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

[rangerrebew]

Who Watches the Watchers in 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.


Source URL (retrieved on January 2, 2018): http://nationalinterest.org/feature/who-watches-the-watchers-the-us-navy-23871