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A former commander of the USS John S. McCain pleaded guilty Friday to dereliction of duty when the destroyer collided with a commercial tanker, killing 10 people and injuring five in the Straits of Singapore last August.
Cmdr. Alfredo Sanchez, who has served in the Navy for more than 20 years, testified during a special court-martial at the Washington Navy Yard, Stars and Stripes reported.
“I am ultimately responsible and stand accountable,” Sanchez said. “I will forever question my decisions that contributed to this tragic event.”
Per disciplinary proceedings, Sanchez agreed to retire from service, forfeit $6,000 in wages, and was issued a letter of reprimand.
Sanchez claimed responsibility for the deadly collision. He said had failed to put a well-rested, well-trained crew in place to steer the destroyer into the Straits.
The former commander, who was immediately reassigned after the collision, initially faced negligent homicide charges, CBS News reported.
According to Sanchez, an 18-year-old undertrained helmsman had been navigating the destroyer, known as "Big Bad John," leading up to the collision.
(Score: -1, Redundant) by Anonymous Coward on Monday May 28 2018, @07:43AM
As someone who has lived and breathed tech for almost 40 years of life, I can tell you that I have also come to the conclusion there are some places it simply shouldn't be placed at this time, and given the compromises being made in its engineering and implementation, perhaps ever (short of a major shift in who is running the companies producing it.)
Cars without at minimum failover/overriddable manually controlled steering, brakes, throttle, etc? No way. Planes and ships with completely electronic drive/fly by wire systems with no manual failsafes? *HELL NO* The former are more risky on a day to day basis to a small group of people, but the latter have the potential to kill hundreds to thousands in a single even, even if odds of that event are far smaller on average compared to the car. I hold similiar reservations about softswitches on computer hardware, especially devices with microphones, cameras, and other personally identifiable metadata, although that is more about asymmetric information warfare than immediate safety concerns like badly implemented electronic interfaces and failsafes on multi-ton to hundreds of ton vehicles exhibit. Mankind is providing its collective immaturity in the safe usage of semi and autonomous electronics technology in places where human or physical failsafes are not already engineered into place. And as most of these examples prove, the human element failsafe is unreliable not because of the individuals who fail, but because of the management, lack of training for all possible conditions, and underengineering that result from the true perpetraitors not being held to task for their systemic shortcomings. Start at the top before you blame the bottom. This commander deserves his career ending blow, but so do all the other personnel both within and without the service who helped produce the failure conditions which caused this collision. And there are a lot more of them than one commander.