@ Kennettheking "As a 'superpower' the US should hold itself to a higher standard than this......with power comes responsibility. And, yup, if they going go around killing people at will, then we may just as well be protected by the Chinese.....same thing isn't it?"
Yup you are right. Nobody should come close to a yank vessel.
"Without providing prior notice of the exercise, officers on Saratoga woke the enlisted Sea Sparrow missile team and directed them to conduct the simulated attack. According to U.S. Navy, certain members of the missile firing team were not told that the exercise was a drill, rather than an actual event.
As the drill progressed, the missile system operator used language to indicate he was preparing to fire a live missile, but due to the absence of standard terminology, it was failed to appreciate the significance of the terms used and the requests made. Specifically, the Target Acquisition System operator issued the command "arm and tune", terminology the console operators understood to require arming of the missiles in preparation for actual firing.
The officers supervising the drill did not realize that "arm and tune" signified a live firing and ignored two separate requests from the missile system operator to clarify whether the launch order was an exercise. As a result, shortly after midnight on the morning of 2 October,
Saratoga fired two Sea Sparrow missiles at
Muavenet. The missiles struck in the bridge, destroying it and the Combat Information Center, killing five of the ship's officers and injuring 22."
On 29 September 1994, some of the Turkish Navy sailors serving aboard the
Muavenet instituted legal action against the United States government. The action encompassed two wrongful death claims and 299 personal injury claims. On 20 February 1997, the
U.S. Court of Appeals affirmed a lower court ruling against them.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TCG_Muavenet_(DM_357)
This was the navy has been to two world wars. In all fairness there was at least one person with a clear understanding what he/she were doing which
conspicuously missing at
USS Vincennes (CG-49) in 1988.
Sadly no compensation has been offered.
Which USN Admiral has been quoted as saying " we had to simplifie and rewrite our manuals 3 times in a decade"
Then was it a coincidence that bold faced complex words begun to appear on comic book pages.