Fourth US Navy collision raises suspicion of attacks

The deadly accident involving the USS John McCain is the fourth in the area, and remains a mystery. So far this year 17 US sailors have died in the Pacific southeast due to seemingly accidental collisions with civilian vessels.

There are only a few reasonable explanations for the sudden increase, says James Rickards, who runs a service Rickards & Massengill’s Defense Technology Alert, and focuses specifically on the defense sector. Rickards also follows currency wars, international monetary economics and financial warfare.

He said “that’s why some recent tragic incidents involving the US Navy” have captured his attention. The first US Navy collision this year occurred in January, when the USS Antietam ran aground near Yosuka, Japan.

The next accident was when the USS Champlain collided with a South Korean fishing vessel in May. “According to reports Navy personnel spotted the fishing craft and tried to contact it, but it lacked a radio and GPS. It’s pretty strange to think that a South Korean fishing boat wouldn’t have GPS — almost beyond belief,” Rickards says.

On 17 June, the USS Fitzgerald — operating near Yokuska — collided with a container ship from Philippines, killing 7 US sailors. They were only found the following day in flooded compartments. A month later, 7th Fleet Admiral Joseph P. Aucoin said “the bridge team lost situational awareness” and fired the commanding officer, executive officer, and command masterchief.

“Should four collisions in the same geographical area be chalked up to coincidence?” TNW asks. TNW, thenetweb.com, recently reported on the ease with which hackers were able to breach civilian ships.

The US Chief of Naval Operations (CNO) responded that they were looking into the possibility of a cyber-attack. Adm. John Richardson tweeted that the “review will consider all possibilities”.

TNW suggested that a sovereign nation may be behind such alleged attacks, and singled out Russia, China, and North Korea, all of whom have reasonable access to the location of all four incidents, He said the may have been testing their “cyber-attack capabilities in the field”.

The third hypothesis may be a wave of terrorist attacks against US military personnel, but terrorists are likely to take responsibility for attacks which they have not done so far.

While it remains within the realm of possibility that these are isolated incidents that have no connection, the frequency with which the collisions are occurring might suggest something other than human error at fault.

Rickards said the accident could mean “that someone’s combining cyberwarfare with kinetic techniques” to attack US ships. “In other words, hacking into a system to turn a civilian merchant vessel into a battering ram to attack our vessels remotely.”

According to Rickards this is something the Russians have worked on in the Black Sea. “That’s not speculation. We do have intelligence that the Russians have actually tried techniques like this on vessels in the Black Sea.”

A former Navy information warfare specialist and current chief intelligence officer at a cyber intelligence service told The Daily Reckoning: “When you are going through the Strait of Malacca, you can’t tell me that a Navy destroyer doesn’t have a full navigation team going with full lookouts on every wing and extra people on radar.”

He added: “There’s something more than just human error going on because there would have been a lot of humans to be checks and balances.”

The Pentagon said the Navy investigation turned up little evidence of a cyber attack however, making it more likely that mechanical failure or crew error is to blame for the collision between the destroyer and a chemical tanker.

So it may not be the “Russians” after all. A record 16 out of 100 Navy women are reassigned from ships to shore duty due to pregnancy, according to data obtained under the Freedom of Information Act by The Daily Caller News Foundation’s Investigative Group.

That number is up 2 percent from 2015, representing hundreds more who have to cut their deployments short, taxing both their unit’s manpower, military budgets and combat readiness as a result of gender integration goals.