Nearly sinking Navy Ship

Tip: Pentagon Covering Up Fact That Female Officers Nearly Sank Navy Ship

Posted on | June 17, 2018 | 128 Comments

The USS Fitzgerald after a deadly collision with a freighter in June 2017.

An anonymous email came in over the transom this morning:

Hi, Stacy.
During the early weeks after the USS Fitzgerald was speared by a lumbering Philippine container ship, it was noteworthy that the captain and a couple of admirals were publically named, but not the actual officer in charge, the officer of the deck. (OOD) The other person who should have kept the Fitz out of trouble is the person in charge of the combat information center, the Tactical Action Officer. That individual is supposed to be monitoring the combat radar, which can detect a swimmer at a distance of two miles.
Not until a year later, when the final reports are made public and the guilty parties have been court-martialed, does the truth come out. The OOD was named Sarah, and the Tactical Action Officer was named Natalie, and they weren’t speaking to each other!!! The Tactical Action Officer would normally be in near constant communication with the OOD, but there is no record of any communication between them that entire shift!
Another fun fact: In the Navy that won WWII, the damage control officers were usually some of the biggest and strongest men aboard, able to close hatches, shore up damaged areas with timbers, etc. The Fitz’s damage control officer was also a woman, and she never left the bridge. She handled the aftermath of the accident remotely, without lifting a finger herself!
Look it up: The OOD was Sarah Coppock, Tactical Action Officer was Natalie Combs. . . .
When I noticed last year that they were doing all they could to keep the OOD’s name out of the headlines, I speculated to my son that it was a she. Turns out all the key people (except one officer in the CIC) were female!

Indeed, I did some searching, and Lt. Coppock pleaded guilty to dereliction of duty. Lt. Combs faced a hearing last month:

In an 11-hour hearing, prosecutors painted a picture of Lt. Irian Woodley, the ship’s surface warfare coordinator, and Lt. Natalie Combs, the tactical action officer, as failing at their jobs, not using the tools at their disposal properly and not communicating adequately. They became complacent with faulty equipment and did not seek to get it fixed, and they failed to communicate with the bridge, the prosecution argued. Had they done those things, the government contended, they would have been able to avert the collision.

That two of the officers — Coppock and Combs — involved in this fatal incident were female suggests that discipline and training standards have been lowered for the sake of “gender integration,” which was a major policy push at the Pentagon during the Obama administration. It could be that senior officers, knowing their promotions may hinge on enthusiastic support for “gender integration,” are reluctant to enforce standards for the women under their command.
This was the story of Kara Hultgreen, the Navy pilot who died in a 1994 F-14 crash. Investigation showed that Hultgreen had been allowed to proceed in her training after errors that would have meant a washout for any male pilot. But the Clinton administration was pushing for female fighter pilots, which resulted in a competition between the Navy and Air Force to put women into these combat roles. It is not necessary to believe that (a) women shouldn’t be fighter pilots, in order to believe (b) lowering standards for the sake of quotas is a bad idea. Of course, you may believe both (a) and (b), but it is (b) that gets people killed.
It seems obvious that the Pentagon (and the liberal media) sought to suppress full knowledge of what happened to the Fitzgerald in the immediate aftermath of the June 2017 incident that killed seven sailors, in the same way the details of Kara Hultgreen’s death were suppressed. It took investigative reporters like Rowan Scarborough of the Washington Times a lot of hard work to find out what actually happened to Hultgreen. Let’s hope other reporters will dig into what’s happening in our military with the “gender intergration” agenda at the Pentagon now.

Knife Control in the UK

With Knife Crimes on Rise, British Judge Recommends Duller Kitchen Knives

Katherine Rohloff / June 14, 2018
A veteran British judge says Britons should round off the tips of their large kitchen knives as a way to cut down on the rising number of knife attacks in England, which has strict gun controls.
Judge Nicholas Madge made his proposal at his recent retirement ceremony after 77 knife-related incidents, including three deaths, occurred in Bedfordshire, England, over the prior two months, The Telegraph newspaper reported.
“Why do we need 8-inch or 10-inch kitchen knives with points?” Madge said at the May 25 event. “Butchers and fishmongers do, but how often, if at all, does a domestic chef use the point of an 8-inch or 10-inch knife? Rarely, if at all.”
Amy Swearer, legal policy analyst at The Heritage Foundation’s Meese Center for Legal and Judicial Studies, ridiculed the idea as knife control.
Rounding off the tips of kitchen knives, Swearer told The Daily Signal, is “the liberals’ version of gun control in England, 40 years ahead of the United States.”
“Blunt tips for knives seems practically absurd. You can make a shank out of plastic in prison,” Swearer said. “Will they regulate plastic next? Where will the line be drawn?”
The Heritage policy analyst attributes Madge’s “extreme” proposal to England’s gun control policy, in place since the mid-to-late 1990s.
England slowly achieved the dream of American gun control advocates, but it didn’t help curb crime, Swearer said.
“To keep people safe, allow law-abiding citizens to defend themselves,” she said.
Today, England suffers from an epidemic of so-called “hot burglaries.” Hot burglaries occur when an individual enters a house despite knowing that the resident is home.
Swearer said that in the U.S., 14 percent of all burglaries are “hot,” while England’s “hot” rate is 60 percent.
“There was a study that asked burglars why they did or did not commit hot burglaries,” she said. “American burglars said residents were more likely to have a gun, while English burglars knew that the resident didn’t have a gun, and that they could get [the victim] to open [his or her] safe.”
Swearer attributed that to the Second Amendment right to bear arms, a right Britons don’t enjoy:

England didn’t have a gun problem, and did everything [American pro-gun control advocates] wanted. Now, they are in a worse, violent situation than they were already in, even compared to the U.S. By cracking down on the most basic things, liberals are laughing. … Basically, Britain has become a police-protectionism state, so now [the British] have the right to hope that the police arrive in time before they are killed.

Madge’s call for blunting knives stems from the fact that deadly mass attacks may be committed using anything that can serve as a weapon.
England has seen a 21 percent spike in knife and other non-gun related incidents from 2011 to 2017, with an incident occurring every 14 minutes with a sharp object, the Independent reported.
Swearer said that’s because knives in England have become the “new guns.” If British citizens were given their guns back, she said, England would be better off:

We have the Second Amendment, literally, for things like this, and we shouldn’t listen to people who try to diminish it. The Second Amendment protects firearms used by law-abiding citizens for lawful purposes. When we ignore these provisions, that basically removes a very serious protection that prevents us from going down the path that the Founding Fathers did not want, and become just like England.

Happy Flag Day.

D-Day