In 1618, in one of the trigger events of the Thirty Years War, infuriated Protestants, fearful that their right to practice their religion was under assault, threw two Catholic aristocrats and their secretary out of a third-floor window of Prague’s Hradčeny Castle to the courtyard seventy feet below. Astonishingly, some said miraculously, the trio survived the fall. The event has gone down in history as the “defenestration of Prague.” Eventually millions died in combat, of famine, and from the epidemic diseases that swept the Holy Roman Empire during the bitter religious war that followed.
“Defenestration” seems to be an apt word to describe the recent fate of Admiral Bill Moran, U.S. Navy, who was nominated by the President in April and confirmed by the Senate in May to become the Navy’s thirty-second Chief of Naval Operations in midsummer following the retirement of the incumbent, Admiral John Richardson. Late on 7 July, just weeks before he was scheduled to take over the historic leadership post, Moran stunned the service and official Washington by announcing his immediate retirement.
It’s not entirely clear if Moran was pushed out the window by Secretary of the Navy Richard Spencer or merely helped out of it by him. Either way, it has been hard for those in and around the Navy to understand what happened. The surprise retirement days before the culmination of his career by an officer widely admired in the Navy and in Washington was immediately—and for many unconvincingly—explained by the fact that Moran evidently had continued for months to have professional contacts with a disgraced former public affairs officer, Navy Commander Chris Servello.
Servello himself had just retired in June, a long eighteen months after first being the subject of sexual harassment complaints by three junior officers and then of Navy staff, NCIS, and DoD Investigator General (IG) investigations. At the time of the women’s complaints, Servello was—as he now describes it on his Linkedin profile page—partway through two years as “Special Assistant for Communication and Outreach, and Spokesman for the Chief of Naval Operations.”
Strictly speaking, the DoD IG investigation last October was not of Servello himself, but of Admiral Richardson’s response to the formal complaints about Servello’s conduct. This presumably final investigation had been prompted by a status query the month before from Senator Kirsten Gillibrand (Democrat, New York) to the Pentagon Inspector General, Glenn Fine. Gillibrand’s original 2017 query to the IG stated, “I am extremely troubled that it appears Navy leadership turned a blind eye to [Servello’s] unacceptable behavior to show favor to a trusted aide to the detriment of not only the subjects of his unwanted advances, but the entire Pentagon community who knew of this alleged abusive behavior yet saw no immediate action by their leaders….”
The persistent contact between Moran and Servello—who in the long wait for retirement served as a public affairs officer for Naval District Washington and in two billets at the Defense Media Activity on Fort Meade—was taken as evidence of the admiral’s poor judgment in the matter, suddenly deemed very late in the succession process to have been a disqualifying fault for the move up.
It’s difficult to write confidently about this high-level leadership and personnel management fiasco, in part because only parts of the key document, the heavily redacted October 2018 IG investigation, have been made public. If that text and press reports are to be believed, decades after women were admitted to the Naval Academy, nearly thirty years after Tailhook ‘91, and several years into the epoch of “#Me Too,” Servello’s boozy pursuit of three junior female PAOs merited the termination of his career.
That he remained on active duty for months notwithstanding an adverse fitness report and a non-punitive letter of caution (probably to permit the 1999 Naval Academy graduate sufficient time in service to retire) isn’t remarkable; that Servello kept his place at—or perhaps only near—the high table even during the long interregnum between accusations and his retirement is. More remarkable still is that the actions of this mid-career officer still reverberated in the Pentagon’s E Ring so powerfully as to later destroy a senior’s brilliant career.
Everything about this imbroglio before and after the IG investigation smacks of poor personnel management and also of astonishing insensitivity to modern standards of officer conduct. The Secretary of the Navy owes the Navy’s officer corps an explanation.
Pushing an urgent replacement for Moran into office over the summer in advance of the usual congressional August recess instantly became the Navy’s top priority, and a replacement was swiftly announced: Vice Admiral Mike Gilday. It remains to be seen if Admiral Gilday’s sudden ascension to the top of the uniformed Navy will see him suffer for having obviously been a hasty second choice. He is a surface warfare officer whose prior billet was as the three-star director of the Joint Staff, and he’s being catapulted over the heads of six officers already wearing four stars.
This regrettable matter stirs up turbulence that today’s Navy can ill afford. An explosion of technologies is swiftly changing all the familiar verities of naval warfare, at once making the seas and the airspace above them much more transparent; the threats to legacy submarine, surface, aviation, and ashore forces (“legacy” meaning those operational now) much more lethal, and the roles of officer and enlisted sailors—the people—in the loop much more uncertain. Coping with all that, and with challenges posed on the one hand by a chesty Russia and China and on the other by rising tensions with our traditional friends and the slow splintering of post-war alliances, will demand the most capable leaders our Navy can muster. All that aside, as one keen observer of the scene has observed, the Navy’s flag officer pool isn’t so deep as to permit the sudden, unexplained sacrifice of one of its superstars.
Leadership insufficiency is visible everywhere in Washington today and not just in the Navy, as reflected in the extraordinary number of vacant senior government positions and those many filled by acting appointees, and by unprecedented levels of personnel turbulence in all these billets, including those in the White House staff.
Leadership turmoil can be toxic in any organization, and the Navy has suffered from this toxicity repeatedly in the past thirty years. During the Tailhook ’91 scandal, the Navy and NCIS threw due process out the window for many accused. A few years later, the nomination of Vietnam and Gulf War hero Admiral Stan Arthur to be CINCPAC, was withdrawn by CNO Admiral Boorda who caved to specious political pressure. Arthur was forced to retire, cutting short the brilliant career of a man widely admired in the Navy. And as I wrote in Proceedings last year, the Navy’s handling of the Fat Leonard Scandal “has been seemingly interminable, multilayered legal proceedings, where efforts to balance the enforcement of law against the rights of individuals have produced distortions of process, the best example being the treatment meted out to Vice Admiral Ted Branch, a 37-year-veteran most recently Deputy Chief of Naval Operations for Information Warfare, who was edged into retirement.” In the wake of each of these scandals, good people, rising future leaders, voted with their feet.
What assurances can the Navy give to today’s lieutenant commanders, commanders, and captains that if they work hard enough and endure years of high-pressure jobs, deployments, and family separation required to make admiral that they won’t be cashiered—defenestrated!—for making a small mistake themselves or even associating with someone who might have made a big one?
Admiral Moran’s sudden departure reeks of a zero-defect culture at the top. While Commander Servello’s obnoxious conduct might have been handled better, the price Admiral Moran has been made to pay is a punishment that does not fit the crime.
