I spent most of my career around sailors who’d tell you straight what was broken on the ship because a sailor who hides a casualty or a material failure from his CO gets people killed. That culture of honest reporting up the chain is supposed to be sacred.
This week, CNN released footage that should trouble every veteran watching this administration manage the Iran war. The USS Gerald R. Ford suffered a fire in March that the Navy initially said caused no damage and posed no threat to operations. The video tells a different story: gutted berthing compartments, a fire-suppression system that failed outright, and a crew that fought the blaze manually for thirty hours. Add to that nearly 600 inoperable toilets across an 11-month deployment (the longest since Vietnam) that further made life rough for Sailors.
There is a pattern of lies, to include casualties, that the current administration executes….and the erosion of trust will be felt for years amongst the American Public.
