Attacking alcohol abuse is the key to ending misconduct in the fleet - Navy Community - discussions, photos, video - Navy Times

Attacking alcohol abuse is the key to ending misconduct in the fleet

It’s hard to argue with the MCPON’s logic. Reeling from a year that saw some 250 incidents of misconduct in the chiefs’ mess, an alarming increase in drunken-driving incidents and five high-level enlisted khaki firings since Jan. 1, the Navy’s top sailor is encouraging commanding officers to kick troublemaking chiefs out of the Navy.

There’s no room for non-hackers in a Navy that’s dealing with record retention and facing four more years of drawdowns. In December 2009, a year into his tenure as master chief petty officer of the Navy, Rick West pledged to personally review chiefs’ misconduct cases and to publicly announce high-level firings. Prior to that, only disgraced skippers and occasionally executive officers were turned into fleetwide examples of the consequences of bad behavior.

Kicking out chiefs whose conduct is unacceptable is the right thing to do. And while chiefs face the boot for a range of misconduct, including fraternization or acts of dishonesty, it’s no stretch to say that alcohol abuse played a role in many, many cases. The Navy continues to be afflicted with a deep-rooted subculture of problem drinking, one that harkens to the days of wooden ships, iron men and alcohol-drenched port visits.

Case in point: The skipper and command master chief, along with six more chiefs, a junior officer and a petty officer, were just kicked off the destroyer Stout while on deployment in the Mediterranean because of the crew’s “pervasive pattern of unprofessional behavior.” Excessive alcohol consumption was a factor. The fact that Stout had just taken part in a sensitive mission tied to volatile events in Libya makes this incident particularly alarming.

But it is far from being an isolated case when it comes to serious problems tied to boozing by sailors, especially senior ones. The number of drunken-driving incidents involving chiefs rose 35 percent last year, from 51 in 2009 to 69 in 2010. In the first six weeks of this year, 14 chiefs have been busted for drunken driving, including a command master chief and a submarine’s chief of the boat. At that rate, nearly twice as many chiefs will be nailed for DUI this year as last year.

While the number of chiefs who get in trouble accounts for less than 1 percent of the senior enlisted community, West himself points out that one is too many. Every case is an embarrassment to the chiefs who take pride in their status as deck-plate leaders. They not only see to it that the fleet’s work gets done and gets done right, but they are lead-by-example role models younger sailors look up to for guidance in professional bearing and personal conduct.

Chiefs who fail in that run the risk not only of professional ruin, but of negatively influencing other sailors.

The Navy needs to redouble efforts to spot sailors who are abusing alcohol, to get them help earlier and to reduce even further the number of those who somehow manage to get selected for chief.

Firing and publicly shaming nonperforming chiefs likely will help tamp down the number of misconduct incidents and hopefully prevent another Stout-like mass firing. but the Navy needs a deep-dive assessment on the true extent of its alcohol problem and a commitment to eradicate it, at whatever cost. Without that, the misconduct will continue to plague the Navy.