There has been a lot of talk and debate throughout teh innarwebz of late about a certain US Navy Capt. Brett Crozier, who was until recently the commanding officer of the nuclear supercarrier USS Roosevelt. There have been a number of takes on the subject, and opinions appear to be sharply divided about the man.

For a bit of background on the subject, take a look at this link, very kindly provided by our friend and longtime reader The Male Brain:

“Captain Crozier! Captain Crozier!”

U.S. navy Capt. Brett Crozier received a stirring tribute from the crew of the USS Theodore Roosevelt on Thursday after he was stripped of his command for publicly raising concerns about a coronavirus outbreak aboard the aircraft carrier.

Nearly 5,000 sailors flooded the decks to applaud Crozier and chant his name as he left the ship late Thursday in a raucous moment caught on video.

Crozier was relieved of his duties after a memo to superiors that warned of a growing COVID-19 outbreak among his crew was leaked to the public. Crozier had asked for permission to isolate most of his crew members on shore and take the aircraft carrier out of service in order to save lives.

“We are not at war. Sailors do not need to die,” he wrote in the memo, which was published by the San Francisco Chronicle. “If we do not act now, we are failing to properly take care of our most trusted asset, our sailors.”

Crozier was fired for creating a panic with the memo and demonstrating “extremely poor judgment” during a crisis, according to Acting Navy Secretary Thomas Modly. He said Crozier had allowed “emotion” to affect his judgment and that he should have kept the memo within the chain of command.

“What it does, it undermines our efforts and the chain of command’s efforts to address this problem and creates a panic and creates the perception that the navy is not on the job, the government is not on the job, and it’s just not true,” Modly said.

“We do, and we should, expect more from the commanding officers of our aircraft carriers,” he said.

As of Thursday, the navy said 31 per cent of the ship’s crew had been tested for the virus while the ship remained docked in Guam. A total of 114 tested positive, while another 180 tested negative.

The navy has said the ship will keep enough sailors on board to sustain essential services while testing continues.

“Generally speaking, we have to keep these ships ready just in case they’re needed,” Modly said.

The furore here arose when Capt. Crozier wrote a memo that was widely circulated within the military, and then got leaked into the public sphere (inevitably, of course) – over a non-secure communication channel.

What surprised a lot of people on the Right, perhaps, is the fact that His Most Illustrious, Noble, August, Benevolent, and Legendary Celestial Majesty, the God-Emperor of Mankind, Donaldus Triumphus Magnus Astra, the First of His Name, completely supported the decision of his Secretary of the Navy in firing one of the fleet’s top commanding officers.

This President has been extraordinary, even when compared with his illustrious predecessor, St. Ronald Magnus of the Right, in terms of his support of the military and the men who fight and bleed and die for their country. His direct personal intervention in the Gallagher case is a great example of how the God-Emperor cares about the fighting men of the USA – and if you read the headlines about that particular case, you might just realise that it is, in fact, possible to become even MORE disgusted with the whorenalists of the lying (((media))) than ever before.

So why, then, did the God-Emperor support the firing of a supercarrier captain in this case?

Because that captain apparently went outside the chain of command. And not just that, but because the same captain also permitted his sailors “liberty” in Vietnam – at precisely the time when Vietnam was recording a surge in COVID-19 cases.

Now, many of those who support Capt. Crozier’s decision, point out that the man put the welfare of his men before his own career.

That is true. He did.

I can easily see things from his point of view that he needed to fall on his own sword in order to prevent his men from suffering unnecessarily.

The raucous farewell that he got from the men and women formerly under his command shows that he was a popular officer and a skilled leader, and those who worked for him genuinely liked and respected him.

This is all to the good.

But there is one aspect of this that civilians (like me) don’t understand very well:

Chain of command is HOLY WRIT in the military.

This is one aspect of military life that befuddles and confounds those who have never experienced it. I count myself among them. The closest I’ve ever come to that life was the time I spent in the Boy Scouts as a, well, boy – back before the Boy Scouts of America sold out to Satan and let butt-buggerers and kiddie-fiddlers flood their ranks.

But it is an iron law of military authority that the chain of command must be followed and obeyed.

Many – I wager most – of my readers don’t need me to explain it, because they served in the military themselves. And unfortunately, since I did not, any explanation that I attempt to provide will by definition be inaccurate and insufficient.

So if any of my readers find my explication of the chain of command to be incorrect, then I can only apologise and ask them to correct it in the comments.

The reason why the chain of command has to be respected, is because that continuity of authority gives a leader his own authority over men under his command. If that chain can be broken at a whim, then by definition it has no power – which means that the leader himself by definition therefore has no power.

That chain goes in an unbroken line from the President, as Commander-in-Chief, through the admirals and generals, right down to the section leader (or whatever the Naval equivalent is). Breaking it not only makes a captain look bad, it makes his entire crew look bad, and it makes his immediate superior look bad.

The reality of the military is that, like any other big bureaucratic organisation, “face” plays a huge role in how people see themselves and each other. If a leader loses “face” among his peer group because his subordinate went around him to highlight something wrong, the resulting shame and social pressure and ostracism make him far more likely to lash out and punish his subordinates way out of proportion with the offence committed.

Furthermore, by bucking the chain of command, an officer also bucks the time-tested and time-honoured method by which responsibility is shared among the officer corps.

The point of going to your immediate superior to report a problem is to ensure that it is handled appropriately, and so that responsibility is allocated to those with the authority to deal with it. Always and everywhere, responsibility must equal authority. If those responsible for fixing a problem have no authority to do so, the result is chaos; if those with the authority to fix a problem feel no responsibility to do so, the result is madness.

According to what the Secretary of the Navy’s office had to say on the matter, Capt. Crozier did not respect the chain of command. He flouted it, willingly and directly, by sending his memo to people who should not have been copied on it, over unsecured and unclassified systems.

Is all of that true?

I don’t know. Until Capt. Crozier’s case is dealt with through the military tribunal system, any speculation on my part, or anyone else’s, on the subject, is precisely that – speculation.

However, all of the evidence that we have, indicates that the Captain went right above his own boss’s head – a boss whose stateroom was literally down the hall from his own.

It gets rather worse, though, and this is where Captain Crozier definitely made a big mistake – again, assuming that the charges against him are true, which is not for me to decide.

As retired Navy SEAL Commander Ryan Zinke points out, an American supercarrier is a symbol of power, prestige, and hegemony no matter where it sails or what it does. The sight of an American carrier is awe-inspiring no matter where you are, or from what era that carrier happens to be – I’ve stood on the deck of the USS Intrepid at least four times, and I’ve come away from each and every experience with stars in my eyes even in my mid-thirties.

What Captain Crozier allegedly did was to inadvertently reveal, through insecure communications channels, that one of America’s 11 supercarriers had a potentially lethal disease onboard and therefore could be combat-ineffective – during a tour of duty in the Pacific Ocean while tensions with China, the very nation responsible for crippling the entire WORLD, are significantly raised.

The phrase “loose lips sink ships” is not merely wartime propaganda, it’s actual truth.

Furthermore, what Capt. Crozier did has profound implications, because of what we know about the Kung Flu by now.

As the information in the original article points out, 30% or so of the roughly 5,000 crew of the USS Roosevelt have been tested, and of that 30% (about 1,500 people), 114 tested positive and 180 tested negative. That indicates an infection rate of 7.60% – less than HALF the infection rate found in other near-laboratory conditions for the virus, such as the cruise liner Diamond Princess.

Given that the mortality rate of the virus, under absolutely perfect conditions for its spread, is recorded at less than 1%, the danger to the sailors is real and absolutely deserves to be taken very seriously – but it is not terrifying.

And it now turns out that Capt. Crozier himself is positive for COVID-19. On top of that, the very same Acting Secretary of the Navy who fired Captain Crozier for sending out highly classified information in a manner that made a media leak absolutely inevitable, the Acting Secretary of the Navy who fired the Captain has now resigned because of the backlash that he received for, apparently, doing his damn job.

Clearly something is going on, and I reckon that there is some serious involvement from the DC Swamp in all of this.

This whole story strikes me as one giant sad fustercluck of a mess. Assuming that Capt. Crozier was fired with cause, then it is probably true that he put the good of his men over his own career. However, there are ways to do that without potentially endangering the lives of 5,000 men and women under his command. There is a reason why the chain of command exists in the first place, and there must be consequences for violating that chain, because doing so diminishes the authority and responsibility of every man underneath a commander if he thinks that he can just buck lawful commands by going above his superior’s head anytime he wants.

I write that, by the way, as someone who has gone above my immediate superior’s head – multiple times. (I had a Chinese boss at the time, and I am quite obviously not Chinese, at all. Enough said, really.) It didn’t end well for me. It’s a big part of the reason why my career basically took a swan dive off a cliff and smashed right into the rocks a few hundred feet at the bottom.

Trust me when I say that it’s a bad idea to commit such a mistake.

There are times when it is, indeed, right and necessary to put the lives of your men above your own career and personal success, and this requires bucking and even breaking the chain of command. And then there are times when it is not only necessary but absolutely critical to follow that chain of command to its inevitable conclusion, because breaking it would not only endanger the lives of your men, but the safety of your entire country.

Time will tell which was true in Captain Crozier’s case, but the evidence so far indicates that he made a big mistake in sending out that memo.