Archives for April 2004

Strategy Page outlines some thoughts on the recent upward swing in the trend of Navy Ship Commanding Officers being relieved.

My parents, who live near Naval Station Jacksonville, Florida, were shocked when the Captain of the USS John F. Kennedy was relieved last fall. Many of their neighbors serve on the ship or at the nearby Naval Station. Big news in a company town.

Read on:

The U.S. Navy is experiencing an extraordinary number of ship captains getting relieved from command. In the last 14 months, 23 captains have been relieved. That’s 5.4 percent of ship captains a year. At the end of the Cold War, in the late 1980s, the rate was about 3-4 percent a year. So why has the relief rate gone up 50 percent? 

Only a small percentage of reliefs have to do with professional failings (a collision or serious accident, failing a major inspection or just continued poor performance.) Most reliefs were, and still are, for adultery, drunkenness or theft. With more women aboard warships, there have been more reliefs for, as sailors like to put it, “zipper failure.” There may have been more than are indicated, as sexual misconduct is often difficult to prove, and a captain who is having zipper control problems often has other shortcomings as well. Senior commanders traditionally act prudently and relieve a ship commander who demonstrates a pattern of minor problems and who they “lack confidence in.” 

Read more at Strategy Page.

I finished reading Rick Atkinson’s excellent book In the Company of Soldiers, which will be reviewed in Sunday’s New York Times.

The book itself is not as engrossing or as interesting as his Pulitzer Prize winning An Army at Dawn, but it’s a fascinating read, particularly it’s profile of Major General David Petraeus.

For General Petraeus, ambiguity is everywhere, the very essence of command. How do you parse the difference between what can be done and what should be done? Even when Petraeus awards Purple Hearts to some of his wounded troops he lauds them for the fact that they ”walked point for our nation” while they ”performed brilliantly in countless ambiguous situations.”

Atkinson knew Petraeus before the war, and knew he would be, as it were, the very model of a modern major general. For starters, there was the sheer, riveting force of his personality. This West Pointer (class of 1974) is alternately described as ”smart, articulate, and driven” and ”intense, good-humored and driven.” Accidentally shot in the chest during a training exercise in 1991, he nearly died. But his surgeon, Dr. Bill Frist (now the Senate majority leader), operated for over five hours, and a friend remembers how Petraeus cut short his convalescence: ”He said, ‘I am not the norm. I’m ready to get out of here and I’m ready to prove it to you.’ He had them pull the tubes out of his arm. Then he hopped out of bed and did 50 push-ups. They let him go home.”