With 2025 behind us, we can look back on the year and figure out who deserves that most prestigious of Naval Gazing awards, the William D Brown Memorial Award for the biggest naval screwup that didn't kill anyone.
Compared to last year, our crop of entries is slightly down, although one navy in particular seems determined to win a third award on the trot:
- USS Harry S Truman ran into a tanker, then dropped one Super Hornet over the side while evading missile attack before losing a second a week later when the arresting wire broke
- USS Nimitz, for losing a Super Hornet and a helicopter on her final cruise
- USS New Orleans, attempting the classic route to Brown glory by setting the ship on fire
- The US Navy, specifically SecNav Phelan and SecDef Hegseth, for their mishandling of the Constellation program
Fortunately for the free world, none of these were sufficient to claim the prize, or even the coveted status of runner-up. The latter goes to the People's Liberation Army Navy and the Chinese Coast Guard for some truly astonishing shiphandling during their harassment of Filipino vessels in the South China Sea. They claim nobody was killed, preserving their eligibility,1 and for the first time, the incident was captured on video:
But they clearly lacked the necessary will to win, which could have been demonstrated by sinking one or more of the ships involved in the collision, and thus were narrowly beaten out by North Korea, for the truly impressive feat of capsizing a destroyer while trying to launch it. Even though it's not clear how much they wanted the victory, as they chose to refloat the ship and are continuing efforts to put it into service, the judges believe this demonstrates the excellence that the Brown Award stands for. Well done, North Korea, and we hope this is merely the first of many victories.
Past Winners:
- 2018: The Royal Norwegian Navy and the crew of Helge Ingstad for playing in traffic with an oil tanker
- 2019: On account of nobody reaching the required standard of excellence in 2019 alone, this Award has been given as a lifetime achievement award to Vern Clark, Arthur Cebrowski, Wayne Hughes and Donald Rumsfeld.
- 2020: The USN and the crew of Bonhomme Richard, for using fire instead of an oil tanker to write off a ship
- 2021: The Iranian Navy and the crew of the replenishment ship Kharg, although style points are docked for copying the previous year's winner
- 2022: Evergreen Marine, for breaking the actual William D Brown's record for biggest ship hard aground in Chesapeake Bay
- 2023: The USN and VP-4, for turning a perfectly good P-8 into a very bad boat
- 2024: The USN and the USS Gettysburg, for shooting down one of their own planes in the Red Sea
1 It's not entirely certain that this claim is true. The Filipinos are claiming that there were 2 dead as a result of the collision, which if true would disqualify it from contention. I'm not an expert in sorting out these kind of claims, so I'm going with official figures. ⇑
Comments
Being interested in failure modes generally, these are always some of my favorite posts, but this sentence in the summary accident report really piqued my interest... "The second Super Hornet made an evasive maneuver and was set to eject, but the second SM-2 was deactivated before impact" sounds like a great topic for an article. From the that that "It explodes off our left on the surface of the water", "deactivated" presumably means something more like "told to ignore its target" but even that leaves a lot of questions. Do humans or machines make that decision? (Given how little reaction time there must have been over those distances at those speeds.) I assume there's an encrypted command sent, and that there's nothing you can do about jamming (because the obvious alternative would mean that jamming would make all your missiles ineffective), and cryptography covers spoofing? Do we know whether that's post-quantum cryptography yet, just in case some power already has an effective quantum computer, or is everyone still assuming no-one does? If the command is more of a "divert" than a "don't explode" (because even a non-explosive collision is likely to be problematic at those speeds), is there any sophisticated attempt to not accidentally hit other targets [including ground-based ones], or does it just hit what it hits? Or were the pilots' impressions incorrect, and the missile was actually commanded to explode off-target (more like what you see when a rocket launch goes wrong, say)? So many questions raised by one short sentence!
Keep up the good work!
Oh, Bean, please do not investigate on 1997, eh...