The man who seduced the 7th Fleet | Hacker News Reader

The man who seduced the 7th Fleet

washingtonpost.com

I cynically speculated that none of this would show up on USASpending.gov, but lo and behold, $30.8 million worth of contracts show up on for "GLENN DEFENSE MARINE (ASIA) PT" on USASpending.gov:

https://www.usaspending.gov/Pages/AdvancedSearch.aspx?k=Glen...

...which is (perhaps coincidentally) close to what the story reports:

> Francis and his firm have admitted to defrauding the Navy of $35 million, though investigators believe the real amount could be much greater.

The thing that strikes me about this is that likely far more people are being pointed at here than were likely involved in this fraud and cover-up. I'm not saying that the people who have been charged didn't do anything wrong. But for most people who were trying to use Fat Leonard, I suspect they did so because of there being distinctly less bullshit to deal with.

Because this guy was crooked as can be, he probably ignored the bureaucratic crap, or was able to push it to someone who worked for him because the extra income from his fraud could take care of it. And everyone in the operational navy probably loathes bureaucracy, or at least everyone else's. Actually, I'm guessing that hatred holds true for all people everywhere.

People do stupid shit to avoid paperwork. Guys fail to get paid thousands owed to them for moving their own stuff because they just got a new command and don't have time to chase people down to push paperwork to get paid. They sign off on stuff that didn't actually get done rather than trying to get priorities changed because they decided that the mission of the ship is more important than the second SAPR stand-down this year. So if you have this guy who shows up where you're going to be and just does the work that you need done, that's probably pretty appealing to people who do battle with bureaucracy for a living.

Here's a paper on the pervasive ethical numbing in the military (you can find writeups by various news outlets for a quicker summary): http://www.strategicstudiesinstitute.army.mil/pdffiles/PUB12...

>About 30 admirals are under investigation

Couple of questions from a civilian. How many admirals the Navy has? How many they needed to win WWII? Is there a title inflation?

According to Wikipedia[1] there is a cap of 160 flag officers in the US navy. Maybe someone can confirm if the admirals referenced in the article are such flag officers?

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Admiral_(United_States)#Statut...

Admirals (ranks O-7 through O-10) are a subset of flag officers in that flag officer is generic for admirals and generals both.

As some others have mentioned, there are joint billets that don't count against these quotas. DIRNSA is one example, and one with some name recognition perhaps. Currently it's Admiral Rogers, though another recent person in this billet was General Alexander. NATO commands like SACEUR are another place where you'd find flag officers not included in these quotas.

As of December 2015 there were 217 flag officers in the Navy [1], meaning 1-star (rear-admiral, lower half, O-7, eq. to a brigadier general) to 4-star (admiral, O-10). You have 162 places for Navy flag officers, but you also have 61 spots for "joint duty" Naval flag officers [2]. There are fewer flag officers than there used to be, but the force is smaller, so the proportion is higher than it was back in the 60s and 70s.

[1]: https://www.fas.org/sgp/crs/natsec/R44389.pdf

[2]: https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/10/526

I wouldn’t say there is title inflation as much as command inflation. The services fight over how many commands they have. This controls how many officers they can promote and how much budget they can request. Like other government agencies, the goal is the expansion of the bureaucracy’s influence and power. This is indirectly correlated to the number of commands.

Although I’m not a fan of the current batch of senior leadership based upon my experience in the Navy and further illustrated by the evidence uncovered in the article, I wouldn’t say the people who are Admirals haven’t worked their way up to that title. The military is definitely top heavy due to the pension system, but not, in my opinion, due to title inflation as you would think of it in the civilian world.

On one hand, many in the world of foreign policy think the US military has become top heavy, and the number of admirals/generals is being cut back (I think both the Sec'y of Defense and congressional leaders are on board with this).

On the other hand, executives serve an important purpose, and it's always easy to say 'there's too much bureaucracy' without actually having any idea how much bureaucracy is needed.

And I've heard that US military doctrine is to focus more on reducing the number of enlisted and lower ranked soldiers than reducing the number of military leaders when becoming a peacetime army. Because it's easier to get inexperienced people than military leaders with years of service, and they will need those experienced leaders when they go to war.

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