By Tom Sharpe*
Some say bad things happen in threes. It seems when it comes to the US Navy, they happen in fours. The report into four separate incidents involving the aircraft carrier USS Harry S Truman has just been released and it makes for uncomfortable reading.
In the space of five months the Truman had one of her jets shot down by her own air defence escort; she collided with a merchant vessel whilst approaching the Suez canal; she turned hard enough in response to an inbound missile to tip a jet and a tractor over the side; and she then lost one more plane over the front due to a snapped arrester wire.
The cumulative loss of aircraft, missiles fired in error and subsequent equipment fixes and upgrades exceeds $285 million dollars. Thankfully, no one died.
To me, the first was the most remarkable. On 22 December 2024, whilst operating in the Red Sea, and during a day of delivering heavy and sustained strikes on the Houthis whilst simultaneously defending against waves of drone attacks, the missile cruiser USS Gettysburg mistook two of Truman’s returning F/A-18 Super Hornets for Houthi anti-ship missiles. The Gettysburg fired two Standard Missile 2s (SM-2s) that destroyed one jet (just after the aircrew ejected) and narrowly missed the other. The report identifies causes including leadership lapses, inadequate training, a malfunctioning Identification Friend or Foe transponder left unreported and offline, disjointed strike group planning, conflicting orders, a radar coverage gap during a shift change, and an E-2D Hawkeye malfunction.
Quite a lot in other words. The Gettysburg, as the group’s air defence command ship, is pretty much entirely responsible here. This is one of those incidents where so many failsafes have to be missed that it almost defies belief. I’d imagine the ejected aircrew thought the same as they realised that the missiles they’d just seen fired were, in fact, heading for them. The captain of the Gettysburg was subsequently relieved of his command. I have to say as a former naval air-defence commander myself, if I’d overseen the same disaster I think I would have beaten the system to that decision.
The Truman’s woes were only just beginning though. On February 12, 2025, the carrier, steaming at 19 knots through crowded waters near Port Said en route to the Suez Canal, collided with the merchant vessel MV Besiktas-M. The impact caused structural damage to the carrier’s hull. Investigations revealed a cascade of failures: poor seamanship by the officer of the deck, inefficient crew communication, failure to transmit Automatic Identification System signals, sloppy deck log recordings, and the commanding officer’s abdication of navigation duties amid a “just get it done” culture exacerbated by fatigue.
Entering the Suez Canal at night is no joke. There is an absolute sea of lights, ships at anchor, ships coming the other way, fishing boats, pilot boats and so on. It’s chaos. You would have to have a very good reason to be steaming through that lot at 19 knots in a 100,000 ton ship – I’m not sure I can think of one good enough. The captain had to be summoned to the bridge which to my mind is incredible. I can’t imagine, again as a former warship captain, not being firmly welded to my seat up there at such a time. I can’t imagine the captain of a Royal Navy warship not being on the bridge for entry to the Canal. The captain’s actions when collision became inevitable did at least minimise the damage with the report making it very clear that had he not acted, the outcome – no fatalities and relatively minor damage – could have been very different. Repairs, including patching holes, erecting temporary bulkheads, and reinforcing safety rails, cost $685,000.
It wasn’t over yet for the hard-luck carrier. On April 18 2025, as the Truman was under attack in the Red Sea, she turned hard to present the best aspect for missile defence. The ship heeled over in the turn. A Super Hornet was being towed by a tractor across the flight deck with a sailor driving the tractor and another steering in the jet. Both jet and tractor slid across the tilting deck and over the side, though fortunately the two sailors managed to bail out and remained aboard.
Key failures were a faulty aircraft brake system, slippery non-skid deck coating unchanged since 2018, and poor coordination between bridge, flight deck and hangar teams. The $36 million jet was a total loss, with no separate repair costs detailed.
This one deserves some slack in my view. It is almost impossible to describe the complexity of carrier aviation at the best of times – do it at night and whilst under genuine enemy attack and it increases exponentially. I had enough marginal moments operating a single helicopter from the back of frigates and destroyers, especially when manoeuvring hard in heavy seas, to know that this sort of thing shouldn’t happen – but occasionally it does.
The report pinpointed subpar maintenance, including a missing washer in the arrester machinery, ineffective quality checks, chronic personnel shortages, insufficient training, leadership blind spots, and the fact that this happened after 52 gruelling days of non-stop flight ops (it’s hard to sleep aboard an aircraft carrier during flight ops). The aircraft, valued at $60 million, was lost, alongside $207,000 in carrier repairs for the cable and machinery.
The exam question for me, now that we know more about the separate incidents, is whether or not this is just a function of high operational tempo with occasional fog-of-war over the top or is there something deeper going wrong here.
Here the rule of four comes back to haunt the US Navy. In 2017 the US Seventh Fleet suffered four major mishaps in the Western Pacific. On 31 January, USS Antietam grounded in Tokyo Bay, spilling fuel. On 9 May, USS Lake Champlaincollided with a fishing boat off Korea. On 17 June, USS Fitzgerald was rammed by a container ship near Japan resulting in seven deaths. On 21 August, USS John S McCain collided with a tanker near Singapore and ten people died.
One thing the US Navy is never shy of is publishing its findings from investigations like this. All four of those incidents sprang from the same root causes: chronic personnel shortages, relentless operational tempo producing extreme fatigue, inadequate individual and team training, eroded seamanship skills, poor bridge resource management, failure to follow basic navigation rules, broken or ignored equipment, and a “can-do” culture that discouraged reporting risks.
Ships were routinely sent to sea under-crewed and under-trained. The collisions were deemed entirely preventable; the Navy accepted full responsibility, relieved multiple flag officers and commanders, and initiated the still-ongoing “Surface Force Readiness Reform” programme. And yet here we are again, eight years on and the similarities between the “new four” and the “old four” are visible and uncomfortable.
There are a few things I noted over the many years I spent operating either next to, or onboard US warships. First, they are very hierarchical. You do not question orders. At the ship/unit level, this can mean dangerous situations not being resolved quickly enough.
To illustrate this, once upon a time I was taking my frigate alongside in Portsmouth harbour, at night and as was my wont, going at a fair lick. At a critical moment whilst rounding the top of the harbour, I gave an incorrect wheel order. The pin-sharp young sailor on the wheel simply said, “say again wheel, Sir”, something he never normally did. I immediately checked and corrected the order. I can’t see that happening in the US Navy. He and I had a small drink once we got alongside as that could have ended quite differently.
Second, USN officers are often risk averse and relatively inexperienced when it comes to ship handling. In my view the fact that a US surface-fleet officer will have spent half his career in engineering jobs rather than ship-handling ones doesn’t help. The USN’s seemingly limitless appetite for firing COs for the most minor of incidents means that even when a US officer gets some ship-handling time he’ll tend to be reluctant to push the limits.
Third, the USN tends to be overly reliant on technology. That’s partly jealousy talking because their kit is generally so much better than ours, but it does take away a little bit of human judgement. Again, the USN tendency to shoot first and ask questions later makes operating around them quite lively at times. I don’t want to be overly critical of this as the aggressiveness of the USN is part of what makes it so formidable, but the Gettysburg shoot-down is a clear case of overreliance on (faulty) technology and no one in the chain willing not to pull the trigger. One only has to read the report into the USS Vincennes shooting down of a civilian airliner in 1988 to know how bad this can get if left unchecked.
Fourth, they do thrash themselves. There is a “no back down” culture in the USN where “sleep is for the weak” and other corrosive notions are promoted. Back in the day on routine operations in the Northern Arabian Gulf, their patrol periods would be half again the length of ours, then they would come alongside for the minimum time to resupply and go straight back out again with no time for a rest.
On paper it looks impressive but a Royal Navy ship would often get more things actually done over a six month period because we were better at surging and then backing down. The USN tends to just go flat out all the time until everyone and everything, including the captain and the ship itself, is knackered. All eight incidents highlighted above have fatigue running through them. Managing this is Navy 101. Get too tired and you’re no good to anyone. There is no doubt that the US Navy is sweating its ships extra hard right now which makes this issue even more important.
There are lessons for others in all of this. As China starts flexing its aircraft carrier muscles with the basic Liaoning and Shadong and now increasingly the US-level Fujian, it’s worth noting that so far they remain confined to short range, daytime, heavily protected sorties in uncontested conditions. If the US Navy – which despite the incidents above remains the best in the world at this – can make mistakes, then the Chinese will too. In other words, don’t believe China’s shiny and superficially impressive aircraft carrier PR, for now.
The day will come when China’s next carrier – even bigger than a USN one – goes to sea with a full complement of planes and a crew with expertise fully developed in the Fujian, but today is not that day.
The Royal Navy is also returning to carrier ops after a long hiatus. We’ve just managed a successful carrier deployment to the far side of the world and back, with no collisions or groundings and no jets lost – not this time, anyway – but many pieces of the puzzle are still missing and we certainly have no particular cause to be preening ourselves.
I’ve always been uncomfortable criticising the US Navy because they are some of the best in the world at what they do – often enough they are the only navy that can do a given thing. They also tend to suffer more problems and incidents than others simply because they have more ships and aircraft and people. To me the USN makes the world a much safer place and there is no better friend and ally to operate with.
But even the best can learn from mistakes, and there’s certainly plenty to learn here.
*Tom Sharpe served as a Royal Navy officer for 27 years, commanding four different warships. His primary specialism was anti-air warfare.
This article fist appeared in the Telegraph and is republished with the author’s permission.
