former information warfare specialist in the Navy, told McClatchy.

Richardson responded by saying that there was no indication of a cyberattack so far, but he was not ruling anything out.