Task and Purpose article takes on Marine Corps senior officer misconduct

Paul Szoldra is an enormously talented young writer and former Marine infantryman, now Editor in Chief of the national security news page Task and Purpose (you may recognize Paul's name as the founder of the military's version of The Onion -- "Duffelblog").  He has written a provocative piece on senior officer misconduct in the Marine Corps which has prompted substantial discussion in the officer community.  

Szoldra capably chronicles the case of the relief for cause of Colonel Larry Miller, former commander of the Marine Corps Wounded Warrior Regiment, organized to "[provide] leadership and [ensure] compliance with laws and Department of Defense (DoD) regulations related to the support, recovery, and non-medical care of combat and non-combat wounded, ill, and injured (WII) Marines, Sailors attached to Marine units, and their family members in order to maximize their recovery as they return to duty or transition to civilian life."

Wounded Warrior Regiment has had a bad run of luck with commanders lately -- in 2016, former commander Col Shane "Rhino" Tomko was sentenced at a general court-martial for various personal behavior offenses to 60 days' confinement and a $10,000 fine.  (Blogger's note:  Colonel Tomko was a classmate at Basic Officer Course 5-92 and I counted him as a friend, at least until this happened.)  

WWR is one of a handful of commands for which commanders are personally placed by the Commandant of the Marine Corps.  Tomko was installed by the 35th Commandant, General Amos, and Miller was given command of WWR by the 38th Commandant, General Neller.  The non-consecutive string of failures of commanders suggests these units ought to be placed by command screening boards, like the vast majority of other O-6 commands in the Marine Corps.  The sanctity of the duty to wounded and recovering Marines, sailors, and their families demands an organization commanded by officers who have been screened through an exacting process, rather than placed through connections and force of personality (Tomko, in particular, was a gregarious force of nature.)

The larger issue is one of toxic commanders and leaders generally.  The scuttlebutt around the Corps is that behavioral issues with Miller and Tomko were ENTIRELY predictable by their reputations among peers and known indiscretions, begging the question of why no one ever intervened to moderate their behavior in the 25+ years prior to their assuming O-6 command?  And how were their reporting seniors completely oblivious to their character issues for all that time, or if they knew of the character issues, why did they keep writing performance evaluations that not only kept these officers in the game for promotion, but also for O-5 and O-6 level command?  Szoldra focuses on a single data point -- the relief of Larry Miller -- and one must resist the temptation to make too much of an anecdote, but Miller's relief is not an outlier:  it has become a regular occurrence.

Since I have the power of the bully pulpit, I want to surface an important issue with regard to command reliefs:  the absolute opacity with which the services treat command reliefs.  The services almost always hide behind the old saw of "loss of trust and confidence in ability to command" which can be code for incompetence, crimes of moral turpitude, modest misconduct, or even one-off occurrences which may sometimes be beyond a commander's control.  The service position has always been that the reasons behind relief are protected from disclosure by the Privacy Act.  I'm not sure that's a faithful reading of the Privacy Act, and I'm pretty confident the services could be more transparent without violating the Act.  Moreover, if, in the eyes of DOD OGC, the Act really does constrain the services from telling the public the reasons that commanders, entrusted with hundreds or thousands of young American lives, and millions to billions of dollars in gear, equipment, and program costs, are relieved, then they should seek an exception in the annual NDAA modifying the Privacy Act, creating an exception to provide transparency in reliefs for cause and administrative punishment of commanders and OICs.  Commanders who don't accept that level of transparency don't have to accept command, and there will be a raft of equally capable alternates willing to roll those die.  When commanders are fired, in my view, DOD owes the public financing their operations insight as to the reasons, and the Department owes other commanders information on where exactly the lines are that will allow you to keep your job or get you fired.  And they owe subordinates the reasons so that the young servicemembers know there is real accountability.

Here's hoping the new CO can get the WWR command culture under control, just as the Commandant has a responsibility to study the trend in reliefs and figure out a way to screen prospective commanders more effectively.  A good place to start, after a scientific and peer-reviewed study of Marine commander reliefs for the past 10 years, might be to take a page out of the book of the new Army screening program.