https://www.cotton.senate.gov/imo/media ... report.pdf
TL:DR - the Navy has a huge problem.This review was conducted at the direction of Senator Tom Cotton and Congressmen Mike
Gallagher, Jim Banks, and Dan Crenshaw as a strictly nonpartisan exercise in Congressional
oversight. The authors of this review conducted long-form interviews with numerous active-duty
and recently retired or detached officers and enlisted personnel about their insights into the
culture of the United States Navy following a series of high-profile and damaging operational
failures in the Navy’s Surface Warfare community. The discussion below is intended to inform
Congress of the findings of these interviews, with an emphasis on subjects including funding,
maintenance planning, administrative management, and operational employment.
The review did not focus on any single failure, each of which has been thoroughly investigated
by the appropriate authorities, but rather examined the broader question of whether the episodes
taken as a whole indicate any underlying systemic problems affecting the performance of the
surface Navy. The incidents that formed the impetus for this review included the catastrophic fire
on the USS Bonhomme Richard pier-side in San Diego, the collision of the USS McCain in the
South China Sea, the collision of the USS Fitzgerald off the coast of Japan, and the surrender of
two small U.S. Navy craft to the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps Navy in the Arabian Gulf.
The direction from members of Congress was to establish if these incidents were part of a series
of isolated, unit-level breakdowns, or if they instead indicate larger institutional issues that are
degrading the performance of the entire naval surface force.
