“On the upside, everyone’s diversity and trans-awareness training is up to date.”
The Navy’s Cultural Ship Is Listing
The service is trying to do too much with too little public support, as the chain of command frays.
In the U.S. Navy, “shock trials” involve taking a warship to sea and conducting drills to see how well she might absorb the stress of combat. The Navy has lately experienced institutional shock trials: bribery scandals, collisions and sundry other public-relations nightmares. This week in San Diego the USS Bonhomme Richard, a $750 million amphibious assault ship, caught fire and burned for days. Earlier this year, Capt. Brett Crozier was relieved of command of the USS Theodore Roosevelt after writing a letter saying he needed to move his sailors off the aircraft carrier to arrest an outbreak of the novel coronavirus.
High-profile mishaps and unwanted publicity point to an overarching problem: For several years the Navy has been forced to do too much with too little, a debate that deserves wider attention. The Navy also seems to be suffering from a cultural dysfunction in the chain of command. To repair it, the Navy will need to reinvent its process for refining leaders and perhaps even the service’s broader mission. What’s at stake is the quality of American military talent that fights the next war—an eventuality that seems less far-fetched amid the tense mood of a global pandemic.
The 2017 crashes in the Western Pacific involving the USS John S. McCain and USS Fitzgerald still loom large in the Navy. An investigation revealed that Pacific fleet ships were going to sea with too little training and that crews weren’t skilled in the basics of sea navigation. Also implicated was the Navy’s “can do” culture—the propensity of naval officers to try to get the job done no matter the cost.
“Interviews revealed that, particularly among ships based in Japan, crews perceived their Commanding Officer was unable to say ‘no’ regardless of unit-level consequence,” according to a 177-page “comprehensive review” of the 2017 incidents. Vice Adm. Joseph Aucoin, who commanded the Seventh Fleet during the collisions, wrote in a naval publication that he’d “made clear” to his superiors “the impact of increased operational demand on training and maintenance well prior” to the accidents. Despite “explicitly stated concerns,” he wrote, “the direction we received was to execute the mission.” He was fired shortly after the accidents.
In 2015, a submarine ran aground in Florida, resulting in $1 million in damage. The Navy fired Capt. David Adams, the officer in command when the accident occurred. Journalist Hope Hodge Seck of Military.com made a public-records request for the 475-page investigation, the details of which she published in March. Capt. Adams had warned his superiors that his crew was too inexperienced to handle a precarious predawn return to port. He was nevertheless told to execute the mission.
The Navy’s tradition of firing commanding officers who fail is a venerable one, and the Navy has tried to absorb the lessons of these incidents. But as Ms. Seck notes, the sub mishap “came against the backdrop of a Navy grappling with a culture in which overworked and unready crews were regularly put underway in service of operational needs.” The careers of commanders like Capt. Adams can look like the casualties.
The Roosevelt is a confounding example. The Navy’s investigation makes a strong case for removing Capt. Crozier. He failed to rein in the ship’s senior medical officer, who, according to the Navy’s investigation, was predicting up to 50 virus deaths on the ship and threatening to take the medical department’s grim case to the press. (One sailor assigned to the Roosevelt died from complications of Covid-19.)
Yet the Navy’s report also details how the Roosevelt’s leadership became frustrated with its superiors at Seventh Fleet headquarters over the chaotic process of moving sailors off the ship. The fleet proposed moving thousands of sailors from Guam to Okinawa, Japan, nine hours away by plane. Capt. Crozier and his colleagues thought this impractical and had been asking to move the entire crew into hotel rooms on Guam, where the situation on the ground was deteriorating. Some sailors were temporarily quartered in open-bay gyms on Guam, and the number of cases among the crew was rising.
The ship’s top officers, the Navy’s June report says, “felt they had been distracted by numerous” requests for information “from higher headquarters,” and “that in the end, they were going to be made to stay in the makeshift berthing on Guam, long-term, which they viewed as worse than the ship.” The Navy insists Capt. Crozier’s eventual letter was unnecessary, but in a conflict at sea this culture of distrust could have been deadly. Whatever else was going on here, there was dysfunction in the chain of command.
In an organization as large as the Navy, improving the culture—an amorphous concept—is difficult. Adding to the challenge are the distinct subcultures found in Navy communities, from aviation to the submarine service. The “Fat Leonard” bribery scandal implicated many senior officers. The ship accidents took down more in the Pacific. Talent developed over decades went out the door in a matter of a few years.
“When you start adding all these things up,” says Rep. Mike Gallagher of Wisconsin, a Republican on the House Armed Services Committee, “what it all equals is a generation of our best naval officers has been wiped out.” Had China’s military “a decade ago decided it wanted to wipe out some of our most talented officers, it probably couldn’t have done a better job than we’ve done ourselves.”
The priority should be developing and retaining a new generation of naval leaders. Guy Snodgrass, a now retired Navy pilot, wrote an internal memo in 2014 while on active duty, later published in the Naval War College Review, stating that the Navy’s system of managing talent “tends to focus heavily on the quantitative needs of the service at the expense of retaining the right officers.” Mr. Snodgrass found that commanding officers who still had more potentially productive years ahead of them in the Navy were packing it in, and too many officers were leaving the ranks after 10 years, even with no pension. One complaint: Service members “perceive a withdrawal of decision-making power from operational commanders.”
Promotion is predicated on what service members call “hitting the wickets”—slaloming down a preset career path, getting the right experience in the right jobs at the right time. It’s an anachronistic process that doesn’t necessarily develop skills and sound judgment. Jobs tend to last 24 or 36 months, which erodes expertise and accountability on board ships that need those qualities in abundance to operate effectively. Service members ride out the consequences of decisions made by others who have left the building or even the Navy.
Operationally, the Navy needs a culture shift. Congress lacks the political will to fund the ever-expanding commitments with which civilian leadership saddles the Navy. The downward pressure on the military budget will be more severe as Congress spends trillions of dollars responding to the coronavirus.
Yet the Navy’s operational tempo is rising. Take the unsustainable pace of deployed aircraft carriers and their strike groups. The USS Abraham Lincoln strike group in January finished a 295-day deployment, the longest of any carrier since the end of the Cold War. (“While her extension was the best decision we could offer to support the demand for forces,” Navy leaders told Congress in March prepared testimony, “it does not come without consequences,” such as longer and more expensive maintenance.) The carrier USS Harry S. Truman recently completed two deployments in close succession. Another carrier, the USS Dwight D. Eisenhower, last month set a record of 161 consecutive days at sea without a normal stop in port for a pause due to the coronavirus.
The Navy in June had three carrier strike groups operating in the Pacific, an impressive show of force that may cost something later in overworked crews. The Navy and its political masters will have to decide whether the priority is “presence”—being on patrol everywhere—or “war fighting,” a distinction Mackenzie Eaglen of the American Enterprise Institute makes to me.
One promising development is candor from Navy Secretary Kenneth Braithwaite, a retired rear admiral and former ambassador to Norway, who told senators at his confirmation hearing earlier this year that the department was in “rough waters” due to “a breakdown in the trust of those leading the service.” He invoked the late management guru Peter Drucker, whose insights about corporate management perhaps apply in war: “Culture eats strategy for breakfast.”