Commentary—

Civilians On Board Can’t Be Reason

For Nuclear Sub’s Collision

By Chris Powell

Thanks to the Greater Hartford Chamber of Commerce and its chairman, former East Hartford state Rep Tim Moynihan, seven years ago I stumbled onto a chance to join a shakedown cruise on what was then the Navy’s newest nuclear submarine, the USS Hartford, a Los Angeles-class attack sub. It sailed for a few hours from the sub base on the Thames River in Groton out into Long Island Sound and back.

The recent report about the terrible collision between a similar sub, the Greeneville, and a Japanese fishing ship near Honolulu, in which nine people were lost, make it sound like a miracle that the two dozen or so of us civilians on that cruise of the Hartford didn’t cause the boat to knock over the Gold Star Bridge.

Of course there was some catastrophic mistake with the Greeneville, and someone is bound to lose his military career over it, maybe just for starters. But the Navy’s admission that civilian observers were sitting at two control stations on the Greeneville at the time of the collision is coming to seem like a suggestion that the cause of the collision may have been joyriding.

That in turn may jeopardize the Navy’s efforts to give the news media, the well-connected, and other civilians the ability to see the Navy in action. Even if the Navy has meant those efforts only in the most cynical way – to build support for wasteful weapons – the loss of such access would be sad and unnecessary.

On the Hartford seven years ago, as on the Greeneville the other day, some of the civilians were allowed to get close to and even touch the sub’s controls at the helm. I would not have been seated at the weapons console if there had been torpedoes or cruise missiles aboard. The executive officer had a Polaroid camera and one by one invited the civilians, who included a state senator, to be photographed at a periscope. (The caption on my photo: “That is Weicker’s yacht. Fire 1!”)

I could not have known whether the studious young men at the several video screens around the helm that displayed seemingly inscrutable wavy lines were taking sonar readings or playing high-tech Etch-A-Sketch, but everything in the control room was slow and deliberate.

While the people out of uniform, including children, were incongruous, even those at the helm were not really sailing the ship. Everyone there was watched carefully.

The real problem on the Greeneville probably will turn out to be not the presence of civilians in the control room but the command decision to bring the boat up, either without ordinary precautions or on the basis of faulty navigation or equipment failure.

Submarines have collided while submerged in warlike conditions where navigation was necessarily uncertain and the course had to be concealed, but there seems to have been no such challenge facing the Greeneville. That the captain apparently did not know he was surfacing under a ship and that this ship apparently had not been tracked carefully for some time is astonishing.

The Navy will just have to come clean about the catastrophic mistake here; the civilian presence on board won’t explain it.

Nine people are dead and a fantastically expensive piece of naval equipment was put at risk. There will have to be atonement so that nothing disgraces the fleet whose century of heroism and sacrifice is recorded at the sub base museum in Groton, and so that Americans can still get a close look at the military they pay for.

(Chris Powell is managing editor of The Journal Inquirer in Manchester, Conn.)