Military Vehicle Accident - Army and Marine Corps personnel are trained to operate smart vehicles such as tanks and trucks. However, the Army and Navy reported 3,751 non-combat vehicle incidents that resulted in the deaths of 123 service members between fiscal years 2010 and 2019.
Today's WatchBlog article explores our new report on smart car incidents and how to prevent them.
Military Vehicle Accident
An average of 34 Class A and B accidents (the most serious categories) occurred in each fiscal year from 2010 to 2019. Each of these accidents caused at least one death, permanent disability, multiple hospitalizations, or more than $500,000 in costs.
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Number of Army and Navy Class A and B Tactical Casualties and Military Casualties, Fiscal Years 2010 to 2019.
We found that human factors such as driver inattention, loss of attention and lack of training were the most commonly reported causes of non-combat vehicle accidents. The Army and Marine Corps have procedures in place to prevent or reduce the severity of vehicle accidents, but these procedures are not always followed, often due to a focus on "mission accomplishment."
For example, workers defined risk ratings—used to identify risks associated with tactical vehicle operations—that were inaccurate and reused without being updated, artificially lowering the standards of perceived risk. In addition, the Soldiers and Marines we spoke to said that they did not always take precautions that could reduce the severity of accidents, such as using seat belts or other restrictions in tactical vehicles. In addition, in some cases we found that the restraints were not working or had been removed from the vehicle.
According to drivers and other workers we interviewed, front-line managers, such as traffic controllers, are responsible for enforcing safety rules such as speed limits and using seat belts. , as well as training less experienced drivers. Employees have told us that unqualified or inexperienced front-line managers can increase safety risks.
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We found that inadequate motor training can contribute to accidents. In interviews with the personnel of 9 Army brigades and 11 Marine Corps battalions, we found that the experiences of pilot training are very different. Chief drivers, who are responsible for licensing and training drivers at Army bases, told us that competing priorities are reducing the time available for training. For example, many professional drivers have said that it usually takes a week to complete a night's training properly, but they completed their training in 4 hours.
We've made 9 recommendations that would allow the Army and Navy to operate tactical vehicles more safely and ultimately save lives:
As the next round of COVID boosters becomes available and flu season begins, what do we know about vaccination rates among adults? Last month, two Marines were killed and 17 injured - not in combat, but on a trip: Their truck overturned on the highway outside Camp Lejeune, North Carolina. And it's not as uncommon as you might think. We have found that as a parent or spouse of someone in the military, there are many opportunities to get that dreaded "call" and learn that your loved one was killed in an accident rather than in combat. And many - many - of incidents involving armored vehicles during training.
Lt. 1st Connor McDowell, a Marine Corps platoon leader, was on a training mission in a light armored vehicle at Camp Pendleton, Calif., in May 2019 when he hit an unmarked trench covered in brush. .
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Susan Flannigan: He yelled to his men "roll, roll, roll" and pushed his gun into the seat next to him under armor, but he couldn't get down in time and threw himself into the hole, he rolled over and broke. him.
Michael McDowell: At first I thought it was what happens when you train like you want to fight. But when we went to San Diego to get him back, I had a few moments of downtime at the hotel. And I googled "rollover" and "army". And I found out that in Pendleton a month before that, a Marine attacker had died in a rollover. So I went back to "army" and so on. And suddenly I saw a death row of military vehicles, of all kinds: Humvees, light armored vehicles, Bradley fighting vehicles. Then I realized that this was not an isolated incident. This is a management problem.
Michael McDowell: During training. I can accept people who die in war. But if you train in your own country and die needlessly from preventable injuries, that's a big problem that needs to be addressed.
To fix it, McDowell kept digging, and what he found was so profound and yet so routinely overlooked that it led to a scathing report from the Bureau of Government Accountability: The GAO found nearly 4,000 of these incidents in the Army and Marine Corps from 2010 to. 2019, which resulted in 123 deaths, nearly two-thirds related to rollover. And surprisingly, most of them happened during the day, on normal roads, and even in parking lots.
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But they don't "happen". The GAO concluded that there was often "improper care." That the drivers were not properly trained and the vehicles were not inspected adequately. Some cases involve more detail, as was the case of Christopher-Bobby Gnehm, a Navy sailor.
A year and a half later, in the summer of 2020, he and 15 Marines were training at Camp Pendleton in advanced attack vehicles - or AAVs - the largest armored vehicles used by Marines on land and at sea. His stepfather, Peter Vienna, said the Marines had no business sending the AAVs used in his son's training.
Peter Vienna: They were 40 years old and in very bad shape. And instead of wanting AAV to be in a better position than it was - there was more. they had received all that were in bad condition.
Peter Ostrowski: So they're sitting in the parking lot at Camp Pendleton, basking in the sun. They get worse.
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Petar Ostrovski: A week before the mission, we spoke on the phone. And he suggested that "AAVs sink all the time." They called them, and he called it a "floating coffin."
Two AAVs broke down and the vehicle chosen by their sons lost its engine. However, the mission was not over.
Peter Vienna: The safety of our boys was secondary to the completion of the training. This is not a war. It's not "I have to do it right away." This is training. There had to be a complete shutdown in many respects.
But 16 young men crammed into the AAV, as seen in a video one Marine sent to his father. Almost immediately it began to take water: ankle level; calf condition; seat position when the AAV system fails individually.
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Peter Vienna: The communication system was interrupted. They were in the dark, using the lights of their cell phones to try to see.
Peter Vienna: No. So there should be two safety boats in the water. They left with nothing.
This is an AAV on the sea floor in an underwater video we obtained through a Freedom of Information request. Seven men escaped alive. Nine did not. It turned out that many had received little or no safety training on how to escape.
Peter Vienna: There are so many things that don't make sense. They were in the water for 45 minutes, but they were still found at the bottom of the sea with all their equipment... on their heads, their life jackets.
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Peter Vienna: They didn't know what to do. Everyone was looking at each other, like "What does this mean, what are we doing?"
Leslie Stahl: You know, the Marine Corps did its own investigation, and the Marine Corps concluded that this, and I'm going to use a specific definition, "is preventable."
Peter Ostrovsky: The lack of knowledge from top to bottom, the lack of preparation, certainly the lack of responsibility to take care of our sons - it was scary.
The Feres doctrine prevents anyone from suing the military for anything that happens to service members in the line of duty, no matter how bad.
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Nancy Vienna: The biggest thing for me was that these young men were not safe. I have this vision in my head - the nightmare of an AAV crash. What were his last words?
It was one of the worst training events in Marine Corps history. But accidents continue to happen, and the GAO says less serious ones go unreported. Christian Avila Taveras, an Army combat medic, was training in 2018 when a car broke down and his car had to be towed.
Cristian Avila Taveras: Probably around 1:30 in the morning. It's dark, it's raining, it's muddy. The car we were pulling went down and hit us. And so we just turned around. And I was thrown out of the car, and the car fell on me, hurting me from the waist down.
His left leg had to be amputated above the knee. His right leg was so damaged that he spent the next two years in good condition, learning to walk again.
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And we learned that there was another rollover during training at the same place on the same day as Avila Taveras'.
The military has told us that there are fewer people killed by cars than last year,
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