remarks. Do not mouth off about your superiors with reporters present. Do not rage against the bureaucracy, do not humiliate the men and women under your command, and above all else, do not have sex with people you work with.

Navy Capt. Owen Honors was the latest military officer to learn these lessons, after his amateur blue-comedy vids cost him his command of the U.S.S. Enterprise yesterday. But chances are he won’t be the last. In the new issue of Proceedings, retired Capt. Kevin Eyer writes about the rise of a post-Cold War “zero-defects mentality” that strips officers of their commands for infractions unrelated to the accomplishment of their missions. He’s talking specifically about the Navy — which is more strict than other services about relieving officers  — but that doesn’t mean officers from the Army, Marines or Air Force are safe from the phenomenon. The important thing is not to sabotage yourself.

Lord knows lots of officers do. Here’s our guide to seven of the stupidest, most boneheaded, most defeat-from-the-jaws-of-victory unforced errors that have cost officers their jobs. No one’s immune, least of all journalists, to counterproductive behavior. But remember: if you’re going to get fired, make sure it’s because you’re actually bad at your job.

1. Army Gen. Stanley McChrystal. The current patron saint of all self-terminating military careers. “No single American has inflicted more fear and more loss of life on our country’s enemies than Stan McChrystal,” Defense Secretary Bob Gates said — alas, at McChrystal’s retirement ceremony in July. McChrystal hunted and killed the Iraqi terrorist Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, ran an extensive commando war from the shadows at the Joint Special Operations Command and rewrote the playbook for the Afghanistan war.  A scholar as well as a warrior, his men loved him so much they called him “The Pope.” Maybe that had something to do with his still-inexplicable decision to slag off (or let his staff slag off) most of his civilian superiors, including the vice president and the national security adviser, while Michael Hastings took notes for Rolling Stone. He apologized, but within a week he was done as commander in Afghanistan. Now he’s lecturing and writing a book about leadership — a method for the Pope to gain absolution.

2. Air Force Col. Michael D. Murphy. The Air Force contains a lot of fine legal minds, and its Judge Advocates General corps commands respect. Murphy was as respected as any of them, even running the Air Force’s Judge Advocate General School in 2005. Only there was one problem: two decades before, he was stripped of his law degree and opted not to tell the service — the kind of professional misconduct that led Texas and Louisiana to disbar him in the 1980s. It took an unrelated investigation in 2006 to alert the Air Force to Murphy’s 20-year omission, which promptly cost him his post running the Air Force Legal Operations Agency. So pissed were the brass that when Murphy finally retired in 2010, he left the service as a first lieutenant — the grade he held before disbarment.

3. Army Gen. Kevin Byrnes. Lots of officers lose their jobs for inappropriate sex. Very few become the center of conspiracies because of it. In 2005, the Army fired Byrnes from his post atop the Training and Doctrine Command — the brain and nerve center of the service — for what his lawyer described as an extramarital affair with a civilian woman. But very few wanted to believe a four-star general could get fired for something like that during the Reign of Donald Rumsfeld, when generals who commanded deteriorating wars were secure in their jobs. And indeed, the punishment was harsh: Byrnes was three months away from retirement. Confusion is understandable, but some took it way far: one website said Byrnes was fired for “instigat[ing] a coup against the neo-con hawks in an attempt to prevent further global conflict.” (There was more where that came from.) Sometimes the truth is more mundane, but no less embarrassing.

4. Navy Rear Adm. Steven Kunkle. It was like Lysistrata in reverse: before going to war, a man’s appetites turned sexual, and he was going to satisfy them. Only it was 2003, and Kunkle was commander of the U.S.S. Kitty Hawk Battle Group, which sailed from Japan to the Persian Gulf to support the impending Iraq war. Kunkle was barely aboard his aircraft carrier for a week into the voyage when he heard that he was done — a disciplinary hearing found the married admiral guilty of an “inappropriate relationship” with a female officer not in his chain of command. Just six months earlier, 7th Fleet commander Vice Adm. Bob Willard sacked Kitty Hawk’s captain, Thomas Hejl, but at least that was for persistent engineering troubles aboard the carrier; Kunkle couldn’t even appeal to incompetence, just poor judgment.

5. Navy Capt. David Schnell. When the military wanted to impress upon the media how serious it was about helping Pakistan survive its summer flooding, it emphasized one word: Peleliu. The amphibious assault ship arrived in Karachi on August 12 to provide 19 crucial Marine helicopters and 16 tons of food and humanitarian aid. But it also carried with it a looming crisis. Three days later, Capt. David Schnell lost his command of the ship for being “inappropriate, improper and unduly familiar” with “several crew members.” It remains unclear exactly what Schnell did, or with how many people, but it was a big embarrassment for the Navy right as it was trying to put its best global-force-for-good foot forward.

6. Army Reserve Col. Lawrence Sellin. Sellin pinned the Afghanistan war command between a rock and a hard place — that is, between media embarrassment and wounded bureaucratic pride. And for that, he had to go. In August, Sellin, a staff officer assigned to the International Security Assistance Forces Joint Command in Kabul, released an epic rant on the UPI wires about how pointless his organization was, staffed full of conformist colonels mainlining tedious PowerPoints to “cognitively challenged generals.” Worst of all, at IJC, “progress in the war is optional.” The next day, Sellin contacted Danger Room to let us know he was fired. Unlike most of the other officers on this list, Sellin’s reputation increased after the firing. He developed a following among staff officers looking to vent their frustrations at the military’s PowerPoint-bloated ways; you can find him at military fora like Small Wars Journal, debating the merits of the Afghanistan war.

7. Navy Capt. Holly Graf. It takes a lot to get fired from the Navy for “cruelty,” especially when expressed through cursing — a sailor’s God-given right — but that’s what made Graf the Navy’s most controversial officer of 2010. Graf commanded the Japan-based cruiser Cowpens, and according to a Navy inspector-general’s report released in March, ran it without much regard for her crew. She made them walk her dogs, perform at her holiday parties, and put them in toddler-like “time-outs” when they annoyed her. And annoy her they did: “I can’t express how mad you make me without getting violent,” she told a sailor, part of an impressive litany of verbal abuse documented in the report. But few in the Navy came to Graf’s defense when she was fired last January — check out the bile spewed at her on this website — largely because she showed a similarly short fuse since running the destroyer Winston S. Churchill in 2002, and was promoted in spite of it. When a panel ultimately recommended she retire from the Navy last month at her captain’s grade, Navy Times editorialized that Graf should be shipped out as a lieutenant commander.

Photos: U.S. Army

See Also:

• Why Obama Had to Fire McChrystal
• Navy Captain Jerks His Way Into Viral-Vid Stardom [Updated …
• Without Honors: Navy Fires Captain for Lewd Vids
• Colonel Kicked Out of Afghanistan for Anti-PowerPoint Rant …

Authors: Spencer Ackerman

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