Former SEAL Jack Carr on Navy Dismissal of Captain Brett Crozier

I do go on different shows now as a military analyst. They ask me things and I answer honestly and I try to do it in a thoughtful way. So example being the, this was the CEO of the Roosevelt that was relieved the last couple weeks because he wrote this letter and you know was framed by senior level officials as he sent out essentially like an open letter. It sounded like they made it sound like he sent it out through his entire address book and he went above the chain of command and so he was fired and it didn't go through the right proper channels. And it smelled weird to me from the beginning because you don't get to be in command of a nuclear powered aircraft carrier by being like, eh, just some guy. Like, you know the military, you're in for like 25 years at this point, you're a captain and I would be shocked if he had not exhausted every other avenue to try to get out what he needed to have done. And he's responsible for fighting that aircraft carrier and he's also responsible for the men under his command. And he, and now we have like 900 cases on that ship. It's a corona, which is explained to people that the ship was infected. Yeah, so they had a couple cases. I think they had three to start with on an aircraft carrier to dock in Thailand or something like that, you know, maybe in January, early February, something like that before really things got out of control. So you're an aircraft carrier and the only place worse than a ship in a circumstance like this was an infectious disease is probably a submarine. But he saw what was happening and he saw it starting to spread. He saw it as saw that it was impossible to abide by social distancing guidelines. And once you do when you actually have it, not just social distancing, but once you have it, how you isolate somebody impossible to do on a ship. And so he saw that. And then the story is that he wrote a letter and it got picked up by the Chronicle in Northern California and that it just went out to this huge number of people. So it went out to 20 people. It was I've read the letter. It's four pages. It's very, very well done. Very thoughtful. It gives two courses of action. One if we're at war and how we can keep fighting the ship and two if we're not at war need to take care of these guys and be ready for when war comes. So it's very clearly delineated in these four pages. Very professional. It's on Navy letterhead and it went out to 20 people. And for me, I thought, you know what, this is very strange that he's being attacked like this from senior level leaders making it seem like he sent it out to his entire like Gmail address book. Now it's still us Navy dot mill or whatever. It's not a secret, secret communication, but there's official Navy emails that aren't secret as well. And yeah, it bypassed the chain of command, I guess. But that at some point I think is his responsibility. He needs to keep that ship fighting. And who knows what the personal relationship was between him and the guy above him or whatever. I think there's some this investigation will show it. And now that and then the Secretary of the Navy flies from Washington, D.C. to Guam to give a speech to these people on the aircraft carrier. And he says that the captain has just been relieved of duty was either stupid or incompetent if he thought that what he wrote in that email wasn't going to get out to the press. Meanwhile, the ironic part is that whole thing is videotaped. That whole speech is taped and there's audio that makes it out to the media. So that's a funny part for me. But then also so then he's fired a couple of days later. And then the the Secretary of the Army or the Secretary of Defense now writes a letter, an open letter that says essentially the same thing as the captain of the aircraft carrier wrote a few days earlier that got him fired. So it's really interesting. I found some of these some of these shows and got to sit down with a couple of different people with military backgrounds. And I was the only one saying that something doesn't smell right here. And this guy has a responsibility to fight that ship to support his soldiers or sailors. And something's just not right about this. And now we'll see what happens. But point being, yeah, I do get asked about these things. And I answer honestly, because the one of the other guys were saying on this show was that no chain of command. He didn't follow the chain of command. And he should have followed that chain of command. Or the typical Navy type line. But being from special operations and being a free thinker as we're supposed to do, we're supposed to be creative. We're supposed to think, think of red cell things from the enemy side, think about it from that side of the house and do what we do, which is why we get in trouble a lot of the time in special operations because we're kind of not military. And I mean, we're military, but we like to like to not break the rules. We like to bend them to a certain extent to get what we need done. And that's just very natural for us. But when you're sitting down with people that aren't like that and don't think that way, it's kind of interesting. But point being, I do get asked about these things. And I don't really measure it against if I can alienate people or not. It's just, hey, I'm gonna be honest, I'm gonna be open, I'm gonna be authentic. And that's what people can trust about me. And they can trust about my writing is that when they read that, they know that I just didn't get it from somebody else. Like it's a part of me somehow. And it's very personal, even though it's fiction. And that's what you can trust. And if my protagonist is using a certain weapon or a certain knife or a certain, it's not just that I googled Navy SEAL knife and so or someone's saying, and then he pulled out his Navy SEAL dagger instead. Like, no, that's not how it goes. You know exactly who made it with the relationship, all that sort of thing. So what people can trust is that they're gonna get my honest assessment. That's what I owe the guys in the teams. I owe them my honest assessment. That's what I owe the people above me in the chain of command. No matter what it did, I owed them my honest assessment because that's what they could trust. They didn't have to worry about whether I'm just telling them something just because I think that's what they want to hear. Or I'm looking to get ahead because I never wanted this to be a career in the military. I was just in there to fight and to lead. But that's what they can trust is my honest assessment. So that's how I deal with today. I'm just gonna answer honestly, but it will be thoughtful. It's not gonna be like an off the cuff craziness that I didn't have to go back and retract or I hope it's not gonna be. It's gonna be thoughtful because that's what I owe the guys also was that thoughtful assessment both up and down the chain. So that's just natural for me to do and what you're gonna get today. Thanks for watching. I'll see you next time. Bye. Bye. Bye.