Thank you for your service and semper fi. I do not believe he should be held criminally responsible. Get your ship ready for sea is a lawful order. By his own written statement his crew ( senior command) has bee previously qualified on at least one other ship. The equipment, based the long version from the same publisher, was in ill repair but functional for Navigation.
By your statements you have had an exemplary career but where is the part where you had to go through something that happened and you weren’t the investigator but the investigated?
As for me, I am just a nobody who did nothing in places that don’t exist.
Well, thank you - Semper Fi right back to you. The “nobody that went nowhere doing nothing” sounds like fun..
No, I never needed to be investigated - I am a former enlisted, so when I was commissioned, I knew how things worked - and valued the expertise and talents of my NCOs. If you put the effort into it, you can the tough jobs done well and keep your people alive.
Combat means that all bets are off, but a leader will do everything possible to keep the mission done and his troops survive.
Military careers and the professions within them require talent, dedication, and really intense attention to detail. You have to inspect, test, and inspect some more. You don’t leave anything to chance.
All of the things that happened that night on the Fitzgerald were preventable; all of them. The CO should have known all of them and corrected the problems long before.
If you decide to gain in responsibility in the navy, do it - but don’t use that CO as an example.