Crew of the Teddy Roosevelt, you are under no obligation to love your leadership, only respect it. You are under no obligation to like your job, only to do it. You are under no obligation, you are under no obligation to expect anything from your leaders other than they will treat you fairly and put the mission of the ship first. Because it is the mission of the ship that matters. You all know this, but in my view, your Captain lost sight of this and he compromised critical information about your status intentionally to draw greater attention to your situation. That was my judgment and I judged that it could not be tolerated of a Commanding Officer of a nuclear aircraft carrier.
>The poor judgement by Captain Brett Crozier did compromise his mission and publicly put our enemies on notice a nuclear powered asset was compromised. He deserved to be removed. However, in response, Secretary Modly also compromised the structure of command authority with public statements exhibiting his own bad judgement. Criticism of command leadership goes up, never down.
> Modly’s decision to relieve him of his role as CO of the Roosevelt was justified — Crozier is still a captain in the Navy — his previous decision to provide the captain with his call phone is “very odd,” the former senior official said, and raises questions about the circumstances leading up to his dismissal.
>“This is an invitation to ignore the chain of command. If he had used that cellphone number, his career was over with too — because the Navy would have gotten to him somehow.”