For more than two years, the Navy’s intelligence chief has been stuck with a major handicap: He’s not allowed to know any secrets.I mean, it's the Navy. Still.
Vice Adm. Ted “Twig” Branch has been barred from reading, seeing or hearing classified information since November 2013, when the Navy learned from the Justice Department that his name had surfaced in a giant corruption investigation involving a foreign defense contractor and scores of Navy personnel.
Worried that Branch was on the verge of being indicted, Navy leaders suspended his access to classified materials. They did the same to one of his deputies, Rear Adm. Bruce F. Loveless, the Navy’s director of intelligence operations.
More than 800 days later, neither Branch nor Loveless has been charged. But neither has been cleared, either. Their access to classified information remains blocked.
I mean, it's the Navy. Still.
ReplyDeleteHeh :) I was going to make the obligatory reference to "naval intelligence" being an oxymoron (gotta slam our "sister service", as the Spousal One likes to call it), but you'd already gone there.
Kudos for not attempting to pin this on the Obama administration as I've seen several places this morning. It's not as though there were a shortage of legitimate things to blame them for, to the extent that we have to go looking for specious examples :p
It never ceases to amaze me how pundits can simultaneously complain that Obama pays no attention to the military whilst darkly suggesting that he micromanages (and is intimately involved with, therefore responsible for) every dumb decision made by the military.
Because the military brass *never* made dumb decisions before 2008 :p
One, he lost his clearance. Good. Better to err on the side of caution. This is the system working as intended.
ReplyDeleteTwo, the article seems to present it as a bad thing that he no longer can see classified materials and do his job. Bull feces. He's an Admiral. He does not produce, nor particularly consume intelligence materials in his duties. He's an administrator. I will bet dollars to donuts that prior to this, he barely ever delivered a single intelligence briefing, and instead that was done by a Commander or lower. So his need (and thus, his need to know) does not exist. He shouldn't really need to see the materials in the first place.
Three, he should not hold that position anyway. It's terrible that he may be an innocent man caught up in a corruption and bribery scandal. If he were lower enlisted, no one would think twice about putting him off duty and have him sweep a warehouse until the investigation cleared him or charged him. The fact that he's allowed to stay in his position is the only part of this that really has any controversy to this for me.
"But, how does that make sense? You just said he shouldn't need to see classified materials to do his job." Correct. But that doesn't mean you put someone ineligible to hold a clearance in a job position which requires responsibility over those who do. Frankly, he should either be assigned to be in charge of a naval training facility (preferably one of the navy boot camps) or simply put on administrative leave until such time as the investigation clears him or charges him. It works for lower enlisted, it ought to work just fine for officers (cause you can't have an admiral sweeping warehouses, can you).
Frankly, I'd say we have too many flag officers in the Navy (and the armed services in general). More than one admiral per ship/sub in the fleet is ridiculous. There is bloat at the top of the admin chain in the military, and it does not add to readiness nor combat effectiveness. But that's just my opinion.
The fact that he's allowed to stay in his position is the only part of this that really has any controversy to this for me.
ReplyDeleteThat's right. Unfortunately, due process takes time and in the meantime he shouldn't be in this job. This job needs someone who can go back and look over the original materials if it's called for.
As the article states, too, it's hugely disruptive of work if you are uncleared. You can't get any SIPR email, so all discussions that need to involve you have to be downgraded to UNCLASS and go on NIPR. You can't attend a meeting without everyone shutting down their SIPR computers and clearing their desks until you pass by. The meeting can't discuss anything derived from classified materials unless it's been downgraded enough to be UNCLASS. That means that, just by being there in the meeting, you're limiting everyone else's ability to coordinate information. You are a human bottleneck.
It'd be a kindness to him to reassign him to something he could really do. If you've ever even just been waiting on a clearance upgrade to be adjudicated, you can understand how hard it is. You've got to be in the job in order to have the 'need to know,' and without 'need to know' you can't have the specific clearances you need. So you get there, and then you file the forms, and then you wait for the approval. In the meantime, you might as well go golfing every day because not only can't you do your job, you're impeding everyone else by being around. It's a miserable position to be in.
Three, he should not hold that position anyway. It's terrible that he may be an innocent man caught up in a corruption and bribery scandal. If he were lower enlisted, no one would think twice about putting him off duty and have him sweep a warehouse until the investigation cleared him or charged him. The fact that he's allowed to stay in his position is the only part of this that really has any controversy to this for me.
ReplyDeleteAmen. Oh wait... that's sexist, isn't it?
/running away
Frankly, I'd say we have too many flag officers in the Navy (and the armed services in general). More than one admiral per ship/sub in the fleet is ridiculous. There is bloat at the top of the admin chain in the military, and it does not add to readiness nor combat effectiveness. But that's just my opinion.
ReplyDeleteYou're absolutely correct. I get so aggravated when I read conspiracy theory articles about the Obama administration (which I'm not even sure remembers we *have* a department of defense) is "purging" the military of senior officers.
The ratio of senior officers to everyone else has gone through the roof in recent years. The services all know this is bad and have been talking about how to fix it for ages - long before President Huh??? ascended the Imperial Throne.
I imagine it's hard to get admirals and generals to admit there need to be fewer of them :p
Those two should have remembered to cash in their Democrat favors, but if they didn't have any from HRC and Hussein... well, that was one problem they failed to notice in time.
ReplyDeleteYou're absolutely correct. I get so aggravated when I read conspiracy theory articles about the Obama administration (which I'm not even sure remembers we *have* a department of defense) is "purging" the military of senior officers.
ReplyDeleteOh, I don't lay that particular bit of rhubarb at the President's feet. First off, because it's inaccurate. He's not purging the military of senior officers. The services are, however, doing an effective job of driving out its combat veterans. Mostly due to institutional dislike of those who have "seen the elephant". It happened in the 1990s too. Basically, senior leadership who never went on a combat deployment are discomfited by those upcoming leaders who have, and it leads to policies pushed down that tend to drive those who know how to best do the military's job of killing people and breaking things out of their minds. Things like "combat uniforms must be properly ironed", nevermind the fact that a) that's not what a combat uniform is for, and b) ironing actually destroys the IR masking coating in the combat uniform. Tattoo policies also tend to get more strict. Mostly because servicemembers who deploy to combat areas tend to get tattoos commemorating their service or buddies, it's happened since WWII. And every down-cycle following a war, there's new pressure to not allow servicemembers to have tattoos (it used to be "at all", but at least now it's "visible". Because apparently it's "unprofessional" for a soldier, sailor, airman, or Marine to ever have tattoos. Somehow.
IOW, I don't think it's any kind of conspiracy, it's just that garrison minded officers and NCOs don't like the "slovenly" field minded combat vets. So they do their level best to make the environment less conducive to those kinds of servicemembers so they'll just leave. The term, since at least WWII has been politely termed "Mickey Mouse BS", but more generally termed "chickenshit regulations".
For the record. I have no tattoos, I never served in anything even remotely related to combat, and this still was my observation from the post-Desert Storm Army. I stand by it.
ReplyDeleteMike, I am not the most knowledgeable person on this topic. From what I've seen, at the officer level it is a career killer not to have combat experience. Very few survive that.
ReplyDeleteThat may not be true at the SNCO, NCO, or enlisted levels - to that, I cannot offer any insights (even my usual second hand ones!). And it may only be true in the Marines, though. I don't know much about Army - it's a much larger organization.
I haven't seen senior officers without combat experience weeding out the competition - if anything, at that level the opposite is true (the weeded out are the ones without combat experience, which is stupid as an absolutely huge part of warfighting is logistics, planning, support, etc). They can't necessarily win wars, but they can certainly lose them if those jobs aren't done right.
I *have* seen a lot of very bad behavior that was ignored when we were fighting actively catch up with senior officers once they were back in garrison. And I have seen the whole oozing sense of entitlement, sometimes combined with substance abuse, end some careers. But I haven't seen anyone railroaded - they generally ended their own careers by doing things - repeatedly - that they knew would get them fired.
I have zero sympathy for folks like that, because officers should be held to a higher standard and it's poison to see some Colonel or General get away scot free while junior enlisted get cashiered or even court martialed for the same offenses.
Then there's this sort of thing, which doesn't explicitly require combat experience, but would tend to advantage those who possess it.
One thing I did observe with younger Marines was
Mike, I am not the most knowledgeable person on this topic. From what I've seen, at the officer level it is a career killer not to have combat experience. Very few survive that.
ReplyDeleteIn 1992 when I entered the Army, the vast majority of senior officers and NCOs had never seen combat. How could they have? Sure there were a small minority who had just entered service as Vietnam was ending, but as I said, they represented a very small minority. Out of all the NCOs I ever knew in my five years, I had a single E-7 who had been in Panama, but given that we and our allies numbered only about 27,000 in that conflict, that's probably about representative of those who had been there and that were still in service. I had none who had been in Granada (about 7,300 served there), and while I knew many who had been in Desert Storm, they were almost exclusively E-6's and below (and most were E-5s) when I knew them.
Now, it is true that I never once interacted with someone above the rank of O-6 while in service (I saluted a Vice Admiral once, but that hardly counts), and the most badass, hard-charging officer I ever spoke with (all of about 3 sentences) was this man. He assuredly had combat experience, and he may be the only officer I knew who did. Most were LTs, CPTs, and the occasional MAJ, all of whom were far too young to have served in combat (especially considering most of them had been Military Intelligence, which tends not to be a combat specialty for some reason).
Now, what you say is absolutely true. There were promotion points added to scores for promotion if you had served in combat. I could see them on the promotion point worksheets we filled out. It did NOT escape my notice, however that the number of points available for combat experience were dwarfed by those available for college credits. And while promotions from E-4 to E-5 and E-5 to E-6 relied on the points system, E-6 to E-7 and above did not. Instead, there were boards. And if the board did not approve your file for promotion, you did not advance. And given that most of those boards consisted of SGMs with about 15-18 years in service, how many of them do you suppose had combat experience? The minority did.
Now, you could brush that off and say, "well that may be true, but it's hardly evidence they were keeping out combat vets". And you'd be right. It was indicative, but by no means proof. Instead, what I saw that convinced me of it were the little restrictions that kept cropping up time and again that caused the combat soldiers I did happen to know to want to leave. Some of them surely were just signs of the changing times. We went from one sexual harassment sensitivity class per year (mandated following the events of the Tail Hook scandal) to three per year (following a scandal in which Drill Sergeants at one basic training company were having sex with their trainees, and one other scandal that I can't seem to recall). Some were not. Changes came down with regards to uniform policy (like the ironed and starched BDUs that the Desert Storm combat vets were vocally incensed about), changes to physical fitness standards from a combat focused PT test (which included the grenade throw) to a pushup-situp-run test lauded for being "lower impact" while favoring thin wiry soldiers who might not be able to lift their own bodyweight (but BOY could they run!), changes with regards to "sergeant's time" which was formerly used to teach soldier skills instead being used to polish brass and wax floors in the barracks, to regulations on how much alcohol you could have in your barracks room (1 liter of wine, or four wine coolers, or a six pack of beer; hard liquor was disallowed which just meant we drank in town or on our way back from the liquor store... safer than drinking in the barracks, I'm sure...). Sure, most of these sound trivial, I'm sure. But there was a never ending parade of this stuff, none of which particularly improved combat readiness, efficiency, or quality of life for the soldiers. And the few combat vets were the most torqued off by that. They (again, remember most I knew were NCOs) wanted to pass along the skills that they had used to do the job efficiently in the field, and instead they were told that the spit and polish was lacking.
ReplyDeleteThere's a place for spit and polish. I don't deny that. It teaches attention to detail, pride in your equipment, and keeps idle hands busy. When it comes at the expense of actual soldier skills, however, it's not a positive thing. In fact, I'd like to say it is like Aristotle's virtues; taken to an extreme a virtue can become a vice. The problem is, spit and polish vs rough and ready requires a balance, and there was no balance against the spit and polish mindset in senior leadership (both NCO and officer).
And I believe I see it again when I see nonsense like the previous Sergeant Major of the Army who went so wildly overboard on his uniform standards that the next SMA rolled them back as one of his first acts (I suspect that our previous SMA was pushed out because he was causing retention problems, but that's just a theory). And I see it when I see resistance to combat vets like Lieutenant General McMaster's promotion to Brigadier General in 2006 and 2007 (notably NOT the Obama Administration). He was passed over multiple times for "unexplained reasons" even though his tactics used in Desert Storm were being taught at West Point as the right way to do things. It took the personal attention of GEN Petraus at the request of SecArmy Geren to oversee the promotion board to finally get McMaster his flag. Why would this be neccesary? Because McMaster (who was a CPT in Desert Storm had what the other COLs awaiting promotion to BG did not... combat experience. Now, a lot of this was played as "he argues against the status quo". And when the status quo is Generals who have never seen combat (remember, the eldest of them in the 2000s were post-Vietnam and pre-Desert Storm officers, so opportunities for combat were next to nil) argue that the Army should be one way, and this combat experienced officer tells them they're wrong, then yeah, I would tend to listen to the one who has actually done the job than one who sat in garrison, filling out reports, and polishing the brass.
ReplyDeleteAnd I say this as a non-deployed, brass polishing, report-filling-out garrison soldier. This is not even a "back in the good old days" kind of thing, this is a "oh ****, they're doing the same stupid stuff again" kind of thing. And again, it's not a "this administration" problem. This is a generational, multi-decade problem of senior officers and NCOs fundamentally not understanding the soldiers out at the sharp end, wondering why they're all so scruffy looking and "disreputable", and wanting them gone in favor of spit and polish soldiers like themselves.