Vice Adm. John J. Donnelly said Thursday that he is trying to determine whether the alleged misconduct on the USS Hampton is an isolated incident.The easiest thing for the Sub Force to do in this case is decide that the problem was completely confined to the Hampton and not look into real root causes. And by "root causes", I don't mean limiting it to integrity; I mean looking deeper and asking the hard questions like, "Why would an entire division decide to avoid the 'long hours and hard work' on this particular requirement?" They should maybe look into whether whatever checks were skipped can perhaps be done in a less time-consuming way, or checked less often, or if maybe there's a smarter way to put together a system of having supervisors periodically monitor these checks than what we're doing now -- something that lends itself to being less paperwork-intensive and more deckplate-focused. Of course, doing that would involve making Naval Reactors admit they have not been doing it the best way up until now, and that's a longshot. Still, I can always hope...
“I do not have any indications now of a forcewide problem, certainly not of the magnitude that we have there,” said Donnelly, commander of the Submarine Force. “But I am asking those questions, and we're looking very hard at this.” ...
...“We have a group of individuals, not a single individual, but a group who were working together, and they compromised their integrity,” Donnelly said. “I think they were pushing the easy button, perhaps to avoid the pain of long hours and hard work.”
A chief petty officer in the squadron's staff noticed irregularities in the records during a routine engineering check, Donnelly said...
...“We're looking very, very carefully at the root causes of what happened on the Hampton, and the investigation is still ongoing, so it's a little early for me to draw conclusions there,” Donnelly said. “I expect we'll wrap it up in the very near future.”
Update 0951 03 Nov: More on VADM Donnelly's remarks at the Navy Times.
