
The U.S. Navy wants to neck down the 18 configurations of ship control systems on surface vessels to help avoid collisions at sea, such as two separate incidents in 2017 involving the USS John S. McCain (DDG-56) and the USS Fitgerald (DDG-62). The collisions killed 17 sailors. "On the DDG-51 class alone, when we started diving a little bit more deeply, we found nine different variants of ship control," Capt. Scott Larson, the program manager for Surface Ship Readiness and…