Or it could be the underside of command - you are one 17 year old away from being fired. As the CO, you are accountable and responsible, “knew or should have known.” It can be the character/indiscretion ones, or an unacceptable level of training incidents/accidents, and while the CO is not the Training Officer, he or she is responsible for paying attention to every aspect of mission performance and proactively addressing problems. It could have been sloppy handling of classified material identified in a command administrative inspection 6 months earlier that was identified again in a follow-up inspection. The CO is accountable and responsible for directing his or her team to track and follow up, make process improvements, request administrative assist visits from senior staff organizations to advise on best practices, etc. The truth is the CO is enormously busy and cannot keep eyes on everything, so your gut, brains and experience have to work together to tell you what to pay attention to, and to immediately create an understanding that your people can take bad news to the CO, and they won’t be verbally slain, just bring some root cause analysis and the start of the plans to correct.
The workday morning after any change of command of mine, I would sit down with my CSO or XO, review any problems identified during the turnover with the previous, and then call for, within 48 hours, unannounced inspections/audits of areas I knew I could be fired for if I overlooked them. I knew I had about a week where I could legitimately blame my predecessor, so I dived into f2f with the responsible officers: all the budgets, the govt credit card program, all conduct incidents for the last year, classified material control, required training (this one has bitten the butt of many a CO), the status of required trained Casualty Assistance Calls Officers, results of last command inspection, were we on time with submission of officer and enlisted evals (one of my known must-do things for your people), a few other things, and a one-time-only amnesty period where they could tell me what had been ignored, fudged, faked, sidestepped, or poorly done, and then I became part of the team to solve it, and all the action items would go on the CO’s tickler to be driven by the CSO or CO. I had started doing this kind of thing in my first department head job, just getting all the ugly stuff out on the table, taking it in stride (game face covering up some “oh, $hit” thoughts) and being true to my word to not be a screamer and focusing on resolution as a team.
The point of all this sea storying is to note COs get fired for fairly routine but important stuff they had failed to pay sufficient attention to. I always swore if I ever got fired, it would be because I took an ethical stand about something, not because people I was responsible for mismanaged the govt travel card program. And yes, in the early days of the program, there weren’t good controls at the command level to monitor it. In one of my post-COC program reviews-with-amnesty, it was brought to my attention the LCDR staff Doc had been using the govt credit card for her monthly mortgage payment. Within 24 hours she had written counseling from me; from the start of the program, the rules were clear on that, not to be used for personal non-govt travel-related expenses. She had taken advantage of the fact no one was reviewing charges on the card. Now that I knew about it, I had to deal with her, do refresher training on all, document. We caught a senior enlisted leader who used it regularly at his neighborhood bar. If this had been called into the Inspector General fraud hotline, the formal investigation would probably have used “knew or should have known” and “failure to oversee a program per required standards.” We handled all the transgressors appropriately, in house, and treated it as an opportunity to re-set and learn. I did call the COS and Chief Medical Officer at my 3-star boss’ staff and told them why I was not submitting an end of tour performance award on the doc, but otherwise treated her fairly in her performance eval as a good medical officer.
There are a thousand ways to get fired as a CO, not all of them the “juicy stuff.”
I think the Attila nickname probably originated in those misty, long-ago first meetings with new CO…where I was probably quite clear about getting all the stinking stuff in the open and powering through fixing it .
