In the past few weeks, a US Navy destroyer collided fatally with a huge commercial vessel. This is a very rare event which actually happened twice in a short period of time during this summer. In view of this, maritime experts presented considerations into the possible misleads that lead to these incidents.
Surface warfare officers (SWOs) look to weather, sensors, watchstanders, training requirements, leadership and regulations (COLREGS) as possible contributing factors to the collisions.
Collision avoidance on Navy vessels can be roughly cast into four elements, three technical and one human. On the bridge, the watchstanders have:
- the AIS system which relies on tracking ships that broadcast their identities,
- the military radar systems linked into the ships combat systems,
- the civilian radar and contact management systems, and
- the eyes of sailors standing watch on lookout normally posted port, starboard, and aft on the vessel.
All these systems are complementary and overlapping, but not exactly delivering the same information.
Possible “Normal” Explanations
- Flawed human decision-making: U.S. Navy warships maintain teams of watchstanders in order to mitigate the effects of a flawed decision being made by any one individual. Ultimately, one individual makes the final decision on what actions to take in an emergency—the Officer of the Deck (OOD) if the Commanding Officer is not available.
- Common tragedy from fatigue in an inherently dangerous environment: Many of the previous collisions involved a loss of situational awareness by an at-least-partly fatigued crew. It is hard to avoid such conditions in an inherently dangerous, around-the-clock operating environment.
- Mechanical Failure : The Navy has acknowledged the MCCAIN suffered a steering casualty prior to the collision. While backup steering exists in the form of manual controls in aft steering or using differential propulsion to twist the ship in the absence of rudder control, such control methods are not as efficient as the normal controls. Additionally, there would be a brief delay in switching control unexpectedly or transmitting orders to aft steering. In normal conditions, this would not be serious. In a busy shipping lane, with the least hesitation due to shock at the unexpected requirement, the brief delay could be catastrophic.
- Quality of training for ship handling by young Surface Warfare Officers (SWOs): In March 2017, LT Brendan Cordial had a Proceedings article entitled “Too Many SWOs per Ship” that questioned both the quality and quantity of the ship handling experience that surface warfare officers (SWOs) received during their first tours. Later in a SWO’s career track, the focus of new department heads (DH) is tactical and technical knowledge of the ship’s weapons systems and ship’s combat capabilities, not necessarily basic ship handling. Ship handling skill are assumed.
- Pace of forward operations – especially for the MCCAIN after the FITZGERALD event: Both destroyers are homeported in Yokosuka, Japan, the headquarters of the U.S. Seventh Fleet. While only the line of duty investigation has been released for the FITZGERALD collision, one can assume that the officers and crew of the McCAIN would have heard some of the inside details from their squadron mate.
But along with the “normal” explanations, the possibility of cyber or other intentional distortion of critical data does remain a possibility.
Cyber Misleads and Mis-function
Cyber affects outcomes because it is now a near universal substrate to all key societal and shipboard functions. Either cyber errors mislead humans, or its digitized operations malfunction in process, action, or effect, or both while buried inside the complex systems.
However, that the two collisions involved large commercial ships with similar crews and technologies, and that two U.S. Navy vessels were sister ships close in age and technologies suggests commonalities that could be more easily exploited by adversaries using cyber means rather than humans.
According to experts, commercial navigation systems are remarkably easy to hack quite apart from GPS spoofing. The cyber security of these bridge systems against deliberate manipulation has long been neglected.
However, remotely accessing and then changing the triggers and sensors of military systems – if possible – would be very hard given the Navy’s efforts in recent years. That possibility is tough to evaluate because the open source knowledge regarding such systems is likely to be third party information on proprietary subordinate systems at least five or six years old – or much more. Both major U.S. adversaries in Asia – North Korea and China – already show propensities for long-term cyber campaigns to remotely gain access and infiltrate or exfiltrate data over time from all military systems, including shipborne navigation. This is less likely simply because this is where the cybersecurity focus of the Navy and DOD already is.
Of course, the truth is that in the cyber world, nothing can be trusted if it is not reliably verified by multiple, independent, and alternative sources of expertise. USS FITZGERALD did not discern its error and correct fast enough to avoid being in the wrong place at the wrong time. The McCAIN may have trusted its right of way entitlement too long, or made a traffic avoidance maneuver and suffered a steering casualty at the worst possible moment.
Or perhaps both ships encountered something unexpected: a commercial ship operating on corrupted code. In the future, we should expect that any merchant ship controlled by digital information technology can be hacked.
The article was originally published at CIMSEC.
The views presented hereabove are only those of the author and not necessarily those of SAFETY4SEA and are for information sharing and discussion purposes only.
[divider]
About Dr. Chris C. Demchak
Dr. Chris C. Demchak is the Rear Admiral Grace Murray Hopper Professor of Cybersecurity and Director of the Center for Cyber Conflict Studies, Strategic and Operational Research Department, Center for Naval Warfare Studies, U.S. Naval War College.
About Commander Keith “Powder” Patton
Commander Keith “Powder” Patton, USN, is a naval aviator and the former Deputy Director of the Strategic and Operational Research Department, Center for Naval Warfare Studies, U.S. Naval War College.
About Dr. Sam J. Tangredi
Dr. Sam J. Tangredi is professor of national, naval and maritime strategy and director of the Institute for Future Warfare Studies, Strategic and Operational Research Department, Center for Naval Warfare Studies, U.S. Naval War College.
