Published in the prestigious Sunday Outlook section of The Washington Post, this op-ed explores the failures of accountability in the aftermath of the tragic 1989 explosion in Turret Two of Battleship Iowa. Accountability throughout our society remains one of my primary concerns.
The Washington Post, November 24, 1991
Commentary and Opinion
A Former Captain Says the Navy Must Do More Than Apologize
TO HIS CREDIT, the chief of naval operations, Adm. Frank B. Kelso II, dealt forcefully with a troublesome chapter in the Navy’s history when he publicly repudiated the key finding of the investigation of the USS Iowa tragedy. Doing what no institution does easily, Adm. Kelso extended “sincere regrets” to the family of the man who the investigation had identified as the ship’s saboteur. Assuring the nation that a lesson had been learned, Adm. Kelso announced the adoption of a higher standard—one of “clear and convincing” evidence—to preclude future missteps.
So far so good. But even if the Navy is never able to. determine whether defective powder bags or a man-made detonation device caused the disaster, two key steps remain before the matter can be closed:
First, we need to go beyond the apologies to the families of the dead and redress the taint of incompetence unfairly inflicted on the living Iowa crewmen, on their families and on the Navy itself by the now three-times discredited investigation.
Second, we must refurbish the Navy’s great iron principle of “accountability”: that a ship’s commander and all of those up the chain are ineluctably responsible for their decisions and leadership as they exercise the life-and-death authority of military command.
At the time of the explosion on April 19,1989, the Iowa was five years out of mothballs, and for two of those years I was its proud captain. The 1,500-man volunteer crew were superstars of the Navy’s Atlantic Fleet Under crew leaders like Master Chief Bob Scott, they became a close-knit family who mo;ed from success to success: the Battenberg Cup as the top ship in the Atlantic Fleet; the president’s flagship for the International Naval Review in New York harbor; repeated fleet “E’s” for overall excellence. The ship became a magnet for quality sailors from all over the Navy.
At the same time, the Iowa began a strenuous regimen at sea to develop anew the classic arts of gunnery—all but forgotten in the missile age. Under Master Chief Chuck Hill, whose big-gun experience extended back to the Korean War, the crew polished safety procedures and tuned the massive turret machinery; Master Chief Steve Skelley, a treasure of gunnery history, coached them in gunfire-control techniques.
In the summer of 1987 the Iowa was dispatched to the Middle East, where the Iran-Iraq conflict had spawned the “tanker war” on shipping in the Persian Gulf. Assigned to fend off Iranian attacks on unarmed tankers frassing through the Strait of Hormuz, the crew noted that the Iranian forces invariably quieted down whenever the Iowa entered the combat zone. They ascribed this response to their well-publicised skills in precision gunnery.
In 1988, the Iowa’s crew returned from the gulf to their Norfolk home port, rejoining their proud families at the pinnacle of success. They had become a center of excellence for the fleet, a finishing school sending highly polished professionals on to duty throughout the Navy.
The tragedy happened a year later when, during a routine fleet exercise off Puerto Rico, a quarter-ton of propellant exploded bi the center gun of turret two, killing 47 crewmen instantly. President Bush flew to Norfolk to lead the nation’s memorial service, promising that the Navy would get to the bottom of what seemed to be an unfathomable accident. A national wave of sympathy enveloped the mourning families and stunned crew.
Then it all turned sour. As the investigation proceeded, rumors of homosexuality and insurance payoffs surfaced in the press. When released to the public, the completed investigation insisted that only a planted device could account for the unprecedented explosion. One of the dead sailors was named the likely perpetrator. The ship’s commanding officer testified that his crew had been beset by “dopers, marginal performers.”
The findings met a storm of criticism. The acrimony washed over the battleship’s crew and then spread to tarnish the Navy itself. Two congressional committees formally chastised the Navy for defective investigatory procedures. The Iowa’s service was terminated and the ship towed back into mothballs. Men who had earned their pride by working hard and per-forming to high standards retreated in sadness and embarrassment as memory of the ship’s service to the nation was lost.
Then, when its own experiments confirmed an independent lab’s discovery that the method of packing the 100-pound propellant bags might lead to a fatal explosion, Navy ordered a complete review. Adm. Kelso’s apology and his tutorial about the necessity of “clear and convincing” evidence followed. Military operations are inherently dangerous, whether in training or on the battlefield. Explosives and high performance equipment must be used with meticulous care to ensure success without casualties among one’s own forces and innocent civilians. The ultimate safeguard is the accountability exacted of our commanders: the inescapable requirement that each official up the chain of command be held responsible for the quality of his or her decisions and leadership.
In the American Navy, the fundamental notion behind accountability is that those in the chain of command are responsible to the crews for their safety and well being. This precept derives directly from our long-standing tradition of the citizen-soldier. The Founding Fathers explicitly rejected the European tradition of a professional officer caste that put its own stature and survival above that of troops forcibly drawn from the peasantry. Instead, in our democracy the military leader’s authority over his troops was linked to a parallel responsibility to them as fellow citizens.
Accountability is a severe standard: The commander is held responsible for everything that occurs under his command. Traditionally, the only escape clause was “an act of God,” an incident that no prudent commander could reasonably have forseen. And “reasonably” was tied to the requirement to be “forehanded”—a sailor’s term dictating that even unlikely contingencies must be thought through and prepared for. The penalties of accountable failure can be drastic: command and career cut short, sometimes by court martial.
Adm. Kelso’s courageous reversal of the Iowa investigation’s un-proven charges against an enlisted man was an important affirmation of the accountability principle in the’ Navy. No American sailor can put confidently to sea, no soldier march onto a battlefield, without the personal certainty that he can trust his commanders to support him. In a democracy with an all-volunteer military, the life of our military institutions depends completely on our citizens’ confidence that these crystalline standards remain id place.
The problems arise in moving from theory to practice. Time and a degree of privacy are needed for an institution judiciously to weigh accountability issues after a major incident. Yet time and privacy are incompatible with the insistency of today’s journalists on full, prompt disclosure, or with their expertise at finding insiders prepared to speak anonymously. Still, the media are not wrong to be intrusive: Journalistic scrutiny is a necessary fact of life in a democracy.
Accountability starts, but does not end, with the front-line commanding officer. The climate established around an individual ship by others in the chain of command may also be relevant. But as illustrated in the aftermath of a number of major incidents over recent years—including the bombing of the Marine barracks in Beirut, the shoot-down of an Iranian airliner by the USS Vinceunes and the Iraqi attack on the USS Stark—the examination of these expanded dimensions of accountability can be affected by fears that a protracted inquiry and its inevitable media coverage could damage U.S. international interests. Thus we see an emerging pattern of selective accountability, sometimes through the truncation of investigations of major incidents, sometimes by limited application of their findings. In contrast, less publicized incidents like a minor grounding will often see the full weight of the “system” used to crush a captain.
In the Iowa case, pursuit of a single enlisted man deflected attention away from the prerequisite examination of the responsibilities of the full chain of command and reinforced this disturbing trend—disturbing because without full accountability, the individual commander’s responsibility evaporates among a faceless military bureaucracy.
The Kelso apology has opened the door to the restoration of accountability on the high seas. The Iowa case will serve a long-term good if it galvanizes an examination among naval officers about how to adapt the historic precept of accountability to contemporary, met dia-charged settings.
With these lessons—that we must honor the dedication and competence of our crews, and that we can never falter in accepting the iron principle of command accountability—we can begin to put the Iowa case to rest. Let us all praise the Iowa crews as we do so.
Capt. Larry Seaquist was commanding officer of the USS lowa from April 1986 to May 1988 and of three other warships in prior tours at sea. He currently is assigned to the Pentagon as a national-security strategist. The views expressed are his own.