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| Very Nice Summary of Glitches Leading to USS Gettysburg - F18 Takedown by Former Aegis Captain |
| 2025-03-09 |
| [RealClearDefence] At around 0300, on Sunday, 22 December, the Aegis cruiser USS Gettysburg (CG 64) shot down an F/A-18F preparing to land on USS Harry S Truman (CVN 75) while operating in the Red Sea. The Carrier Strike Group to which each of these units was assigned was an element of the U.S.-led Operation Prosperity Guardian, assigned to protect Red Sea merchant traffic from Yemen-based Houthi attacks. First, we all need to understand that there is only one man who knows what happened on that day, and that is the commanding officer of Gettysburg. Apart from the F/A-18F crew, which possesses a very small but critical piece of the puzzle, everyone else is just an observer, a post-exercise armchair quarterback. Having said that, while Gettysburg’s captain knows what happened in terms of the detailed, incredibly complex sequence of events, unless the failure was the result of discrete, identifiable human error, he may not, in the immediate aftermath, understand why certain things did happen. For example, if systems or off-ship persons failed to operate as advertised, he wouldn’t know exactly why those systems or persons failed. That level of detail may only be revealed in the post-mortem. Slowly, those pieces are being put together, and each day more is understood as to what happened. That is a good thing, because this was a combat-level laboratory, in which strengths and weaknesses were on real-world display. This was a night which should be closely studied, and learned from, against future nights in which the missiles are flying. Here’s the problem: By the time that the Navy, writ large, understands all the errors and failures that contributed to this particular chain of events, a standard strategy may well have been enacted, i.e., “Nothing to see here, folks. Move along.” You see, the Navy doesn’t like to discuss “family business” with taxpayers, who may ask awkward, and potentially embarrassing, questions. It is much easier to pin the tail on one specific, commanding officer donkey. During the first decade of this century, the commanding officer a ship was referred to, by the staff of Commander Naval Surface Forces, as “the sacrificial captain,” and for good reason. Holding one person up to the public, as the single point of failure in any specific disaster, forestalls further, probing questions that often don’t have easy answers. In the end, this may mean that larger systemic issues remain unresolved. Rather, blame is often placed at the door of the ship in question, and everyone else who might have been, in one way or another, complicit, simply moves out of the blast pattern until it’s safe to go back to exactly what they were doing before. Based upon information from people who know and understand specific parts of the overall equation, I believe what transpired that night is significantly more complex than the idea that the ship simply made a mistake. It appears that this is what happened: There was an “Air Warning Red” environment in the Red Sea, that night. This means that the Harry S. Truman Carrier Strike Group was under attack. In fact, in the hour proceeding the engagement in question, the strike group had countered one-way attack (OWA) UAVs and cruise missile threats. In such a scenario, the defending ships – in this case, led by Gettysburg – are charged to kill anything “not positively identified as friendly.” This of course, begs the question as to how you identify an airborne object as “friendly.” Without wading into the esoteric, there is one method that most commonly serves as the final arbiter of a friendliness; and that is “Mode V” IFF, or Identification Friend or Foe. It is not the only method, but it is the final, pre-engagement gate though which a ship must pass before undertaking an engagement. Mode V is an encoded piece of IFF query that only friendly units can respond to. In fact, the missile system in Gettysburg will not allow the ship to shoot a target with “Positive Mode V.” And the challenge is automatically initiated before any missile shot. In other words, if the challenge is automatically initiated, and if Gettysburg could not fire if a positive response was received from the potential target, and if F/A-18F’s are equipped with Mode V - which they are - what failed on that day? It now appears that the accident was caused by a combination of human and computer errors. As far as human error, much does fall on the shoulders of Gettysburg. If the ship had followed its own procedures properly, despite the other issues which arose, the engagement might have been averted. In the effort to identify aircraft as either hostile, neutral, or friendly, there is a complex, multi-watch station effort that takes place on a ship. On that night, while not all Mode V messages were arriving in the ship, at least one operator did get a positive response from the soon-to-be engaged aircraft. However, the ship then went to flight quarters. When a cruiser goes to flight quarters to either launch or recover a helicopter, a large segment of the ship’s radar is shut down to prevent harming the ship’s helicopter. Then, once flight operations were concluded, and the F/A-18F was redetected, it was mistakenly identified as a “Vampire,” or incoming hostile missile. That operator could have stopped the engagement. Why didn’t he? In another case, a Gettysburg operator was able to identify the jet, based upon its radar emissions. It appears that he reported this via push button action, rather than voice. His report got hung up in the computer system, which has been a known electronic warfare problem in NAVSEA – the provider of computer systems to ships - since 2021. Still, if the operator had asserted his knowledge, via voice, to the commanding officer and Tactical Action Officer (TAO) disaster might have been averted. There was another system onboard Gettysburg that day. A system which more than backs up the standard Combat Systems computer networks. This system is called the Cooperative Engagement System, or “CEC.” That system would have known the exact identity of the F/A-18F in question, and independently of any other system. On that night, CEC was down. If it had been working, the chance for a “blue-on-blue” engagement would have been erased. Unfortunately, and even though they knew that this critical system was inoperative, the ship failed to report this casualty. If you’re the captain, you bear ultimate responsibility. This has always been the code. This is the way we like it. As far as the ship’s captain, his change of command took place prior to the release of the still-in-progress investigation. He was not fired, but you may rest assured that his career is over. Still, the fact that he was not “relieved-for cause,” suggests that the responsibility for this event spreads far beyond USS Gettysburg. Related: USS Gettysburg: 2024-12-28 Yemen's capital Sanaa hit by air strike USS Gettysburg: 2024-12-25 Second US Navy fighter jet narrowly avoided 'friendly fire' by second SM-2 missile fired from USS Gettysburg, Navy official confirms USS Gettysburg: 2024-12-25 'They Shot Themselves Down.' Americans Forced to Justify Themselves After Yemen Attack |
| Posted by:Clem+Elmish4239 |
| #3 The command of the air craft carrier is different from the command of the air crew. Two separate organizations. So, there were four individual command structures involved in this problem… |
| Posted by: Old SALTY 2025-03-09 13:34 |
| #2 Does the USS Gettysburg have (or once had) a US Navy on board camera system? |
| Posted by: NN2N1 2025-03-09 08:27 |
| #1 Everybody on the Gettysburg CIC team knows what happened . |
| Posted by: Super Hose 2025-03-09 00:49 |