One Step Forward, Two Steps Back?

So a few days ago, I posted about Congress passing a law that would allow the women from the USNA 2010 commissioning class to enter the Nuclear/Submarine pipeline to serve as the first female Submariners. Again, not to beat a dead horse here, but regardless of your opinions, what a great advancement for women in the Navy!

Then I saw this article on "Early Bird"- Early Bird is a compilation of news articles from many different new sources. It's then organized by subject: "Iraq", "Afghanistan", "Healthcare", "Elections", "Taxes"- whatever the articles are about. So it will list a few different articles about a time when the Iraq elections are a hot topic from multiple different news sources. Then someone uploads a webpage of all of these stories to what we call "the high side" which is our classified/secret computer system. This is great because when you can't rely on NIPR (which is our unclassified server) browsing to allow you to read the news (or, if you are on watch, which is at a secret server), then you still always have access to the news. I'm actually kind of going to miss "Early Bird" when I get home. After the title of the article, they give you a 2-sentence summary of the article so you can read it and decide whether or not you want to actually read the article. Plus, you can read about the same topic from multiple news sources.

Anyways, I saw this article yesterday and then tonight found the "TIME.com" version.

The Rise and Fall of a Female Capt Bligh

This is the story of a female Captain in the US Navy who was recently relieved of command (she was the Commanding Officer of a guided-missile Cruiser stationed in Japan).  I encourage you to read the article for yourself and I will try and withhold too many of my own opinions.

However, I hope that this event does not cause people (the general population, Navy officers, junior Sailors, etc) to look at it and say "well that's how women act when you put them in Command" or any other way that relates her actions to her gender. This kind of terrible situation could have easily occured by either a male or a female Commanding Officer and the outcome on their career would have been similar.

The only thing that frustrates and hurts me is that there you had a very successful (at least initially), pioneer female officer that could have gone on to even greater roles in the Surface Navy and touched the lives of hundreds of thousands of her fellow lady SWOs for the better. Instead, she seems to have had a harmful effect on junior Sailors and Officers, both male and female at every level of the chain of command. This is where the real tragedy lies.

And while sometimes I complain and say I hate my job and get frustrated by many of the SWO-isms of my community, I am incredibly grateful that I have never worked for or with a person like this. This is a tragic illustration of how not to be a leader, regardless of your job or your community or your profession.

What do you think? Do you think the board's findings were fair and accurate? Sound off below!