The latest US navy collision should worry Trump’s Asian allies | Mary Dejevsky

The dismissal of Joseph Aucoin, commander of the US 7th Fleet, is more formal than practical as Aucoin was close to retirement anyway. But heads had to roll after a series of accidents, including two recent fatal collisions. Military responsibility is what it is; in the end the top man had to take the rap. More surprising than Aucoin’s dismissal, perhaps, is that he did not submit his resignation as a matter of honour first.

When it was reported this week that a US navy destroyer had been involved in a collision with an oil tanker near Singapore and 10 US crew members were missing, it was hard to believe that this was not old news being reheated. Had we not been here before? Only two months ago, seven US crew members died when the USS Fitzgerald warship collided with a container ship in Japanese waters near the US naval base at Yokosuka.

It turned out, however, that this latest incident was another collision between a US naval vessel and a civilian ship in the Pacific. This accident occurred to the east of Singapore and, like the earlier collision, it happened at night. As with the previous incident, too, at least some of the crew members were killed when their sealed sleeping compartments were flooded.

If one fatal accident involving the US 7th Fleet could – generously, perhaps – be regarded as a misfortune, a second looks a great deal worse than carelessness.

For the US, the latest incident would also have had particular resonance because the ship involved is the USS John S McCain, named in honour of the distinguished father and grandfather of Senator John McCain, who has become the voice of political reason and principle in the early months of a presidency that has been anything but.

Two accidents in two months would be bad enough. But it does not stop there. In May, a guided missile cruiser collided with a South Korean fishing vessel, and last August a US submarine collided with a support vessel. That is four incidents in just over a year.

No wonder, then, that the 7th Fleet commander’s head is on the block, or that the chief of naval operations, Admiral John Richardson, has ordered a worldwide “operational pause” of its whole fleet. All commanders have been instructed to halt operations to “assess and review with their commands the fundamental practice to safe and effective operations”. A review is also under way to find out what caused the various accidents.

So far, the official presumption appears to be that human error was the most likely cause. Disciplinary measures were announced last week against the captain and crew of the USS Fitzgerald. In an intriguing glimpse of other possibilities, however, Richardson said on Twitter – the favoured public medium since Donald Trump became president – that he would not exclude the possibility of some kind of outside interference or cyberattack as a cause.

It is understandable that those in charge of the most powerful navy in the world, let alone those whose security it is entrusted with protecting, find it hard to believe that morale or discipline have become so diminished as to make even this relatively small number of incidents possible. And it is all too tempting to believe that someone – China would be the favoured candidate, given the region and the capability, though North Korea and Russia could also be in the frame – might have been able to tamper somehow with the GPS or other technology in such a way as to make an incident more likely. Particular tensions over Chinese claims to control routes in the South China Sea or friction with North Korea over its nuclear programme have recently flared to unprecedented levels.

In many ways, though, the immediate cause of this spate of incidents matters less than the shadow it casts over the operational competence of a key part of the US defence sector – and by far the most powerful navy in the world. At a time when there is a president in the White House whose decisions appear inconsistent, verging on flaky, it is more important than ever that key institutions of state, starting with the military, appear solid and reliable. In this respect, it is not just the US that the 7th Fleet has let down, but Washington’s allies in Asia, too.

• Mary Dejevsky is a writer and broadcaster. She is a former foreign correspondent in Moscow, Paris and Washington, and a special correspondent in China and many parts of Europe. She is a member of the Valdai Group, invited since 2004 to meet Russian leaders each autumn.