Let My People Think
The scene is familiar to every sailor, and almost every other American. An oak paneled courtroom, Naval and Marine officers in dress uniform, solemn and serious, watching a Navy Judge Advocate examine a Marine First Lieutenant on the witness stand. These two men obviously don't like each other. Their exchange is heated, bordering on spiteful.
Coffey, the sarcastic and cynical lawyer played by Tom Cruise, asks, "Can Dawson [one of the defendants accused of murder in the story] determine on his own which orders he is going to follow?"
Kendrick, played with exquisite nastiness by Keifer Sutherland, glares at him. "No, he can not."
From the movie, A Few Good Men, This exchange, as dramatic as it gets, by extension begs another, more important, question, one with even deeper implications. Does the Navy want junior officers or enlisted members who can and will think for themselves?
Sadly, the answer is usually no.
When I first reported to the USS Doyle in 1996, the Navy was experimenting with changing the way that ships order navigational charts and publications. Before then, a radio message was sent directly to the Defense Mapping Agency (DMA, now the National Geospatial Intelligence Agency, or NGA). The experiment was designed to see what would happen if we started ordering them through the Navy supply system instead.
Now, using the supply system for anything new, in and of itself should have raised a horde of red flags, but it didn't seem to register with anyone that this could possibly be a bad idea. It took longer to place an order, got more people involved in the line than before, far more than needed to be there in the first place, and suddenly we were getting charged for materials that we previously weren't paying for because the computer system didn't like the word "free." It probably still doesn't. And those were just the problems on the ship. Off the ship, the order went to three different places before being filled; then the charts, instead of being mailed directly to the ship, went back through the supply system, stopping again in three places before they reached the ship, adding weeks on to the delivery time.
It's a wonder we got any charts at all.
Of course, I mentioned all of this and more in my inputs for the report that the command had to make back to the supply center and DMA. Not a word of it left the ship. The outcome had been predetermined by the upper chain of command, both on the ship and higher, and it would be overwhelmingly positive. Partly because of Doyle's report, the system was adopted Navywide.
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