She must have been a bad, bad girl

I had read she became flight leader a while back and thought it would be cool to see her fly with the Thunderbirds at Seymour Johnson in the Spring. …Guess not!

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Wow, there was a lot of news about this for a while. Had to have been a pretty severe faux pas.

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Dang the demo team was going to be at Chino in May for our airshow. Wonder if this is going to negatively impact that part of their schedule?

Wheels

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I think this decision is something that should be seen as a serious responsibility and not a sexist move, of course.

I much rather have an uncertain element removed than see doubt and fear sneaking in an aerobatic team.
Beside, she’s not being kicked out of any outfit.

That said this wording could have gone better…

Col O’Malley said … he was excited about the other women currently serving in the Force too.

Like… Dude… Seriously.
:stuck_out_tongue:

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Agreed. As for what really happened, who knows…

There’s a multitude of scenarios that seem plausible, but no information.

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Uuh, has someone edited my post?!
There was a pun that’s now lost…

EDIT: Ah no, it was me being dumb! :smiley:

So, she was “in command” of a “team”. An interesting choice of words. In the Navy she would have benn the Officer in Charge (OIC) of the team or we probably would have said “Detachment”. Of course “Team” sounds better.

The difference between holding a command as the Commanding Officer (CO) and OIC is fairly significant in the Navy. You need to be screened for command. A board of officers meets, goes over all the officer’s eligible to be selected for command and selects a certain amount depending on the needs of that particular community. OICs are not formally screened. Once screened you must attend a 2 week school on how to be a CO. A good part of that school is focused on how to avoid the pitfalls that can get you relieved for cause, as this officer was. OICs do not attend that school.

Plus as a CO you have more authority with regard to the UCMJ than an OIC has. So an OIC has less responsibility and less authority but still the requirement to operate somewhat autonomously.

So it sounds to me that, whatever the USAF calls it, she was much more of an OIC than CO. Which, fortunately for her, that should make being relieved less of a career killer…although my experience with USAF officer evals and promotion…she probably won’t go past Major.

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I’ve often wondered about how getting relieved of a command affects a person’s career in the military. I know it’s bad, I’ve just been curious how bad it is.

Getting fired as a civilian has (as near as I can tell) almost no repercussions due to employment law. I’ve known teachers who were relieved from their contracts - for cause - who had no problems finding a teaching job elsewhere. Some of them for some pretty bad stuff, like assaulting a kid. I know the military is an entirely different culture, so it has to be different getting fired from your job there than it does for the rest of us.

Depends on the nature and severity of it, influenced by current culture. Also depends on the individual and how high on the totem pole they are. Unfortunately, I have some personal experience with the subject, so I’m not entirely unbiased on it.

A great question. As @Franze said “Depends on the nature and severity of it, influenced by current culture.”, although I’m not against current culture. What is current culture? The running joke amongst us COs is that the goal was to make it through your command tour without getting your picture on the front of Navy Times.

Being fired from your “job”–a specific position/billet on a ship, sub, in a squadron–fairly early in your career is easily survivable. Later on…less so. I sat on two O5 boards (promotion to Commander). Yes, we have the officer’s entire record from they day they commissioned. An early mistake or error in judgement, that they didn’t repeat and no other glaring bad marks probably meant they were still very much in the running, all things considered.

In the Navy, being relieved of command for cause is a career ender. Period.

As I mentioned, the Navy carefully screens your and specifically trains you. In my case, in my warfare community, there were 54 CAPTs up for the O-6 command screen in 2010. Only one, myself, screened. As they say, “To those who much is given, much is expected.” Then you have a 2-week school for yourself, and a 1 week school for your spouse. Two weeks is not that long, but is fairly intense. They really force you to look at yourself, what you do, how you make decisions, etc. At the end there is no way that you do not understand what is expected from you and what they will not be tolerated–from you and from your command.

It usually breaks out as either personal misconduct or professional misconduct/mishap. The most “common” mishap in the Navy is running your ship aground or hitting another ship. Still if there are mitigating circumstances–i.e. the shoal was not shown on the latest charts–it is survivable…but usually not.

All that said, you don’t really have to be very blatant or the errors all that egregious if your boss “loses confidence in your ability to command”. Those are the key words that you will see in circumstances like this.

Speaking of which, I question that an O-6 (USAF Col) could really had full confidence in an O-3’s (USAF Capt) ability to command in the first place. I had a few outstanding LTs (Navy O-3) in my command. But I never had full confidence that any of them were ready to get their own unsupervised command, even of a “Team” (whatever that is).

The vast majority of O-3s are just too inexperienced for Command. They can and do serve as OICs–specifically the helicopter detachments that deploy aboard FFGs, DDG, sand CGs–in charge of a couple other junior officers and a bunch of “wrench turners”. They are assigned as part of the Ops Department on the ship–LCDR Ops O, LCDR XO and CDR/CAPT CO chain of command right there. If they do get relieved for some reason (the CO can kick them off the ship) it isn’t going to help their career but it may not kill it.

Even if you have a real stand out LT, why put them into a position to fail? As senior officers we are supposed to mentor junior officers and protect them from preventable career killing mistakes. Give them responsibility commensurate to their rank with proper supervision. I would much rather chew out a LT for a typical LT mistake (I have and the issues ended right there) than relieve a LT for a CDR mistake that he/she never saw coming.

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It’s probably complicated too. As a leader, you can only be successful if those you are leading want you to succeed. Sometimes you can help that along by being a good leader and fostering that from the beginning and changing the minds of people. Sometimes, people just want to you to fail because of who you are for various reasons. If only it were simple huh? I’m glad I’m not in an HR type position, and I don’t envy anyone that has to wade through different sides of a story to figure out what happened.

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This. I saw where she was being replaced with a Major (O-4) which makes you wonder why she was put in that slot in the first place. Either it’s a O-3 billet, and some poor major is having to deal with being stuck in it, or she was in a position she shouldn’t have been in the first place.

Thank you, @Hangar200. That’s about as succinct an explanation a person could ask for.

Not arguing with you, but in the US Army, a company commander is usually a Captain, the XO a 1st Lt., and butter bars are platoon leaders. If memory serves that’s about 150 troops under your command in an infantry company. So, the Army doesn’t mind laying on responsibility early it seems.

Yeah…after I wrote that I remembered that my son, a CPT in the Army is about to take command of a company. :open_mouth: Let me try this again.

The Army is a completely different culture than the Navy and Air Force. I know the Air Force has a O-3-level course they go to. The Navy does not because as an O-3 you do not have real command opportunities. On the other hand, the Army has an O-3 course that is at least a couple of months long, that is all about leadership and command. Army company command is a “real” command. It is also a less independent command than the what the Navy deems as a command insomuch as a company commander’s immediate superior in the chain of command (ISIC) are usually fairly close by, i.e. on the same fort. By comparison, when I was in command in Dam Neck, VA, my ISIC was in Pensacola FL. When an Army company goes out to the field they are certainly more independent, but never so much so as a ship at sea. Obviously, increased communications capability, especially in the last 20 years, has reduced that independence of an at sea command quite substantially.

I assume that the F-16 demo team does the “air show” circuit. So a couple of jets (with pilots) and their ground support personnel traveling around the country. That could be as large as an Army company. However, to me the difference seems to be in the amount of independence the commander of this team has when they are “on the road”, perhaps away from home base for a few weeks at a time. [Insert “Amarillo By Morning”]

All that said, the thing that really makes this unfortunate is that the USAF made such a big deal out of the gender of the officer getting this command in the first place. Why? It wasn’t the Thunderbirds, Blue Angels or Golden Knights. It was a case of the You-Saf doing a “look at us…we were the first service to put a woman in this role!”

…and now that she was relieved, it is a big deal, much bigger than it probably should be…and we have O-6 actually saying that he is “excited about the other women currently serving in the Force too.” [Insert Archer saying, “Phrasing”] Really? Seriously? We’ve only had women in the military for the entire time that O-6 has been serving.

How many people had even heard of this command/team? (I spent my adult life in the military, including two Joint tours, and I had never heard about it.) Of those that did know of it, how many knew the team commander’s name before this? (The Maj mentioned in the article doesn’t count). Or put it this way, how many USA Company commanders may have been relieved for cause over the last year and it made BBC News? Yeah…I thought so.

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The F-16 demo team was at PoF a couple of years ago and are/were slated to fly at this years airshow. I couldn’t tell you the commanders name when they flew a couple of years ago to save my life though. What I do remember being joked about was that he had at least one hollow leg

Wheels

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The one I never understood were the two Growler pilots who actually got suspended from flight operations for skywriting a giant phallus in California. I mean, come on, people.

Yes, that’s nuts and the penalty seems a bit stiff. Maybe cooler heads eventually prevailed. Or maybe the guy got sacked.

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It’s the whole tax payers’ money being well spent thing…so maybe they used a couple thousand dollars in fuel and stuff…break that out over a couple hundred tax payers…let me do the math…divide by…cary the 2…so yeah, I would spend 2.76¢ to see that! :grin:

I’d say I saw what you did there, but I think we all saw what you did there.

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