Uss Bonhomme Richard (lhd-6) Organizational Culture

USS Bonhomme Richard (LHD-6) Organizational Culture

Paul Bartley

National University

USS Bonhomme Richard (LHD-6) Organizational Culture

The U.S. military is among the most trusted of American institutions. The trust accorded to the U.S. Navy by the American people derives from our status as members of the military profession. Only to the degree that the Navy is, and is perceived to be, trustworthy can we maintain our status as the naval profession in American society. The Navy must transform existing processes, adopt new problem-solving techniques, and cultivate “art of the possible” thinking to reap the benefits of new ideas and leverage developments in new technology. I will discuss my personal experience and research found on a concept to change Navy organizational culture into an innovative, intellectually agile institution.

When I was 17 years old I decided to join the military right out of high school because I knew my parents couldn’t afford to send me to college. I didn’t know what branch to choose but after some recruiters from the Navy came I decided that was where I wanted to go. I left for boot camp in Great Lakes, IL two months after graduating and started my new life in the Navy. After that I was sent to Pensacola, FL for “A School” to learn my job in the Navy as an Aviation Boatswain’s Mate Handler (ABH). I finally arrived in San Diego, CA for my first command the USS Bonhomme Richard (LHD-6) where is the organization I will talk about during our deployment in 2009-2010.

I got to the USS Bonhomme Richard on February 1, 2009 and was sent to V-1 division on the flight deck. We left for deployment in September 2009 to go do the normal task of going to the Persian Gulf, do patrol, and send Marines to Kuwait for training. Once we got close to the Strait of Hormuz to head into the Persian Gulf the ship took a hard turn and we as a ship knew something was wrong and that our mission must have changed. That night our Commanding Officer Capt. John Funk announced that we were not heading up the Strait of Hormuz anymore and that we were headed for the Gulf of Aden to help with matters in Yemen. Most of us didn’t know how bad this mission was going to be both the ones that done it before broke down and wanted to leave the ship immediately. When we arrived in the Gulf of Aden we didn’t get off the ship for 128 days, could hardly contact family or friends back home, and moral went way down due to this and other problems.

When morale dropped it was due to our CO Capt. Funk. He was so dedicated to making Admiral that he lost site of the wellbeing and moral of the crew and other officers. One 2-Star Admiral came onboard during the mission and told him that he could pull the ship for a weekend to Djibouti and give the crew some time off but he insisted to stick to the mission until it was complete. Our mission was to bomb the Arabian Peninsula where there were 45 Al-Qaeda with three of them being masterminds. The Yemen President Ali Abd Allah Saleh apparently asked us to bomb them to get rid of the Al-Qaeda and when asked who did it he said they bombed them. Here is the whole story behind all of this:

US cables released by the Wikileaks website suggest that Yemen allowed secret US air strikes against suspected al-Qaeda militants. President Ali Abdullah Saleh claimed raids were conducted by Yemen’s military when they were in fact carried out by the US, according to the cables. The files also reveal that Mr Saleh rejected an offer to deploy US ground forces in Yemen. The US fears Yemen has become a haven for al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula. The cables detail how Mr Saleh claimed responsibility for two US air strikes in December 2009, according to the Guardian . A few days after the second attack on 24 December, Mr Saleh told the then head of US central command, General David Petraeus: “We’ll continue saying the bombs are ours, not yours.” On 21 December, US ambassador Stephen Seche reported in a dispatch that “Yemen insisted it must ‘maintain the status quo’ regarding the official denial of US involvement.”Mr Seche quotes Mr Saleh as saying that he wanted operations to continue “non-stop until we eradicate this disease”. The messages are among more than 250,000 US cables obtained by the whistle-blowing website Wikileaks. The files are released in stages by Wikileaks, and details are also being published in the Guardian, the New York Times and other papers around the world that investigated the material. According to the files released on Friday, Gen Petraeus had flown in to Yemen’s capital Sanaa to tell Mr Saleh that the US would also allow its ground forces to be deployed in Yemen on counter-terrorism operations. Mr Saleh rejected the offer, although he had told President Barack Obama’s national security adviser, John Brennan, in September 2009 that he would give the US full access. “I have given you an open door on terrorism,” Mr Saleh is quoted in a US cable after the meeting with Mr Brennan. Al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula is suspected of having launched a number of attacks on targets in the West, including failed plots to bomb several cargo airliners in October. The cables also reveal Mr Saleh to be an erratic partner in negotiations, the Guardian reports. US security officials who met Yemen’s long-standing leader in the course of 2009 described him as “petulant” and “bizarre”. After one meeting with Mr Brennan, the US ambassador reported that Mr Saleh had been “in vintage form”. Mr Seche wrote that the President was “at times disdainful and dismissive”, while he was “conciliatory and congenial” on other occasions. Mr Saleh told Mr Brennan that should the US not help Yemen, “this country will become worse than Somalia”. (BBC, 2010)

So as you can see this was mission to complete the problem was after we completed it we still stayed in the Gulf of Aden till March 2010. During that time the morale dropped a lot due to always being at Rivercity 1 which means no contacting in or out and Alert 120 in case Al-Qaeda tried to retaliate. Some of the Chief Warrant Officer finally talked the CO into giving us a beer day. It was 120 days in from when we left Thailand when normally beer days are supposed to be every 45 days out to sea straight. He only agreed to the beer day because we were pulling into Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia on March 8 and didn’t want the crew to go crazy on the country when we got there. Over the deployment there were a total of three port visits not including Hawaii and spent most of that time out to sea with not much communication to home. When we arrived home a month later the CO Capt. Funk was relieved of his duty, after only a year, while out to sea for RIMPAC due to the low morale of the crew.