When I was in high school, my father gave me several books to read over a summer written by Admiral Daniel V. Gallery. Admiral Gallery was a famously combative Navy officer who, twice in his career, found himself on the edge of a court‑martial. In his book Eight Bells and All Is Well; he meticulously described both episodes before boards of inquiry and pre–Judge Advocate court‑martial proceedings.
The first case arose in June 1944, when then‑Captain Gallery’s hunter‑killer group forced German submarine U‑505 to the surface and, on his own initiative, boarded and captured her, seizing an intact Enigma machine and code materials. Admiral Ernest J. King, the Chief of Naval Operations, was furious; if the Germans learned their boat had been taken, they would change ciphers and compromise Allied code‑breaking, and King seriously considered court‑martialing Gallery for recklessly endangering intelligence operations. Secrecy was so effective, however, that the Germans never realized U‑505 had been captured, and instead of a court‑martial Gallery ultimately received high decorations, including the Distinguished Service Medal, while his task group received a Presidential Unit Citation.
King also argued that Gallery had jeopardized his crew and his ship by closing with a submarine that might be booby‑trapped and by recovering German lifeboats and sailors who could themselves have been rigged with explosives. The Monday‑morning quarterbacks of that era sounded a lot like the critics now baying for Pete Hegseth’s scalp, calling for “war crimes” charges from the comfort of television studios. Pundits like the ladies on “The View” demand blood without any serious understanding of how rules of engagement are developed, how responsibility runs up and down a chain of command, or what information is actually available in real time during an engagement
As a rule of thumb in special operations, mission accomplishment is the first priority, followed closely by the safety and survival of our own operators. Those making command decisions at every level work from that hierarchy, and they spend months gaming out scenarios before an operation ever gets a green light. In the U‑505 case, critics later said Gallery had risked his men needlessly; perhaps if he had left the Germans in the water and blown the submarine to pieces from a safe distance, he would have been a model officer on the promotion list
Instead, he was pulled off the front line during the investigation, even though that investigation ultimately vindicated his judgment. In today’s media environment, the same people who now rush to portray every misstep as a “war crime” might well hail him as a hero for risking American sailors to save enemy lives and preserve evidence. The irony is that many of them treat the well‑being of the enemy as morally equal to, or even superior to, the safety of the operators actually carrying out the mission.
Admiral Gallery made the sort of risky call that many in the media now insist our special operations commanders should have made differently during the Venezuelan drug interdiction. Yet the end result of such decisions must be evaluated in light of the information available at the time, not with omniscient hindsight. Any fair assessment has to include the pre‑mission planning, the intelligence picture, and the real‑time pressures facing the commanders—not just the final casualty count.
In medicine, this is understood instinctively. When evaluating surgical residents at Morbidity and Mortality conferences after a death or bad outcome, the focus is not only on what happened but on how and why key decisions were made. That kind of review forces the evaluator to stand in the shoes of the person being criticized. That is precisely what is not happening today, whether in the media or in Congress, when people rush to pass judgment on the drug interdiction case now dominating the headlines.
Gallery’s second brush with court‑martial came after the war, when he became an outspoken critic of Harry Truman–era plans to shrink the Navy in favor of an Air Force–centric strategic bombing doctrine. He wrote fiery articles for outlets such as The Saturday Evening Post—including one widely remembered under the headline “Don’t Let Them Scuttle the Navy!”—that were considered so insubordinate he again “barely escaped” formal charges, effectively ending his prospects for a third star even though he remained on active duty as a rear admiral until 1960.
Once again, Gallery chose controversy over careerism. He challenged what was already becoming a postwar “military‑industrial complex,” warning that fashionable theories and bureaucratic interests were driving strategy more than sober military judgment. Barely a dozen years later, President Eisenhower used his farewell address to warn the nation about that very problem as the Cold War deepened.
Today, figures like Pete Hegseth, Donald Trump, and Kristi Noem—whatever one thinks of their personalities or politics—are rocking similar establishment boats and confronting similar institutional headwinds. Those shouting about “unlawful orders” and “war crimes” occupy the same moral high ground that Harry Truman, Robert McNamara, and later neo‑conservative architects of endless war once claimed, even as they pushed policies that repeatedly left the United States more exposed and entangled.
The country needs more officers and public servants in the mold of Pete Hegseth and Dan Gallery who are willing to stand up to the status quo. For the sake of the mission and for the sake of the men who are actually in the fight, the nation needs more than a few good men—it needs leaders who accept the burden of hard decisions and a citizenry willing to judge them by the standards of courage, prudence, and process, not by cable‑news outrage cycles
Admiral Daniel V. Gallery’s experience shows how controversial, risk‑laden combat decisions can be condemned in the moment yet vindicated when the full context, results, and reasoning are examined, which is precisely what is missing from much of today’s commentary about Pete Hegseth and the Venezuela interdiction.
