From the start of nearly all Navy training, be it Recruit Training Center Great Lakes, the United States Naval Academy, or Basic Division Officer School, Navy leaders are taught one major guiding principle: Sailors First. Every sailor is precious to us, and without their trust, we can accomplish nothing. The issue with this maxim is that Navy leadership fails to buy what they’re selling, at all levels of leadership. The crushing operational and administrative demands of a continuously growing U.S. naval fleet has lessened the appetite for career risk that commanders are willing to assume on behalf of their sailors. The myth of “mission essential” pits commanders against their sailors, forcing them to justify any reduction in readiness or operations, whether at sea or shore, to their chain of command. If these trends are allowed to continue, America’s trust in its nation’s military and the leaders that govern it will diminish.
The nature of a pandemic is that it is all reaching and indiscriminate. The impacts of disease and fear are seen at all levels. They are agnostic of nation, state, service, or creed. Military families are affected exactly the same as civilian families. Impacts to childcare, exceptional medical needs, low wages, housing, transport, to name a few, are all similar. What is different are the support systems in place. Navy medicine is a far wider safety net than the majority of the public has in place, and federal wages ensure that sailors won’t go without pay while the economy experiences a recession. In fact, the U.S. Navy has been enacting new policy nearly every day to ensure displaced sailors affected by the Secretary of Defense’s (SECDEF’s) stop order movement are minimally affected on a financial level. Weighing the Navy’s response in policy at this logistics level would lead one to believe that they are doing a great job taking care of their sailors, and in a lot of respects, they are. Much has been and is being done on an administrative level to ease the pain for sailors and their families. Operationally, this is not the case.
In the upswing of a crisis which, at the time of this writing, is expected to claim 100,000 to 240,000 American lives, the U.S. Navy is conducting business as usual. Ships must go to sea, and the units that support them are expected to continue operations. This is not unusual. What is unusual is the gross disregard for quarantines and CDC guidance, the Navy’s policy to leave isolation and quarantine policy up to the individual commander based on their impacts to mission, leaving too much leeway for a commander to enact inadequate guidance to mitigate the spread of COVID-19. Delegated leadership and flexibility of operations is one of the things that makes the Navy work. Decision making can be pushed to those commands that are impacted, and commanders decide how to approach and report that approach to their seniors. These senior leaders are taught to practice the principles of “calculated risk.” What happens when one of these leaders calculates the risk, develops a solution, and reaches out to inform his or her chain of command? More often than not, they are shot down, often publicly or in front of a group of their peers. Squadrons that cancelled travel have been chastised by their leadership. Squadrons that attempted to minimize operations have been told to continue business as usual. Training squadrons are still running at a full tilt. The nation is watching as Captain Brett Crozier, former commanding officer of the USS Theodore Roosevelt (CVN-71), illustrates these concepts for us. His pleas for help from higher authority, in the face of an active and accelerating viral outbreak on his ship, were met not with praise for his concern of his sailors and the resources he needed to enact the solution he presented, but with dismissive press conferences from the Vice Chief of Naval Operations, Chief of Naval Operations, and the Secretary of the Navy, and ultimately his firing for “a loss of trust and confidence.” Sadly, this is precisely the fear that drives commander’s decision making at every level. Instead of calculated risk, Navy leaders know that taking a tack that goes contrary to their bosses opinion will have this same result.
In naval aviation today, commanders are trying to be solutions-oriented. Numerous aviation squadrons have approached their commanders with requests to enact minimum manning to maintain operations and minimize the impact to sailors by impacting production or readiness. Most squadrons are shifting to an alternating shift plan to avoid contact between halves of their squadron. But when they try to cut back on operational commitments, the company line they receive in response is “All of naval aviation is mission essential.” But if everything is mission essential, then nothing is.
The mission as it stands now is readiness. We are not currently at war, although there are tensions the world over that forward deployed forces keep in check. The current mission of the U.S. Navy is forward presence operations, visiting ports to wave the flag and sailing through contested waters while closely monitored by a team of lawyers. Operational squadrons daily concerns are passing inspections, flying their allocated flight hours, and filling check boxes that indicate they are mission ready. Those last little check boxes are important: they get reviewed and briefed at the highest levels. What do those boxes reflect? They paint a picture of squadron readiness. They determine whether or not a squadron’s reportable units (crews, pilots, and aircraft) have completed certain training that label them ready for deployment, specifically whether they have trained enough to mitigate the risk of “chopping” or crossing into a new fleet area of responsibility. What missions are truly mission essential then? Is it basic safety, flight currency, tactical training? Is it teaching student naval aviators the very basics of flight? In the face of the defined and very real threat that COVID-19 represents, you would be mistaken to think that these requirements would be relaxed in order to protect our most vital asset: our Sailors.
The impact of these poor applications of CDC guidance, quarantine, and isolation will be felt shortly. Much is made of the idea that sailors are healthier and fitter than the average citizen, but what is not accounted for is the communities these sailors are traveling to and from, every day, by coming to work as normal. Sailors are interacting with unknown quantities at work. The true cause and mechanism of spread of COVID-19 is reassessed daily. It is now presumed to spread asymptomatically. These sailors then return to their homes, their daily lives, where they interact with countless individuals and push these unknowns back into the society that the Navy is tasked to defend. Naval bases in fleet concentration areas are in the heart of major metropolitan cities, cities that are already expecting massive impact. By continuing operations as normal, our leadership puts the lives of civilians at risk. Is this the legacy the Department of Defense (DoD) will leave in history? Will we continue to risk the health of sailors and their families in the name of operational readiness?
The entire Navy heard about Captain Crozier’s firing through a press conference this week. Through all of the flowery words, one piece stood out: A man who willfully and willingly put his career on the line to protect his people from a viable threat to their well being, after coming forth with an actionable and well thought out plan, was relieved of his command. His lack of professionalism, portrayed by allowing his letter to be leaked, cited as the cause. Acting Secretary Thomas B. Modly’s words were hollow, although he acknowledged the exact impact he was trying to avoid. “To our commanding officer’s, it would be a mistake to view this decision as somehow not supportive of your duty to report your problem’s, request help, protect your crews, challenge assumptions as you see fit.”¹ Actions speak louder than words, and DoD leadership’s actions speak loud and clear. If you value your naval career, don’t dare put your sailors first.
The author is speaking on his own behalf, and the thoughts and opinions expressed in this article are his own. They are not necessarily those of the U.S. government, Department of Defense, or the U.S. Navy.
Endnotes
- Thomas B. Modly. “Press Briefing with Acting Secretary Thomas B. Modly and Admiral Michael Gilday” Navy.mil; Secretary of the Navy Press Briefing with Acting Secretary Thomas B. Modly and Admiral Michael Gilday
