Gilday off to rocky start, but he’s what Navy needs
WASHINGTON — Adm. Michael M. Gilday, the chief of naval operations, sent a bracing message to his admirals and chief petty officers in July after he toured the aftermath of the horrific fire aboard the USS Bonhomme Richard in San Diego.
“My gut tells me our Sailors met that challenge head on,” Gilday wrote to his senior staff. His advice: “Focus on the positive attributes — that will overcome the negatives we want to avoid.”
This is the kind of upbeat message that Navy commanders have for centuries delivered from the bridge while facing adversity.
But is it enough? After a chain of accidents at sea, ethical lapses and instances of poor judgment over the past half-dozen years, the shipboard fire offers another siren warning that the Navy is badly stressed — operating too hard, with too little training and too much political interference.
Gilday knows he needs to be a strong leader now, in the Navy’s time of troubles. But he faces a heavy lift. The Navy is the military’s most hierarchical service, and also the loneliest for a commander. Serving as the chief of naval operations, or CNO, is a special challenge for Gilday, 57, who was jumped from three stars to four a year ago when he was named to the top post, bypassing other, more senior admirals.
A quiet, self-effacing man, Gilday is impossible not to like. But in his first year as CNO, he has struggled to keep the Navy’s balance as President Trump overruled his recommendation on a discipline case involving a Navy SEAL, and acting Navy Secretary Thomas B. Modly short-circuited his investigation of the dismissal of Capt. Brett Crozier of the USS Theodore Roosevelt after an outbreak of COVID-19. “Gilday lost a year,” says a former four-star. He’s only now planting his flag.
Gilday discussed the Navy’s problems with me during a frank, hourlong interview last week, initiated at his request. When I asked for his “theory of the case” about what’s wrong, he focused on two areas. The first was professional competency, which was demonstrably flawed in two 2017 ship collisions and in Crozier’s ham-handed handling of the Theodore Roosevelt. The second involved character lapses, evident in SEAL discipline cases and the “Fat Leonard” corruption scandal involving the Pacific fleet.
The Navy’s recent troubles began in the Pacific with a long-running scandal involving a company called Glenn Defense Marine Asia, run by a Malaysian man named Leonard Glenn Francis — known as “Fat Leonard” because of his girth. He supplied equipment and services to the 7th Fleet in the Pacific and, starting in the early 2000s, he began catering to the needs and whims of senior Navy officers who could give him business.
Too many Navy officers succumbed. Federal prosecutors filed charges against 17 Navy officials, including 10 commissioned officers. Several dozen more officers were investigated but not charged. They escaped conviction but their careers were over. “There has been significant impact in flag ranks” from the Fat Leonard fallout, says Gilday. “We’ve lost some really good people.”
The Pacific fleet was rocked again in 2017 by two collisions at sea that raised basic questions about the professional competence of officers and sailors. On June 17, 2017, the destroyer USS Fitzgerald collided with a cargo ship off the Japan coast; seven sailors drowned in their quarters. Disaster struck again two months later, on Aug. 21, 2017, when the destroyer USS John S. McCain steamed into a giant oil tanker off the coast of Singapore, resulting in the deaths of 10 sailors. In both cases, lack of training and proficiency was part of the problem.
The Navy’s troubles continued with the SEALS, an elite force whose members were exhausted by a decade of almost continual deployment to the killing zones of Iraq and Afghanistan. A breaking point was the case of Eddie Gallagher, a Navy chief petty officer convicted of a war crime in 2019 after circulating a photo of himself with the corpse of an Islamic State prisoner killed in Iraq. The Navy tried to maintain its disciplinary standards. But Gallagher’s lawyers mounted a campaign for him on Fox News, and Trump intervened to countermand the Navy’s decision.
The Crozier incident was one more fireball for the Navy. Gilday initially balked at ousting Crozier, favoring an investigation first, but Modly, the acting Navy secretary, wanting to anticipate Trump’s wishes, fired Crozier — and then stepped down himself. Gilday eventually removed Crozier in June, concluding after a careful inquiry that he hadn’t adequately taken care of safety onboard.
Can Gilday be the leader the Navy needs? He’s off to a rocky start, but he has time to recover if he takes firm command now. If Gilday has a normal tour, he probably has three more years at the helm. That should be time to fill the wardroom with a team of trusted officers, take the bridge and get the Navy moving, at flank speed.