Discipline for Seamen

Scuttlebutt
43

Because of all the abnormalities that you point out with Gallaghers situation is the reason why I couldn’t respond to freighterman1s supposed similarly framed scenario. He starts out, “Case Study: After a thorough investigation of the facts…”. That beginning is pretty dang simple & everyone should come to the same conclusion which is the organization isn’t well ran & the CEO is a dick. But that wasn’t any where close to the case with Gallagher which had lots a shenanigans, variables & public relation factors.

Also, let me state this first, I read all of freightermans1 comments & it is my opinion from those comments that he sincerely cares about the employees that he is responsible for. While I don’t agree with everything he says he sounds like a stand up dude & I would love to have a professional like him running our HR department. But a lot of HR Managers are certifiable dirtbags. I worked with 2 separate HR Managers at 2 different companies that waited for guys off time to be completed & for them to travel across the country just to be laid off. I had a HR manager tell me I couldn’t go home to see my first son born because I didn’t find myself a relief! I completed all the paperwork for family leave, notified HR, both Masters & my normal relief 6 months previous. I told the idiot I wasn’t a crew coordinator, I didn’t have a database with everyone’s schedule & phone numbers & that I was going home regardless. No offense intended to freighterman1 but when I read a scenario where anyone fires the HR Manager I automatically assume the HR Manager deserved it because of so many bad experiences with them.

44

That’s the only crime he was convicted of. He was charged with many. And the prosecution crumbled when a colleague most likely perjured himself and made a statement that was not made in any of the previous interviews.

Gallagher texted about killing the child with his knife when he sent the photo with his corpse. Threatened his teammates to stay silent. This is not contested, nor in the stories you quote, I guess there’s no reason to present all the facts save the ones presented by his hi power legal team (one of whom he is apparently stiffing). Perhaps Navy prosecutors did screw up, if so it’s a shame.

Nothing about this smells good. And just because one is not found guilty, doesn’t mean someone is innocent. And the standard of conduct for military isn’t just avoiding convictions but also the situations that get into the realm of criminal or even just ‘unbecoming’.

Only thing that got his ‘attention’ was that CinC was told by TV people to do something. He listens to the TV people.

45

I don’t know what country you are from, but here in America you are innocent until proven guilty. Chief Gallagher was convicted of one crime only. You are correct however, indeed he was charged with several crimes and acquitted of them.

The “child” you refer to was a combatant. And I don’t care how old the person is, if they are carrying a rifle, a pistol, an RPG, or a suicide vest, they are a valid wartime target, and I would engage them.

I wonder if you have ever been in combat- not just a combat zone, but actually engaged in combat action. If you have not, then you have no understanding of what Chief Gallagher has been through. And even if you have been in combat, have you been in the same situations that Chief Gallagher was in? If you have, then I honestly don’t understand your opinion.

46

Army major wants his medals restored and his removal from the special forces reversed.

47

If it’s true that Gallagher can only be judged by his peers with related military experience then it should to be acknowledged that’s exactly what happened. He was judged by his peers in the Navy.

Trump, by that criteria is not qualified to make judgments in this case.

48

Setting aside for a moment the personalities in the news, the echoes of “extreme intervention” in an organization are predictable.

Anyone disciplined by a manager will now routinely appeal to the CEO to overturn the decision. If the case of the original appellant wasn’t unique, then anyone else who has been disciplined can now go to the CEO and ask for the same deal.

If the CEO overturns a decision because the case is unique, this isn’t a problem. ‘Unique’ means something that falls into a gray area; a one-off, a unicorn, not likely to be encountered again for years. If the CEO overturns the manager’s decisions for anything else, or because of personal predilections or favoritism, someone will always be knocking on the CEO’s door because their case is “different”.

The more the CEO overturns the decision of their managers, the less authority the managers have. Some may quit. New managers coming in will not view the rules of the organization with the same respect as the previous managers. They will make their decision based less on the needs of the organization, and more on the predilections of the CEO.

This starts divisions within the organization: the faction which abides the rules of the organization, and the faction which abides the CEO. Of course, most companies are so small and shallow in structure the difference between the two is functionally meaningless. But the bigger the company is, the bigger the problem.

49

This is true except for one thing.

What if the CEO wishes to use the company, not for the benefit of the shareholders and other stakeholders but instead for his own corrupt purposes (a drug deal)?

In this case each time the CEO violates company norms the people loyal to the company will object while people loyal to the CEO will support the CEO’s action.

After a few company loyalist are fired the rest will get the picture and if they wish to keep their jobs they will abandon their loyalty to the company and become loyal to the CEO.

50

I don’t have a lot of bandwidth to research & post links but I spent less than a minute trying to remember cases of when CEO’s stepped in to correct supposed wrongs committed against individual customers & lowly employees. Most of them were cases with a lot of publicity & others not. If I had faster internet & desire I’m sure I could find dozens of other instances. As an investor, I want a CEO who monitors all aspects of his company, especially problems that deals with brand image & public relations. I’m sure they teach this in MBA courses.

  1. Jay Leno was a car washer at a dealership in Detroit & was fired. The CEO of one of the Big 3 bypassed everyone in the chain of command & put Leno back to washing cars.

  2. A grandmother in the UK always told Google thank you & please while searching the web. One of the presidents contacted her & told her thanks for her kindness.

  3. 2 African American gentlemen were treated bad at a Starbucks. CEO contacted both them & closed every single US Starbucks down for a day to retrain & to make sure mistake never happens again.

  4. CEO of Southwest has stepped in several times one the behalf of individual employees & has stated several times that the customer isn’t always right when they mistreate his team members. Southwest is consistently ranked as one of the best companies in the US to work for.

  5. As a teenager I worked at a Wendy’s. While it wasn’t at my store, Dave Thomas would visit stores & work the grill for 30 minutes to an hour for publicity & for old time sakes. Dave Thomas would remedy individual employees problems if he could when he was making his rounds.

But again, comparing the POTUS to a company CEO & a Navy SEAL to an AB isn’t scale appropriate IMO.

51

I agree, but it does make for fascinating talking points. There are parallels, and there are differences.

I notice franchises like McDonalds and Dennys are always getting into public relations troubles, in part because each franchise is essentially just a guy on his own trying to make a buck on cheap labor with high turnover. There are no middle-managers. The owner makes a business decision (or has one made for them by an 18-year old part-time worker) in real time. Process, rules, appeals, from someone higher up? There’s little to none of that.

When it comes to bad press in the 24-hour media of today, there’s the franchise owner, and the CEO of the corporation. No in-between.

Companies like Mc Donalds want this to be the case. Because each McDonalds is a franchise, if one ends up in hot water the CEO of the corporation can say, “That’s not us. That’s that guy."

This plausible deniability works in the corporation’s favor. “Hey, it’s not our fault Unit 145569 screwed up in Peoria, but we’re such a great company, I, the CEO, am going to swoop in and fix it.” The problem gets fixed, the CEO looks good, the company gets a name mention, and they don’t have the expense of middle managers trying to avoid the problem in the first place.

Perception is everything in businesses like food service. (Full disclosure: I was dissed once in a Denny’s in Wenatchee. I’ll never step foot in one again. That will show them…:rage:)

Of course, this kind of alpha/omega management only works with certain problems in a franchise-system. If the problem is, say, e-coli contamination, then the corporation is going to need a whole set of middle managers to monitor the problem across the company before it occurs, with all sorts of rules, or one rogue franchise can sink everyone with bad publicity.

52

Here’s an interesting article from the Navy times talking about how the CNO’s directive regarding other members of Chief Gallager’s platoon was not followed.

It also discusses the rather poor performance of the Jag corps.

Like someone else said in this forum, ”rot in some of the flag officers” at the top

And after reading the article, The HUGE question that popped into my brain after viewing the picture of Alpha Platoon posing with the dead body was, “Why was Chief Gallagher the only one charged with “the crime” of a picture with the dead terrorist?”

53

Fair point. But only 5 of the 12 jurors had combat experience. From this article:

“Five said they had personally faced the enemy and five had experience with detainees. Eight had lost friends or shipmates in combat.”

Lastly, CinC has the ultimate say. The military operates under civilian control. One needs to remember that President Truman exercised civilian control when he fired Douglas MacArthur, who was immensely popular with the military and civilians.

54

President Abraham Lincoln was well known for using his authority to grant clemency or pardon his soldiers and sailors. One of his generals even wrote personally to the President:

“President Lincoln, I pray you not to interfere with the courts-martial of the army. You will destroy all discipline among our soldiers. – B.F. Butler.”

No matter, Lincoln did as he would.

It was President Johnson who granted the most pardons in American history when he pardoned nearly the whole of the Confederate army - an act certainly more political than merciful.

FDR pardoned several hundred WWI draft doggers. Truman did the same after WWII.

Pardon and clemency by presidents is not unusual even in high visibility cases. President Obama commuted the sentence Chelsea Manning for her act of espionage committed in uniform.

There are many more examples of commanders dismissing charges against men who may have committed atrocities during or after battle. This time isn’t all that different.

55

I’m digressing from the thread, but:
If an accused person is poor, must all the jurors be poor? If the accused person is a beaten-wife, must all the jurors be beaten-wives, or beaten at some time in their lives?

If the accused person is white, does it matter if seven jurors out of five are non-white, and five are white, or vice versa?

56

You wrote:
“If an accused person is poor, must all the jurors be poor? If the accused person is a beaten-wife, must all the jurors be beaten-wives, or beaten at some time in their lives? If the accused person is white, does it matter if seven jurors out of five are non-white, and five are white, or vice versa?”

Damn. You’re good; You’re making me ponder!!

Ok, I don’t have a good rebuttal to “poor” or “wife-beater”, but regarding race: Yes it does!! Many cases have been rebuked because of “racial” issues.

I believe I could have gotten my head wrapped-around the verdict if the jury were all SPECOP types; SEALS, GREEN BERETS, DELTA, MARINE RECON, etc. But, using an extreme example, having some cook or yeoman, who never heard a bullet crack over his/her head, pass “judgment” on a SPECOPS guy? Yeah. I have a problem with that.

And after reading/seeing the photo that had Alpha Platoon with the dead guy, and only Gallagher is accused & convicted?? Yeah, I see a miscarriage of justice. Totally

And at the end of the day, there is divergence of opinion, not only with in the civilian community, but also within the SPECOP community on the justice for Gallagher. I think he got screwed-over, but my son (Purple Heart recipient from Afghanistan) does not. [I’ll wait and see if he changes his mind after he sees the Alpha Platoon photo. LOL]

57

Pres Carter pardoned the Viet Nam draft dodgers too. (And I’m still butt-sore about that. Well, a little-bit.) But I also recognize it was the right thing to do.

58

Here’s the picture at the center of the maelstrom (for those who didn’t read the article):

image

59

As many people have noted, pardons for soldiers during wartime is a subject unto itself.

The most infamous war crime in my lifetime involving American forces was the My Lai massacre. Absolutely horrendous. The officer in charge was sentenced to life in prison. In the end he served 3.5 years of house arrest before the president pardoned him. The reasoning for that pardon would be familiar today.

In the last analysis, I think the U.S. public sanctions these pardons because they realize that once you ask a fellow citizen to kill, it can be hard to stop killing. Once you ask a man to break the most sacred of rules, how can you ask him to follow any other rules?

Another good reason to avoid going to war in the first place.

60

As a foreigner I’m relieved you guys can discuss this in a healthy manner, even if the right side of the republicans in America is alien to me. Living during Pax America, shit could become a lot worse if you let maniacs kill people without repercussion in bumfuckistan. Gallagher escaped hard time, but in the civilized world the dude is persona non grata.

61

Killing people is EXACTLY the reason Chief Gallagher was sent to bumfuckistan.

It floors me that we have so many Monday morning quarterbacks who can just say with so much certainty (from the air conditioned comfort of their Lazy-Boy) exactly what the Chief should have or shouldn’t have done over there in that shitty hellhole he was sent to. I’d really like to know what percentage of these people have ever held a weapon in their hands and of that (my guess is small) percentage, what percentage have ever held that weapon in a combat zone surrounded by REAL maniacs willing to blow themselves up in a effort to kill you. Because in THAT environment, rules of:

do not apply.

You gotta make a choice…do you want the freedom afforded by warfighters like Chief Gallagher or not? If you don’t like how he and men like him provide that freedom, then go see/send your children to go see your local recruiter and sign on the dotted line. Until that happens, it does my heart good to see the CinC send a strong message that the men at the tip of the sword will not be made to be scapegoats by the “leaders” above him. Based on what I saw when I was in the Navy, I think @squidly was absolutely DEAD ON when he said:

Trump had the balls to call ‘bullshit’ and make it right.

62

I hope not, then USA is beyond the pale.

Carl von Clausewitz - War is the continuation of politics by other means.