“Learning from others’ mistakes is far smarter than putting your own lads in body bags” — Former Defense Secretary and retired Marine Gen. Jim Mattis.
The abrupt firing of the popular commanding officer of the virus-stricken aircraft carrier USS Theodore Roosevelt and the resultant resignation of the acting Navy secretary will be an object lesson in military leadership that will likely be the subject of war college classes for years to come.
The tale of two leaders — Capt. Brett Crozier, who sounded the alarm that his crew needed to be evacuated faster to prevent deaths, and Thomas Modly, the Navy’s top civilian who accused Crozier of “betrayal” in engineering the leak of his damning email — have some parallels.
Both men believed they were acting on principle. Both then faced criticism for perhaps doing the right thing the wrong way, and both lost their jobs, but only one lost his reputation.
And therein lie the lessons in leadership offered by the sorry episode that left the Navy with a public relations black eye. To wit:
Fortune favors the bold but not the rash. Modly was infuriated, feeling he was blindsided by a memo written by Crozier pleading for help that ended up in the San Francisco Chronicle and embarrassed the Navy leadership. Now, in war, when you have lost confidence in a commander, you need to take quick, decisive action.
But, in the case of the Roosevelt, there was nothing to be gained by firing Crozier immediately and against the advice of senior military officers, who urged Modly to wait for the facts to be determined by a thorough investigation of who said what to whom.
The carrier was in Guam with most of the crew disembarked and clearly would not be going anywhere for weeks, despite the Navy’s dubious insistence it could deploy on short notice if needed.
If an investigation determined, as Modly believed, that Crozier deliberately went outside the chain of command to undermine his superiors, there would have been plenty of time to fire him before the ship went to sea again.
Lesson: Act in haste; repent at leisure.
Emotions can cloud your judgment. Ironically, Modly accused Crozier of allowing his emotions to color his judgment, and then he let his emotions get the better of him. He promptly boarded a government Gulfstream jet, flew 8,000 miles to Guam, and delivered a profanity-laced screed to the crew of the Roosevelt, berating the sailors for giving their beloved commander a rousing send-off, after he was relieved of command, calling Crozier “either too naive or too stupid to command a ship.”
After at first defiantly insisting he stood by every word, Modly, on his arrival back to Washington, was informed by Defense Secretary Mark Esper that he would have to apologize.
He then half-apologized, saying he did not believe Crozier was “naive” or “stupid” and instead then reiterated his accusation that Crozier deliberately “sent his alarming email with the intention of getting it into the public domain.”
As calls for Modly’s head grew louder, he was allowed to “volunteer” his resignation. He then had to go into isolation for foolishly exposing himself to the coronavirus on board the ship.
Lesson: Insincere nonapologies can be worse than no apology, so, when you’re in a hole, stop digging.
Nuance is not your friend. Modly’s case against Crozier was based on the principle that, in order to relieve an officer of command, all that is required is a “loss of confidence.” The officer in question doesn’t necessarily need to have done anything wrong. It’s enough not to have done enough things right or even the one thing right at a critical time.
Modly’s justification for relieving Crozier of command hinged on the idea that he panicked in urging that almost all of his crew be evacuated from the ship and that he used poor judgment in putting too many operational details in an unclassified email that was distributed too widely to remain secret.
It’s a concept that’s well understood in the military, as Chairman of the Joint Chiefs Gen. Mark Milley said on Fox the day after Modly fired Crozier. “When he loses trust and confidence in a ship’s captain, then that’s it. It’s target down,” Milley said.
But Modly misjudged the optics of firing an officer who seemed to be fighting for the lives of his crew.
Lesson: If your defense depends on a highly nuanced argument, from a public relations standpoint, you’re sunk.
Knowing what the right thing to do is not the hard part. Doing the right thing is the hard part. Crozier, too, faced a dilemma. Convinced he had not pushed hard enough to get his sailors off his virus-infected ship, he knew he now had to do something dramatic to light a fire under his superiors.
He drafted an email that went to the three admirals above him in the chain of command and their executive officers in which he “respectfully” requested assistance, noting “all efforts to date have been inadequate and are unnecessarily putting sailors lives at risk.”
In the email, Crozier took responsibility for “not demanding more decisive action” when the ship first pulled into port but said, “If there is ever a time to ask for help, it is now regardless of the impact on my career.”
In a detailed action plan attached to his email, Crozier pleaded, “We are not at war. Sailors do not need to die.”
As of this writing, one sailor from the ship has died, and Crozier, who was among the more than 700 sailors on the Roosevelt to test positive for COVID 19, is awaiting word on whether he might be reinstated as the ship’s skipper.
Lesson: If you’re worried doing the right thing will cost you your job, you’re probably not the best fit for that job.
Jamie McIntyre is the Washington Examiner’s senior writer on defense and national security. His morning newsletter, “Jamie McIntyre’s Daily on Defense,” is free and available by email subscription at dailyondefense.com.
