Captain Courageous
One of the few news items to break thru the tsunami of COVID-19 coverage is a related story — the relief from command of the skipper of USS Theodore Roosevelt. There has been a lot of coverage of the courageous Captain vs. the feckless Navy/administration. Trump is probably at fault somehow. At one level, the coverage makes sense, but there is another dimension of the story that has been totally overlooked.
We’ll start with a little background.
The Battle of Midway opened a whole new chapter in the history of naval warfare. The aircraft carrier replaced the battleship (and its ancestors — the dreadnought, ship-of-line, galleon, trireme and war canoe) as flagship of the fleet. Prior to aircraft carriers, ships flung projectiles at enemies within site of each other and launched marines onto opposing decks or shores. Aircraft carriers allowed for the projection of a lot of deadly force almost anywhere on earth, while standing well away from enemy ships or shore weapons.
The nuclear powered fleet carrier is a technological marvel. It is an airport and small city afloat. It travels surrounded by a flotilla of support and protection — supply ships, antiaircraft ships, patrol aircraft above and attack submarines below. Command of a carrier is the pinnacle of the career of a line officer. Such officers are groomed in graduate schools and command supply ships as underway training before being entrusted with the Navy’s crown jewel.
Any commander of any Navy vessel is obligated to notify the Secretary of the Navy in the event his/her ship is hampered for any reason in the performance of its assigned mission. That notice has the highest priority and it is communicated with the highest level of secrecy. In my day, it was called a CasRep (Casualty Report).
The question at hand is why the commanding officer on one of the linchpins of American national security would send a memo over an unclassified channel to 20+ people about a significant percentage of his crew being at risk, thereby impairing the ships ability to fulfill its mission. Such a communication could easily have been intercepted by Russia, China, Iran, North Korea or all of the above. Even if the memo had not been leaked to the press, the Captain was sure to get fired. A man with 25+years of highly regarded service, and on track to be an admiral, commits professional suicide.
I can easily understand that the Captain’s initial communication with the chain of command did not result in an appropriate and timely response, and he therefore felt obligated to push harder. Bureaucracy is bureaucracy. It is always invested in routine and usually responds like the proverbial deer in the headlights when presented with a crisis. HOWEVER, any naval officer who wears four gold stripes on the sleeves of his dress blue uniform, and occupies the most prestigious post at sea that the Navy has on offer, has lots of friends and mentors in high places. He could have found one or a few senior admirals to whom he could have communicated the urgency of his situation in a totally secure manner. Why he chose to go public is a complete mystery to me. We may never know the answer, but it is a question that should be asked.
I surely hope the Captain recovers from his bout with the virus and I surely hope some of our crusading reporters do their job. Reporting should have more colors than black and white.
