From my experience in dealing with safety incidents in the Air Force, there was likely a long chain of events that led to these accidents. I know the AF doesn't do things exactly the same way, but this principle tends to hold in my observations of all major system-level accidents.

Somewhere, somebody has been allowing themselves to take chances that they were continually allowed to get away with. After all, "Hey, nothing happened, right?" The next person trained thinks that the safety deviation is actually the process. Then, since they are now overseen by the original reckless person, they are willing to take further chances. This daisy chains, and if you are lucky, the accident will happen early enough that the chances aren't fatal.

An example: The Texas A&M bonfire tragedy. The investigators found that for years unqualified engineering students were being given final design approval authority while at the same time they were urged to constantly increase the height of the tower. Unfortunately, their accident caused the deaths of 11 people.

The perfect example for the Air Force is the 1994 Fairchild B-52 crash. In that case, you had the best B-52 pilot anyone ever knew taking chances and enforcing illegal procedures on younger pilots.

I suspect the same thing is happening in the 7th Fleet right now. And the commander of the 7th Fleet will have to figure out if his problem is in his training procedures or his ability to select commanding officers. We don't know enough about MCCAIN yet, but in the case of FITZGERALD, the skipper was new, so he had a lot of hold-over sailors from the previous commander. Now, he is solely responsible for command of his ship, but you can bet that whatever deficiency in training occurred, it was going on during his predecessor's time.

This is quickly becoming something the CNO needs to get his hands on.