Today, the safety work on military vessels is
influenced by civilian approaches, regulations and codes. This influence
introduces important civilian lessons into naval vessel design, but can also
potentially be in conflict with military task solving. One regulation, which is
largely influenced by IMO codes, is the Swedish Military Ship Code formulated
by the Military Safety Inspectorate. Risk management could present an approach
for investigating if the civilian influence on the code leads to decisions and
solutions that hinder military task solving. IMO’s Formal Safety Assessment
(FSA) is a risk-based approach for such an investigation.
The effect of using IMO and classification
society-based codes for the design of
naval vessels has been found to assist in the engineering process and to
guarantee a basic level of safety. However, the civilian naval engineering
practices are not sufficient for guaranteeing survivability and thus safety in
military cases. However, there could be a potential conflict between the rules
that prescribe aspects of vessel use, and military task solving.
In 2010, the Swedish Navy introduced a new rule
re-defining the sea area of safe operation for respective classes of vessels.
The new rule is based on an EU directive developed for European passenger
vessels. The Swedish Military Ship Code is not intended to limit military
(wartime) operations. However, a Swedish naval vessel does (as most naval vessels do) always operate under
a basic readiness level and therefore under military conditions. The potential
conflict between rules that limit vessel use (rules for areas such as operations) and military task solving have
not, so far, been investigated.
The objective of the published article was to describe
the investigation performed and to focus on the meta lessons identified by
applying the FSA structure to a military maritime safety case. The
investigation analysed the safety level in the Swedish navy as a result of the
regulation on sea areas of safe operation. The objective of the described
investigation was to investigate the safety impact of the new sea areas given
the Swedish Navy’s concept of operation, staffing structure, and competence. An
additional objective was to determine if the rule is cost effective, and
whether, if needed, sufficiently low risk can be achieved by an alternative rule,
which has less impact on the Navy’s operations.
The investigation identified that it in the period
studied there have been safety issues leading to risks higher than negligible.
For the studied severe accidents, the identified risk levels are a result of
decisions made on-board when solving military peacetime tasks. However, the
quantitative analysis of the nine severe accidents shows that not only the human element affect the probability of an incident. Thanks to the military education,
training, organization and personal safety equipment severe incidents that involve high speeds, cold water and vessels lost or severely damagedalso often result in relatively
low levels of consequences. Such incidents would
typically lead to multiple fatalities for a civilian vessel.
The less severe incidents leading to injuries were
most often a result of maintenance work performed on-board independent of the
vessel operation. Therefore, in the material, there is a low number (<1) of
accidents per year related to the vessel operation with potentially severe
consequences and a higher number (>5) of accidents per year related to work
on-board leading to injuries.
An investigation in accordance with the FSA, as
performed in the described investigation, in qualitative terms analyses both
the effectiveness and the effects of the rule. Therefore, an analysis
can show
if a regulation affects safety in the manner intended and if there are other
means by which the regulation affects the operations. However, in order to reach high validity, the FSA approach needed to be
supported by more explicit support on uncertainty treatment and propagation and
by a peer review with strong contextual knowledge. The quantitative risk
estimated was not, and should not, be in focus.
The investigation particularly highlights the need for
an approach for analysing proposed safety changes both in terms of
effectiveness and in terms of suitability. In 2008, after the accident in which
Combat boat #848 was lost, the Swedish Accident Investigation Authority recommended
11 changes. One of those changes was to implement new sea areas of safe
operation according to the civilian regulation; in addition, there were several
regarding strengthening the crews’ risk understanding. In this investigation,
the recommendation to implement new sea area limitations is shown to be
problematic in several ways:
- the proposed changes would not have affected the accident with Combat boat #848
- the proposed rule to implement was neither understood nor analysed by the Swedish Accident Investigation Authority, and
- the proposed changes most likely affect safety culture negatively, as the changes prescriptive nature of safe and unsafe sea areas contradicts the general need to develop the crews’ risk understanding.
From this example, it can be identified that the
effectiveness of the proposed changes must be analysed by the Accident
Investigation Authority or by the Armed Forces. The result of an accident
investigation is a set of recommendations; however, these recommendations must
be analysed before they lead to new rules, particularly if the recommendations
affect operation types that the Accident Investigation Authority have limited
insight into. It must be ensured that new rules have the intended effect on
safety; this responsibility must be taken by the organization deciding the new
rules.
This investigation has shown that the recommendations
to change the sea area rule led to a rule that has very limited positive
effects, possible far-reaching negative effects and substantial operational costs.
The safety level for a vessel is a complicated
relationship between several factors including the vessel type, the quality of
the vessel’s maintenance and the vessel operation (seamanship). This finding is
also identified in this investigation. It is stated in earlier studies using
the FSA approach that “human error problems” can and must be included. However,
this study shows that human element
strengths also can and must be included, as they had an important impact on
the link from incident to consequence and are an important part of the
seamanship. The study identified that the high level of safety training of the
persons on-board was important to making sure that severe incidents often lead
to relatively limited or minor injuries.
An approach in accordance with the FSA structure is
suitable even for areas outside the IMO’s typical scope. The FSA structure does
not limit the approach to operational conditions as defined by civilian ships.
However, the analysis needs to incorporate operational knowledge suitable for
the area under study.
The military
vessels’ concept of operations differs from civilian ships in such way that
civilian safety rules can become irrelevant.
The case examined also raises many questions such as
about how to articulate the actual difference between civilian and military
contexts, especially in peace time; about how risk to individuals should and
could be compared to national security risks as a result of operational
limitations put on armed forces; and about how different types of hazards
combine to create risk. These types of questions that are dependent on the
connections between the organizations and technology under study and the
Swedish society in general are largely here left unanswered. However, answering
such questions without concrete examples easily becomes abstract and will
therefore not affect decision makers. The hope here is that the case studied
and described can be used as one
example that together with other suitable and complementing examples can assist
in making future conclusions that assist decision makers and increase the
understanding of applicability and validity of risk management in state safety
and security issues. However, it is unlikely that the perspective on risk
presented by the FSA alone can answer such important and complex questions.
Compared to traditional risk analysis of technical systems the FSA covers more
aspects of the socio-technical system studied. However, the analysis power
provided is not, and not intended to be, an approach that can be said to fully
represent risk and safety in socio-technological systems.
Also more specifically in relation to this case
further work, both in regard to how central parameters should be measured or
calculated and more overarching questions, is needed. In relation to the
definition of central parameters, it is important that such definitions (such
as how to calculate the number of ship years) are clear and communicated. Two
overarching questions that need further investigation are how risk limits in
relation to military tasks should be defined and how to define and assess
operational costs in general and quantitatively.
The extra risk introduced by antagonistic threats is
not assessed, and the crews have not been tested in relation to such
conditions. Therefore, the negative effects of the rule (as a result of the
civilian and commercial background), which reduce the crews’ need for
continuous risk assessment on-board, could be even more harmful to war-like
military operations than what is shown in the material studied.
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