Commander of US fleet to be relieved after collisions

Washington, Aug 23 : The US Navy plans to relieve the commander of the fleet that has sustained four collisions in Asia and deaths of over a dozen sailors in 2017, an official said.

Vice Admiral Joseph P. Aucoin, the head of the Seventh Fleet in Japan, the US Navy's largest overseas fleet, will be removed on Wednesday in connection with four collisions since January, including two fatal ones in the past two months, The New York Times quoted the official as saying on Tuesday.

Admiral Aucoin was scheduled to retire in September, but his departure was pushed up as his superiors lost confidence in his leadership.

Admiral Scott H. Swift, the commander of the US Pacific Fleet, flew from Singapore to the Seventh Fleet headquarters in Japan, where he will relieve Admiral Aucoin, who has commanded the fleet since September 2015.

The removal comes as the Navy prepares to conduct a rare suspension of ship operations worldwide for a day or two in the next week to review safety and operational procedures.

Navy officials have also been investigating the role that training, manning and crew communications may have played in the collisions.

Divers have found remains of missing American sailors in the flooded compartments of the Navy destroyer John S. McCain, which collided with an oil tanker on Monday off the coast of Singapore, The New York Times quoted Admiral Swift as saying.

"It is premature to say how many or what the status of the recovery of those bodies is."

Admiral Swift said the search at sea would continue despite the discovery of remains in the ship. "The focus of the US Pacific Fleet is our 10 sailors and their families."

The collision was the second in two months involving a destroyer from the Seventh Fleet based in Yokosuka, Japan.

In June, the destroyer Fitzgerald collided with a cargo ship off Japan that left seven sailors dead.

After Monday's collision, Admiral John Richardson, the Navy's top officer, said all 277 Navy ships worldwide would take an "operational pause" to review basic seamanship, teamwork and other "fundamentals".

Defence Secretary Jim Mattis said an inquiry into the collision had begun.

The destroyer is named after John S. McCain Sr. and John S. McCain Jr., Navy Admirals who were the grandfather and father of Senator John McCain of Arizona.

Senator McCain, who is the chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee, in a statement here endorsed the operational pause.

"I agree with Admiral Richardson that more forceful action is urgently needed to identify and correct the causes of the recent ship collisions," he said.

The collision between the McCain and the Alnic MC, a Liberian-registered tanker about three times its size, occurred east of Singapore.

Andrew Tan, the chief executive of the Maritime and Port Authority of Singapore, said about 250 people from various Singapore agencies were involved in the search.