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The U.S. Navy isn’t real happy that they had to send the USNS Big Horn to port for repairs. The Pentagon is very carefully not saying how the ship got damaged. There’s a chance of it being the fault of one of our adversaries, since it happened in the Arabian Sea. More likely it was human error of some sort. The Defense Department is touchy about things like that, since World War III could erupt at any moment and we need to be at peak readiness.
Navy investigates allision
The Navy calls their refueling ships “oilers.” The USNS Big Horn is one of those. It’s out of commission right now, anchored in the port of Oman.
Tugs assisted the damaged vessel in on Tuesday afternoon, September 24, a local ship spotter reports. The Pentagon confirmed “that the tanker was in the Omani port as of Wednesday.”
The Big Horn “is now undergoing a repair assessment while the service investigates the cause of an underwater allision that damaged the ship.”
That’s an obscure technical term used by the Navy which means “the running of one ship upon another ship that is stationary.” It could mean they ran over a submarine. One of ours or somebody else’s would be the next question but nobody’s mentioning it.
What the Navy does say is that “USNS Big Horn (T-AO-198), a replenishment oiler, sustained damage while operating at sea in the U.S. 5th Fleet area of operations overnight on September 23.”
The good news is that everyone is safe. “All crew members are currently safe and U.S. 5th Fleet is assessing the situation.”
No apparent leak
Navy officials were quick to ensure all the tree-hugging environmentalists that there “was no apparent leak of fuel from the 42,000-ton oiler.” That’s not just how much the ship weighs, it indicates how much fuel it could have spilled.
No matter how hard reporters pressed their sources, the best statement they could get from anyone about what happened is that “the oiler had suffered an underwater allision with its stern.”
Insiders are quick to point out that means Big Horn “either grounded or hit an object underwater while operating in the Arabian Sea off the coast of Oman.”
There are already social media posts going viral which “show flooding in an aft engineering space and a damaged rudder cap.” The Navy doesn’t want to give our enemies any information so they’re staying quiet.
The public was already aware that “the Kaiser-class oiler had been assigned to the Abraham Lincoln Carrier Strike Group.” It’s their job to resupply “the embarked air wing and the ship’s escorts.” With the Big Horn out of service, the Navy is “exploring other ways to provide fuel to the air wing and the escorts.” Congress is already howling about the readiness issues.
“If we cannot fuel our ships, our capabilities will be greatly diminished,” Senator Roger Wicker points out. “Big Horn’s problems also speak to a larger challenge – we are woefully in need of a larger logistics fleet, which is the lifeline for our global military presence. I hope this incident serves as a wake-up call that it is high time to fix our shipbuilding industrial base and support our merchant mariners.” The Navy would love a whole new fleet, as soon as Congress buys them one.
