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Letters

Keep the revived jack

Commodore Esek Hopkins used the First Navy Jack as a signal to engage the British in the American Revolution. The revived Jack in today’s fleet represents a historic reminder of the nation’s origin (“Wrong flag, wrong fight,” Back Talk, March 30).

Since 1775, our primary mission, to ensure the freedom of the seas, has remained unchanged. Today, terrorists threaten free commerce and individual liberty.

I agree that terrorism is a tactic, but the battle is with the ones engaging in such tactics. Our enemies use tactics such as bombing innocent bystanders or U.S. service personnel, or pirating ships. We, as a Navy, have embraced the mission and are fully committed to the end. This flag represents a renewed commitment by the Navy to our first principles — to secure freedom, both at home and abroad.

AWOCS (AW/NAC) Loy Hower

Oak Harbor, Wash.

Ball cap pride

As one who is getting ready to transition to the ranks of the retired, I would occasionally like to show pride in the Navy and my former units by wearing command ball caps. If they go away as part of the uniform, will we still be able to find the caps of our units in the Navy Pride section of our exchanges? I doubt it. After I retire, I will proudly wear my HS-75 Emerald Knights cap until it falls apart.

AT1(AW) Christopher Crawley

Doylestown, Pa.

I wear my U.S. Navy senior chief ball cap to show my pride in the greatest Navy in the world. I think change is good, but at the expense of pride of ship, pride of the Navy and pride of the U.S.? I don’t think so.

I don’t think you will find too many retired sailors wearing the new eight-point Navy Working Uniform caps. If a survey were taken, it wouldn’t surprise me to find that most ball caps are bought by individuals, not by commands.

Reserve LICS Donald Wiener (ret.)

Newark, Del.

SWO leadership failure

I was a surface warfare junior officer, and stuck it out through two sea tours and a shore tour before I knew I couldn’t continue in an excessively negative work environment (“A failure of leadership,” Back Talk, March 23). I decided I would either transfer to another community within the Navy or get out, despite my love for driving ships and a then-$75,000 SWO bonus offered if I would simply complete two more tours as a department head.

I had consistently negative tours afloat. Just about all the things you could think of that a boss should never do, I’ve either seen done to others or had done to me. Yelling, cursing and being made fun of, plus a lack of sleep and public beratings, all are part of everyday life in the SWO community, no matter how good your performance.

Worse than all of that, though, I never had anyone in my SWO chain of command who legitimately expressed an interest in my professional advancement or well-being anywhere close to the way I did for my own sailors. In short, I gave up because I felt like no one cared about me.

As long as there are enough end-strength numbers in the community, and complaints are kept to a minimum, things won’t change.

The simple fact is that it’s far easier, faster and more effective to throw more money at the community as a sort of acknowledgement that there is a hardship to be endured and compensated for than to attempt to achieve a real change in the SWO corps’ leadership techniques.

I acknowledge that there are those who say leadership is changing, that it just takes time for all the bad leaders to get out. That may be the case, but in the meantime, bad habits continue to develop and filter down to new generations of SWO leaders. In my case, I couldn’t see the change happening (and still can’t).

Until more junior SWOs start “voting with their feet” and getting out of the community in large numbers, leadership will continue to ignore the problems, and the SWO community will continue to be mired in its own negativity.

My sincere thanks to Donnie Horner for bringing this often-discussed but never-resolved problem to light again. The more these issues are brought up and discussed honestly and openly, the more likely a viable solution will present itself.

Lt. Cmdr. Tyler Goad

Stuttgart, Germany

Navy Times asked for possible reasons why the SWO corps and surface fleet is having so many problems of late:

• Pre-commissioning training for Naval Academy and Reserve Officers’ Training Corps midshipmen: “Gray ship” cruises on commissioned vessels can now be avoided if you play your cards right, and the movement of Officer Candidate School back to Newport, R.I., has not included moving yard patrol boats there yet, so any school related to SWO training in Newport is hurting.

• Division officer school — or what’s left of it — is a mere shell of what it was 20 years ago.

• Department head school is a shell of what it was, plus with no YP squadron in Newport, and no full-time training ship, seamanship suffers.

• Commanding and executive officer selection: Back in 1992, after qualifying as an engineering officer of the watch, tactical action officer and fleet officer of the deck, and passing a written test, shiphandling and oral board “tests,” I “command qualified” as an O-3. Six months later, that command qual, which had been the requirement for XO screen, was revoked under a new methodology for choosing XOs. Following an increasingly political XO selection board, the candidate was designated “command qualified” upon graduating from prospective executive officer school; he might be chosen for command at sea after surviving an XO tour. However, with the number of surface ships slashed in the late 1990s, coupled with the set-asides for aviators and surface nukes, there were no guarantees that even after years of sea duty you’d amount to anything in the SWO Navy.

Considering the lack of sleep at sea, the work hours each day in port or underway, the cuts in funding, crew size, and the emergence of a snobby Aegis “zero defects” mentality, we are blessed that sailors still want to take on the challenge of being a surface warfare officer. Unless the Navy restores all facets of SWO training to what they were in the 1980s and early 1990s — and takes a close look at crew size and the gnawing pain of sleep deprivation at sea — groundings, collisions and fires at sea will be more likely to happen.

If a retired lieutenant commander can recognize and speak out on these problems, then maybe some of our retired SWO flag officers ought to speak out, too, before we lose an entire ship full of sailors to a preventable collision at sea.

As defense budgets are cut, and our fleet ages, many current surface Navy COs who came up through the “Aegis Mafia” never served on any ship that was more than five to 10 years old.

There are many ways to learn about sailors and leadership, but being out at sea is hard to beat. Not everything can be computer-generated at a training command.

Lt. Cmdr. Thomas Strother (ret.)

Annapolis, Md.