Acting Navy secretary quits after calling captain stupid

Acting Navy Secretary Thomas Modly resigned Tuesday after an uproar over his decision to remove — and then ridicule — the commander of a U.S. aircraft carrier who demanded that the Pentagon do more to stop a coronavirus outbreak spreading through his ship.

Modly relieved Captain Brett Crozier of his command for writing and distributing a memo pleading in urgent terms for all but a skeleton crew to be removed from the USS Roosevelt, which was sidelined in Guam. “We are not at war,” Crozier wrote. “Sailors do not need to die.”

Modly said the captain’s memo, which was made public by the San Francisco Chronicle, his hometown newspaper, “jeopardized the national security interests of the United States” and that the Navy was already addressing Crozier’s concerns.

While the Navy leader had the backing of his superiors initially, that support was undercut when an audio recording surfaced of Modly telling the carrier’s crew that Crozier was “too naive or too stupid” to lead the ship.

President Donald Trump, at a White House briefing on Tuesday, said he “had no role” in Modly’s departure but that the secretary “did that just to end that problem.”

On Monday, the president said he was going to look into the episode. While praising both Modly and Crozier, Trump signaled he didn’t think the Roosevelt’s departing commander deserved to have his career tarnished by the fracas.

“You have two good people and they are arguing,” Trump said.

On Tuesday, he said again that Crozier had made a mistake in writing the memo. “He didn’t have to be Ernest Hemingway,” the president said, adding that Modly “shouldn’t have said what he said.”

Defense Secretary Mark Esper, in a memo on Tuesday, said Modly’s decision to resign showed he was “putting the Navy and the sailors above self” and that “his care for the sailors was genuine.”