are we taking advantage of the damage

Getting your Money’s Worth from Fat Leonard

This week I’ve done a small sampling at sea and ashore; CONUS and forward deployed – and I’m hoping to expand the sample here.

What am I interested in? Simple; are we taking advantage of the damage we inflicted on ourselves from the Fat Leonard scandal?

Why am I interested in it? Well, it (mostly) isn’t because the scandal has everything you would want in an adult after-school-special; alcohol, prostitutes, bribes, graft, extortion, adultery, potlatchesque gift giving … no … not for those reasons.

Something more simple.

In my small sample, I have come to find out that not only are people headed in to CDR Command+ and senior staff duty not receiving training on the larger ethical failures of leadership with Fat Leonard, there is no sharing of lessons learned, or even discussion of husbanding agent care and feeding.

It is almost as if Fat Leonard never happened. Surely this is isolated, but is it?

It seems you might get a little disorganized chat with the JAGs, but nothing you can use from the very real examples we have in Fat Leonard.

We have people going through multiple CO and senior staff tours (exactly where the ethical failures happened and will happen again) without even a Navy-led discussion of husbanding agent issues centered around where corruption is going to come from.

Now, my sample size is small, but the consistent, “I got nothing” or even “I’ve been told not to talk about it or ask questions about it” strikes me as nothing more than professional malpractice writ large.

Is this because we are embarrassed at the huge web of failure we had to the very senior levels? Well, I hope we are embarrassed, but that is even more reason to bring it out in the open.

As an institution, we should embrace our failure so we can learn from it and, by discussing it, inoculate future leaders from repeating the mistakes.

The next Fat Leonard is out there, and he’s waiting to have his picture taken with you. It would be kind of nice if those types of people never made it to that point, wouldn’t it?

If you have experienced good Fat Leonard training in the fleet, let us know in comments.

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