Who Watches the Watchers in the U.S. Navy?

James Holmes

Security, Asia

What does the latest Navy Strategic Readiness Review say about the state of the U.S. Navy?

So how would the ghosts of strategists past rate the U.S. Navy’s just-released Strategic Readiness Review? The review represents the navy’s quasi-independent inquest into the hardware and human failings—a.k.a. problems with “readiness”—that wracked the sea service during the annus horribilis that was 2017. (I say quasi-independent because one of the coauthors, retired admiral Gary Roughead, oversaw the service during part of the time when the maladies the review documents seeped into naval operations.)

Here is one guy’s guess at the masters’ judgment: the review is useful on the whole, yet disappointingly noncommittal about whom to hold accountable for the navy’s malaise. Authority, it seems, comes down hard on sailors out in the fighting forces while staying its hand vis-à-vis topmost leaders—the leaders responsible for devising the rules and standards whereby sailors out in the fighting forces do business. That’s a mite perverse.

Let’s start with the bad—fittingly for this season of joy. Navy public-relations boilerplate typically justifies firing ship commanders, executive officers or their senior assistants by citing senior leadership’s “loss of confidence” in their “ability to command.” Lose the confidence of higher-ups and out you go.