Brett, it is highly doubtful that any COs would have been relieved 'back in my timeframe', under the circumstances you outlined in the first quote above. Your cite could be interpreted as "no culpability assigned to the CO or crew". What then would be the justification for firing the CO?
BR, I don't believe the USS Cole incident falls into the catagory cited above. There was a security breach involved.
BzB
BzB, sort of...yes there was a breach, they weren't in strict compliance with the rules, but they were cleared of any wrongdoing.
Quick version: They set their security posture IAW direction from higher, and that posture was determined to be insufficient to stop the attack (ie you executed as directed and it still didn't work).
The "breach" was that they were required to have picket boats on 15min stdby....they didn't/couldn't do that since there was nobody around to do in in Yemen, and they couldn't use their own boats, b/c they decided to go stbd side to the fueling station (boats launch on stbd side) as they were on call for contingency tasking and needed to be able to get underway quickly.
Point is, even if they had done that, it wouldn't have mattered since the suicide boat didnt' give them a 15 minute heads up and had blended into a heavily trafficked area.
So, maybe not everything right, but an investigation did clear him/them.
That said while he wasn't fired (but then he didn't really need to be with a dead ship), he was promoted to O-6 several times but kept getting punted in confirmation hearings.
