Cold War Indian Ocean Presence
Operational logs show that during the initial phases of expanded carrier operations in the Indian Ocean, nearly 18% of all planned combat and surveillance sorties were aborted. The cause was critical mechanical failures driven by extreme heat and the vast distances from established naval repair depots. This single statistic reveals a fundamental truth of the U.S. Navy’s projection of power into the region. Ambition consistently outpaced its logistical and material support capabilities, creating a decade-long crisis of readiness.
The initial American naval footprint in the region was light. Following the British announcement in 1968 of its intent to withdraw forces from East of Suez, the United States inherited a strategic void. The U.S. Navy’s Middle East Force (MIDEASTFOR), established in 1949 and based out of Bahrain, was a modest presence, typically comprising just one command ship and two rotating destroyers. Its mission was primarily diplomatic, a function of showing the flag to reassure allies. Archival records show that the 1971 British departure, coupled with the 1973 oil crisis and the introduction of long-range Polaris A3 missiles that could target the Soviet Union from the Arabian Sea, forced a strategic recalculation in Washington. The region was no longer a naval backwater. It was a central theater in the Cold War.
This shift triggered a deliberate and rapid expansion. The cornerstone of this new posture was the development of a remote coral atoll, Diego Garcia, into a major naval and air facility. A 1966 agreement with the United Kingdom provided the legal framework. In January 1971, U.S. Navy Seabees from Naval Mobile Construction Battalion 40 (NMCB-40) arrived to begin construction. They built a communications station to monitor Soviet fleet movements, dredged a deep-water lagoon for anchorages, and laid down a 12,000-foot runway capable of handling heavy bombers and transport aircraft. The Naval Support Facility was formally established in October 1977, transforming the atoll into a forward-deployment site and logistical hub. This was a direct response to the growing Soviet naval presence, whose 8th Operational Squadron steadily increased its ship-days in the ocean, gaining access to ports in Somalia and Yemen and directly shadowing U.S. naval movements.
The geopolitical chessboard was defined by oil and ideology. Over 60% of the world’s oil shipments transited the Indian Ocean, passing through chokepoints like the Strait of Hormuz and the Bab-el-Mandeb strait. The 1979 Iranian Revolution and the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan that same year presented what Washington viewed as direct threats to these sea lanes. U.S. naval operations intensified. Carrier battle groups, once a rare sight, began continuous deployments. A close review of operational logs shows that after 1979, maintaining at least one, and often two, carrier battle groups in the region became standard procedure, stretching naval resources thin. The establishment of the Rapid Deployment Joint Task Force in 1980, a precursor to U.S. Central Command, institutionalized the military’s focus on the area.
This surge in operational tempo placed immense strain on an underdeveloped support infrastructure. The long distances from primary supply depots like Subic Bay in the Philippines or from the U.S. mainland meant that ships operated at the extreme end of a tenuous supply chain. A carrier battle group requires a constant flow of fuel, munitions, spare parts, and provisions. A failure of a catapult steam system on the USS Nimitz (CVN-68) or a breakdown of an arresting gear engine on the USS Constellation (CV-64) could not be quickly rectified. Spare parts had to be flown thousands of miles, often requiring multiple air-to-air refuelings for the transport aircraft. The establishment of the Afloat Prepositioning Force at Diego Garcia in 1980, a squadron of ships loaded with Marine Corps equipment and supplies, was a direct attempt to mitigate these logistical shortfalls. The maintenance and medical challenges were severe, as tropical heat and humidity accelerated corrosion and material fatigue on aircraft and ship systems.
1960s Hospital Ship Deployment
A close review of operational logs from the mid-1960s reveals a significant point of inter-service friction regarding advanced medical support for nascent Indian Ocean operations. It does not center on the deployment of a hospital ship, but on the explicit denial of one. As the United States projected power into the region with deployments like the Concord Squadron carrier task force in 1964, naval planners faced a serious medical logistics problem. The area was thousands of miles from established naval hospitals. Sickbays aboard the carrier and its destroyer escorts were equipped for routine ailments and limited combat casualties, not a mass-casualty event like a major flight deck fire or boiler explosion. On-scene commanders, tasked with contingency planning, logically requested the assignment of a hospital ship to provide a robust, floating medical facility capable of handling a large-scale disaster.
This request was summarily rejected.
The decision from Washington was a direct consequence of strategic prioritization. By the mid-1960s, the Department of Defense viewed the escalating conflict in Vietnam as the military’s primary effort. The Navy’s two principal hospital ships, the USS Repose (AH-16) and the USS Sanctuary (AH-17), were both pulled from the reserve fleet, modernized, and recommissioned specifically for service in Southeast Asia. The USS Repose was recommissioned in October 1965, followed by the USS Sanctuary in November 1966. Both ships, each with a capacity for over 750 patients and equipped with multiple operating rooms, advanced diagnostic tools, and large medical staffs, were deemed indispensable assets for supporting the high volume of combat casualties generated by operations in Vietnam. From the Pentagon’s perspective, diverting one of these platforms to the Indian Ocean for a contingency that had not yet occurred was an unacceptable risk to the active war effort. The Indian Ocean was an economy-of-force theater; Vietnam was not.
This strategic calculus forced a different and far more complicated logistical solution dependent on inter-service cooperation. In the absence of a hospital ship, the burden of major medical care shifted from the Navy to the Air Force’s Military Airlift Command (MAC). The resulting doctrine was one of stabilization and long-range evacuation. A critically injured sailor from a carrier in the Arabian Sea would first be stabilized in the ship’s sickbay. From there, the plan called for a helicopter transfer to the nearest viable airfield, which could be hundreds of miles away. Only then would the patient be loaded onto a MAC transport aircraft, likely a C-141 Starlifter, for a multi-thousand-mile flight to a major military hospital, such as Landstuhl in Germany or facilities in the Philippines or Japan.
This air bridge was a chain of potential failures. It demanded constant coordination between Navy fleet schedulers, Air Force airlift planners, and medical personnel from both services. A single aeromedical evacuation mission was a complex sequence of events. It relied on the availability of aircraft, clear weather, access to airfields in foreign nations, and specialized flight nurses and medical technicians to keep patients alive during the long transit.
Joint Medical Command Deficiencies
The failure of Operation Eagle Claw in April 1980 was more than a tactical and political disaster; it was an exposé of the profound weaknesses within the U.S. military’s joint operational structure. A close review of the Holloway Report, the exhaustive post-mortem commissioned by the Joint Chiefs of Staff, details crippling deficiencies in mission planning and command and control. While helicopter failures and sandstorms were the immediate causes of the mission’s abort at the Desert One staging area in Iran, the medical plan was a disaster in waiting. It was symptomatic of a systemic inability to integrate the distinct medical hierarchies of the services. The plan for casualty care was a convoluted, multi-stage process reliant on perfect coordination between Army Delta Force medics, Air Force flight surgeons, and Navy medical personnel aboard the USS Nimitz. There was no unified medical commander with the authority to direct assets across service lines. An Army medic treating a wounded operator at Desert One would have been operating under Army medical doctrine. The Air Force C-130 crew designated for evacuation had their own procedures. The final destination, the Nimitz in the Arabian Sea, represented a third, entirely separate medical system. Archival analysis of the planning documents shows no evidence of standardized medical records or even compatible radio frequencies for coordinating patient handoffs in real-time.
This was chaos by design.
The core of the problem lay in the very structure of the Rapid Deployment Joint Task Force (RDJTF), the parent command for the Eagle Claw mission. Formed in 1980 to respond to crises in the Middle East, the RDJTF was a headquarters element superimposed over existing service components. Each service retained its own logistical and medical support chain, optimized for its specific environment. An Air Force medical group was built to stabilize and rapidly evacuate casualties by air to large, fixed hospitals. Navy medicine was ship-based, designed for self-sufficiency at sea. The Army’s medical system was tailored for large-scale ground combat, with echelons of care moving with the front line. When thrown together in the Iranian desert, these systems did not mesh. A Navy RH-53D Sea Stallion helicopter taking off from the Nimitz was staffed by naval personnel, trained on naval equipment. The plan for Eagle Claw required them to transport and refuel alongside Air Force C-130s and embark Army special forces. After-action reports from subsequent joint exercises like BRIGHT STAR 81 revealed these same fissures. An Army paratrooper injured in a jump would be treated by an Army medic, who would then have to negotiate with an Air Force tactical air control party to arrange an evacuation flight, which might then be destined for a Navy ship. Each step involved a different command and different paperwork, burning precious time.
The absence of standardized procedures for receiving non-Navy casualties aboard naval vessels was a particularly dangerous point of friction. Aboard a carrier like the USS Nimitz, the ship's medical department was trained according to Navy regulations. Their casualty receiving protocols were designed for sailors and naval aviators. When the plan called for the Nimitz to receive potentially dozens of casualties from an Army ground force, it introduced a host of unresolved questions. Army and Marine Corps personnel used different medical record formats. Would an Army medic’s field medical card be understood by a Navy corpsman? Did the IV fittings used by an Air Force pararescueman match the equipment in the carrier’s sickbay? Who had the authority to make treatment decisions for a non-Navy patient? The failure at Desert One, where eight servicemen died not from enemy fire but from a ground collision during a confused withdrawal, was the ultimate consequence of this disjointed approach.
Littoral Zone Casualty Reception
Amphibious warfare doctrine from the 1970s and 1980s reveals a dangerous gap in medical planning centered on the challenges of the littoral zone. This near-shore environment, a mixture of shallow waters, unpredictable tides, reefs, and coastlines often devoid of ports, prevented large, deep-draft naval vessels from providing direct support. A carrier battle group or an amphibious ready group was forced to stand off, sometimes dozens of miles from the coast. This distance created a buffer zone for casualty evacuation. The process of moving a wounded Marine or soldier from a beachhead to a shipboard operating room became a multi-stage gauntlet, entirely dependent on smaller, more vulnerable platforms. A helicopter, like a Marine Corps CH-46 Sea Knight, was fast but highly susceptible to low-altitude air defenses and adverse weather. Its internal cabin was cramped, making in-flight treatment difficult. Finding a clear landing spot on a flight deck engaged in active air operations was a complex, time-consuming effort of deconfliction.
The alternative was by sea.
This meant relying on surface craft like Landing Craft Utility (LCU) boats or Rigid Hull Inflatable Boats (RHIBs). These vessels were slow and exposed. An LCU transit from the beach to the parent ship could take hours, with the casualty strapped to a litter, exposed to the elements, and subject to the constant, jarring motion of the waves. The physical transfer of the patient from the small boat to the large ship was another point of high risk. In anything other than calm seas, the small boat would pitch and heave violently against the hull of the larger vessel. Casualties had to be hoisted, often in a Stokes litter, by a deck-side crane or winch. After-action reports from joint exercises frequently documented failures in this process: near-drops of litters, delays caused by incompatible hoist fittings, and injuries to the naval personnel trying to manage the transfer on a slick, moving deck.
Specific difficulties for non-Navy units operating in these environments were systemic. A Marine rifle squad engaged in a coastal raid near the Strait of Hormuz operated under a completely different set of procedures than the Navy crew of the destroyer waiting for them offshore. The Marines’ organic medical support was a Navy corpsman attached to their platoon, trained in battlefield trauma care but equipped with only what he could carry. When that corpsman’s capabilities were exceeded, the evacuation chain began, and so did the friction. The Marine unit would communicate on Marine-specific radio frequencies, which often had to be relayed through a chain of command to even reach the Navy ship. The decision to launch a boat or helicopter for evacuation rested with a naval commander who had to weigh the risk to his assets against the condition of a single casualty he knew little about.
The logistical hurdles in transferring these casualties were baked into the system. Aboard a Spruance-class destroyer or an Oliver Hazard Perry-class frigate, the ship’s sickbay was a compact facility run by a handful of hospital corpsmen, designed to handle routine illnesses for a crew of a few hundred sailors. It was not equipped to function as a trauma center for Army or Marine ground forces. An Army Ranger wounded during a coastal reconnaissance mission would arrive with injuries from small arms fire or explosives. The Army medic who stabilized him used an Army-issue field medical card to document treatment, a format unfamiliar to the Navy corpsman who would receive the patient. The IV bag hung by the Army medic might use a different catheter gauge or drip set than the standard naval stock, forcing a time-consuming change-out of equipment upon arrival. The very litters were a source of conflict. Marine and Army units used litters that did not always lock into the welded sickbay bunks on Navy ships, requiring casualties to be physically held in place or secured with makeshift straps during rough seas.
1971 Friendly Fire Aftermath
Operational logs from the 7th Fleet reveal the precise anatomy of a tactical catastrophe in the South China Sea. In the pre-dawn hours of a moonless night in 1971, a U.S. Navy guided-missile destroyer, on station providing naval gunfire support, acquired a fast-moving surface contact on its AN/SPS-10 radar. The contact was small, low to the water, and on a vector that suggested a potential infiltration run toward the coast. The destroyer’s Combat Information Center (CIC) attempted to challenge the vessel via radio and query its Identification Friend or Foe (IFF) transponder. No response was received on either channel. With the contact closing on a restricted fire zone and matching enemy profiles, the ship’s commander made a decision based on the available data. He authorized the engagement. The destroyer’s 5-inch/54 caliber main gun mounts opened fire, sending a salvo of high-explosive shells across the dark water. The target, a U.S. Coast Guard Point-class patrol boat on a separate, uncoordinated interdiction mission, was struck by the initial volley.
The mistake took mere seconds.
The circumstances leading to the fratricide were a case of inter-service procedural failure. The Coast Guard cutter, operating under the operational control of the Navy’s coastal surveillance effort, Operation Market Time, was patrolling a sector adjacent to the destroyer’s assigned zone. A breakdown in communication between the destroyer’s task force command and the Coastal Surveillance Center in Da Nang meant the destroyer’s CIC plot did not reflect the patrol boat’s presence. The cutter’s own IFF transponder, a temperamental piece of equipment in the humid maritime environment, had failed earlier in its patrol. This common occurrence was not reported up the chain with sufficient urgency. On the destroyer’s radar screen, the 82-foot patrol boat presented a radar cross-section nearly identical to that of a steel-hulled enemy trawler. Lacking a positive friendly identification and with the vessel proceeding toward a coastline rife with known enemy activity, the rules of engagement guided the commander toward the fatal conclusion.
The immediate aftermath was a frantic reversal from combat to rescue. As dawn broke, helicopters were launched from nearby naval assets to the patrol boat’s last known position. They found the vessel crippled and ablaze, its surviving crew, a mix of U.S. Coast Guardsmen and an embarked South Vietnamese Navy liaison officer, suffering from severe burns, shrapnel wounds, and blunt-force trauma. The influx of multi-service casualties was directed to the nearest floating hospital, the USS Sanctuary (AH-17), which was on station in the region. The Sanctuary’s medical staff, accustomed to receiving battlefield casualties directly from helicopter medevacs, was suddenly confronted with a mass casualty event born of friendly fire. The ship’s flight deck became a scene of triage as UH-1 Huey helicopters landed, offloading litter patients. The ship’s crew, trained primarily for Navy and Marine casualties, had to contend with a patient load from a different service branch. This introduced immediate friction. Coast Guard health records carried by the wounded were in a different format than the standard Navy field medical cards, and the initial reports from the rescue teams were confused regarding the exact number and service affiliation of the wounded. The ship’s blood bank was heavily taxed, and multiple operating rooms were activated simultaneously to handle the complex orthopedic and soft-tissue injuries caused by the 5-inch shell fragments.
Inter-Service Communication Failures
A formal investigation into the May 1987 attack on the USS Stark (FFG-31) details a sequence of communication failures, both mechanical and human. Patrolling in the central Persian Gulf, the frigate’s AN/SLQ-32 electronic warfare suite detected an Iraqi aircraft on a closing vector. The ship’s Combat Information Center tracked the contact, assuming it would follow the typical pattern of Iraqi reconnaissance flights and pass by. Standard procedure dictated radio challenges, which the Stark’s crew transmitted twice. No reply came from the Iraqi pilot. Aboard the frigate, there was no escalation of alert status. The official inquiry later revealed that the ship’s Tactical Action Officer failed to inform the commanding officer when the Iraqi jet locked its fire-control radar onto the ship, a definitive sign of hostile intent. General Quarters was not sounded. The ship’s primary terminal defense, the Phalanx Close-In Weapon System, remained in a passive state.
This was a complete breakdown of situational awareness.
The first Exocet anti-ship missile struck the Stark’s port side, just below the bridge. It did not detonate, but its unspent rocket fuel ignited a ferocious fire that immediately severed forward firefighting water mains. Seconds later, the second missile hit almost the same spot, penetrating deep into the crew berthing compartments before exploding. Thirty-seven U.S. sailors were killed. The blasts and subsequent fires obliterated the ship’s internal communication lines, plunging the forward third of the vessel into a state of isolated chaos. Damage control teams and first aid parties were cut off from each other and from the bridge, operating on instinct and training in smoke-filled, burning compartments. There was no central command and control for the initial internal response. Information was passed by runner, when it could be passed at all.
The process of identifying the dead and wounded became a desperate accounting effort conducted in near-total darkness. With internal phone circuits destroyed, knowledge of who was alive, wounded, or missing was compartmentalized within the surviving sections of the crew. A damage control team working in a forward passage had no way to communicate with a triage point being established on the fantail. The ship’s hospital corpsman, facing a mass casualty event far beyond the scope of a frigate’s small sickbay, had to make life-or-death triage decisions based on a trickle of inaccurate, delayed information. Initial casualty reports relayed to responding naval assets were confused estimates, hampering the ability of regional command to mobilize the correct scale of medical support. The flight deck was designated as the primary casualty collection point, but moving severely burned or wounded sailors through the mangled, smoke-choked ship was a physically demanding and hazardous task.
This lack of a unified information flow created critical failures in triage protocol. The ship’s medical personnel were forced to prioritize casualties as they arrived, with no clear overview of who else was still trapped or the severity of their injuries. The handoff to external support units introduced new layers of communication friction. While the initial rescue and assistance came from other Navy vessels like the destroyer tender USS Acadia, the plan for definitive care for the most severely wounded relied on the established aeromedical evacuation bridge to facilities in Europe. This required coordinating with U.S. Air Force assets. A Navy corpsman’s field medical card, filled out on the deck of a burning ship, had to be legible and understandable to an Air Force flight nurse aboard a C-141 Starlifter transport. The patient data, including treatments administered and drugs given, had to be verbally relayed between teams from different service branches during a loud, high-stress transfer from a ship or Bahraini airfield to the evacuation aircraft.
Unofficial Casualty Care Protocols
A review of ship-level medical logs and after-action reports from the Indian Ocean and Persian Gulf during the 1970s and 1980s reveals a pattern of systematic deviation from joint casualty care doctrine. The official multi-stage aeromedical evacuation process, dependent on Air Force C-141 Starlifter flights to Landstuhl, Germany, was often seen by naval medical teams as a bureaucratic death sentence for a patient in critical condition. The time required to request, schedule, and execute such a transfer often far exceeded the golden hour vital for surviving traumatic injuries. In response, shipboard medical officers and senior hospital corpsmen developed their own informal networks. Aboard a carrier battle group, this meant a ship’s surgeon on a frigate with a critically burned sailor might bypass the entire joint request chain, using secure voice radio to directly contact the carrier’s medical department to arrange an immediate helicopter transfer.
This was a calculated risk.
Such actions violated communication protocols and the established chain of command, but they placed the patient’s survival above procedural compliance. These unofficial transfers relied on leveraging personal relationships between medical officers across the battle group and the availability of non-dedicated aircraft. A helicopter like an SH-3 Sea King, whose primary mission was anti-submarine warfare, would be unofficially redirected from its patrol station to perform a medical evacuation between ships. This ad-hoc system was faster and more responsive, but it was also fragile, dependent entirely on the willingness of individuals to bend the rules and the availability of assets that were not officially part of the medical plan.
The development of improvised casualty evacuation methods became a necessity. During Operation Earnest Will, the mission to escort reflagged Kuwaiti tankers, the threat of mine strikes and small boat attacks was constant. The official response plan for a mass casualty event, such as the one that occurred on the USS Stark, was slow and ill-suited for the confined waters of the Persian Gulf. In the immediate aftermath of the two Exocet missile impacts, the ship’s own damage control and medical response was hampered by severed internal communications and destroyed firefighting mains. While official aid came from other Navy ships, the initial movement of the most severe casualties was often improvised. Analysis of similar exercise scenarios shows that units frequently drilled using any available vertical lift asset for CASEVAC. This meant a Marine Corps CH-46 Sea Knight returning from a coastal surveillance mission or even a small Army special operations helicopter might be flagged down for an urgent evacuation, regardless of whether it was a designated medical platform.
These methods were raw and unrefined. A wounded sailor might be strapped into a Stokes litter and hoisted into the unpressurized cabin of a helicopter not configured for medical transport, attended only by another sailor with basic first aid training. The handoff of the patient on the receiving ship’s flight deck was another point of high-risk improvisation. Deck crews, accustomed to moving cargo and munitions, had to adapt on the fly to handling a live patient amid the chaos of ongoing flight operations.
Ad-hoc solutions for treatment and transport were driven by deep-seated incompatibilities in equipment and procedure between the services. A Navy hospital corpsman receiving a wounded Army Ranger would be confronted with a field medical card in an unfamiliar Army format, forcing him to rely on verbal handoffs that were prone to error. The very litters used by Army and Marine units often did not properly lock into the retaining brackets on Navy sickbay bunks, requiring corpsmen to use duct tape or spare webbing to secure a patient in rough seas. Intravenous (IV) lines were another common point of friction. An IV kit used by an Air Force pararescueman might have different catheter gauges or drip sets than those stocked in a ship’s medical locker, forcing a time-consuming and potentially hazardous change of equipment for a patient in shock. To overcome this, corpsmen became masters of invention, fashioning adapters from spare tubing and consolidating patient information onto blank notecards.
Public Affairs and Operational Truth
A close review of the public statements following the May 1987 Iraqi missile attack on the USS Stark (FFG-31) reveals a study in crisis communication, one designed to project strength and control while obscuring a series of internal failures. The initial White House narrative, delivered by President Reagan, framed the event as a tragic, unprovoked attack on a neutral vessel, emphasizing the heroism and sacrifice of the crew. The official language focused on Iraqi culpability, the bravery of the sailors, and American resolve to remain in the Persian Gulf. Public affairs officers at the Pentagon and within the Navy reinforced this storyline, distributing press releases that highlighted the crew’s desperate and ultimately successful damage control efforts. This narrative was not false, but it was incomplete.
It was a story told in broad strokes of heroism to mask a picture of systemic breakdown.
The internal post-incident investigation, a formal inquiry led by Rear Admiral Grant Sharp, painted a profoundly different picture. The Sharp Report, portions of which were declassified years later, detailed a complete failure of the ship’s defensive posture. The frigate’s AN/SLQ-32 electronic warfare suite detected the approaching Iraqi Mirage F1, and the Combat Information Center tracked it, yet no effective action was taken. The ship’s Tactical Action Officer failed to notify the commanding officer of the approaching threat, even after the aircraft locked its fire-control radar onto the ship. The Phalanx Close-In Weapon System, the ship’s last line of defense against missiles, remained in a passive state and was never activated. General Quarters was not sounded until after the first missile had already hit. The official inquiry concluded that the attack was the result of a failure to follow established procedures and a profound lack of situational awareness within the ship’s command structure.
This divergence between the managed public story and the classified operational assessment forced a deep reliance on improvised solutions at the tactical level, particularly in casualty care. The official doctrine for handling a mass casualty event on a frigate was never designed for the reality of two Exocet missile impacts. The first missile, though it failed to detonate, severed forward firefighting water mains, rendering the ship’s built-in damage control systems useless in that section. The second missile detonated deep within crew berthing compartments, causing the majority of the 37 deaths and 21 injuries. With internal communication lines destroyed and established triage stations inaccessible, the ship’s hospital corpsman and surviving crew were forced to invent a casualty collection and treatment system on the fly. The fantail became the primary triage point, not because any manual dictated it, but because it was one of the few areas free from the fire and smoke that consumed the forward two-thirds of the ship.
The movement of the wounded was a brutal, ad-hoc process. Wounded sailors were carried through darkened, smoke-filled passageways by teams of their shipmates, with no central command and control to guide them. The ship’s Mass Casualty Plan, a documented procedure for such an event, was rendered largely irrelevant by the scale of the damage. This tension between documented procedure and practical improvisation continued during the handoff of casualties. The initial assistance came from other Navy vessels, but the most severely burned sailors required evacuation to specialized facilities, a process that relied on the Air Force’s aeromedical evacuation network. A Navy corpsman’s handwritten field medical card, filled out on the deck of a burning ship, had to be understood by an Air Force flight nurse during a high-stress transfer. Each step was a point of potential friction, a translation between service-specific protocols, equipment, and terminology, held together not by a joint doctrine that worked, but by the ingenuity of individuals determined to save lives in spite of the system.