The American Spectator

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(Page 3 of 10)

p> AYE, AYE, SIRS br> Re: Jed Babbin's A Day in Grootland : /p> p>One item that jumped out at me while reading Jed Babbin's article about the carrier Harry S. Truman : a single warship has 3 full captains aboard. No other Navy in history (including ours) has ever had more than one captain per ship. Apparently, that is no longer the case. Now, we have one captain who is the ship's nominal commanding officer, another is the Commander of the Air Group (CAG), and the third, apparently is the Executive officer (i.e. second in command)! Prior to 1983, the CAG was always an officer with the rank of commander and he reported directly to the ship's captain. This was changed after some screw-ups in air strikes against Lebanon (all of which were unrelated to the command structure on the carriers themselves). The Executive officer was also a commander. These arrangements had been in effect on our carriers through WWII, Korea and Vietnam, and had worked aboard all of the post-WWII supercarriers, including the Harry S. Truman 's immediate predecessors in the Nimitz class. At a time when the Navy is heading towards 200 ships, isn't it just a little bit stupid to be the only Navy in all of history to have more than one captain aboard a single ship? Seems the command structure is more than a tad top heavy, particularly as the ranks of the subordinate officers have also crept upwards. br> -- Anthony Mirvish

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