The Navy’s rash of firings has stirred special anxiety, however, with some officials and analysts characterizing the problem as a leadership crisis.
Since January, the Navy has booted a dozen commanding officers and temporarily removed a 13th, pending an investigation. At that pace, the Navy will match the record total of 26 commanders it fired in 2003.
“It’s a phenomenally high number,” said Norman Polmar, an Alexandria-based naval historian who has been an adviser to several top Navy officials. “There is something seriously wrong.”
He said the trend is a clear sign that the Navy’s screening process for promotion is flawed. “Perhaps we don’t have the best and brightest,” he said. “It’s also the naval leadership’s responsibility,” he said, to ensure that commanders are qualified and to articulate appropriate standards for officers.
Navy officials said they have been consistent and rigorous in holding their commanders responsible.
In a telephone interview, Navy Secretary Ray Mabus said he didn’t think the firings illustrated a broader problem, noting that only a tiny percentage of the roughly 1,500 commanding officers in the service have been affected. About 285 of those commanders are in charge of ships and submarines; the remainder oversee various agencies in the Navy.
“We hold absolute standards of conduct, and if you breach those, you’re going to be relieved,” he said. “But I don’t see a pattern, and I don’t think it’s an epidemic in that sense.”
After the record number of sackings in 2003, the Naval Inspector General conducted a review of terminations over the previous five years. Although the review found that personal misbehavior was the largest single cause, it found “no systemic factors relating to the increase,” such as shortcomings in the Navy’s promotion system.
Some officers and analysts suggested that the rash of inappropriate relationships stemmed from the Navy’s continuing adjustment to the presence of women on ships. “Many commanding officers didn’t deal with women when they were junior officers, and now they have to,” Polmar said.
The Navy opened its entire surface combat fleet to women in 1994 and began training female officers to serve on submarines last year. Overall, women make up about 15 percent of the active-duty Navy.
But Roughead, the chief of naval operations, scoffed at the idea that gender integration was to blame. “I’ve never heard anybody say, ‘I wouldn’t have strayed if there were no women on this ship,’ ” he said.
Of the 29 commanding officers fired since last year, three have been women.
Cmdr. Mary Ann Giese, the commanding officer of the Naval Computer and Telecommunications Station in Bahrain, was relieved of command Aug. 21 after a Navy investigation found that she had engaged in “inappropriate relationships” with sailors.
The two other female commanders were terminated for excessively harsh leadership styles.
Capt. Etta Jones, commander of the USS Ponce, was fired April 23 after a sailor called an anonymous Navy hotline to report a “hostile command climate” while the warship was in the Mediterranean Sea to support the war in Libya. Navy investigators found that Jones endangered two sailors with a loaded weapon, failed to prevent hazing and cultivated “a hostile work environment permeated by verbal abuse, fear and intimidation.”
The Navy also had to intervene on the USS Cowpens, a warship operating in the Pacific, after sailors complained that their commander, Capt. Holly Graf, was verbally abusive, forced them to take timeouts like toddlers and created an “environment of fear and hostility,” according to a Naval Inspector General report. When the Navy dismissed her in January 2010, officials concluded she had subjected the crew to “cruelty and maltreatment.”
Staff writer Greg Jaffe contributed to this report.
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