Preferential Treatment

By lex, on December 5th, 2011

You may or may not remember the former CO of the USS Ponce. She was the eighth in an I-can’t-recall-how-many COs to be relieved for cause in 2011. Took her XO with her.

Summat of a pip, * it seems:

The Navy commander who was fired in April from her position as skipper of the Norfolk-based amphibious ship Ponce gave preferential treatment to female officers and repeatedly put her crew’s safety at risk, according to an investigation report released Wednesday.

Cmdr. Etta Jones, who took command of the transport dock in October 2010, was removed while the ship was on deployment in the Mediterranean Sea. The Navy took action after a member of the crew submitted an anonymous complaint alleging that Jones also verbally abused and demeaned subordinates, failed to report incidents of hazing, and mishandled the ship, various safety procedures and a loaded weapon.

The investigation report, obtained by The Virginian-Pilot through the Freedom of Information Act, says all of those allegations were found to be true.

The full report can be found here. It makes for some batsh!t crazy reading.

This isn’t a guy thing or a girl thing, really. Many more male COs have been relieved this year. A 21:1 ratio, albeit uncontrolled for gender representation in command. Which I don’t know what that is.

Still, I believe it’s a Navy thing.

As in, “What were we thinking?”

It isn’t like we were deliberately choosing alkies, reprobates, incompetents and sociopaths. It’s that we weren’t identifying them.

After all, in a relative terms the axing of 20 commanding officers – OK, I do remember – among a cohort of nearly 1500 barely breaks the signal-to-noise ratio. It’s a vanishingly small percentage.

But it’s not like we haven’t had 15-20 years to look at these folks. You don’t earn command through a lottery. “Close and daily observation”, etc. Screen boards.

Something’s broke.

** Original link gone; replaced with different source – Ed. 

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