What the Hell Is Up With The Navy Lately?

[Anomalocaris]

Depending on the weather, there would be lookouts out on deck, or at least on the bridge. Sonar and radar may or may not have been in use, but I would have expected them to be. Kind of hard to miss a tanker.

The incidents have involved big cargo ships.  There's a theory that the GPS on the Navy ships were hacked, giving them a false location.  That's called "GPS spoofing".
https://www.newscientist.com/article/214...berweapon/

The incidents involving the Navy ships happened at night.  So if the cargo ships had GPS spoofing equipment on them it would be easy to hide the equipment on the cargo ships and if the equipment requires a lot of power the ships' generators could provide it without any problem.  Of course that doesn't explain why the Navy ships didn't see the cargo ships on radar, unless there's a way for the cargo ships to give off false radar information.  If that's the case we have some really serious problems because our military forces would never see the attacking enemy forces, especially if the equipment could be put into planes and missiles.  

In the case of GPS spoofing it would be possible to deflect our cruise missiles and ICMBs and maybe even turn them back on us.  This is a very big deal.  DARPA had better get busy.

Of course there's also the possibility that the seaman's union is using GPS spoofing to kill the drive toward robot ships that will sail without any people on board.  

One thing that the Navy can do is to record all radar images on ships at sea.  This will show if there's something going on that prevents detecting cargo ships.  They should also investigate where the components for our radar systems came from.  Maybe they got them from China.  

In any case it will be a good idea to hold off any fight with North Korea until we know what's going on.

The initial report said USS Fitzgerald did not have a qualified watch standing officer on the bridge when the collision occurred.   If true, this would be a stupendous breach of basic maritime rules even if the ship had not been in a crowded shipping land. Reports also suggest USS McCaine suffered a steer failure before the collision.

The GPS spoofing equipment would not cause an accidental collision because it may create confusion in the ship's absolute location, it doesn't cause any confusion in the ship's relative location with respect to other ships around her.   Also, GPS spoofing would confuse the GPS units on all nearby ships, and this would show up on publically available maritiming ship tracking information.