The family of Admiral Mike Boorda is paying an awful price for having a loved one involved in the leadership of the Department of the Navy. Did the job itself kill him? Probably not, but it is likely that had he never been subjected to the near breaking strain of the tasks before him as Chief of Naval Operations he would still be among us. Are these jobs at the top different in some fundamental way from the command positions an officer must hold en route to the top? Are we asking too much of those who hold these jobs? I think that the answer to both these questions is yes.
The military and civilian leaders of the Department of the Navy and the Navy and Marine Corps follow very different paths to the most senior positions in their respective professions, yet the challenges that face them at the top are sometimes very similar. Both face a constant balancing act in their decisions, which must answer to two different if related constituencies. They both must receive the support and approval of the uniformed and civilian members of the Navy and Marine Corps, but they also must answer up the chain to the Department of Defense, the President, Congress and, ultimately, the American people.
The uniformed leaders would appear to be well trained to respond to and lead the institutions of which they are a part. Throughout their careers they have been a part of a well-structured system of regulations, standards, and customs by which were judged their performance, judgment, tenacity, and general worthiness to progress to the next rung on the ladder of command. It is a rigorous, demanding cauldron that allows few mistakes. The survivors are special people.
The Navy Department has a complicating characteristic not so strongly shared by the Army and the Air Force. There are two services, and one of them—the Navy—is divided into three parts. Three semi-belligerent parts, each with its own traditions, problems, and ways of doing things, all competing for resources. They produce submarine Navy or aviation Navy or surface Navy leaders whose first loyalty is to the element in which they spent the bulk of their careers. In my experience, only a handful of the more gifted naval leaders have been able to grow completely beyond the ingrained parochialism that is a natural product of their experience.
Because of this, the Navy, more than any other service, is subject to often vicious, sometimes debilitating internecine warfare for roles, missions, and money. Seldom do all of the navies and the Marine Corps pull together against a common enemy—like the Air Force—although when they do, it is remarkable. “. . . From the Sea,” for example, the result of the efforts of hundreds of bright, uniformed people at many levels, came in response to the Air Force’s “Global Reach, Global Power,” and it fundamentally reshaped the nation’s maritime strategy. Now, if they only could cooperate long enough to reshape the resources to match ....
Of all the Navy flag officers, the Chief of Naval Operations must try to rise above his experience and life-long loyalties to manage and lead the whole, often only to be considered a traitor by his own community for his trouble. Of late, he has paid an enormous price for it.
Despite this constant creative tension, the U.S. Navy and Marine Corps are two of the finest institutions on the planet. They produce honorable, decent, capable, responsible leaders who are measured to an extremely high standard. These leaders then reach the highest levels and learn the truth to that old saw that “there is sea duty and shore duty, but there’s nothing like D.C. duty.”
On D.C. duty, these leaders meet, possibly for the first time. Washington’s top political leaders. Political leaders grow up in a completely different environment, where there is a much lower degree of predictability. The outcome of a course of action is at the whim of the electorate, which can be stampeded in surprising directions by unexpected events, hostile media coverage, or a negative campaign by an opponent. A political leader lives more in the immediate present than anyone in any other profession can imagine. What is true, important, and worth working for this week may be totally forgotten in a year as public interest moves elsewhere.
If that weren’t bad enough, uniformed leaders also have to work with and answer to unelected politicians within DoD and the Navy Department itself. This is tough to take because most military leaders would prefer to be given a blank check by Congress and be allowed to set spending priorities according to military requirements. They are, after all, the career professionals. The civilian leaders come from a variety of backgrounds and may have no military qualifications at all. Some are specialists from industry—usually found in the acquisition chain—but most either have been long-term staff members of congressional military committees or were involved in some way with the political campaign that elected the President. Only rarely does a career bureaucrat find his or her way into one of these jobs. Even more exceptional is for a life-long Navy man like Larry Garrett to make it to the top.
The real political civilians initially feel that their first responsibility is to protect and defend the person who got them the job, no matter what their oath of office may say. In politics, loyalties tend to be personal. In the military, however, they are likely to be institutional. These differences are not necessarily good or bad; they just are. I saw this at an extreme level during my service in the White House during the Iran-Contra affair. Over time, however, the civilian workers’ loyalty begins to shift to the institution in which they serve and they become ardent champions of the Navy and Marine Corps and sometimes useful catalysts for change. These strong allies of the uniformed leaders can even provide a layer of insulation for them. Their help is needed because nothing in a naval officer’s career can prepare him or her to deal with the witches’ brew served up in Washington when the combination of a public feeding frenzy and scared, overreacting politicians is at work.
Some military leaders adapt more quickly than others to the realization that to protect their services from destructive political forces they sometimes must bend to the political will rather than break. Bending is no dishonor. It means that our leaders are listening to the public; that is what is supposed to happen in a democracy. The people give the orders, even if occasionally they are dumb orders. Congress is not the enemy and often is a powerful friend. Sometimes harder to take is the fact that every defense expert (including some who claim to be friends), think tank, study group, and research service has a right to add its voice as well.
Under extreme circumstances—such as we faced over Tailhook—the leaders must endure severe political pressure for rapid change within their respective services. This clashes with the leaders’ realization that any bending to the political will is certain to be labeled by their shipmates as mere "political correctness” or worse, a “sellout.” This clash of worlds and realities is hell for our leaders in uniform and often for their civilian counterparts. The agony for them is that they know that, in the naval services the same as in civilian life, it takes long-term work to bring about the kind of cultural changes needed to deal with such ingrained problems as gender discrimination. And yet the American people and the politicians who respond to them often demand instant solutions.
Uneasy lies the head of the CNO, for example, who is the Navy’s top spokesman and cheerleader and who must spend a great deal of his time making the Navy’s case on the Hill or down in the DoD bureaucracy. He must screen daily press clippings and read public opinion polls with great interest. He must Play on the national stage and speak out to accrue maximum credit for his service. Worst of all, he must do damage control. In the damage limitation efforts he occasionally must disconnect himself from the system of which he has been a part of his adult life. Instead of administering a carefully balanced system of due process and judgment by peers that results in an outcome that everyone in uniform more or less supports, the leader occasionally must ignore the system and, in the interest of the service as a whole, he may be called upon to do unpleasant things. He may have to fire a life-long friend or cut off a head or heads to satisfy that ultimate constituency—the public. His pain is especially acute if the crime does not—at least in the eyes of the system—justify the punishment demanded.
Yet this should not seem strange to a service that long has held the captain of a ship that runs aground responsible even though be may have been asleep at the time. It does not, however, prevent second-guessing. If Secretary of the Navy Frank Knox and Chief of Naval Operations Admiral Harold Stark were alive today, they probably would be defending themselves against charges of “selling out” to politicians for their decision to relieve Admiral Husband Kimmel after Pearl Harbor.
The people who rise to this level are of strong character. They believe in the value of their systems and do not lightly break from them. When they must, the cost in personal anguish is high, not least because those outside the service seldom properly value the cost and those inside frequently vilify the leader for “failure to stand up for his people.” This clash between the system and the expedient action has taken place lately in the most public of arenas. I have seen great leaders give their jobs their all only to have their lives destroyed or their careers cut short, not because they failed to think of the Navy or Marine Corps first, but because of the public perception that those leaders did not bend to its will. The political pressure became too great for some to carry on.
And we should not forget why they were attacked. The same forces are still out there and will be waiting for Navy and Marine Corps leaders yet to come. While Navy Department leaders struggle to restructure their forces around the “. . . From the Sea” strategy, they must not neglect the public demand that women be fully integrated on board ships and in cockpits. And at the same time that they are trying to adjust the war fighters’ appetites toward more affordable, if marginally less capable, ships and airplanes, they also must struggle with the fact that none of the services has an executable program after 2000. This latter challenge is all the greater because neither the public nor either of the political parties seems to be concerned about it. Yet the same public will be mightily displeased if its Navy and Marine Corps fail to perform as well as they always have in the past.
The public will, driven by a harsh media, has been like a gale-force wind blowing through the Department, catching good, decent men like Larry Garrett, Frank Kelso, and now Mike Boorda in its path. All of these men tried to protect the Navy, and succeeded to a great extent, and as a result were destroyed by the hurricane of public opinion. We who love the Navy should not also abandon them.
The challenges that face our civilian and uniformed leaders today are as great as any in the history of the Navy and Marine Corps. We who love these outstanding sea services should take stock and agree to get off our leaders’ backs and let them get on with the future. They need all the help and support we can give them.
Mr. Howard was Under Secretary of the Navy from 1989-1993, Assistant Secretary of Defense from 1987-1989, and Special Assistant to the President in the White House from 1986-1988. He retired as a Minister-Counselor in the career Foreign Service.