A medical condition has forced a change of commanding officers on the USS Henry M. Jackson gold crew. The Ohio-class ballistic-missile submarine is homeported at Naval Base Kitsap-Bangor.That's all there is so far. As always, please don't speculate on anything operational that isn't already out in the public domain.
On Wednesday, Cmdr. James Bilotta was relieved of action for a disqualifying medical condition... He had only been in charge of the gold crew since March 15.
Update 0552 16 August: Although some of the comments could lead one to believe that HMJ is currently undergoing a RIM (Rectally-Inserted Microscope) Job from Squadron for some reason, at this point we really don't know what's going on -- nothing's been put out officially in the public domain. However, as one of the commenters points out, I'm guessing there are few boats that could survive such a close inspection unscathed. This has been one of my complaints about the Submarine Force's response to problems for quite some time. Everyone wants to know what the "root cause" of the problem is, and the easiest way to "find" that is to figure out everything the boat's been doing wrong. Ever since I've been able to comment about since things (starting with the San Francisco grounding), I've pointed out that this tends to focus attention on the individual boat to the exclusion of a possible systemic problem (such as, "There are too many requirements for any submarine crew to meet them all, but in trying to meet all of them, submarine crews tend to spend less effort on those requirements that are really important"). Big Sub Force sees a problem on a boat, finds they weren't following all the requirements, and says to themselves "Well, there's the problem; this particular boat wasn't following the requirements". They delude themselves into thinking that other boats are following all the requirements because various inspections say they are -- the problem is that everyone knows what the inspection teams (TRE, ORSE) are looking for, so those requirements are met. It's only during a post-incident witchhunt that the other "problems" are found. If the Submarine Force wants to find out the true state of procedural compliance, I recommend they go down to their best boat, without warning, and give them the same kind of "help" they give to a boat that just had a problem. I suspect they'll find that there are certain things that all the boats aren't doing -- not just the "problem" boats -- and maybe they can use that to get rid of some of the administrative requirements that offer nothing but time-suck to boats and their crews who are just trying to do their job and keep the surface/dive ratio equal to 1. [/rant]
Update 0938 19 Aug: From the sounds of it, any RIM-jobbing of HMJ that may or may not be going on would be completely appropriate. That is all.
