The Navy says it is continuing to investigate what led to the USS Gettysburg firing at a Navy fighter in the Red Sea in the early hours of December 22.
The Pentagon has released few details of the accident, but the two F/A-18 crew members ejected seconds before the missile struck. They suffered minor injuries.
The USS Gettysburg is part of a strike group engaged in an attack on Houthi rebel positions in Yemen. The terrorist group has been disrupting international shipping since the start of the war in Gaza in 2023.
According to a defense official, the Pentagon is not providing additional detail on the downed fighter, citing the pending investigation.
The ship was outfitted with the latest version of the AEGIS weapons system, which enables the crew to monitor the airspace, like air traffic control. AEGIS also handles the ship's weapons systems.
"A lot's going on, and it all is supposed to be coordinated by AEGIS," said Steven Wills, a former naval officer who works with the Center for Maritime Strategy. "Something must have happened - whether that's a computer problem, an electrical problem, or a human problem, or a combination of all of those."
At the time, the newly revamped Gettysburg had been in the Red Sea for less than a week. The ship provided air defense for the carrier strike group.
It's the first ship to deploy from a group of vessels in a controversial years-long program to extend the life of the aging Ticonderoga-class cruisers.
Congress ordered the Navy to keep the cruisers in the fleet, though the ships suffered years of deferred maintenance after the Navy heavily used them over the last 20 years, said Shelby Oakley, a director in the Government Accountability Office's (GAO) Contracting and National Security Acquisitions team.
"They kind of went into this effort expecting them to not be in great shape, but then realized it was even worse than expected," Oakley said. "And then they took a number of actions that I think contributed to the cruisers getting in worse shape throughout the effort."
In a recently released report on the modernization, GAO found the Navy cut the number of required inspections in half. The Navy also didn't fine contractors for substandard work, even after a gunmount on Gettysburg was initially installed at the wrong height. The ship's crew told investigators that they found more problems with the electrical systems and propulsion systems as they prepared to deploy in September, Oakley said.
"Some of the missteps that the Navy took continued to contribute to maintenance problems and continued lack of understanding about what it would take to bring these ships back," she said.
GAO concluded the Navy wasted $1.84 billion when 11 cruisers were scheduled to be modernized in 2015, though only eight went through the process and only three are scheduled to finish the maintenance process and return to the fleet. The Navy told GAO that it hasn't committed to deploying the 34-year-old Gettysburg again after the end of its current mission.
Accidental shootdowns are rare. The last one happened in 1988, when the cruiser USS Vincennes — equipped with an earlier version of AEGIS -- misidentified an Iranian commercial airliner, killing everyone on board, Wills said.
"The people watching the display thought they were looking at a descending F-14 on a strike attack against their ship," he said. "But actually, it was obviously the Airbus airliner instead. So what you see on the screen can sometimes be deceptive."
And with the proliferation of drones and anti ship missiles, Wills says protecting commercial shipping in the Red Sea has become even more challenging than during the 1980s.
"There's definitely the potential that they thought they were seeing drones, thought they were seeing cruise or ballistic missiles, or both," Wills said of the Gettysburg crew. "And that's a very complicated threat environment."
Even so, the F/A-18s are supposed to show a distinct radar signature. A malfunction on board the aircraft could have stopped it from transmitting its identity to the cruiser, Wills said.
"I'm eager to see what the reports say," Wills said.
This story was produced by the American Homefront Project, a public media collaboration that reports on American military life and veterans.
