New Scandal Reveals Pattern Of U.S. Navy Disregard For Junior Sailors

In the space of three months, the U.S. Navy has experienced two major scandals concerning the Service’s poor treatment of junior sailors. Compared with other recent Navy scandals like the long-simmering Red Hill Bulk Fuel Storage Facility water contamination crisis, the Navy has serious challenge in identifying and resolving “widely-known but unrecognzied challenges.” For junior sailors, naval leadership is far too often out of touch, either disinterested, unaware, or ineffective, only able to muster a viable response after sailors either die or go public with their frustrations.

A Navy that corrects chronic failures only when compelled by public notice is unacceptable.

The pattern is undeniable.

Earlier this year, after a fed-up sailor vented on the Reddit.com social media site, relating grim living conditions at the Walter Reed National Military Medical Center barracks in Washington, DC, both Congress and naval leadership were stunned. Junior sailors had gone “for years without hot water,” assigned rooms “without working fridges, thermostats or even locking doors,” and were “left to broil in barracks with broken air conditioning during humid Mid-Atlantic summers.” The Navy, stung by the public notice, lurched into action, fixing things.

But just as the Walter Reed scandal faded from the public eye, scrutiny turned to the USS George Washington, a super-carrier moored in Newport News, Virginia. The carrier is in the midst of a long refit—a refit that has run far longer than expected. After suffering a series of suicides, deaths accelerated, with three other USS George Washington sailors dying by suicide over the past month. In total, ten crew member deaths have been attributed—by one government entity or another—to suicide over the last two years of the carrier’s long refit.

As both the Navy and Congress rush in to assess conditions and climate aboard the ship, it is clear the Navy, again, disregarded junior sailor welfare until the sailors themselves started to break down. In this case, the Navy’s response not only suggested that naval leadership is often totally unaware of basic sailor welfare, but that the Navy’s cultural challenges are so deeply embedded that junior sailors may be inured to mistreatment, struggling to articulate their challenges for their an unaware or unmoved command chain.

This impression was reinforced on April 22, when the Navy’s top enlisted leader, Master Chief Petty Officer of the Navy Russell Smith, in an “all-hands” meeting with the crew, scoffed at their situation, saying, “What you’re not doing is sleeping in a foxhole like a Marine might be doing.” The enlisted leader told his sailors the Navy could do little to relieve conditions for junior sailors aboard refitting ships beyond doing better “to manage your expectations coming in here.”

Such sentiment is unacceptable.

The welfare of junior sailors is a fundamental duty of any military service.

Given that the Navy seems unable to fix things, the Department of Defense should quickly intervene, empowering analysts entirely unaffiliated with the Navy assess the service and identify “widely-known-but-unrecognized” problems facing the Navy’s junior enlisted. And then, after meting out accountability, Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin needs to force Navy leadership to fix the things they broken, rebuilding their relationship with the Navy’s lowest-ranking sailors.

Problems Are Not Rising Up The Command Chain

On May 3, as House Armed Services Committee Vice Chair and 20-year Navy veteran, Representative Elaine Luria (D-VA), climbed aboard the USS George Washington super carrier to assess conditions and climate aboard the stricken ship, the Navy sounded lost, confused, and not up to the task of managing the welfare of junior sailors in their charge.

At a press conference, Representative Luria related how Admiral Daryl Caudle, the commander of the Navy’s Fleet Forces Command, explained that the Navy is “very good at once there is a problem identified finding solutions and corrective actions…they are not always as proactive in certain circumstances in identifying problems before an incident of some type happens.”

But the problems should have been obvious to anyone who bothered to walk through the guts of the ship.

Everyone in the maritime business knows that shipyard refits are never easy for sailors of any rank.

On naval ships, work during a refit is constant, demanding, and, at times, chaotic when a ship is trying to make up for a delay in schedule. And though many sailors get to go home after a minimum of a 12-hour day—after fighting through ugly parking arrangements and up to three-hour commutes—many sailors—particularly junior sailors—can get stuck at the shipyard, “living” aboard the ship for an extended period while refit completion dates are pushed back again and again

A ship in the midst of a major refit is no place to live. The vessel is never quiet. At least two, and usually three shifts of shipyard workers are usually charging about the vessel, trying to get things done. It is unsafe and uncomfortable. The constant din, along with the irregular power disruptions, stints without running water and failures in heating and cooling systems, is a grim environment.

Life aboard the USS George Washington was apparently so wearing, some sailors took to their cars, sleeping in an isolated, far-away parking lot.

Of course, now that the scandal has gotten public attention, help is on the way. Sailors are being moved off the ship, more mental health resources are arriving, and investigations have commenced.

But the Navy’s investigations are limited and far too narrow. At Newport News, the Navy will focus on the ship, exploring the “command climate, command culture, onboarding” and the “systemic stressors to working in the shipyard environment.”

That’s all well and good, but, given that junior sailors were found, just a few months ago, suffering almost identical conditions ashore, the Department of Defense needs to direct the Navy to look a little harder at junior sailor welfare—identifying and fixing those chronic, widely-known problems that, somehow, remain “unknown” to the Navy’s managerial staff and to Congress.

It’s Time, Again, For Accountability:

Junior enlisted sailors matter.

In a recent speech, Carlos Del Toro, the Secretary of the Navy, said “As General George Patton once said, “wars are fought with weapons, but they are won by men.” This sentiment—while it doesn’t reflect the contribution females now make on the battlefield—remains true today.

Ships and aircraft are wonderful things—America wouldn’t have a Navy without them. But the enlisted sailor remains the Navy’s basic, fundamental fighting unit.

Forgo sailor welfare, and the U.S. Navy will be unready to “fight tonight,” navigate, fight fires, or, for that matter, ensure the safe and accident-free operation of critical fuel depots.

Junior sailors are not machines. The cold and hard rules of “condition-based-maintenance” do not apply to them. And if junior sailors feel they have no other option than to kill themselves in their service to get problems resolved, nothing but real, honest human intervention can help. At the end of the day, the only way to root out many of these “known-but-unreported” welfare challenges is for naval leaders—at all levels—to get out there and get their hands dirty, seeing how sailors are working and living.

But that is not happening.

The present-day disregard for the human element in naval warfare and in naval leadership is indefensible. While the Secretary of the Navy may boast that “Today…we use data analytics to anticipate and solve problems before they happen,” analytics are useless if sailors no longer report concerns or if those concerns somehow fail to make their way up the command chain.

It has become far too easy for naval leaders to isolate themselves from their charges, only obtaining their morale and wellness information from well-massaged PowerPoint presentations or brief “grip-and-grins” with well-supervised sailors.

Officers are, too often, disincentivized to be problem-solvers, while the Navy’s civilian leadership, often drawn from the ranks of Navy retirees, are loathe to intervene in a culture they helped build or mete out responsibility upon old friends.

Things must change.

If, as the Navy Secretary has said, “together, we must continue to creatively recruit, retain, equip, and promote the best of all of America,” then, the Navy must do everything it can “to enable the success of our Sailors and Marines, and to care for their families.”

And, if not, the Secretary of Defense should step in and get his people to get it done.