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Communications, and Funding: Other news of the early 21st century -- including the final report of the 9/11 Commission, the investigation of the loss of Space Shuttle Columbia, and the end of the fruitless hunt for Saddam Hussein's WMDs -- show that the prompt and accurate sharing of relevant and vital information between different government bodies remains an ongoing, daunting challenge. Large, diverse, and widely dispersed organizational complexes, it appears, can produce results that amount to much less than the sum of their parts. Stale satellite altimetry data existed suggesting a possible uncharted-seamount hazard along USS San Francisco's route, but this wasn't conveyed to the submarine. It would not be surprising to eventually find that more-modern data exists somewhere, definitively identifying the seamount with which San Francisco collided, but said data was never analyzed fully, or was never made available to authorities who establish safe transit corridors and navigation procedures for submarines.
Time and again, our politically-driven national budgeting process shows itself prone to addressing solutions to dangers too late, reactively, often closing the barn door only after the horses have bolted -- and sometimes not even then. Voters are much more willing to accept the burden of paying for fixes after the latent danger becomes an outright catastrophe, splashing across front-page headlines while saturating the audio-video media and circling the globe via Internet blogs. Such is human nature, infamously difficult to change.
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But the San Francisco collision has served upon us due warning. One crewman died of his injuries, and many others were seriously hurt. How much is a human life worth, compared to the cost of providing better obstacle-avoidance aids? San Francisco suffered serious damage, and her emergency surfacing after the crash was at first rather "touch and go." Repairs to her hull and bow sonar will be extremely expensive. If she'd hit the seamount in a slightly different place, or at a slightly different angle, she might have been lost with all hands. How much are 137 highly-trained submariners' lives worth, collectively? The price to replace San Francisco by a new submarine would run in the billions. The ecological -- and psychological -- impacts of an American nuclear reactor sunk near populated islands are hard to reckon. The diplomatic and public-relations consequences, within the U.S. and internationally, would surely be dire. Our nation, and our national security, had a very close call, much more so than most people seem to realize or admit.
Might it not be a wise investment to selectively equip those SSNs tasked to operate in poorly charted waters with on-board gravimeters? Or are we going to behave again, institutionally, the way we did after the Space Shuttle Challenger disaster? Few lessons were learned then, they were all forgotten quickly, and another, equal disaster became inevitable -- and did occur. The same can be said about a long string of CIA failures and missteps, and about the series of increasingly brazen al Qaeda attacks against two U.S. embassies and then the destroyer USS Cole before September 11, 2001.
Our Navy is gearing up more and more for operations in shallow-water and near-shore undersea environments. Too few submarines must rush hither and yon to cover too many crisis contingencies. In such circumstances, safe undersea navigation takes on a whole new degree of importance. We mustn't make the same team error with our thinly-stretched Silent Service that we've already made with manned space flight, intelligence gathering, and homeland security. Submariners, and their families, deserve better than that.
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© 2005 Joe Buff. All opinions expressed
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