How sexual harassment and the shipyard crippled a Navy warship – By Geoff Ziezulewicz and Diana Stancy (Military Times) / May 7, 2024
By the time the junior officer emailed her peers in March 2022, reminding them to do their jobs and protect their sailors from each other, the men and women of the Navy destroyer Bulkeley had suffered through a rough couple of years.
The warship had entered a maintenance and modernization stint in March 2019 that was expected to last 15 months. But Bulkeley didn’t leave the Virginia shipyard until June 2021, more than two years later.
Once out, the undermanned crew, missing sailors in key positions, worked at a feverish pace to get the warship in shape ahead of a planned homeport shift from Norfolk, Virginia to Rota, Spain.
Along the way, standards had laxed, festered and metastasized in some sections of the 22-year-old ship, crew members would later say.
