When I saw this cover, I wanted to just reach through the screen and strangle somebody. Of course, as it turned out-the cover picture was nothing. What really should make anyone's head explode are the new "solutions" to the Command Screening process.
And for the record-I qualify on on two of the three-no one will ever accuse me of being a bully-so I think I know a thing or two about drinking and chasing tail- and the exercise of command there with. Plus to be honest, if Navy Times thinks today's crop qualifies as true drunkards, they clearly have set the bar so low, they would not know a real drunk if it rammed them in their back bumper.
Which, come to think of it, might be a good thing to have happen to more than a couple of Navy Times editors-and more than a couple of the witless flags who continue to propose these stupid ideas. Furthermore, glaring headlines like this one-exaggerate what is really a minor problem.
Yes there are drunks and playboys who get through "the process"-I'm proud to call some of them friends of mine. What you probably don't remember very well-is that they also flew airplanes, drove ships, and guided submarines through destroyer screens from time to time. Many of them did it quite well, as a matter of fact. More than a few of them were somehow still able to inspire loyalty among their squadron mates. Or has that basic fundamental part of the Navy service escaped Greenert, now that he has a lineal number of 001?
Furthermore-for the most part, and the record pretty well shows this, generally most of them cared for their units and cared for them very deeply. What they didn't care for-in the slightest-was your twisted and sick view that they had to toe in the way of an idea of what is "moral" and what is not.
Or does the prospect of the blatant hypocrisy of your position-is itsomething you can clearly ignore. Especially for every firing that you do have-you have probably about three more acts-that are not-and will never be detected. When you have a Navy where a guy can fuck another guy in the ass, married or single, with our blessing-but a guy can't fuck a woman with a condom without getting axed-you lost the moral high ground a long time ago.
Want to stop firing so many CO's? Instead of mucking up a screening process that is not generally broken, why not stop being so obsessed with who and what they do off duty? There are civilian laws to deal with what happens outside the gate, the Navy doesn't need to add to them.
And whatever you do-for God's sake-stop trying to pretend that the Navy is somehow "a moral profession". By definition, it is not. An organization whose root purpose is to execute-in the aggregate-the mass murder of literally thousands of one's fellow human beings is not, by any rational definition of the term "moral". No matter how much it accomplishes as a "global force good.
Now that preceding sentence is not-in any way shape or form-saying that there should not be rules and regulations. There have to be rules and regulations. I've been clear that there are redlines that cannot be crossed. But lets define those lines in a more clear and practical way, shall we? Especially when you have the "diverse" institution you have now. How about , in a Navy where "morality"-at least as defined by the UCMJ-is now a relative term anyway. ( or am I just imagining that a homosexual Sailor, by definition of the word "homosexual" is violating the Sodomy statute ( as well as great number of male v female Sailors. 😉 )-why not go back to the old tried and true method to gage Naval regulations. Namely, "what type of behavior really gets in the way".
A man a lot smarter than me wrote:
Then, after 1989 and the Soviet Union’s collapse, the Navy fell into an unchallenged peace so profound that we could reflect deeply on topics considered to have been trivial in the past. Our best minds were turned loose to busily pursue previously “other” issues, while the government tried to find a new global strategy to inform our military’s mission. Then, this rising tide was immeasurably spurred by the 1991 “Tailhook” debacle, which set the stage for dramatic social change. We had no enemies except, it seems, ourselves. Overnight, everything was on the table.
So has the metric for success as a commanding officer changed since the 1980s? Certainly. Mission accomplishment took a distant back seat to myriad other considerations because we could suddenly afford it. Has the “standard,” which the CNO assured us in August will continue to be enforced, changed? No. But when you change the variables, new results are assured.
The so-called zero-defects mentality that emerged in the mid-1990s greatly expanded what might be measured against the unchanging standard of perfection. Beginning in the 1990s, a DUI became a death penalty for officers seeking command. You could be a superb warrior, but if your Sailor was arrested in Japan, you were humiliated. COs were scourged if they didn’t meet unrealistic retention goals. An overweight captain was doomed, regardless of any other consideration. What changed was what, on any given day, would be measured against the standard of perfection.
While no electronic records related to CO firings exist before 2000, the San Diego Union Tribune has quoted sources in the Naval Personnel Command saying “nearly every commander fired 50 years ago got into trouble for running the ship aground or hitting a pier.”
Mission accomplishment got the standard of perfection applied to it in the past. Not so much today. According to the same source, “changing social standards mean more wires to trip over.” Indeed, there are captains in command now who have professionally survived collisions at sea and failures to pass major inspections. Those are metrics against which we are currently not willing to fully apply the standard, for whatever reason.
But we are absolutely willing to apply the standard of perfection when it comes to a captain’s handling of his mixed-gender crew. ( Skippy comment-somehow the word "hers" never quite gets the same attention, celebrated female firings notwithstanding)
Now that same author goes on to note that there are people who get through the screening process that have no business doing so.Here is a news flash-they will continue to do so. Oral Boards and written tests won't solve that.-you will just get people who test well. The selection board is a human process-a compromise-that like it or not sometimes makes mistakes. In fact I submit to you that this "new" process will actually get you more bullies, especially if they are female. That is why you have other tools-including firing people.
How about trying a solution that they tried 30+ years ago? Keep people doing their primary warfare specialty ( flying, sailing, submarining) for the entirety of their sea tours till they reach the time to screen for command. Have community leaders who brief the records and let community reputation have more meaning in the selection process than JPME, Diversity awareness or DC tours. There is no substitute for experience-the career path laid before our folks today does not put a premium on that. You have folks showing up to Department head tours with barely 1400 hours-when I went to my department head tour I had almost 2700 ( And yes its true I was a whore for flight time-if you were not flying, what was the point of being in the Navy after all?). Thanks to IA's, disassociated tours and other workarounds for nonexistent problems, quite simply you are not "saving" enough in the experience bank so that when people do assume command the don't have that experience to draw on. Three tours of three years flying, floating or submerging should be the minimum-not the exception.
On other thing I think needs to be looked at seriously, is having the Navy admit it was wrong to want younger commanding officers. Move promotion control points from O1-O6 back by at least a year. The goal is to have more folks showing up to their first operational units at the rank they should be, Ensigns; and in the process buy some more time to get those three sea tours of three years done-and get the post graduate degree they will need.
And while you are pointing fingers-why not point more than a couple of fingers at those who created this situation in the first place?
Casual observers—those who have never served in a fully integrated ship’s company—seem convinced that men and women can serve together in ships with utter disregard for one another’s sex. That sounds ridiculous, because it is. It only sounds sensible to people so determined to make something work that they are able to discount fundamental human nature. Simply put, you cannot put men and women in a small box, send them away for extended periods of isolated time, and expect them not to interact with one another. They’re like magnets being put into a box and shaken—they stick. It is what has kept our species going for 250,000 years.
There are two possible outcomes here. First, we can continue to enforce the standard, ratcheting up the pressure on captains and ships to asymptomatic levels. At least a standard is set and enforced, and the CNO himself has said that “you’re not going to change the standard, just because the number may be getting high.” A scorched-earth policy is supportable as long as it is consistently applied without passion or favoritism. There will be losses, but those losses will grow to be accepted, just as collision and grounding are now.
The second, more likely scenario is that the Navy will grow weary of these embarrassments and find another path. While that may seem inconsistent (and it is), it is also more realistic. Time has a way of altering perception, and this hemorrhaging of COs makes us look embarrassingly unprofessional.
Cause and Effect
Given the trend in 2010 and liberally counting commissioned cruisers, destroyers, frigates, and amphibs at 150 units, that means that 4 percent of ship captains will have been fired. That is not 1 percent. More telling, if one only includes mixed-gender crews in the calculus, it is certain that the numbers are even more glaring.
The end of the Cold War set the stage for a wide-open-to-change era in the Navy. Certainly, the first key change, post-Tailhook, took place when CNO Admiral Frank Kelso mandated that women go to sea in our combatants. Then, in 2000, CNO Admiral Vern Clark (a SWO) decided that a major effort needed to be undertaken to create the resources necessary to remediate 50 years’ worth of underfunding in the Navy’s real-property accounts. The strategy chosen to effect this effort was to increasingly model Navy practices on more “efficient” industrial models and practices—change upon change, leading to unanticipated effects. One of those is that our surface fleet is in trouble. Another—and one that was certainly unanticipated—is that our captains are failing to handle the challenge presented by mixed-gender crews.
In the end, it all comes down, as Vice Admiral Balisle suggested, to causes and their unanticipated effects. It may seem like an excellent, timely, or even an unavoidable idea to integrate a ship. It may be the right time to integrate a submarine. It might even be the time, as the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs Admiral Mike Mullen (another SWO) suggests, to do away with the “don’t ask, don’t tell” policy. But to do so without the full and conscious awareness that there will be a cost, potentially high, at a variety of levels, is to abdicate responsibility.