Three official commissions - one by the United States, one by NATO and one by Turkey - will investigate the firing recently of two Sea Sparrow missiles from a U.S. aircraft carrier into the side of a Turkish destroyer. The incident - during NATO maneuvers in the Aegean Sea - killed four sailors and the ship's captain.
Such an "accident" is very hard to explain without the benefit of the results of one or more investigations, for, as one American admiral said, there should have been several layers of safety that "should have been in place to prevent such a thing."The probable cause of the accident is to be determined by official panels. But one is left to wonder how a small, electronically blind surface-to-air missile, used by aircraft carriers such as the USS Saratoga, would have found its way to the bridge of the Turkish destroyer three miles away in the middle of the night during simulated war games.
The suspicion that the firing was deliberate, or even a costly accident, cannot be easily erased.
What happened to those routine safety checks - and, furthermore, what does this accident say about U.S. Navy procedure?
Recent misfortunes of various kinds indicate the Navy's seams are showing. Accidents of this kind do not just happen. The Sparrow missiles had to be armed and fired through a series of deliberate steps.
Who was in charge? Who wasn't paying attention to standard operating procedure - and why? Why was the commander of the Turkish vessel killed?
Coming in the wake of the Tailhook scandal and the explosion in 1989 on the USS Iowa that killed 47 sailors, this accident leads to the conclusion that the Navy is rudderless.
Perhaps the Navy's own investigation will find a low-level scapegoat to blame for the mistake, as was tried in the Iowa case. Better yet, perhaps it will really learn what happened and assign proportional responsibility and punishment. Only then can such "accidents" become increasingly rare, as they should be.