After losing the trust and confidence of the Secretary of Defense, Navy Secretary Richard V. Spencer was asked Sunday to tender his resignation and exit the Pentagon.

In a prepared statement emailed to Navy Times, Pentagon spokesman Jonathan Hoffman said that Defense Secretary Mark T. Esper became concerned about Spencer’s “lack of candor over conversations with the White House involving the handling of Navy SEAL Eddie Gallagher,” an inside deal Spencer allegedly concocted with President Donald J. Trump.

Esper has asked Trump to consider Kenneth Braithwaite, the current U.S. ambassador to Norway and a retired Navy rear admiral, as the 77th Secretary of the Navy.

According to Hoffman, Esper and Army Gen. Mark A. Milley, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, spoke with Trump on Friday about what had become a pivotal moment in the history of traditional civil-military relations.

The president had tweeted he would shield Special Warfare Operator Chief Edward “Eddie” Gallagher from what was widely perceived to be a punitive Trident Review Board set up by Rear Adm. Collin Green, the commander of Naval Special Warfare.

At issue was whether Green’s chosen panel could strip Gallagher of his coveted SEAL trident nearly five months after he was convicted at a July court-martial trial of posing in a photograph near a dead Islamic State prisoner of war.

Trump had intervened multiple times in Gallagher’s case, including restoring his chief’s anchors after he had been demoted to petty officer first class following his conviction.

Hoffman disclosed Sunday that Spencer was saying one thing in public about supporting Green’s pitch to let the process play out — a policy favored by Esper — but in reality he’d previously proposed to Trump to restore Gallagher’s pay grade and allow him to retire with his trident pin.

“When recently asked by Secretary Esper, Secretary Spencer confirmed that despite multiple conversations on the Gallagher matter, Secretary Esper was never informed by Secretary Spencer of his private proposal,” Hoffman said.

After all the drama of the past week, Esper now has decided to let Gallagher keep his trident.

He’ll meet with Chief of Naval Operations Adm. Mike Gilday and Navy Under Secretary Thomas Modly — now the acting secretary — to figure out how to move forward.

“I am deeply troubled by this conduct shown by a senior DOD official.” said Secretary Esper in the statement. “Unfortunately, as a result I have determined that Secretary Spencer no longer has my confidence to continue in his position. I wish Richard well.”

It’s unclear if Esper will halt similar proceedings against three officers tied to the Gallagher case.

Spencer’s spokesperson, Cmdr. Sarah Higgins, told Navy Times that Spencer would not be making a statement at this time on the latest revelations.

However, a letter of resignation dated Sunday and purported to have been signed by Spencer and distributed by CNN and other outlets tells a different story than the one pushed by the Pentagon.

Calling the need to preserve good order and discipline a “deadly serious business,” the letter indicates that Spencer had come to believe Trump didn’t share his perspective.

“I cannot in good conscience obey an order that I believe violates the sacred oath I took in the presence of my family, my flag and my faith to support and defend the Constitution of the United States,” the letter states.

Only moments after the release of Spencer’s resignation letter, however, Trump took to Twitter to give another version of the Sunday meltdown.

Noting his displeasure with the Navy’s handling of the Gallagher affair, Trump added his concerns about Spencer’s failure to address cost overruns and contracting problems from the former administration and then said that’s why Esper “terminated” his employment.

He thanked Spencer for his service and commitment but promised Gallagher “will retire peacefully with all of the honors that he has earned.”

The president added that he would nominate Braithwaite as the next Navy secretary.

“A man of great achievement and success, I know Ken will do an outstanding job!” Trump tweeted.

Plot twist: What none of the parties knew was that minutes before the Pentagon announced Esper’s decision, Gallagher told his attorney, Timothy Parlatore, that he had decided to voluntarily relinquish his trident for the good of the SEALs, the president and the country, believing that he unwittingly had become a lightning rod for criticism and partisan division.

Shortly after Gallagher told Parlatore to write the letter, his attorney received word that Esper had decided to let him retain the pin.

In fact, Navy Times had to scrap a story about the letter when the Pentagon statement arrived.

“This isn’t a twist any of us saw coming,” Parlatore told Navy Times. “From the beginning, my primary responsibility was to save Eddie Gallagher’s life, then to save his reputation, but Eddie Gallagher loves the Navy and he loves the SEAL teams. He’s been falsely accused of attacking the institution, but it’s an institution we both love and want to improve.

“With this personnel change, this institution will improve and no one will go through the ordeal Eddie went through. At the end of the day, the most important duty any of us have is protecting America.”

Parlatore added, “This case is completely bananas.”

Although Gallagher was accused of a string of war crimes tied to a 2017 deployment with Alpha Platoon, SEAL Team 7 — including the murder of a wounded Islamic State prisoner of war — a court-martial panel of his peers in July acquitted him of every charge except the one that the he never denied, posing next to a dead detainee alongside a dozen other service members who were never charged with any crimes.

Had the offense not appeared at a general court-martial trial, it likely would’ve been handled administratively, perhaps with little more than a verbal reprimand before Gallagher retired after two decades of service.

Instead, it was the legal flotsam left after the military jury washed away what was left of the Navy’s failed case against him.

Before Gallagher’s court-martial trial even kicked off, Navy judge Capt. Aaron Rugh sanctioned the prosecution for repeatedly violating Gallagher’s constitutional rights.

Part of Rugh’s punishment included booting Cmdr. Christopher Czaplak, the lead prosecutor, for his role in a warrantless surveillance program cooked up with Naval Criminal Investigative Service agents to track emails sent by defense attorneys and also to Navy Times.

They were accused of manipulating witness statements to NCIS agents; using immunity grants and a bogus “target letter” in a crude attempt to keep potential pro-Gallagher witnesses from testifying; illegally leaking documents to the media to taint the military jury pool; and then trying to cover it all up when they got caught.

In the end, the jurors recommended that Gallagher be demoted to petty officer first class, a verdict upheld by Chief of Naval Operations Adm. Mike Gilday but overturned by Trump.

“Contrary to popular belief, I’m still here. I did not threaten to resign,” Spencer said at the Halifax International Security Forum, where Spencer was speaking on a panel about the Arctic. “Let’s just say we are here to talk about to talk about external threats and Eddie Gallagher is not one of them.”

Spencer, the Navy’s top civilian, also said he would comply if Trump orders him to stop plans for a Navy hearing to decide whether to strip Special Warfare Operator Chief Edward “Eddie” Gallagher of his SEAL trident.

Though Trump tweeted Thursday that post-conviction administrative proceedings against Gallagher should be scuttled, Spencer said he does not interpret tweets as the formal orders he would require to act.

“If the president requests that the process stop, the process stops,” Spencer told reporters later. “Good order and discipline is also obeying orders from the president of the United States.”

Spencer said he would not consider resigning if that order comes.

“I mean, the president of the United States is the commander in chief. He’s involved in every aspect of government, and he can make decisions and he can do things and give orders as he deems appropriate,” he said.

Spencer’s statements came after NBC News reported that military leaders — hoping to keep Spencer from quitting — lobbied Trump on board Air Force One to stop intervening in Gallagher’s case.

Spencer said he did not know whether those conversations had happened.

A day earlier at the international gathering of national security experts, Spencer told the news agency Reuters that he planned to back the Navy’s top uniformed officials, who initiated post-conviction administrative proceedings to expel Gallagher from the SEALs. “I believe the process matters for good order and discipline,” Spencer told Reuters.

Those comments came after Trump tweeted Thursday: “The Navy will NOT be taking away Warfighter and Navy Seal Eddie Gallagher’s Trident Pin …This case was handled very badly from the beginning. Get back to business!”

Though military leaders have considered press releases and speeches to constitute policy directives, the flap over Gallagher’s trident has raised questions inside the Pentagon about whether a tweet constitutes a lawful order.

The president has intervened multiple times before and after the court-martial trial for Gallagher, who was accused of murdering a detainee during a 2017 Iraq deployment. Gallagher was acquitted of a string of war crimes charges but found guilty on the sole offense of posing for photos with a dead detainee, a charge he never denied.

Although other members of his platoon, including a commissioned officer, posed alongside him, Gallagher was the only one charged. Believing that Gallagher’s demotion to petty officer first class was too harsh, Trump later restored his chief’s anchors.

After Trump’s clemency, however, Naval Special Warfare commander Rear Adm. Collin Green moved to strip Gallagher’s coveted SEAL trident from him and expel him from the elite teams because of the photo.

Critics contend holding a job qualification board for a SEAL trying to retire from the Navy is merely a punitive exercise, the sort of administrative sanction designed to exact vengeance on young officers or enlisted sailors without the power to fight back.

But supporters say the SEALs have a right to regulate their ranks and evict those who can’t measure up mentally or morally for the job.

Attorneys for Gallagher and three officers who face similar Trident Review Board proceedings have sought guidance from Naval Special Warfare about the status of their cases, only to be greeted with shrugs from the Coronado, California-based command.

Brian Ferguson, an attorney who is helping to represent Lt. Jacob X. “Jake” Portier at the review panel — where he’s been alleged to have failed to quickly inform superiors about a crime a military jury says was never committed — fired off an email to Navy officials trying to find a way out of a potential looming crisis in civil-military relations.

“Various national news outlets are reporting that the Secretary of the Navy and (Rear Adm.) Green are considering resigning over the Trident Review Board process,” Ferguson wrote. “Perhaps this is not in the best interest of the country.

“If your command is willing to entertain ways to resolve this matter without a constitutional crisis, I suspect the attorneys for the sailors would be willing to engage in such a discussion.”

Officials didn’t respond.

Navy Times was unable to confirm other media reports that Spencer ever threatened to resign.

Gallagher’s defense attorney, Timothy Parlatore, believes all parties in the dispute over the boards can use Spencer’s statements in Halifax to build a bridge over what appeared to be a widening gap this week in traditional civil-military relations.

“Everything the secretary said is true and it’s exactly what we’d expect from the secretary of the Navy,” Parlatore said in a telephone interview. “This seems to have been manufactured by the media to create a non-existent crisis.”

But Parlatore questioned why Navy leaders continue to balk at accepting Trump’s tweets as orders “because they don’t like the medium that he uses.

“Do they really want to create a precedent where all orders must be written before they can be obeyed? Does a ship’s captain have to start writing all orders to a junior officer? Does a platoon commander need to start writing orders to his Marines to charge a hill?

“I don’t think the medium the president chose to deliver the orders makes a difference,” Parlatore said.

Three sources told Defense News that Vice Adm. Michael Gilday, the Director of the Joint Staff since March 1, will be promoted over his four-star colleagues, who will stay at their current commands.

He’ll succeed Adm. John Richardson, whose tenure was marked by a steadfast push to modernize and toughen the Navy in an era of great power competition as well as twin guided-missile destroyer collisions that killed 17 sailors in 2017 and the ongoing “Fat Leonard” public corruption scandal that gutted a generation of high-ranking officers serving in the Japan-based 7th Fleet.

Gilday, 56, and other Navy leaders met with President Donald J. Trump late Wednesday and received his blessing, according to the Wall Street Journal.

Defense News reported Tuesday that Gilday was under consideration for the job.

His rapid promotion comes after the downfall of Adm. Bill Moran, the former Vice Chief of Naval Operations who announced Sunday that he would file his retirement papers.

Picked by Trump and confirmed by the Senate, Moran was poised to take the helm of the sea service after an Aug. 1 ceremony at the U.S. Naval Academy in Annapolis, Maryland.

Instead, he offered to depart the Navy after 39 years of service due to an “an open investigation” into emails he exchanged with a retired former staffer “who had while in uniform been investigated and held accountable over allegations of inappropriate behavior,” according to a prepared statement provided to Navy Times.

Multiple senior Pentagon officials confirmed that the former officer is Chris Servello, who investigators previously found had behaved inappropriately with female colleagues in 2016 while dressed as Santa Claus at a boozy Pentagon holiday party.

The imbroglio filled with tawdry shenanigans later was tagged by senators as the “Bad Santa” scandal.

Although the law allows for presidents to dip into the ranks of vice admirals to fish out a CNO, it hasn’t been done since President Richard Nixon recalled Vice Adm. Elmo “Bud” Zumwalt Jr. from Vietnam to serve as his top naval officer.

Dwight D. Eisenhower also promoted Rear Adm. Arleigh Burke over 92 flag officers to become his CNO in 1955.

But for the most part, presidents have stuck with four-stars as their choices. If confirmed by the Senate, Gilday will pin on his fourth, too.

Gilday is the son of a sailor.

Raised in Lowell, Massachusetts, he graduated from the U.S. Naval Academy in 1985 and became a surface warfare officer, according to his official biography.

He served on board the guided-missile destroyer Chandler and cruisers Gettysburg and Princeton before commanding destroyers Higgins and Benfold and Destroyer Squadron 7.

The sea combat commander for the Ronald Reagan Carrier Strike Group, he later commanded the Dwight D. Eisenhower Carrier Strike Group as a flag officer.

Ashore, he also directed operations for NATO’s Joint Force Command Lisbon, U.S. Cyber Command and the Joint Staff and served as chief of staff for Naval Striking and Support Forces NATO.

His decorations include the Distinguished Service Medal, four Defense Superior Service Medals, three Legion of Merit Medals and the Navy and Marine Corps Commendation Medal with a Combat “V” device for battlefield valor.

In a preliminary report released Thursday, the board reached an initial conclusion that confusion on the Ingstad’s bridge during watch turnover was the proximate cause of the accident, but the sinking of the ship was caused by progressive flooding that appeared to overmatch Ingstad’s watertight integrity.

The Accident Investigation Board Norway, or AIBN, issued a public addendum to the report and a pair of warnings that the issues that sunk Ingstad could also apply to other Navantia ships, raising questions about a widespread quality issue at the Spanish shipbuilder.

“The AIBN has found safety critical issues relating to the vessel’s watertight compartments,” the report reads. “This must be assumed to also apply to the other four Nansen-class frigates.

“It cannot be excluded that the same applies to vessels of a similar design delivered by Navantia, or that the design concept continues to be used for similar vessel models. The AIBN assumes that its findings are not in conformity with the required damage stability standard for the Nansen-class frigates.”

In a statement to Defense News, Navantia spokesperson Esther Benito Lope stressed that the report is “very preliminary” and that the company has offered to work with Norway on the investigation.

“Navantia has offered, since the very beginning, its collaboration with the [Royal Norwegian Navy] in order to clarify the accident,” Benito Lope said. “Navantia will analyze all the possibilities, considering that some of the mentioned possibilities … are concluded from a very preliminary investigation.”

The statement went on to say that the company has not received any official notice or fielded any consultations about the cause of the accident.

“Navantia has not received any official communication, neither any consults about possible causes, nor participated in any action … in Norway,” Benito Lope wrote.

Progressive flooding

In the addendum to the report, the board found that the initial assessment by the crew in the wake of the accident was that some crew quarters, the aft generator room and the ship’s stores room were flooded, but that the ship was stable and could survive if the situation remained relatively controlled.

But then it didn’t.

The crew began seeing water quickly flooding into the gear room via the ship’s hollow propeller shaft, with flooding then creeping into the engine rooms through the bulkheads.

Propeller shafts have to pass through multiple engineering spaces through watertight openings in the wall known as stuffing tubes or stuffing boxes that are supposed to tighten down as water tries to get through, preventing progressive flooding.

The board’s initial assessment based on crew interviews is that the stuffing boxes did not work as designed on Ingstad.

“This meant that the flooding became substantially more extensive than indicated by the original damage,” the report reads. “Based on the flooding of the gear room, it was decided to prepare for evacuation.”

As a result of the findings, the AIBN issued two warnings: one to the Norwegian military to assess its ships to address the safety concerns, and one to Navantia to “conduct investigations into the issues identified during this initial investigation and to ascertain whether this is also an issue relating to other vessels.”

Confusion

Apart from the flooding that ultimately sank the Ingstad, the accident itself raises some vexing questions.

Ingstad collided with the Mata-flagged tanker Sola TS at around 4 a.m. in unlimited visibility just minutes after Sola had gotten underway from Norway’s Sture Terminal.

The report found that Ingstad was transiting the channel at about 17 knots well before dawn, faster than one might expect near a busy port at night. It also found that the collision took place about 10-15 minutes after a watch turnover.

The report concludes that Ingstad’s bridge watch team mistook Sola for an object on land, and that Sola’s illuminated deck lights obscured its navigation lights from view. Furthermore, even after the Sola got underway there would have been relatively little motion of Sola’s lights as it moved away from the quay.

In the last six minutes before the collision, Sola contacted Ingstad and instructed it to turn away from its course. Ingstad’s watchstanders thought they were communicating with one of the other ships in the channel, still thinking Sola was a stationary object, and said if they turned, they’d run into the object that turned out to be the rapidly closing tanker.

By the time Ingstad’s bridge team recognized the error and tried to evade Sola, it was too late, the report found.

“The AIBN’s preliminary assessment is that the accident was not caused by any single act or event, but can be explained by a series of interacting complex factors and circumstances,” the report reads. “The investigation team is seeking to identify and understand these factors.

“So far, the AIBN has not seen any indication of technical systems not working as intended up until the time of the collision.”

More questions than answers

To retired Capt. Lawrence Brennan, a career U.S. Navy attorney and now an instructor at Fordham University’s School of Law, what’s interesting isn’t just what’s in the interim report but what was left out and will be explored later by other probes.

He pointed to the crew of the frigate Helge Ingstad and wondered what condition they had set the frigate to mitigate or prevent flooding.

He asked about the shift change on the bridge that seemed to coincide with the frigate entering waters bustling with commercial shipping in low visibility.

He indicated that more will be learned from engineers poring over the gash in the hull, which “seemed to be opened up like a can opener,” and interviews with crew members who can trace the quick decision-making process of a watch team that realized, like aviators, that its vessel had “put itself in a box” and faced increasingly bad options as danger loomed.

As for the AIBN’s twin interim safety recommendations to shipyards and Oslo’s military leaders, Brennan said that’s exactly what everyone should expect from an initial probe.

“We saw the exact same sort of investigations into defects discovered in Japanese-built container ships,” Brennan said.

The Space and Naval Warfare Systems Center Pacific awarded Science Applications International Corp. a $116 million prime contract to continue providing a wide range of management and technical support to the Navy’s Tactical Networks In-Service Engineering Activity — what sailors call “TACNET ISEA” for short.

The bulk of the work is expected to be performed in San Diego and Norfolk, with some additional help on Navy vessels and shore sites around the globe.

The contract calls for a three-year base period of performance but includes a two-year option that, if exercised, will hike the value of the deal to about $196 million.

In 2015, SAIC landed a similar three-year $80 million deal with SPAWAR.

“We are proud to continue our support to SPAWAR Systems Center Pacific TACNET and are dedicated to ensuring the highest degree of fleet readiness. For more than 20 years, we have assisted the Navy with sustainment services for critical TACNET systems that serve as the backbone of U.S. naval vessels,” said Jim Scanlon, SAIC senior vice president and general manager of the Defense Systems Customer Group, in a press release.

With more than $4.5 billion in annual revenues, Virginia-based SAIC is a global technical and engineering titan.

Headquartered in San Diego, SPAWAR Pacific spearheads the Navy’s research and development into C4ISR — command, control, communications, computers, intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance efforts, plus the newest cyber and space systems.

SAIC began working on the TACNET program on March 25, 1996, according to a written statement emailed to Navy Times by Lauren A. Presti.

The new contract includes extensive work on the Navy’s Consolidated Afloat Network and Enterprise Service — CANES, the service’s next generation tactical network. The Pentagon hopes to have it installed in 190 ships, submarines and Maritime Operations Centers by 2020.

It also involves maintaining essential networks, such as the Aegis Ballistic Missile Defense System. AEGIS depends on CANES communicating with the Navy ‘s Automated Digital Network System and sharing information with other commands at sea and ashore.

Deckplates get email messages and can browse the internet at sea because SAIC keeps CANES, ADNS and other systems working.

In the fiscal year that ended last September, SAIC handled 756 CASREPs — Navy casualty reports that are filed when a system needs repaired — and finished 164 network upgrades in San Diego, Virginia, Italy, Bahrain and Japan. Another 130 upgrades are planned for 2019 and beyond, Presti said.