[aroch]

Over the last few years there have been several (4-5) instances of British subs nearly striking surface ships in their home waters. Also running aground right outside their home port in 2010. Not exactly reassuring.

The US Navy is much bigger and has global operations. They're just as guilty of being careless but they also have proven war fighting capabilities. No one is asking the British to sail by as a show of power and solidarity.

[Retric]

Near misses are fairly common in all large navies, that says little about the British capacity for warfare. For example both the USS Fitzgerald and USS John McCain actually had significant collisions yet the US Navy is generally considered by far the strongest in the world.

Similarly, military aircraft crash vastly more often than their civilian counterparts, but consider extreme safety simply isn't what militaires optimize for. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_accidents_and_incident...

[dragonwriter]

> For example both the USS Fitzgerald and USS John McCain actually had significant collisions yet the US Navy is generally considered by far the strongest in the world.

The series of four accidents including those two in a short period in the US 7th Fleet was considered a sign of very significant problems. It is not at all typical of large, capable navies.

[Retric]

I agree that these incidents where a sign of significant issues. My point what they said little about the US Nacy’s overall capacity for warfare. Rates of accidents that are completely unacceptable in peacetime are a rounding errors in a significant war.

[dragonwriter]

> My point what they said little about the US Navy’s overall capacity for warfare.

The reason for the fairly significant consequences, the global stand down, etc., is because, as many experts wrote at the time, they said a lot about the US Navy’s capacity for warfare.

> Rates of accidents that are completely unacceptable in peacetime are a rounding errors in a significant war.

Sure, because war results in change in priorites in which the same skill and capacity will produce a much higher accident rate than peacetime.

But a high peacetime accident rate, even if lower than the accident rat that would be acceptable in wartime, demonstrates an institutional incapacity to operate as directed successfully, which is a severe warfighting liability.

[Retric]

> But a high peacetime accident rate, even if lower than the accident rat that would be acceptable in wartime, demonstrates an institutional incapacity to operate as directed successfully, which is a severe warfighting liability.

Or simply a vastly different set of priorities. Navy ships are generally supposed to operate as a unit as their threatened by a host of over the horizon missiles, supersonic aircraft etc. In a very real way crashing into unknown ships isn't something that’s considered as a meaningful risk.

The root cause of these safety issues is however deeper. Militaries are constantly cycling both technology and people through positions. The specific implementation of training and UI where at fault for these crashes which is directly addressable. However, the institutional approach of using new people and technology has huge upsides in war. You need to be able to quickly replace losses in warfare so you need to rely on training not experience, and you need to test that this training is effective. Similarly, you can’t rely on proven technology and it’s proven training because new threats are constantly arriving.

That's directly going to cause accidents and while minimizing them is important, the long term tradeoff is considered worth it.