U.S. navy warship lost power and propulsion for hours, defence official says

Yep, some of the comments here are hysterical. The fact that they got it working again in just a few hours and didn't need a tow means it wasn't even that bad, all things considered.

My husband and I would joke that he only went underway to see what breaks so they can come back, fix it, and do it again a couple weeks later. They had a 3 month underway later where some pretty necessary stuff broke for several hours, but that's was small potatoes by that point. They were so used to stuff going down and having to fix it that it wasn't an issue. People think that these billion dollar ships with thousands of parts will run perfectly every time but it just means you have more fail points and redundancies that might also fail. And then your sailors, bless them, might have only been in that position for six months or less so this is their first time seeing this shit live.

Did they skip "how to not disable the warship day" in navy school?

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My first co-ed deployment on a cruiser, was purposely disabled 1 day before deployment by a tampon being thrown into the engine intake. Set back by 2 weeks to fix. That deployment was miserable.

My brother is on a submarine and it’s crazy how fires with the laundry occur so much it’s almost “normal” for them. Obviously a top priority when your out at sea (especially underwater) but it almost becomes routine.

Can't blame them. A lot of the younger gen didn't join the military out of some misguided patriotic bullshit. But more so out of desperation from being a product of generations of political corruption..

Is it as easy as pushing the yellow button?

Someone flushed some towels too recently

There is nothing helpless about a USN ship, if the crew is trained and the officers know how to manage. Causality drills are a continuing part of on-going training. Human eyes with binoculars can see off to the horizon and can detect a threat. There are back-up communications to request assistance. The article is misleading

It’s almost as if they don’t want to be there

The military doesn't really have consistent safety and reliability requirements. Sometimes the requirements include some robustness, but it's usually hidden as overbuilt functional requirements. So cascading failures are sort of their jam...

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The Oasis of stability in the region full of ... wait a minute

Read the article -- the problem wasn't with Windows (the operating system), but rather the software running on top of it. >The RDM program then attempted to perform a division operation by the valve property; a **divide-by-zero arithmetic exception** was thrown, not caught by the program, and the RDM crashed. Since other Smart Ship systems were dependent on RDM availability across the LAN, these other SMCS components including ones controlling the motor and propulsion machinery began to fail in a domino-like sequence until the ship stopped dead in the water. >“NT was never the cause of any problem on the ship. The problems were all in programs, databases, and code within the individual pieces of software we were using.” It's like your web browser crashing after you visit a sketchy website. The browser's an app, and it crashing has nothing to do with the underlying OS.

They might have brought it back recently, but to my knowledge, they discontinued PMS and brought in contractors for all that stuff in the early '00s. I remember my buddy talking about it and being exasperated that shore services were doing the maintenance for ships when they were in port.

Haven’t heard the gundecking phrase in years

Huh, I didn't know they added French. Is that horde or alliance?

Or me on any battleship lol. Every time I think maybe I can pull it off this time I end up back to island humping in cruisers

At least when you have power you move faster than 10 knots

Wow is only 1 game and it doesn't have French battleships.

People lose all sense of niceties when they arent fed and given comfort. The fragging will start soon

It would be well for you to consider that having your ships and ours, in such proximity... is Inherently Dangerous

Even the best military is incompetent when led by incompetent people.

Way to have an overreaction.

We are still the best military in the world, what are you talking about? Nobody comes close to being able to project air and naval power globally like we can.

This happens all the time, and not just to the US navy. You’re severely underestimating the complexity of the equipment, and how they operate. An engine overheating? We disable it while it undergoes maintenance. Electrical issues causing a voltage out of range? Better make sure that the issue doesn’t get worse. A warship having its power or propulsion offline while MM’s, ETs, and DCs work on it really isn’t a cause for concern.

Paying interest on loans. 

Sorry what? Like I get that the trump administration is bumbling idiots, could have actually prepped for this war with obvious stuff like base hardening, drone defense and filling the oil reserve. And that some of the gulf allies had completely incompetent air defense crews. But the US military just did one of the biggest air campaigns of all time and all Iran can brag about is hitting one plane and knocking down another. Iran has no way to militarily respond in kind so they have resorted to threatening non US merchant boats. Like if you think the Shaheds are impressive, guess what, the US literally used a copy of them against Iran. The war in Iran is insanely stupid, Intelligence agencies did not think regime change was likely, but it absolutely demonstrates the US has power projection capabilities no other country can dream of (okay actually China just needs some time).

Pretty standard to cut power and shut down systems during a casualty outside of active combat. Even if risk to the systems would be rare. Most systems have a battle short option to keep running during extreme degradation.

Or the competent officers are no longer in command

You'd think. However, shit happens. . . https://www.usni.org/magazines/naval-history-magazine/2023/june/west-pac-cruise-hell

It can happen to any ship if it happens in the right location. Yes there are redundancies for ship board power (diesel generators and the standby generator(s)), but if the failure happened to part of the switchboard, it's easier and safer to offline power and make expedient repairs.

I think a lot of the folks commenting have no idea that this is a regular occurrence on destroyers lol

That class of ship has 3 gas turbine generators. While underway they will normally run 2 with 1 backup.

I'm guessing the navy tracks the percentage of time a ship has remained in-service (vs. temporarily out of service). (Example: a ship may have 50% "uptime" (vs. 50% being temporarily out of service).) Do you happen to know what a typical ship's "uptime" is in the navy?

“the Navy still uses Windows XP and other outdated Microsoft products for various systems, despite their obsolescence. They have contracts in place to receive security updates for these legacy systems”

If it happens in combat anytime soon, we will never hear about it, at least not factually.

Kinda feels like whoever did this, just learned it would work in combat 🙃

It wouldn’t happen during combat. There are loads of redundancies on warships. When not in combat, it’s easier and safer to shut everything down while a thorough repair is done. In active combat, backups are used. Ships don’t fight alone, either. Aegis on the cruiser next to you is still shooting down any missiles headed your way. I’ll also add that this shit happens *all the time* to literally every navy in the world.