US Navy in trouble stemming from PC? By Bob McManus.

This time it happened in broad daylight. The guided-missile destroyer USS John S. McCain, after transiting the Strait of Malacca en route to Singapore, collided with an oil tanker three times its tonnage just after dawn Monday; 10 sailors went missing, and the warship later limped into port under its own power. …

The collision is the second in two months involving Arleigh Burke-class destroyers based in Yokosuka, Japan. Seven sailors died in June when the USS Fitzgerald was struck by a hulking freighter in the dead of night. The ship barely survived.

[The Navy’s preliminary report] found that the Fitzgerald’s duty-watch standers were effectively comatose at the time of impact …

The idea that two Navy destroyers — the legendary greyhounds of the sea, lean, swift, and agile — could be run down and severely damaged by lumbering merchant vessels within two months is preposterously unlikely. Yet it has happened.

Considering the Navy’s current state, it should perhaps not be as surprising as it is. Today’s Navy has far fewer ships than it needs to carry out its assigned duties; its sailors are over-deployed and under-rested; its equipment is often obsolescent, and it is emerging from eight years under the leadership of a Navy secretary, Ray Mabus, whose social-justice priorities almost always took precedence over tradition, morale, training, and operational readiness. …

The Navy has developed a serious pregnant-sailor problem. “A record 16 out of 100 Navy women are reassigned from ships to shore duty due to pregnancy,” reports the Washington-based Daily Caller News Foundation’s Investigative Group. “That number is up 2 percent from 2015, representing hundreds more who have to cut their deployments short, taxing their units’ manpower, military budgets and combat readiness.”