Don't Get Caught!, or How US Navy Capt. Owen Honors Learned About Filmmaking

[Pete]

By and large the U.S. public has two different norms of behavior governing armed conflict -- one is for all-out war for national survival and the other is for peacetime and optional conflicts. Under the first one it's a case of "Kill 'em all and let God sort 'em out" and under the second it's the Marquess of Queensberry rules. The uniformed military make no such distinctions and its leaders are frequently surprised when some incident reported in the news puts the two into conflict with each other.

[Ken White]

By and large the U.S. public has two different norms of behavior governing armed conflict...

Not the public. They're broadly similar to Joe in their attitudes.

Just the media and the self anointed pseudo-sophisticates of the nominal intelligentsia.

[DVC]

Not the public. They're broadly similar to Joe in their attitudes.

Just the media and the self anointed pseudo-sophisticates of the nominal intelligentsia.

Well put.

[J Wolfsberger]

... nominal intelligentsia.

I think we are now referring to them as the "Credentialed Class." As in, lots of fancy pieces of paper, but none of the abilities the paper ought to represent. And, apparently, with too much free time on their hands ...

[tequila]

*sigh* If only the coasts could get out of Real America's way ...

[Ken White]

*sigh* If only the coasts could get out of Real America's way ...

A fact often forgotten by too many...

That sigh should be induced by the fact that the various communities and groupings all seem too frequently unwilling to accord each other a modicum of respect for their various strengths -- which all segments have -- and instead, like insecure Corporals, concentrate on denigrating each other.

You did, I hope, notice my use of the qualifiers "self anointed" and "pseudo."

The Coastal states have plenty of "real" Americans -- your word, not mine and I use it only in the sense you imply -- just as flyover country has plenty of folks with delusions of grandeur.

[Presley Cannady]

Bruce Fleming, "He was fired over his videos, but Capt. Owen Honors did the right thing"

[Rex Brynen]

There are, I think, two sets of issues here.

One is how offensive the videos were, or were not--especially in the ship-board context in which they were shown. I also think it is rather hard to make a complete judgment based on the selected excerpts that have appeared online.

Second, there is the judgment that Captain Honors demonstrated in showing the videos, repeatedly, to 5,800 diverse members of the Enterprise crew. I would venture that around 75% of the American public would have predicted that these videos a) would eventually leak, and b) when they did, they would likely adversely impact the image of the US, the USN, and the career of Captain Honors. I further imagine that 95% of all federal employees (including clerk-typists, drivers, and janitors) would have predicted the same.

The question then becomes whether you really want command of a CVN in the hands of an officer whose sense of the cultural, media, and political context (outside the bulkheads of his aircraft carrier) really falls in the bottom 5-20% --especially if, in a crisis, he might be called upon to use that range of skills. Can you really trust that an officer who misleads a visiting Hollywood star into appearing in a sophomoric video won't do the same to a local dignitary during a diplomatic port call?

Provided Captain Honors understands how his well-intentioned actions could be problematic (and learns from that), I see no reason why the incident should be a permanent handicap to his future navy career. However, the notion that senior command officers can blithely act as if they weren't embedded in a broader world is hardly anything that any military should want to encourage.