On November 12th, 1989, USS Kinkaid (DD 965) collided with the Panamanian merchant ship Kota Petani when the destroyer was on the wrong side of the heavily traveled Strait of Malacca.  The collision injured five sailors and killed the ship’s navigator. Kinkaid limped into Singapore and, after temporary repairs, returned to San Diego.  Her commanding officer, Commander John Cochrane, was removed from command on November 23rd.

1989 was a challenging year for the Navy.  Over the course of the year at least 65 people were killed in Navy disasters, including 47 sailors killed in a gun turret explosion April 19 aboard the battleship USS Iowa,  six killed in a fire May 9 aboard a combat supply ship in the South China Sea, two killed in a fire May 14 aboard USS America, five killed in an October 29 training jet crash aboard USS Lexington; a sailor lost overboard from USS Eisenhower off Cape Hatteras, N.C.; a sailor lost overboard from USS Carl Vinson in the Pacific; and a November 9 jet crash into an apartment complex in Smyrna, Ga., that killed two people.

Kinkaid was on her way home from deployment.  Commander Cochrane had been in command for twenty months.  A Navy rear admiral conducted a Judge Advocate Manual investigation that ran to over 500 pages and was completed on December 14, 1989.  The investigator found that both the bridge and combat information center watchteams were so focused on navigation that they were incapable of tracking the many surface contacts in the area and did not realize they were on a collision course until it was too late.  The report also found that the combat information center (CIC) was only half manned, the normal positions to monitor surface traffic were unmanned and unused, CIC leadership were unaware of the surface picture, the bridge and CIC leadership team were very inexperienced, and the Commanding Officer and Navigator did not prepare the ship for entry into the crowded straits.

The navigator, Lieutenant Sean Michael McPhee, was the sole fatality of the collision.  Commander Cochrane didn’t even know that the ship was in the Strait of Malacca because McPhee allowed the ship to enter the busy waters early.  The investigation recommended Article 32 hearings for Cochrane on charges of dereliction of duty and improper hazarding of a vessel. The report also recommended charges for the officer of the deck, Lieutenant Junior Grade Steven Michael Williams.  The petty officer in charge of navigation, the ship’s operations officer, and the CIC watch supervisor were recommended for non-judicial punishment and the former and current executive officers were recommended for nonpunitive letters of caution. The three went to NJP with Commander, Seventh Fleet, on January 5, 1990.  Williams and Cochrane were tried at court-martial. Williams pled guilty to charges of dereliction of duty and hazarding a vessel and was awarded a letter of reprimand and dismissed from the Navy.

Cochrane was acquitted of both charges after an eight-day trial that included over thirty witnesses.  Cochrane was the first commanding officer in ten years to be tried at court-martial for a collision. He was also the last until 2018 when Commander Alfredo Sanchez pled guilty to negligence for the collision between USS John S. McCain (DDG 56) and merchant ship Alnic MC.  Over the next six to twelve months the Navy will continue the court-martial proceedings for Commander Bryce Benson who commanded USS Fitzgerald (DDG 62) when she collided with merchant ACX Crystal on June 17, 2017.  Like Cochrane, Benson was asleep when his ship collided with the merchant.  And like Kinkaid, Fitzgerald’s officer of the deck pled guilty to her charges of negligence.

In the end, the causes of the three collisions - inexperience, inattentiveness, and careless action by junior officers - are similar.  The 2017 collisions were far more deadly, killing seventeen sailors.  Time will tell if Benson’s case resolves like Cochrane’s but history, and the law, is likely on his side.

​Navy culture builds on traditions of the sea and seafaring in a nearly unbroken line from the British Empire through today’s modern ships of steel and nuclear weapons. One common saying is that the United States Navy is “over 240 years of tradition, unaffected by progress;” clearly not fully true, however, tradition is a such a cornerstone of naval life that the word is an unofficial fourth core value and the single most common rationale for any action. “Tradition” is used in many ways and forms and often interchangeably with custom and routine.

However, tradition is not the bedrock historical habit commonly believed. In reality, cultures usually invent traditions, consciously creating and adapting them for unique and specific reasons. “The term 'invented tradition' is used in a broad, but not imprecise sense…[and].. includes both 'traditions' actually invented, constructed and formally instituted and those emerging in a less easily traceable manner within a brief and dateable period...” Hobsbawm and Ranger write that the purposes of these “invented traditions” are to “inculcate certain values and norms of behaviour [sic] by repetition, which automatically implies continuity with the past.” They tell us that these creations are “responses to novel situations which take the form of reference to old situations” where tradition differs from convention or routine (lacking significant ritual or symbolic function) and custom (which is flexible where tradition is not).

This created tradition appears and reappears in naval thinking. The most commonly cited form comes from one of the cases later discussed. Following a 1952 collision at sea in which an aircraft carrier cut USS Hobson in half killing 176 sailors, including her captain, the Wall Street Journal published an editorial which reads in part:

• On the sea there is a tradition older even than the traditions of the country itself and wiser in its age than this new custom. It is the tradition that with responsibility goes authority and with them both goes accountability. This accountability is not for the intentions but for the deed. The captain of a ship, like the captain of a state, is given honor and privileges and trust beyond other men. But let him set the wrong course, let him touch ground, let him bring disaster to his ship or to his men, and he must answer for what he has done. No matter what, he cannot escape…

This article has been reproduced and repeated so often that the lessons within are now mythic in nature and scope. Adherents, especially those with limited understanding of history, are unaware that the lessons are more modern than mythic. The lessons are relevant, but they are not as clear as some profess, or even as well understood as some interpret. In fact, in “Hobson’s Choice” we have the first mention of “a tradition older even than the traditions of the country”- the origination of “with responsibility goes authority and with them both goes accountability;” two ideals firmly embedded in today’s Navy.

Modern Navy culture is largely affected by two things - women and World War II. World War II looms large over modern naval thinking. At the United States Naval War College, Pacific battles against the Japanese are studied and dissected. Novels of the war, including Mister Roberts, The Caine Mutiny, Winds of War, and War and Remembrance, are favorites among officers and sailors alike. Women are the modern impact, with female service at sea allowed in two periods - aboard non-combatant ships in the early 1970s, aboard combatant surface ships since 1995, and submarines since 2015. The period between women first embarking ships in the 1970s and embarking surface combatants in 1995 was one of Navy leadership’s most turbulent times, and a time oft written about.

The 1991 Tailhook Scandal provides a central core of writings. More than 100 women, both civilian and active duty, were assaulted at a naval aviation convention in Las Vegas, Nevada. The incident was a social watershed, not only for what happened in Las Vegas, but what happened afterward. The scandal and botched investigation directly claimed the careers of a Secretary of the Navy, a Chief of Naval Operations, at least three admirals, and almost a dozen other officers. The scandal tarnished the reputations of many others, and “tailhook” remains shorthand for an embarrassing, and revealing, chapter in naval history. However, writings on Tailhook deal more with the investigations, or recommendations for the future of women in the service than they do with any crimes of command. Multiple studies and books speak of military issues with sexual assault, drunken debauchery, botched investigations, and general incompetence as crimes, but they are not crimes of command. Crimes of command, in their purest sense, are solely related to being in command. Crimes of command occur when a commander violates the ideal of command.

Why write this book?

In 2004 I was done with my executive officer tour in USS The Sullivans (DDG 68) and working at the Headquarters, United States Marine Corps. The previous year or so had a spate of commanding officers gracing the cover of Navy Times and the Navy’s Chief of Naval Information (ChInfo) released a story detailing a comprehensive report done by the Navy Inspector General. ChInfo’s offices were down the hall and around the corner so I wandered down and sweet talked a copy from the lieutenant who had it on his desk.
I read through report and thought “this is it?”. There were some great nuggets, and some lessons to be learned, but nothing. Nothing salacious and nothing of import. Basically, the commanders were removed from command, there were no common characteristics and that was that.
​
Six years later I was done with my own command tour. There’d been a spike in removals, another report, and at a Surface Navy Association luncheon I sat next to a recently retired Captain who commanded twice at sea. The topic came up and I asked him about the current official line that only about 1% of commanders were being removed. He scoffed and said something to the effect that 1% is too many, no one should be getting fired – they all know what the rules are.  However, I knew that this 1% number was a problem when you moved back in time. Of today’s 2,500 command positions, only 300 are ships. At the end of World War II, the Navy had over 6,000 ships - 20 times as many as today. If the ratio of ships to overall commands held true, then in 1945 wouldn’t you expect a potential removal rate of 500 commanding officers – each year? If 26 removals make headlines today, what would happen with 500? How valid is that accepted number of 1%?

Over the next ten years I collected stories of commanders removed from command. Some I knew, some were friends; none of the stories were good. At the very least a career was over. Sometimes a sailor was dead. Sometimes a ship damaged very badly. And sometimes, rarely, something bad happened and the commander wasn’t removed and moved on and up. What? Something didn’t make sense.

Eventually, I found a list of incidents someone else cataloged and digitized it. I searched and added to it. I found names and ranks and stories and tried to figure out what happened then and compare it to what was happening now.

In the beginning I had some ideas and preconceptions that matched the current beliefs and feelings of officers and sailors in the Navy and Coast Guard. By the time I was done, those ideas were turned on their head.

I ended up enrolling in the PhD program at Salve Regina University with two goals - assuage the decades old desire to earn a doctoral degree and write this book.  The book is a modified form of my dissertation, but not much modified. Without the PhD you wouldn’t have the ethics or leadership pieces towards the end and those were critical to my finding, and understanding, why the Navy today removes more commanders than in years past.
​