How could someone get to be a captain of an aircraft carrier and not have the awareness to know that if he sents an inflammatory, passionate call to arms specifically requesting political intervention with tons of dire prognostication and CC's dozens of people with no need to know, that his words are going to leak out? I don't like narratives that require either ignoring plot holes or explaining them away with conspicuous and uncharacteristic incompetence. And if we are to try to explain it away as profound lack of political awareness- then what's he doing asking for explicit political intervention in the first place? I don't think that's credible, he's not a mid-ranking individual or Mr. Magoo, he's the captain of an aircraft carrier.



I don't think we can know.
What we've heard is that the superior officers adamantly denied that Crozier ever stated any kind of extreme emergency need to them before and said he never took made any such emphatic request
and we know that the letter was dated the same day it leaked to the media, so they had no chance to respond to the letter before it came out.

But we also can deduce with pretty good certainty that leaking the letter was intentional and that leaking it clearly compromised national security by broadcasting the unreadiness of the US's most important strategic asset to our enemies.

This post was edited by Goomshill on Apr 3 2020 02:35pm

https://www.europapress.es/castilla-lamancha/noticia-lm-anuncia-turquia-le-requisado-150-respiradores-comprados-china-espera-queja-diplomatica-20200403210814.html

Turkey seized a load of ventilators that were on their way from China to Spain in customs, preparing to use them for their own needs.

Pieces of shit.

Did They want ww3, because that's how you get ww3

You're really failing at using Hanlon's razor here. That's exactly what he is until proven otherwise! Keep in mind, he ISN'T a flag officer (high ranking official)... Like I said, you're a political animal and you view things through a political lens. A LOT of people in the military don't (I'd argue MOST) and the ones who do are typically the ones who become high ranking military officials (O-7+). Again, you COULD be correct about his intentions and I'm not saying that you aren't.

Did you read the letter? In what way is it "inflammatory?" He used the word "political" once and I think you're conflating "political" solution with "partisan" solution. You're also overreacting to the concept of "readiness." It literally says in the letter that the carrier could maximize readiness but there may be some loss. Everyone in the fucking world knows what happens if COVID-19 ends up on a ship so this isn't some secret that is going to cause China to attack us.

Lastly, I don't know who was CC'd on the letter. I imagine it was the chain of command, officers in charge of other carrier groups, defense officials involved with operations/funding, etc. were on it. Maybe they DID need to know, maybe they didn't. I would agree with the statement that it's not the Captain's job to make that judgment.

I guess it's surprising to me that you DON'T see incompetence when we see it ALL the time in government (including the military). Are we forgetting about the recent mishaps that the Pacific fleet has had recently?

Edit: Here is the letter
https://assets.documentcloud.org/documents/6821571/TR-COVID-19-Assistance-Request.pdf

This post was edited by thundercock on Apr 3 2020 03:31pm

Pearl Harbor is an unprecedented event, soldiers getting covid-19 which has a 99.8% survival rate among pretty much everyone on that ship is hardly reason enough to say fuck chain of command.

Only reason i think such an action (purposefully leaking) would be justified if someone was critically ill and command denied docking/help, otherwise you gotta go up the chain.

edit: read the letter and it's reasonable however if he knew it would be leaked and cc'd a bunch of people with that intention then he deserves to be fired. Ultimately i think it was a poor judgement call but who knows what his intentions were.

This post was edited by ofthevoid on Apr 3 2020 03:58pm

What about the rate of soldiers turning unfit for service do to corona though? Yes, among the soldiers, virtually no one should die, but it can still potentially take out 5 or 10% of the crew if everyone gets it at once.

If you check out social media, you can find a lot of people who were part of his crew telling their stories. Don't believe EVERYTHING, but it can put some things into perspective. I imagine his commanding officer knew about this (admiral is in charge of the carrier group, captain is only in charge of a single ship in the group) and gave him the go ahead.

Cut down to critical duties only. In 2 weeks you would have 5000 people that are past Covid and have antibodies. Like to me this only makes sense if you literally had people seriously ill (needing respirators/ICU) but to me the probability of people between 20-40 getting seriously ill that are serving in the military and have been screened for health fitness are tremendously low.

The logarithmic growth is concave down, so the containment measures appear to be working.. for now.