Though Tuesday’s resignation of Thomas Modly as acting Secretary of the Navy has resolved a crisis for the Trump administration, I hope that the story of what went wrong on the USS Roosevelt and why its captain could not get clear direction on protecting his crew does not too quickly slip from public consciousness. Basic questions remain as to how exactly the U.S. Navy and its Commander in Chief did or did not act to protect American service members as the coronavirus began to spread across the aircraft carrier.

Although the coronavirus crisis and Modly’s decision to relieve Captain Brett Crozier of command made this inextricably into a story about the Trump administration, another layer that shouldn’t be left out is the ongoing command and performance issues the US Pacific fleet has been experiencing for the past several years. Investigative reporting outfit ProPublica had previously reported on these problems, and has published a new piece connecting this latest incident to their earlier findings. ProPublica had found “repeated instances of frontline commanders warning superiors of risks the fleet was facing — a lack of training, exhausted crews, deteriorating ships and equipment. Those warnings, all sent through the normal chain of command, were met with indifference.” And the story of Captain Crozier fits into this established pattern, so that the recent events surrounding the USS Roosevelt can be seen as a dangerous confluence between an already-troubled US Navy attitude towards dissent with a similarly-minded Trump administration. Clearly, order and discipline are necessary in the military in a way that does not have an analogue in the civilian world; but the military, and by extension, its ability to defend the United States, is not at all well served when the top brass respond improperly to the needs of those under their command. It should be a nightmare for all of us to imagine a military composed entirely of yes-men, unable to account for or correct their mistakes, and courting disaster in the process.