Kurt Schlichter on the firing of Captain Crozier
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14 March 1757: Admiral John Byng is permanently relieved of duty
Schlichter was a Colonel in the Army and saw combat in both our sand wars. What he says here doesn’t, in my opinion, justify our now-former Secretary of the Navy’s publicly saying the same thing, but it does explain why Crozier was relieved of command.
Okay, about this USS Teddy Roosevelt captain…
No.
No, he’s not some sort of rebel hero who fought the power for his sailors and stuff because only he gave a damn about them. That’s crap….
I am not happy to see him get canned. I was an O6 myself, and I would prefer O6s, as a rule, not end up fired. But that was the only course of action available to the SecNav. The guy screwed up, big time.
To believe this CAPT Crozier guy is a hero, you have to believe stupid and wrong things which you should not believe due to their stupidness and wrongness.
You have to believe that the Navy “didn’t care” about sick sailors. Libs take this further to imply that the Navy “didn’t care” about sick sailors because that would have made Trump angry.
This is, as I said, stupid and wrong.
The Navy brass has several things to think about, and there is an order of priority among those things. The priority order is 1) the mission and then 2) the sailors. Notice the order? One of the unique aspects of the military is that it is one of the very few institutions where the lives of its members are expressly and deliberately subordinated to the mission. An aircraft carrier is a major strategic asset, almost incalculably major. And this captain wanted to take it offline. Now, that could have been the decision. Command is about making tough decisions, but it was not his decision. Once he gave his input to his bosses, what he thought meant nothing.
Nothing.
We elect a commander-in-chief to make those decisions. He delegates them in a clear order of precedence to his subordinates. So, CAPT Crozier was not defying admirals or even Trump when he decided he should make the decision. He was defying you and me.
The chain of command is a thing, as he found out when he got his walking papers. And it did not stop being a thing when he did not like the orders it gave him.
If your sailors are your number one priority, you frankly have no business being in command. The mission is the number one priority. That’s hard, and no fun, but’s true. And that’s not an excuse to abuse or neglect your men – far from it. But it is a recognition that you have a mission and that is your priority.
Corzier was the captain of the carrier. There was an admiral down the hall – literally – who was his boss as task force commander. Why did he not go to the admiral? Or maybe he did go to the admiral and didn’t like the answer he got. Your commander disagreed with you? Gee, welcome to military service. Salute and drive on.
There’s no scenario where he’s right on this.
Nor is there any scenario where sending that letter to 30 people outside his chain of command was even not the worst idea in the history of worst ideas. If he did not intend to get it made public, then SecNav was right in wondering whether he was naive or stupid. That letter should have gone to the task force admiral. Now, the SecNav has said publicly that he authorized Crozier to communicate directly with him. Putting whether that was a good idea or not aside, it could have gone to him (you should, of course, cc your boss in that instance) and not dozens of other people. The mind reels.
Equally troubling is the report that he never consulted his command master chief petty officer, the senior noncommissioned officer on the ship. This is inconceivable to me. Your senior NCO (mine was a command sergeant major) should be attached to the commander at the hip and part of every decision. My CSM would have known if I was planning to send out an email like that. Then he would have shut the door to his office (I never used my office because I was always walking around) and told me this was an idiotic idea and that I should not do it. That’s why you get a senior NCO to tell you when you are about to curb stomp your Ted Lieu.
I know his guys cheered him when he left the ship. Maybe this captain thought he was morally obligated to do what he did. But he was wrong. The dereliction of duty is not validated by the transitory emotions of your troops. He had to be relieved. Period.
