US Navy relieves commander of coronavirus-hit ship over memo leak

The United States Navy announced on Thursday that it had relieved the commander of the US aircraft carrier Theodore Roosevelt, who wrote a scathing letter that leaked to the public and that asked Navy leadership for stronger measures to control a coronavirus outbreak on board.

Officials, speaking on condition of anonymity to Reuters new agency earlier on Thursday, said Captain Brett Crozier was being relieved not because he wrote the letter and sent it up through the chain of command, but because the Navy believes he leaked it to the media.

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Crozier “demonstrated extremely poor judgement in the middle of a crisis” in writing a letter detailing the problem that was leaked to the US media before top defence officials saw it, Acting Navy Secretary Thomas Modly said.

More than 100 personnel on the 5,000-person ship have tested positive for the coronavirus so far.

‘Decisive action’

In a four-page letter, Crozier described a bleak situation aboard the nuclear-powered carrier as more sailors tested positive for the virus.

He called for “decisive action”: removing more than 4,000 sailors from the ship and isolating them.

He said that unless the Navy acted immediately, it would be failing to properly safeguard “our most trusted asset – our sailors”.

The letter put the Pentagon on the defensive about whether it was doing enough to keep the warship’s crew members safe, and alarmed the families of those aboard the vessel, whose home port is in San Diego, California.

On Wednesday, the Navy declined to rule out punishing the captain of the carrier.

“I don’t know who leaked the letter to the media. That would be something that would violate the principles of good order and discipline, if he were responsible for that. But I don’t know that,” acting US Navy Secretary Thomas Modly said when asked multiple times whether the captain faced discipline.

The carrier was in the Pacific when the Navy reported its first coronavirus case a week ago. It has since docked at the US Naval Base Guam on the southern end of the US island territory in the western Pacific.