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Holmes: Limit punishment for USS Enterprise

Posted: Sunday, January 09, 2011

I have acutely mixed feelings about the kerfuffle engulfing Capt. Owen Honors, who was fired as captain of the aircraft carrier USS Enterprise last week. On New Year's Day, the Virginian-Pilot newspaper revealed that Honors supervised the production of - and emceed - raunchy videos broadcast to the ship's crew in 2006-07, when he was the executive officer, or second-in-command. Honors left the ship to command USS Mount Whitney before returning as skipper.

Capt. Honors deserved his fate. Naval commanders, from the lowliest ensign to the most senior admiral, set the tone for the fighting men and women entrusted to them. That is especially true for ship captains and for their executive officers, who oversee the most minute details of a ship's daily life. "There's no such absolute monarchy as a sea captain's," declared Sarah Jewett in an 1890 issue of Harper's magazine. "He is a petty king, indeed, as he sails the high seas from port to port."

The truth quotient in this old joke is somewhat less than it was in 1890, when ship-to-shore communications remained rudimentary at best. Radio and satellite communications allow for a modicum of oversight from shore-based authorities. But now as then, captains set what the military calls the "command climate" among their crews. Just as in politics, an enlightened despot presides over a happy ship. A tyrannical or abusive ruler soon wears on his crew - degrading morale and performance.

A ship quickly takes on its commander's personality. A skipper can turn around his command almost overnight, transforming an underperforming crew into a good one - or the reverse. During Honors' "XO Movie Nights," he mocked the Enterprise's surface warfare officers - the nonaviators who operate the ship's engineering plant, pilot and navigate the ship, and so forth - as "fags." Imagine the person who writes your personnel evaluation - and thus holds your career in his hands - disparaging you thusly.

Nor did Honors respect the traditional relationship between U.S. Navy officers and enlisted personnel. Officers - especially senior ones like commanding and executive officers - are expected to treat crewmen and -women averaging 19 years old with a certain formality. Buddy-buddy relations are out. Videos featuring the executive officer repeatedly detonating the "F-bomb" on camera, officers and enlisted men simulating sexual acts, and other provocative scenes are nothing if not overly familiar with the crew.

In short, it's one thing for a ship's leadership to turn a blind eye to a certain amount of adolescent foolishness among the crew. That's part of what makes Navy life fun and memorable, as well as professionally rewarding. It's another thing entirely to foist that foolishness on subordinates - and divide the crew against itself in the process. Enlightened despots know where the boundaries lie and how to preserve them, maintaining discipline while keeping the governed reasonably content.

There's a practical dimension to this controversy that mostly escaped notice in last week's commentary. How did the executive officer of a nuclear-propelled aircraft carrier - in effect, the mayor of a floating city with a population of nearly 6,000 - find time to personally conceive of, film and emcee a series of videos, regardless of their subject? The executive officers for whom I worked in USS Wisconsin (population about 1,600) seldom slept. Was Capt. Honors that much better at delegating authority? Doubtful.

With all of this, why not cheer the Navy's actions in the Enterprise affair? Largely because of what may come next. Big organizations - especially those accountable to the taxpayers and dependent on taxpayer good will - rarely handle scandal well. The Navy is no exception. The service has compiled a mixed record in managing controversy, especially when it involves sex.

Think back to the gun-turret explosion on board USS Iowa in 1989, which claimed the lives of 47 gunners, or to the Tailhook affair of 1991-92. Navy leadership first tried to blame the Iowa disaster on a purportedly homosexual sailor who headed one of the gun crews and, for obvious reasons, no longer could speak for himself.

The Navy's response to the Tailhook sex scandal - which involved drunken Navy and Marine aviators celebrating the outcome of Desert Storm at a Las Vegas hotel - became so extreme that all officer promotions were suspended. My colleagues and I - who weren't aviators and were ineligible to join the Tailhook Association in the first place - had to sign statements swearing that we had not been present at the convention. We then underwent "sensitivity training" given by a visibly embarrassed female colleague.

One hopes today's leaders won't succumb to a witch-hunt mentality as they cope with the Enterprise scandal. The Navy pays high costs in morale for overbearing efforts to ameliorate public and congressional wrath. Let's limit punishment to the guilty.

• James Holmes is an associate professor of strategy at the Naval War College.


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