The Navy fired the commander of one in all its ballistic missile submarines on Friday, the service introduced in an announcement Monday.
The commanding officer of the USS Alabama sub’s blue crew — Cmdr. Michael Lyle — was relieved by Rear Adm. Nicholas Tilbrook, the commander of Submarine Group 9, “as a consequence of a lack of confidence in his potential to command,” the Navy mentioned.
Lyle has turn into not less than the eighth Navy commander to be faraway from command this yr and the primary ballistic missile submarine skipper to be publically relieved in current historical past.
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The Navy’s assertion didn’t supply any extra details about why Lyle was faraway from management, outdoors of the same old comment that the service expects its commanders “to uphold the very best requirements of duty, reliability and management, and the Navy holds them accountable after they fall wanting these requirements.”
Cmdr. Amelia Umayam, a spokeswoman for the commander of the Submarine Power U.S. Pacific Fleet, informed Navy.com in a cellphone interview that the reduction was not as a consequence of misconduct.
Senior officers of ballistic missile submarines like Lyle are topic to even additional scrutiny since ships like the Alabama can carry as much as 20 Trident II D5 ballistic missiles and they’re thought-about a essential a part of America’s nuclear deterrent.
The Pentagon’s Nuclear Weapons Personnel Reliability Program — a collection of safety and medical screenings for people with entry to nuclear weapons — classifies the place as “essential.”
Different positions within the navy that share the identical classification are nuclear bomber crews and missile silo personnel.
In response to Lyle’s official biography, he was commissioned within the Navy in 2004 and served aboard the USS Houston and USS Buffalo, each assault submarines, earlier than transferring to ballistic missile submarines as the chief officer of the USS Louisiana in 2017.
Lyle took command of the submarine’s blue crew in August 2022. The boat is homeported in Bangor, Washington, however was within the shipyard as of final summer season. It isn’t clear if the submarine has since left the yards and returned to an operational state.
Every Navy ballistic submarine has two units of crews — blue and gold. They take turns manning the submarines and taking them on patrol.
In response to the Navy, “this maximizes the [submarine]’s strategic availability, reduces the variety of submarines required to fulfill strategic necessities, and permits for correct crew coaching, readiness, and morale.”
Throughout his profession, Lyle accomplished three strategic deterrent patrols, 4 Western Pacific deployments in addition to “9 missions very important to nationwide safety” and an Afghanistan deployment the place he was “the chief of a Navy postal platoon chargeable for the mail mission in three provinces,” his biography mentioned.
The Navy mentioned that the deputy commodore of Commander, Submarine Squadron 17, Cmdr. Larry Arbuckle, has stepped in because the submarine’s interim commanding officer.
— Konstantin Toropin might be reached at konstantin.toropin@navy.com. Observe him on X at @ktoropin.
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