Monday, February 14, 2005

USS San Francisco grounding secondaries

The absolute best coverage of the USS San Francisco grounding and its follow on actions and finer details is found at Bubblehead's The Stupid Will be Punished. This is required reading if you want to get as close to the truth as you can without being "in the loop."

If you don't know by now, the CO CDR Mooney was permanently
relieved of command last week. Like I stated before a couple of times, I don't have all the facts. What I do know is that the surface and submarine community have a habit of going high-and-right in these situations, and I just don't see why a drone-like firing of CDR Mooney increases safety, combat readiness, or general morale of the fleet. I am concerned that we are encouraging, and therefore promoting, the less aggressive and meek peacetime leader that gets people killed. We have a history of doing that, and it isn't good for anyone.

Unlike WWII, we don't have a few years to push our best leaders to command and
get our torpedoes to work right; this is a "come-as-you-are" war environment.

Maybe CDR Mooney should have been fired, but I don't see it yet. The core to this though is that his Chain of Command has made that decision based on the information they had, and in a way we have to accept that and move forward.

Sad.

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