Schmucks II
Modly resigns as acting Navy chief after firing warship skipper and calling him stupid.:
Five days after firing the commander of a coronavirus-crippled U.S. Navy aircraft carrier, and a day after apologizing for calling that skipper naive and stupid in heated remarks to that warship’s crew, acting Navy Secretary Thomas Modly has called it quits. Defense Secretary Mark Esper has accepted his resignation.
Modly’s trip to Guam, which led to his resignation, cost almost a quarter of a million dollars.
Sailor from USS Teddy Roosevelt found unconscious, transferred to intensive care:
As of Wednesday, 97% of the Theodore Roosevelt’s crew have been tested for the virus and 416 sailors have tested positive, according to the Navy, representing more than 20% of all coronavirus cases within the entire US military.
“We’ve tested almost the whole crew now. We still have about 1,000 tests to report out. But 3,170 tested negative, 416 tested positive, 187 of those were symptomatic, 229 were asymptomatic. We still have 1,164 pending results,” the Vice Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Gen. John Hyten told reporters at the Pentagon on Thursday.
Note that over half of those who tested positive have no symptoms, which shows that limiting testing to only people with symptoms and known contact with someone who was known to have the disease may be missing the majority of cases and allowing the disease to spread. General Hyten doesn’t say that Captain Crozier was correct in raising the alarm, but he doesn’t say it rather loudly and pointedly to anyone listening.
6 comments
Hi Bryan. Things are hectic… No surprise at all there!
Anyway, I tweeted this post. This was once (before Trump/GOP) unbelievable. Sadly, it is now what passes for *normal*. Me, I’m really hoping for a huge asteroid! That will solve all the problems! 👎👿🤬
The worst thing you can do in government service is to tell the truth when it conflicts with your superiors. The problem with getting hit with an asteroid is that conservatives will probably survive with the cockroaches, a related species. 😈
The perfumed princes over at the Pentagon have to be getting whiplash right about now trying to figure out what Hair Twitler wants them to do. They thought he wanted them to fire Captain Crozier, so Crozier was fired, then the hatchet man there was fired for firing Crozier, there’s gotta be some people saying “Wha? What are we supposed to do?”
My guess is that we’re going to see nothing more regarding Crozier until he quietly retires in two months time, five minutes after his promotion to admiral. That’s the time-honored Pentagon way of doing things when Hair Twitler is not involved, quietly have someone retire and to get him to voluntarily do so promise him a promotion to the next pay grade so his retirement pay will be sweeter. Probably for the best, I don’t think Crozier is cut out to be a perfumed prince anyhow.
What they should have done is start an investigation which would last longer than Trump’s attention span. The current COVID-19 count is 10+% of the crew with the majority asymptomatic. As Crozier has the virus they could have removed him for medical reasons and provided the option of a medical retirement as a Rear Admiral – no harm, no foul. Modly created a major problem with his address to the crew. He wasn’t a Chief, so he isn’t allowed to talked like a Chief. He was an Academy grad and SAR chopper pilot before the Navy sent him to teach at the Air Force Academy. I don’t know how he annoyed the Navy, but he must have, to have been assigned to an Air Force installation for his final tour.
Crozier went from rotary wing to fixed wing, which is rare, and then to a deep water vessel command & nuclear school. He was destined for a star. Retirement is a good move for everyone if Trump doesn’t get involved again.
Yep. I know how things are usually done in the Navy, and they are *not* done the way they were done the past six weeks. A quiet “promotion” then retirement is the usual thing when a captain embarrasses them, not all this…. drama. The Navy usually isn’t very fond of drama unless it involves firing missiles at someone or dropping bombs on someone. But you put a Trumpanzee in at the top, you get Trumpian drama. Sheesh.
I wish Rear Admiral Crozier well in his retirement. 🙂
Absolutely no one in Crozier’s chain of command is going to get a Bravo Zulu out of this mess. The first rule of supervision is ‘don’t make your boss look bad’. This situation is totally FUBAR. The government of Guam is mandating that anyone off base must test negative for COVID-19, and you still need nuke ratings watching the fission furnace. The vessel needs to be decontaminated and is either going to require a lot of people or some UV-C robots to sterilize everything.
How do you make sure it doesn’t happen on other vessels? They are going to have to test crews and then quarantine them before deployment. No more port visits or shore leave. That is really going to help recruitment and retention.
We really need a vaccine…