A look at organizational responsibility and just how things are handled when things don’t go as planned is the subject of the essay below. All too often over the years I have seen situations where the buck was passed. Be it in Emergency Medical Services, the Fire Service, or in Public Safety and seemingly all the way up the ladder. It is refreshing indeed to see that the United States Marine Corps plays the leadership game in a more responsible manner.
I looked in sheer horror at the television screen that morning. Seeing what had happened right next to where I had worked many years ago at University City Arco. This is what happened, and how the Marines are addressing it.
“It’s Dec. 8, 2008, 11:11 a.m., and a young Marine pilot takes off from an aircraft carrier, the USS Abraham Lincoln, on a routine training flight. The carrier is maybe 90 miles southwest of San Diego. Lt. Dan Neubauer is flying an F/A-18 Hornet. Minutes into the flight, he notices low oil pressure in one of the two engines. He shuts it down. Then the light shows low fuel for the other engine. He’s talking to air traffic control and given options and suggestions on where to make an emergency landing. He can go to the naval air station at North Island, the route to which takes him over San Diego Bay, or he can go to the Marine air station at Miramar, with which he is more familiar, but which takes him over heavily populated land. He goes for Miramar. The second engine flames out. About three miles from the runway, the electrical system dies. Lt. Neubauer tries to aim the jet toward a canyon, and ejects at what all seem to agree is the last possible moment. The jet crashed nose down in the University City neighborhood of San Diego, hitting two homes and damaging three. Four people, all members of a Korean immigrant family, were killed — 36-year-old Youngmi Lee; her daughters, Grace, 15 months, and Rachel, 2 months, and her 60-year-old mother, Seokim Kim. Lee’s husband, a grocer named Dong Yun Yoon, was at work. The day after he’d lost his family, he humbled and awed San Diego by publicly forgiving the pilot — ‘I know he did everything he could’ — and speaking of his faith — ‘I know God is taking care of my family.’ … The Marines launched an investigation — of themselves. [Last] Wednesday the results were announced. They could not have been tougher, or more damning. The crash, said Maj. Gen. Randolph Alles, the assistant wing commander for the Third Marine Aircraft Wing, was ‘clearly avoidable,’ the result of ‘a chain of wrong decisions.’ … Twelve Marines were disciplined; four senior officers, including the squadron commander, were removed from duty. Their military careers are, essentially, over. The pilot is grounded while a board reviews his future. … A young Naval aviator [who also flies the F-18] said the Marine investigation ‘kept me up last night’ because of how it contrasted with ‘the buck-passing we see’ in the government and on Wall Street. By contrast, he says, when the economy came crashing down, ‘nowhere did we see a board come out and say: “This is what happened, these are the decisions these particular people made, and this was the result. They are no longer a part of our organization.” There was no timeline of events or laymen’s explanation of how a credit derivative was actually derived. We did not see congressmen get on television with charts and eviscerate their organization and say, “These were the men who in 2003 allowed Freddie and Fannie unlimited rein over mortgage securities.” Instead we saw … everybody against everybody else with no one stepping forth and saying, “We screwed up.”‘ There is no one in national leadership who could convincingly ‘assign blame,’ and no one ‘who could or would accept it.'” –columnist Peggy Noonan
On Wednesday, February 25, just over five weeks after Inauguration Day, Attorney General Eric Holder announced that the Obama Administration will seek to reinstate the expired federal “assault weapon” ban and impose additional restrictions.
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