The acting secretary of the US navy, Thomas Modly, has resigned after delivering a speech to the crew of an aircraft carrier denigrating their former commander who Modly fired when his appeal for help dealing with a coronavirus outbreak on the ship was leaked.
The scandal surrounding the USS Theodore Roosevelt, a nuclear-powered carrier now docked in Guam with half its crew on shore, has created a leadership crisis in the navy.
The defence secretary, Mark Esper, accepted Modly’s resignation and said that, with the president’s approval, he was appointing James McPherson, a retired rear admiral and current undersecretary of the army, to replace Modly. McPherson becomes the third person to fill the top civilian navy job in four months.
The Roosevelt affair started when its commander, Capt Brett Crozier, sent a four-page memo to his superiors on 30 March, asking for permission to allow his crew to disembark as it was impossible to achieve quarantine and social distancing conditions on board. The carrier made a port visit to Da Nang, Vietnam, in early March when the administration was downplaying the seriousness of the coronavirus threat, which may have been the source of the onboard outbreak.
“We are not at war. Sailors do not need to die,” Crozier wrote in the letter, which was leaked the next day in the San Francisco Chronicle.
On Thursday, Modly dismissed Crozier, arguing that by widely circulating the memo (his estimates of recipients has varied from 20 to more than 40) the commander should have known it would be leaked, and thereby expose sensitive information about the vessel’s state of readiness.
On Sunday, Modly, who has been acting navy secretary since November, flew to Guam (nearly 8,000 miles) to deliver a speech to roughly 2,500 crew still on board, through the ship’s intercom system. In the speech, a recording of which was quickly leaked, Modly said Crozier was “too naive or too stupid” to command the vessel, and rebuked the crew for having cheered the captain when he left.
After the speech was leaked, Modly said he stood by “every word” including the profanities he used.
The next day, Donald Trump said that he would intervene in the matter, and suggested that Crozier, who had an excellent record, should not pay the price for having “a bad day”. Shortly after that Modly reversed course and issued an apology, admitting that Crozier was neither naive nor stupid. According to several reports, Esper had instructed him to issue the apology.
In his resignation letter, Modly said: “The men and women of the Department of the Navy deserve a continuity of civilian leadership befitting our great Republic, and the decisive naval force that secures our way of life.”
In his letter accepting Modly’s resignation, Esper said the ongoing official had “resigned of his according, putting the navy and the sailors above self so that the USS Theodore Roosevelt, and the navy as an institution, can move forward”.
Adam Smith, the chair of the House armed services committee, said Modly was a competent and experienced official who appeared to have gone too far in trying to emulate and impress Trump.
“Acting secretary Modly is going to have a heck of a time getting the confidence in the navy back, given that he made that speech,” Smith told reporters on Tuesday. “Why would a competent capable veteran with extensive experience and leadership skills make such an obvious mistake? I think it’s because everyone over there is trying to figure out how do I stay in the good graces of the tyrant across the water.”
Source: US Politics - theguardian.com
