'The U.S. Navy has an integrity problem’

By
Capt. John Byron (U.S. Navy, ret.)

Best
Defense office of maritime ethics

"The
U.S. Navy has an integrity problem." So begins
a marvelous study of Navy commanding officers
fired in recent years. It's written by Navy Captain Mark Light, a student at
Army War College when he originally drafted this essay and now moved up on the
faculty at Carlisle. Naval War College Review just published an
edited version and well worth reading in its entirety.

Readers
of this blog have seen a tedious series of train-wreck
stories
about Navy Commanding Officers fired for everything from running
aground to friggin' in the riggin'. The body count between the study years of
1999 and October 2011 is at 101, a high and growing number and that includes
only senior officers, O-5 and O-6. Captain Light lays it all out, or at least
all that can be laid out, given that the data is often short on specifics on
the 'officially fired' and also excludes many situations in which the sacking
was effected through a short tour or backdoor transfer and so below
the threshold of an official detachment-for-cause. 

The
data shows an essentially even trend on the number fired for professional
reasons, but an ugly ramp up of personal or ethical misconduct. The Navy's
problem exists both at sea and in command ashore. Light notes both an increasingly
high standard in the Navy and the effect of modern information technology and
social media etc. on both the ease with which situations are aired and the
visibility they then get. Mixed-gender crews do not seem to be
a factor ... but the vestiges of an archaic Navy 'culture of the service' do
seem to play. 

So
too do the cultures of the three main warfare communities of the Navy: Naval
Aviation, typified by Top Gun shenanigans; the Surface Navy, modeled after
Captain Bligh's BOUNTY; and the Submarine Force, an enigmatic
Silent Service no outsider can penetrate. He's got something there: the Navy's
three warfare cultures are enormously powerful and persist through wars and
reforms both; not all they hold dear is positive for the Navy or its
mission. 

Captain
Light closes with three recommendations to reverse the trend:

Establish a sense of urgency.
Set the standard.
Improve the metrics.

This
is a rock-solid review of a serious Navy problem by a serious Navy
professional. Bravo Zulu. 

And
where are the equivalent studies from the other Services? Does the Navy do it
better? Do the other Services have such excellent leaders that firing is seldom
called for? Or do they lack the integrity that holds those in command to an
unwavering high standard and makes sure that the rest of their leaders know it?
Captain Light tells me that at his war college 'nobody can figure out how to
come up with data like mine for the Army or any other Service.' Why not?