Fat Leonard and USS COLE

There is little chance that I will wrap myself in great honor with this post, but I render it in order to add some context to a situation that appears to be about to blow up, and blow up big time.  I will do so by making an admittedly strained comparison between the tragic terror bombing of the USS COLE (DDG 67) in 2000 and the "Fat Leonard" scandal now approaching its climax.  I will not bore you with the details of the Fat Leonard issue, as you can Google to your hearts delight should you be ill-informed.  I will not recount what happened to COLE, as your reading this blog suggests you already know the story.

Mr. Leonard

Where the comparison is apt is at the level of local knowledge or lack of it, the Commanding Officer of a ship (or Battle Group, etc) based in the U.S. has when operating forward, and the degree to which CO's and others must place their trust in the persistent network of contractors, vendors, and chandlers as they negotiate the world of forward based logistics in an era of light footprints and a dangerously lean logistics force.  No, this is not yet another screed from me that the fleet is too small and that we need more oilers and logistics ships.  It is merely a reminder that our globally dispersed Navy is reliant on networks of providers and a skeleton force of U.S. Navy personnel to ensure they are provisioned and maintained while forward.

The CO of the USS COLE was, in a series of decisions that bring dishonor upon  the Senate, the Navy, and former Virginia Senator John Warner, was denied due course promotion to Captain and ultimately retired after several years of hoping the decision would be reversed.  Warner held entire promotion lists hostage in order to placate a small but noisy constituency of aggrieved COLE families who believed that he should be held personally responsible for what was without question, an act of war.  To refresh memories, COLE was heavily damaged when a garbage scow which tied up alongside, blew up.  Here is where the Fat Leonard comparison comes in.

COLE Memorial

COLE's CO, Kirk Lippold, existed at the ragged edge of an intricate network of supply and maintenance that ensure our forward deployed ships are supplied and ready for action.  It is administered largely by Navy logisticians, who are largely part of the Navy's Supply Corps.  I am certain Lippold prepared his crew and his ship for deployment by doing what we all did in that position, and by my reading, he did it extraordinarily well.  He ensured that they were ready operationally.  He ensured that the crew understood the environment, the threats, the friendlies, the cultures, the religions, and the geography.  He did all that was humanly possible to ensure that his crew could competently operate in what was without question, the most demanding operational environment of its day--but the plain truth of the matter was that he or anyone else in his position simply had to trust that the larger network--administered by people he did not know and who were not responsible to him--had done the necessary spadework over time to ensure that logistics services would be provided on time and at the place of their need, by a vendor not intent on terror.

The CO of a ship writes a message days before entering a port telling this network what he needs. The number of addees on these messages is staggering, as the pie is often divided many ways.  One of the things he asks for is solid waste removal.  He has NO idea who will do this service, how they will provide it, what their performance history is, what they will do with the garbage once it is passed, or whether they intend to blow themselves up when they are alongside.  He relies on the forward deployed network of supply and logistics to have done due diligence on any service provider, and even then, absolute security cannot be provided in the face of determined terrorists (read this as saying that I am not blaming the network on COLE's bombing.  I am saying that blaming COLE's CO is ridiculous on its face).  Most of the time, we roll into port, we get the fuel, parts, groceries we need, we meet a husbanding agent and maybe someone from NCIS, perhaps someone with tours and activities for the crew--it is quite a show, but one that is almost entirely orchestrated from the outside. The numbered fleet staff and the "local" naval infrastructure oversees it and we (the ships--I'll throw myself back into this mix for the time being) fall in on it.  In the case of the COLE, this reliance ultimately proved fatal.  In the case of the Fat Leonard Scandal, it will prove devastating to the Service's reputation.

I have no inside knowledge, but like others, I see a pattern beginning to develop.  I see the recently announced censure of a number of senior officers who once comprised the core leadership of a battlegroup.  I think about the number of battlegroups who did exactly what they did, at least operationally, and that is to pass through the 7th Fleet AOR with various port visits and logistics events.  I think about what was on the minds of those leaders as they pressed forward into demanding operational scenarios, and I think about what was likely NOT on their minds.  Putting aside what may eventually be revealed as obvious moral, ethical, or criminal lapses, these officers are very likely to have simply gotten into their places in a well-oiled assembly line of graft, influence and payoff, thinking that there cannot be anything (or much) wrong with what is going on, because this is what every group coming through does.  I'll bet you a dollar that when all is said and done, there will be a number of post-deployment messages or port visit reports that unabashedly discuss the largess provided by Mr. Leonard in glowing terms, largely because the reporter had no clue that what was provided wasn't de rigueur.  The point is that THE SYSTEM, the network, that these officers relied upon to shuffle them through this unfamiliar environment, was rotten to the core--but the officers existing within it had little against which to compare.

In both situations--the COLE and the emerging Fat Leonard scheme--good, honest, hardworking officers prepared their units for extended operations forward and then inserted themselves into a network over which they had little or no control.  Much remains to come of the Fat Leonard scandal, and it is likely that we will have news of situations in which officers very much participated in activities they knew to be wrong--ethically or legally.  They should be punished to the full extent of  regulation and the law.  But I thought it worthwhile to share at least one view that might give additional context to those who look in on this situation and believe that there is something inherently wrong with the ethics of senior naval officers.  Fat Leonard succeeded for so long because he bought the right people in the network and because his targets were under-informed.

There is risk associated with operating one's fleet forward.  More than one kind of risk as this strained comparison I hope demonstrates.  But common among these risks is the effectiveness of the support network forward and the degree to which its conclusions can be trusted by individual unit commanders.

Bryan McGrath