Robert Green is the speaker. He's written a letter at MilitaryAccountability.net. With Admiral Lee, he wrote "The Institution or the Constitution?" March 25, 2024.
We are not doing what it takes right now to make sure that Readiness is prioritized. What's actually happening right now is senior leaders are protecting themselves, the institution, as we discussed in the article, and their own careers. They are willing to risk the [military] services in order to not take any personal risk. What we are seeing right now is a devastation of manning in just a Navy itself in the fleet. When this thing started out, we were at 7,000 gaps on Operational Sea Duty Billets (positions). And in the two and a half years since that came to light, that has tripled. There are now 21,000 gaps in Operational Billets (positions) at Sea, and it's only getting worse. The services are going to miss recruiting, they estimate, by 41,000 recruits. And the only way, as Admiral Lee and I write in an article, the only way we can get to the bottom of this is by restoring trust. We've got to study this thing. We've got to understand exactly what went wrong and how we can identify those things [so] that never happened again. And we show how the law was broken and trust was destroyed with service members and with the American people. We had service members kicked out and turned homeless with children I talked to one individual who had to live out of a vehicle with kids for a long time ended up being about a year before he was able to move into a family member's basement and couldn't get a job because of the characterization it wasn't a fully honorable discharge all for standing up for his religious beliefs. That kind of thing was happening all over the place.
Another young man, isolated from his SEAL Team, was treated poorly, and forced to be escorted into his own building. He was given manual labor. He was told that the only thing he was allowed to do was yard work. So the very last thing he did before that young man committed suicide was doing the yard work outside of the building that he was no longer permitted to enter. Those kinds of things the American people see this, so if you are a senior leader and you're listening to this interview, we need to own this. We need to embrace the red, and we need to take whatever personal consequences come from it so that we can rebuild trust with the American people. So if something goes hot in the world, which it's highly likely in our current environment, we're going to have a force that's man properly to respond to that.
