[ DailyMail ] ‘Every officer is up to speed on diversity training. Not so much ship handling’: Scathing official report finds woke US Navy is not fit for war because of risk averse, politically correct, control-freak top brass
Members of Congress commissioned the report on issues in the surface Navy
Came in response to fire on ship in San Diego and two ship collisions in Pacific
Retired Marine general and Navy admiral spoke with current and former officers
They identified a number of disturbing trends in Navy leadership and training
Many officers said that diversity training took precedence over warfighting
They claimed combat readiness had become a ‘box-checking’ exercise
A scathing new report commissioned by members of Congress has claimed that the Navy’s surface warfare forces have systemic training and leadership issues, including a focus on diversity that overshadows basic readiness skills.
The report prepared by Marine Lt. Gen. Robert Schmidle and Rear Adm. Mark Montgomery, both retired, came in response to recent Naval disasters, including the burning of the USS Bonhomme Richard in San Diego, two collisions involving Navy ships in the Pacific and the surrender of two small craft to Iran.
The authors conducted hour-long interviews with 77 current and retired Navy officers, offering them anonymity to identify issues they wouldn’t feel comfortable raising in the chain of command.
The report found that a staggering 94 percent of the subjects believed the recent Naval disasters were ‘part of a broader problem in Navy culture or leadership.’
One of the key issues raised by the officers interviewed for the report was a concern that Navy leaders spend more time focusing on diversity training than on developing warfighting capacity and key operational skills.
‘Sometimes I think we care more about whether we have enough diversity officers than if we’ll survive a fight with the Chinese navy,’ lamented one lieutenant currently on active duty.
‘It’s criminal. They think my only value is as a black woman. But you cut our ship open with a missile and we’ll all bleed the same color,’ she added.
Some of the respondents expressed concerns that when combat lethality and warfighting are emphasized, they are treated in a box-checking manner that can seem indistinguishable from non-combat related exercises.
‘The Navy treats warfighting readiness as a compliance issue,’ said one career commander. ‘You might even use the term compliance-centered warfare as opposed to adversary-centered warfare or warfighter-centered warfare.’
Officers interviewed for the report echoed Lehman’s concerns that the practice of firing commanders for the smallest mistakes was a drag on retention, morale, and lethality.
‘Commanders can no longer take risks in a way that they can have small failures, learn, and move forward,’ said one sailor. ‘Failures are terminal to people’s careers.’
‘These are guys that are totally zero-risk,’ one former Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense who served as a surface warfare officer said of the surface warfare community.
The report argues that the independence of command has been eroded and commanding officers fear risk due to its adverse impact upon their careers.
‘The general unwillingness to rehabilitate one-off mistakes, the disinclination to weigh errors against the totality of a naval career, and the practice of discipline-by-paperwork, were broadly understood to be a drain on the Navy’s retention efforts,’ the report stated.
Another issued identified in the report is a perceived fear among Navy leaders of any negative news articles.
‘[Admirals] are supposed to lead us into battle but they hide in foxholes at the first sight of Military.com and the Military Times,’ said one intelligence officer. ‘The reporters are in charge, not us.’
‘COs would be quite risk-adverse,’ one officer said. ‘They would have their senior department heads manning a lot of watches, especially on the bridge and things like that to make sure that nothing went wrong, because nobody wanted to end up in the media, and nobody wanted to end up on the cover of Navy Times.’
Interviewees described an undercurrent of fear that gripped the surface fleet, with commanders unwilling to delegate and senior ranks quick to hand down punishments in response to media pressure.
At one point, the Navy even handed officers 23 compact discs with reading material for surface warfare wardroom training, replacing a five-month course at the Surface Warfare Officer School Division Officer’s Course in Rhode Island.
We gave ensigns boxes of CDs and told them to train themselves between watches, and that was a colossal failure,’ one officer recalled.
One respondent recalled that he had informed his admiral: ‘I’ve got people that I know for certain are not proficient in watch standing.’ And you know what they [told] me? ‘Qualify them anyway.’
‘What are the things the Chinese are concerned about? What are the things the Iranians are concerned about? [The] Intel folks know that, but like there’s no general education about, ‘What are the wars we could fight, and how do we understand the context of these so we get in combat,” one respondent said.
‘We can have both the cultural and political understanding as well as the warfighting implications. And to me, if we’re focused on the front-line warfighting, we should know the worst we’re going into and what the greater context is. There’s none of that right now.’
The report concluded: ‘A major peer-level conflict in the 21st Century will likely play out largely in the naval theaters of operations; unlike the surface Navy’s last major war, which concluded 76 years ago, such a conflict will likely proceed swiftly and not permit significant time for organizational learning once it is underway.’
‘Unless changes are made, the Navy risks losing the next major conflict.’