A lecture delivered at the US Navy Memorial Foundation—2001
THE RISKS AND PLEASURES OF BEING HELD RESPONSIBLE FOR ONE’S PROFESSIONAL JUDGMENT
Chatting with a sharp-looking Lieutenant Commander, a surface type, recently arrived in the Pentagon from sea duty, I asked the young professional, “How soon will you go back to sea after this desk job?” “Oh, they offered me an early command at sea,” came the answer, “but I turned it down. Everyone told me I was better off in this hot E-Ring job than taking a risk in command so early in my career.”
Ah, the old accountability problem—fear of failure: make a mistake in command and it’s all over. One’s career, we’re told, is safer ashore. Always disappointing, this is anything but a new phenomenon. Tales of officers who turned down command are a narrow but well-populated pool in the ocean of sea stories about ship’s captains. What troubles is the kernel of new truth. There is something increasingly unsettling to many of us, former captains, current captains, and wannabes, about command.
Is this right? The heart of the Navy is at sea. Our best and brightest ought to relish command, the sooner the better. If they can’t invest real joy in that pivotal role, then they are certain to make a bad job of it. Fearful captains make for unhappy crews and bad warships. If this antique business of accountability is confusing the next generation of our leaders, we ought to deep-six it.
And why is shore duty safer, anyway? Is there something about the working relationships, the politics, up inside these staff hierarchies that can confer an immunity not available to the commanding officers who actually take the Navy to sea? All the more reason to discard this fossil.
Before chucking the practice over the side, we might look to see exactly what accountability is. The occasional drama of a captain fired or a disaster examined in a military hearing shows only the tiny tail to a much richer and more complex apparatus. As we look at the full picture, we may conclude that the practice of military accountability is indeed in tatters, but less from old age than modern misuse.
The dictionary has nothing to frighten our lieutenant commander: “Accountability. The quality or state of being accountable; especially: an obligation or willingness to accept responsibility or to account for one’s actions.” In fact, it is not so much the actions as the decisions behind the actions. Accountability is about judgment, especially the personal judgment of those entrusted with lives, missions, and our hugely valuable, hugely destructive war equipment. Nowhere in the military is that individual judgment more clearly on view than in a ship’s captain. If we are going to understand accountability we need to start there.
To get the whole view in contemporary colors, let us look at the different ways an officer in command can experience accountability today. Let’s imagine that our lieutenant commander accepted the orders and now commands a surface warship. How does one in command navigate the risk-reward voyage of accountability these days?
Like a good navigator who constantly checks the ship’s position by shooting bearings on different objects, our commanding officer can triangulate by looking in three directions: to the formal machinery of our Navy as a military organization; to the informal, cultural norms of our profession; and to the expectations of our citizen bosses—the voter, taxpayers, and families from whom flow our charter, our funding, and our crews.
Although we are going to focus on the danger, accountability, like navigation, has its pleasures. Remember, accountability is spelled T—R—U—S—T. Being trusted by your crew and your chain of command, and trusting yourself in command, are the real joys of command, the reasons why one asks for the privilege again and again. Of course there are great risks, but nothing counterbalances those better than trusting that the successes of your crew are going to be noticed as quickly as a mishap.
Institutional Accountability
The Navy runs on paper and that is where institutional accountability is to be found-in the welter of directives, checklists, and procedural guides that constitute Navy SOP. An individual CO can deploy a few simple questions as she or he exercises authority day by day:
The first is technical jeopardy: Are my crew and I doing things correctly? I’ve never forgotten the lecture I got from my first Chief Petty Officer on my first day in the Navy: “Son,” he said, “There is the right way, the wrong way and the Navy way. I will show you the Navy way!” Nowadays we have procedures for everything, including checklists to check the procedures and inspections to check the checklists.
We spot right here one of the problems of accountability in its modern clothes: today’s Navy has too many checklists, too many inspections to check the checklists, and too little reliance on the professionalism of the Chief and the Captain. The checklist and inspection mentality cultivates the exact opposite of the qualities of judgment in command we want to weigh in the scales of accountability. We risk creating accountants, not captains.
Of course, there is a balance. Our advanced machinery and complex, multi-unit operations demand precise execution. Under a skillful CO, meticulous observance of technical procedures will not snuff out the alert professional judgment that is the real barrier to catastrophe.
But Murphy’s Law—if something can go wrong it will—is especially powerful near saltwater. From time to time every CO, no matter how vigilant, will either charter an investigation or face one imposed from above, likely both. Investigations come in all sizes and shapes. They can be very public and political or very private and technical. Almost anyone in the chain of command can order one. The only constant is that a lot of trees are going to be turned into paper.
If the incident under the microscope revolves around The Navy Way an investigation can be quite useful. How did this ship steam out of the channel and into the mud? If a proper investigation concludes the CO neglected his navigation he is likely to be relieved “for cause.” The rest of us—after a moment of humility when we acknowledge that “there but for the grace of God go I”—are reminded of the importance of training a crackerjack navigation team. There is nothing for our lieutenant commander, an expert seaman, to worry about here.
In fact, our lieutenant commander CO, knowing that most safety precautions are written in blood and that the design of almost every piece of equipment in the ship incorporates the lessons of prior mishaps, will have a special regard for a well-run technical investigation. Today’s submariners honor the lessons of the USS Thresher disaster. The investigation of that 1963 submarine sinking led to rigorous new standards of submarine construction and repair which have kept generations safe ever since. Navy ordnance safety rules, accumulated through the meticulous investigation of every munitions accident, underpin an extraordinary record of fleet-wide weapons safety. What should worry our lieutenant commander is not the risk of one of these investigations but any sign that they were becoming less rigorous or that they could be manipulated for political purposes.
Unfortunately, that is exactly the trend we’ve seen. Big disasters—the very kind that need extra care to unravel—are increasingly being treated as political events to be managed by public affairs officers rather than professional puzzles for line officer experts to solve. Accountability gets trampled by the image-makers.
Recall the 1988 case when the cruiser USS Vincennes shot down an Iranian airliner. Because it was so spectacular a tragedy and because there were real risks that the abrasive government of Iran—then at war with Iraq—would take this as a deliberate act of war by the U.S., Joint Chiefs Chairman Admiral Crowe announced within a day that, from the information available to President Reagan, the Captain had acted properly in his belief that he was under attack. After giving the CO the highest-level support one can get, Admiral Crowe mentioned as a seeming afterthought that there would, of course, be an investigation. It was no surprise that the closely watched investigating team—which knew the answer before they started asking the questions—came to an inconclusive end. The CO stayed in command though even the mess cooks know that the only way to shoot down a civilian airliner is for there to be profound problems someplace in the spectrum of judgment, training, and system design.
Let’s move on. Every CO is keenly aware that lurking beneath administrative procedure is legal jeopardy: Am I acting legally? Could I be put on trial for what I am doing? A ship’s captain has huge powers but none outside the law. As the Marine Corps was recently reminded when a crewman blew the whistle after being ordered by the squadron CO to jigger aircraft maintenance records, nothing escapes a crew. Any shaving of the corners, any willful infringement of laws protecting individual rights can quickly ensnare the cavalier commanding officer.
Our lieutenant commander, who is as careful with the legal niceties as with the fine points of navigation, is not home free. Because lawyers are involved, the image management problem is even worse. Should something dire escalate toward court-martial a delicate creature like accountability will be trampled by adversary lawyers fighting to win in the press as much as in the courtroom.
In big cases, a media arms race swamps the old-fashioned, four-square court-martial. Our CO needs a high-powered (and very expensive) civilian lawyer who specializes in trial-by-image to go against the media-management experts the Navy will commit to the fight. Fight? Yes. Remember those staff politics? Without a Big Enemy around like the Soviet Union, the only battles waged by admirals and generals are Washington battles for money and prestige. Collisions and explosions out in the fleet can risk huge programs and many careers unless they can be pinned wholly on the CO.
There is a second problem with legal procedures. Because they are adversarial, our lieutenant commander could counterattack with claims that the chain of command failed to support the ship, that the problem was rooted in bad training, bad guidance, bad equipment, bad information, bad something from on high. In the newest mutation, the staff hierarchy finesses those risks with an Article 15 Arabesque.
Gripping as a trial may be, there is not much a courtroom can teach us about accountability. Truth and justice often get bruised and a fragile creature like accountability is certain to be trampled. Recall the spectacle in an Army court martial when what was ostensibly a trial of a senior sergeant’s accountability for personal behavior in high office became merely a mud-fight as each side tried to dirty the other. The trial illuminated nothing about standards of conduct. If not before a judge, where can we find accountability? Our tour now takes us to the institution’s inner sanctum-to the Bureau of Naval Personnel and job jeopardy. Here is where each commanding officer experiences accountability most viscerally: Can I be removed from command right now? The answer is a definite, unequivocal, Yes! And not only removed, but removed summarily. Anytime. 24/7/365.
There need be no warning, there is no procedural protection. A simple loss of “confidence,” which need not be explained, need not even be written down, is all that it takes for a senior to remove a junior in command. (Our lieutenant commander was right, this is a dangerous business.)
Why? Because that is the way the system works. Indeed, it is the way the system must work. The BuPers Manual makes it crystal clear that one has no hold on command at sea beyond that allowed by the trust and confidence of her or his chain of command.
From time to time, someone will contest this. In the Vietnam era, the Arnheiter case led to a great flap at the end of which Lieutenant Commander Arnheiter, discovered to be free-lancing combat engagements, stayed fired and his chief defender, Captain Alexander, who was attempting to use the press to lever the Navy, lost his own orders to command battleship New Jersey. By sticking to their guns about standards of conduct in command Navy’s leaders did a lot to buttress accountability in the fleet. Since the case involved conduct in a war zone some especially important, core values were at stake.
Much as it might seem arbitrary and capricious, the “confidence clause” in one’s orders to command is legally sound. (See a long article by JAG Commander Roger D. Scott in 1998 in the Military Law Review. CDR Scott finds, both in the Constitution and in military necessity, rock-solid legal justification for this right of peremptory removal.
To this point in our survey of the machinery of accountability we can draw some early conclusions:
- Investigations and trials may be useful, but they do not deal well with individual accountability.
- These institutional mechanisms do not function well when there is lots of publicity and public controversy.
- We should be able to hang our hat on the elegant simplicity of professional trust. Navy’s accountability procedures are strongest when they are nothing more than the chain of command affirming or withdrawing its confidence in a commander.
But can we trust that chain of command? Admiral Kimmel is often defended on the grounds that he was a scapegoat for higher ups. From time to time that charge is still heard today-indeed that seems to be the standard tactic of an officer who takes “the system” into court.
We have been shooting accountability bearings on various procedures inside the formal institution. Let us now swing around and orient ourselves by the informal, cultural norms of the profession. That is where we can look for an answer about the trustworthiness of the chain of command itself.
Professional Accountability
To see how cultural norms in a profession can be distinct from but no less powerful than the formal mechanisms of the organization, look at another institution, NASA, much in the news the last few days. The investigation of the explosion of the Shuttle Challenger laid that problem ultimately on a management climate—we would call it a chain of command—which had become overconfident and slack in its safety procedures. Or consider the Marines. We all know that every Marine, young and old, wakes up every morning with one first, piercing thought: If I am not absolutely perfect today, it could be the end of the Marine Corps! That is accountability. At some point early in their career, each new Marine buys into that culture and, in an important way, remains an accountable Marine for the rest of his or her life.
We Navy officers also have a strong professional culture, if perhaps one with less drama. Of course, we sub-divide ourselves into different tribes-aviation, submarine, surface, intelligence, and so on. When we look for attitudes about accountability we need to be alert to some subtle differences among these strongly self-socialized groups.
In general the service reputation of an aviator centers on his skills and accomplishments in the air. So too, for submariner, although the solo, undersea operations and classified missions of submarines create a culture in which the “silent service” talks mostly to itself.
You would probably agree with me that we could expect an aviation admiral to almost instinctively keep the operational skills and combat leadership potential of a subordinate front and center if there is a question whether that subordinate should continue in command. And, to be a bit indelicate, we would probably hedge our bets a little if that admiral up inside the chain of command were a submariner—not knowing whether the senior officer would react as an operational officer or as a Rickover—school, checklist uber alles man.
But I wonder if this operational ethic is eroding. Let me illustrate this concern with my own tribe—the surface community. Many of my fellow ship drivers have worried in print for a decade or more that the surface community is developing a shore duty, careerist orientation. This would be following the “…From the Sea” strategy so far ashore that reputations hang mostly on success in Washington. In such a climate, command at sea becomes more a ticket punch than an end in itself—a “careerist” problem. A smaller fleet means fewer command slots and great pressure to shorten command tours in order to squeeze more officers through the bottle neck.
Why should this concern us today? Because accountability radiates through the Navy from the individual commanding officers of combat units at sea-that is what makes us different from a container ship line. And accountability will not radiate anywhere if it is blanketed by a chain of command which treats command at sea as something to be done for the shortest possible time and with the least possible risk between jobs in Washington.
I will leave it the historians here today to judge whether the command climate in Admiral Kimmel’s time had itself lost some of its sea-going combat edge and therefore was lax in supporting him.
One final, current example may help underscore the crucial role played by our professional culture. Last Friday in Bogotá the Congress of Colombia passed a law which holds military officers and police accountable if any citizens in their custody “disappear.” The military fought this law for eleven years. It was not until this year that the new commander of the Armed Forces, General Fernando Tapias, took up the cause and insisted that his officers be held to this standard so that there could be no blurring of the lines between the military and the assassination and kidnapping squads of the paramilitaries and the guerrillas. We want to make sure in the American military that we are never required by law to do what our professional culture should make automatic and instinctive.
Now let’s finish this exercise in professional navigation by getting a fix on accountability by looking in a third direction-to the American people themselves.
Public Accountability
In the American Navy, the bedrock of accountability is the notion that a commanding officer and those in the chain of command are also responsible down—to the crews for their safety and well-being. This precept derives directly from our long-standing tradition of the citizen-soldier. Our Founding Fathers explicitly rejected the European tradition of a professional officer caste that put its own stature and survival above that of troops drawn forcibly from the peasantry. Instead, in our democracy the military leader’s authority over his troops is explicitly linked to a parallel responsibility to them as fellow citizens. Remember, accountability is spelled T-R-U-S-T. There is no better sign of this trust than reenlistment. I am sure there are many in the audience today whose happiest Navy memories are of reenlistment ceremonies where sailors and their families reaffirmed that trust. I’m sure I’m not the only old timer here today alarmed at today’s low reenlistment rates. When our crews start voting with their feet we need to listen very carefully.
Of course, we have a piercing obligation to all of America’s citizen-taxpayers to uphold and exhibit those special qualities that make America’s democracy such a powerful and important example to peoples all over the world. We ignore Americans and their standards at our peril. We all recall the Tailhook scandals. The real damage of Tailhook was that the morality on display was exactly at odds with the public’s expectations of its military officers.
And here, in the public conscience, is where we can find another fatal weakness in the Kimmel case. What do those who support Admiral Kimmel plan to say to the families of those who died at Pearl Harbor under his command?
A Fix
Let us plot these various bearings. As we look around the horizon of accountability-to the Navy’s administrative framework, to our professional culture, and to our crews, their families, and their neighbors—are we sailing right up the center of the accountability channel?
While I can see several reasons to take heart, I also see some trouble signs—especially one very big one: the Iowa tragedy. I ask you to consider Iowa for a moment in this forum because, like Kimmel, the events raise profound questions of accountability. Unlike Kimmel, those accountability questions hang directly over the head of Navy’s leaders today.
I am not going to argue the Iowa case here. But I will ask you to recall it. In the ten years since 47 men died in Turret Two in battleship Iowa a great deal of new information has come into the record. If we invoke the benchmarks that I have outlined this morning you will find some astonishing problems of accountability. The information now becoming available to us points to:
- an investigation and review process that was deliberately misdirected by senior officers to avoid finding out what happened, seemingly in order to avoid budget cuts and ship reductions from Congress.
- a callous, deliberate campaign which—ignoring all the facts—not only branded one sailor as a mad killer and cruelly attacked his family with deliberate leaks of false information to the press, but misrepresented the deaths to the other families, then turned on the entire ship’s crew and trashed them as well, and finished by sending two other battleship crews into combat in the Gulf War without alerting them to the toxic hazard that had caused more than half the deaths in Iowa. And,
- a professional culture which accepted and defended these illegal acts, even to the point of lying under oath to the Congress about them.
In my view, Navy will never get back on track in the ethics department until these terrible, terribly unprofessional, and very uncharacteristic wrongs have been righted. The public needs to be able to see our Navy for what it is: a service full of honorable officers living ethical, accountable professional lives.
Future Challenges
Let’s finish by looking ahead. As this wonderful Navy of ours steams into the future, what kinds of accountability problems lie ahead? Here are just two of the many new challenges waiting for the next generation of Navy commanders:
- First, the chain of command is becoming fuzzy. When the Iowa crew and I sailed in the Straits of Hormuz during the Iran-Iraq war, my embarked commander at one time was an Air Force General. And he was working for an Army general in Florida. In Bosnia and Kosovo we see chains of command today that mix officers from many different countries and many different military cultures. We are going to have be very careful to safeguard our own accountability standards in these new settings.
- Second, the boundary between military and civilian is being erased. Our ethics and the laws of war are organized around the idea that the military folks are kept carefully separated from civilians. But new forms of conflict and new, long-range weapons intermix the two. Recall from the air strikes which mistakenly attacked civilian trains in Serbia and the Chinese embassy in downtown Belgrade during last Spring’s air war against Milosevic. It is going to be very difficult to untangle such mistakes in the future. We do not have international, cross-service procedures or habits that equip us to run such problems to ground and fix them so they do not happen next time.
What can we do to be ready for these demanding, non-traditional stresses on our professionalism?
Recommendations
Accountability is quality, not a product, so signing out new directives will not have much effect. My sole recommendation is that you each think about accountability and help encourage a vigorous spirit of accountability in our Navy-indeed, in all our Services.
In recent years I have spent a great deal of time talking with senior military officers and government leaders in several of the world’s trouble spots. In Central Asia I meet with officers who until a few years ago were part of the Soviet army. Now they are trying to build new, independent democracies. In the Middle East I work with the Chairman of the Jordanian Joint Chiefs of Staff-a military with a long record of supplying peacekeepers to international problem areas. And in Colombia I am working with military officers and civilian leaders committed to trying to bring a just and durable peace to a country which has been at war for decades. In every working visit to every one of the places I see again how supremely important is the model of the U.S. military-the military of a democracy. I have come to believe that our standards are probably our most important product. When we deploy a Navy battle group we are deploying a wonderful, powerful example of democracy in action.
Nothing makes that example shine brighter than our culture of accountability. Nothing will tarnish us faster than becoming casual about accountability. You can each help safeguard the “iron principle” by helping those in command today remember the central importance of accountability.
Thank you, I look forward to the discussion and to learning your own views.