Navy mass punishment: Unfair and ineffective
Once again an off-base incident in Okinawa caused by an off-duty, intoxicated sailor has caused the admiral who commands all U.S. Naval Forces throughout the islands to go overboard and punish the entire force for the transgressions of one person. Petty Officer Aimee Mejia caused a three-car wreck by driving the wrong way on a freeway while apparently alcohol impaired. For that offense by a single sailor, 18,600 of her shipmates have been restricted to their bases and forbidden from consuming alcohol, on or off base, for an indeterminate period. Rear Admiral Matthew Carter, Chief of Naval Forces, Japan issued that draconian edict on Monday as a sop to both his politically correct superiors and the government of Japan.
Let’s call this overkill punishment what it is, a hastily-issued form of apology to mitigate any demonstrations that are sure to be mounted by the leftist, anti-U.S., Japanese political factions that never miss an excuse to demand that all U.S. forces be withdrawn from their country. Rather than throw the book at the offending sailor in a very public courts-martial while simultaneously generously compensating the Japanese parties involved in the incident for injuries and damages, no, we punish nearly 20,000 innocent American citizens who did nothing, just to demonstrate our sincerity and determination.
Yeah, right, Admiral Carter, like you and the rest of us all know full well, locking up thousands of sailors and denying them adult beverages for long enough to constitute what you consider a satisfactory penance is certain to prevent incidents like this in the future. It’s not like it’s a fact of life that navies are made up of young people and young people have a proclivity to drink to excess and sometimes operate motor vehicles when they shouldn’t. But you, instead of punishing the few who transgress, are going to make your entire command pay just so you can make the grand gesture. That gesture, by the way, is most assuredly soon to be criticized by the Japanese themselves as this grounding of our troops plays holy hell with their local economies.
Then there’s the matter of troop morale and retention, Admiral Carter. How many first-time enlistees who have been subjected to your whimsical ability to make their lives suddenly miserable just to satisfy your own mea culpa, are going think back on that experience when weighing the pros and cons of reenlisting? Mass punishment is effective only as long as it is in effect. As soon as it’s lifted the irresponsible sailors in your force will go right back to being so perhaps with even more zeal built up during their restraint. Your responsible sailors will go on being so, just as they always do but with less respect for your leadership because, unlike you, they know that mass punishment is damned well unfair and employed only by unimaginative leaders who, not knowing what else to do, resort to meaningless gestures.
In the matter of apologies and mass punishment, a commenter at another site suggested that every time an illegal Mexican national gets picked up in a drunk driving accident in this country, that we arrest a thousand other illegal Mexican nationals and imprison them for an indeterminate period, only releasing them back to their native country when the Mexican president publicly apologizes to the people of America for the one drunk’s bad behavior. At the rate Mexican illegals get arrested for drunk driving and causing accidents when driving impaired, it wouldn’t be too long before millions of them were either in jail or back in Mexico. California alone would probably be incarcerating a million per week with Texas not far behind. And unlike with sailors, if you locked up that many illegal Mexicans, the crime rates would drop dramatically.
See, Admiral Carter? That idea makes about as much sense as your mass punishment does. You know, if it’s just a high level apology you need, there’s a guy in Washington who just loves…
Crossposted at American Thinker.
Category: Navy
Taking for granted members of an all volunteer force….great recruiting tool admiral.
I think it’s fair to say that this is what happens when the Navy has more admirals than ships.
You don’t have to be a full blown IDIOT to be an admiral, but in this case it helped! This moron hasn’t heard anything yet, wait til the local bar owners and citizens find out their revenue has just been reduced to NOTHING…working for this A.H., I would assume everyone NEEDS a drink at the end of the day!!
I wonder if the SPs doing random breathalyzers in the dorms.
He may have the rank, but that is not leadership. It is not courage. It is nothing but neck-deep brown nosing.
A deluxe butt snorkel. For sure.
Retention of talented people is a constant discussion in the military, apparently the concept that treating people like shit and changing the deal made in writing during the first enlistment period might be detrimental to retention is something the deep thinkers with their college degrees seem unable to grasp.
Perhaps if it were put in terms their feeble senior officer brains could understand they’d better grasp the situation…maybe the next time they catch a general or admiral drunk or watching porn on a government computer instead of letting them skate, perhaps they can restrict the access rights of the entire senior officer corps computers and remove all alcohol from the officers clubs and government supplied homes of the commanders…then perhaps these fucking arrogant prick bastards might understand how fucking useless some of their edicts are when it comes to generating respect and discipline.
There are some fine officers out there to be certain, men and women of integrity and character. There are also a lot of useless fucking turds collecting a paycheck who bring nothing to the table, however they get to stay because the system is designed to protect them.
That was perhaps acceptable when there was a steady stream of draftees unable to escape their indentured servitude.
In an all volunteer force someone had better learn quickly that making service as unattractive as possible doesn’t do much to entice volunteers to willingly give up personal freedoms and rights for the privilege of being treated like a criminal when they’ve done nothing wrong. With less and less people volunteering there’s already a problem with how unattractive the service is to the public. Pretending that a system that attracts less than 1% of the population is doing fine is about as honest as thinking #BLM actually cares about black lives.
‘mass punishment is damned well unfair and employed only by unimaginative leaders who, not knowing what else to do, resort to meaningless gestures…’
Okay, if you substitute ‘incompetent’ for ‘unimaginative’ or just add that adjective to the mix, you’ve got it right.
I’d have to ask the following questions of the admiral:
1 – Why was this inebriated broad allowed to even get into a car and drive, instead of taking a taxi wherever she was bound?
2 – Why is the ‘friends don’t let drunken friends drive’ rule not promulgated here?
3 – Why is the military in general not showing these morons the real-world consequences of drunk driving, e.g., the astonishing physics of an immovable force like a tree meeting an irresistible force, like a speeding drunk driver? A car wrapped around a tree with a mangled body in it and several other mangled bodies thrown out of it is an eye-opener. Gross ’em out. Take them to an accident scene and shove their noses in it. That might stop them.
4) – When is Carter going to get rid of that bottle of booze he keeps hidden in his desk?
5) When will we see a reduction in the hypocrisy of these senior officers?
I remember attending (yearly?) alcohol awareness training while on active duty at Subase Groton, including the mangled car on display for weeks, so I know the Navy does it. And we still had DUI and underage incidents on a near weekly basis. But the only one ever run through the wringer wasvthe guilty party, not the entire base. With all due respect, this ADM is a moron.
As the self appointed Devil’s Advocate, here are my answers as a former commander who spent many a Monday morning explaining the weekend’s blotter report to the Battalion Commander: 1 – Why was this inebriated broad allowed to even get into a car and drive, instead of taking a taxi wherever she was bound? A: Exactly. Regardless of soon-to-be-former PO2 Mejia’s crimes, there are several failures in leadership here. Her chain of command should have had several redundant programs in place to prevent this. As a company commander, Top and I kept a few hundred in cash at the CQ desk, and gave each paratrooper a card that had our phone numbers and guaranteed any cabby full fare and a generous tip if they got our ‘troop back to the barracks safely. We had a no questions asked policy- we’d just check with the CQ each week to make sure there was enough to cover a cab from the Flaming Mug (or Rick’s). Many a weekend it was zeroed out, but we figured it was money well spent. 2 – Why is the ‘friends don’t let drunken friends drive’ rule not promulgated here? A: Again, exactly. This should have been one of the programs referred to above. In other words, Mejia, while ia world class Blue Falcon, is only a symptom of the problem. 3 – Why is the military in general not showing these morons the real-world consequences of drunk driving, e.g., the astonishing physics of an immovable force like a tree meeting an irresistible force, like a speeding drunk driver? A car wrapped around a tree with a mangled body in it and several other mangled bodies thrown out of it is an eye-opener. Gross ’em out. Take them to an accident scene and shove their noses in it. That might stop them. A: Remember ‘Blood on the Asphalt’ from H.S. Driver’s Ed? I have seen the modern day equivalent of it roughly twice a year since 1987, not to mention totaled cars parked out by the gate, weekly mandatory safety briefs that ALWAYS include ‘don’t drive drunk’… Read more »
What did I miss? Who said she was “allowed” to drink and drive? Who said she was not alone and, if not, that she didn’t slip out the door of a club when no one was looking? Who said that she wasn’t counseled about driving drunk, that she didn’t see the driver’s ed movies or have first-hand knowledge of what DWI can do to people and property? Why is it not just her fault and hers alone–again, who is privy to the circumstances that existed?
I am fully confident that she was counseled and saw the movies.
As for ‘being allowed’ to drive drunk, 90% of the time in a case like this someone in the unit was either with her at the time or knew what she was doing and looked the other way- I saw this time and time again when I was in command. I would be surprised if you never did.
The command’s reaction tells me that they are either seeing a dangerous trend, which is part of the unit culture, or they have information that other Sailors could have prevented this but didn’t- I suspect that it’s both.
As everyone on the board seems to be well aware, troops give up quite a bit of liberty when they sign up; and troops serving overseas give up even more, especially in a place like Japan.
So when a Japanese citizen drives drunk and gets in an accident (and don’t tell me THAT never hsppens), does the Japanese government force all its citizens into house arrest for an indeterminate period of time?
Told in first NCO school: Never initiate a policy you cannot enforce. Specifically, do not tell your soldiers they cannot drink liquor or hang out with women. You will look stupid, and you cannot make that policy work.
This isn’t about recruitment, retention, fairness, effectiveness, or any of that.
This about an admiral in CYA, career self-preservation mode, plain and simple.
I’m sure he’s looking for a civilian job right now, not too far off in the future… a little something that lets him be an ‘advisor’, perhaps, where his lack of real administrative skills doesn’t stick out like a sore thumb.
“Rather than throw the book at the offending sailor in a very public courts-martial while simultaneously generously compensating the Japanese parties involved in the incident for injuries and damages, no, we punish nearly 20,000 innocent American citizens who did nothing, just to demonstrate our sincerity and determination.”
Sounds similar to a current CiC (Clown in Chief) who insists on castigating law abiding gun owners at every opportunity whenever there’s a “mass” shooting in a Gun Free (Open Kill) Zone.
Roger that!
I read on a Navy Facebook page that the Petty Officer left a house party (apparently verboten) at another sailor’s house before the DUI occurred. Apparently the party host himself was just busted very recently for DUI.
Aha! Did he carry host liquor liability for that party? If not, and he let her leave in an inebriated state, in THIS country he’d be liable for her causing the accident and he would have to compensate the other party.
No more drunken sailor jokes I guess.
What do you do with one?
Long ago and far away, Fort Campbell’s strategy to stem the large number of soldiers killing themselves in alcohol-related wrecks was to erect headstones inside the main gate. Each time a soldier was killed in a wreck, up went a headstone with his name and unit on it. There were a lot of them. My take on DWI is that there exists no one who consumes alcohol and who drives who hasn’t been DUI or DWI at one time or another. It’s just that most are never caught and that, along the way, we learned just not to do it, no matter what. Maybe the admiral should have banned driving, rather than drinking. It’s a lot easier to enforce.
By the way, at the time those fake headstones existed, one could buy beer in the day room for .25/can from what originally was a soda machine. Responsible behavior is a discipline acquired individually.
Mandatory viewing by all enlisted of the old “Signal 30” movie short and a new Power Point in 3…2…1
Things like this were a huge reason for my decision not to reenlist many years ago. Sorry to see that it is still going on. But, of course, it happens in the civilian world, too. Ass-hats with power are the same everywhere, the military just retains and promotes them more willingly.
That’s because in the civilian world at some point you have to make money which dooms some of the assclowns. A division that loses money doesn’t typically replace the shop floor employees unless the company is going down anyway.
If you can’t manage your department at my shop I get rid of you, not the department. Guys who seek to punish the whole department for the actions of a few are missing the big picture in not so subtle ways…
I do ‘t know, it seems to be working pretty good. No incidents the last two nights. When I got here in 94, the honch on the weekend was packed with sailors and women. Now, most of the bars have been replaced with clothes shops and hair salons. With constant nanny state oversight, the navy killed that place and sailors ventured up to Yokohama, Kawasaki and the various Tokyo hot spots where there actions go largely unnoticed by the nanny state. In Okinawa, you just can’t hop on a train at Chuo and flee te ever vigilant eyes of nanny. Sucks to be III MEF I guess. Make no mistake, this punishment period has less to do with punishing US personnel and most to do with a public show for Japanese media consumption. The navy exchange / base leadership took the opportunity yesterday to shrink wrap all the shelves containing beer / liquor. If you are not putting on a show, why do something as silly as shrink wrapping shelves? This little “school boy detention period” will get the force’s attention, the Japanese government can hold this dog and pony show up in front of the media to show how remorseful the US is and how they taught everybody a lesson and things will get back to normal. My first experience with this dog and pony started with the heinous rape of a 12 year old school girl in Okinawa in 95. I’d have to take off my shoes to count the number of times we have done it since. It’s all for public consumption. Nobody ever joins the military to be treated like an adult and one the rights you give up when you join is the right to not have to live through mass punishments. The liberty restrictions have been worse in the past so fuck it, the troops will survive. One good thing that has come out of all this is that yesterday there was a metric shit ton more sailors out doing PT in the morning before quarters. Don’t look at it as a “punish all… Read more »
I know im going to get beat up for this, but some one needs to remind the complaining Japanese that we most likely wouldn’t have been in Japan if some little island nation hadn’t picked a fight a little over 70 years ago. Just sayin’
I remember when a milder form of this silliness went on in 2004 when I was at Futenma. As a lance, I already couldn’t leave the base by myself or drive (although they would have let me drive if I requested a second year in Oki – what sense does that make??). After some underaged drinking incidents, they then started the red card/gold card liberty shit. Red cards had to be back on base before midnight. Individual commands could assign the cards at their discretion. Mine chose to simply give all lance corporals and below red cards. As a married 27 year old lance (I joined a bit later in life than most do), it pissed me off to no end that I was being treated like a child when I wasn’t even underaged and had no disciplinary incidents on my record, and it certainly pushed me away from staying in the Corps.
I believe the same thing now that I did back then – if you want to curtail alcohol-related incidents in Okinawa, where the drinking age is 18, allow under 21 personnel to drink on base – but only on base. If you’re 19 and want to knock a few back at the E club, go for it. If you want to go to Gate 2 street and get wasted, you’ll get your ass nailed to the wall. It’s not a perfect solution, but I’m confident it would reduce the number of off-base incidents, which is supposedly the goal. It’s not like there’s a whole helluva lot to do in Okinawa other than drinking, unless you get into scuba diving.
That’s what the Army used to do for posts near the Mexican border- Bliss, Huachuca, etc. Logic is that it’s better to have underage drunk Soldiers on post than in a Mexican jail- or dead on the highway.
I remember when I was stationed on Ft Benning in the early nineties when that post had a CG that relaxed restrictions on liquor and beer in the barracks and the number of DUIs on and off post took a nosedive. Maybe that instead of outlawing morale and the old “BEATINGS WILL CONTINUE UNTIL MORALE IMPROVES”?
It worked pretty well at Huachuca for a long time. Then the USMC detachment commander decided he was tired of 18 year old drunks in his barracks and required his Marines to be 21 to drink. Navy detachment followed suit, USAF was next, garrison commander finally changed the post policy. 1 drawback of the 18 to drink policy, if a troopie got legally drunk on post, then went off post (in a cab), he was now in violation of several AZ state laws. Even if he was behaving. He’s a drunk minor.
reddevil’s post above is long on words, but distinctly to the point…and well said at that. The answer written to question number ONE says it all. Logic 101 being the correct answer to all questions alcohol. Hard to not respect leadership who create and share solutions to potential problems.
This on a side note. A truly great friend named Mike DeLeo from Jersey and myself were alone on a flame tank when Cam Lo (RVN) was completely overrun by gooks. Our tank commander was probably a half mile away, sleeping in a tent they set up for most tank commanders…..for what reason I could not and will never guess. Mike and I did the best we could under the circumstances and lived to see daylight and the gooks running up a small mountain with F 4’s dropping armament on them all the way up. It was one of those nights which haunt you throughout the passing years of the remainder of your life.
Mike gets rotated home after 13 months, all in one piece. After a short leave, he is stationed at Quantico, of all places. How it hurt to learn later he had come in very late one Friday or Saturday night, loaded to the gills, had a bad wreck turning into the the generous sized drive way entrance at a high rate of speed. Learning he had been killed in his own wreck was bad enough. Learning he had been decapitated in the wreck made it all the worse. Sure can say it slowed my drinking down from those days.