On the morning of July 15, a Blue Angels F/A-18 came in over Florida’s Pensacola Beach so low it sent umbrellas and beach chairs tumbling while children covered their ears due to the loud noise. The next morning, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth posted on social media that “The flyovers will continue until morale improves.” That was supposed to be the message of a leader slashing pointless rules. He’s half right. Slashing pointless bureaucracy is a worthy task for any leader. The trick is distinguishing between the ones holding back catastrophes and those that are just in the way.

Capt. Adam Bryan, who has commanded the Blue Angels since April 2024, told reporters that they never intend to fly over a crowd that low. The squadron began a safety review. That afternoon acting Secretary of the Navy Hung Cao posted that the debrief was complete: “No reprimands. No firings. No problem.” It was at least the third such intervention in five months, and only six days after he reversed the suspensions of eight Apache pilots who flew low over a crowded South Carolina beach on July Fourth. The posts encourage a cavalier attitude “that can only lead to accidents,” said Jeff Guzzetti, a former investigator for the National Transportation Safety Board and the Federal Aviation Administration.

The Blue Angels conduct safety reviews for a reason. The Navy counts 26 pilot deaths in the team’s first 70 years. Almost all came in the team’s early decades before the Navy imposed an intense safety culture. In 2011, four of six Hornets flew below their assigned altitude at Lynchburg, Virginia, and even though all six landed safely, the squadron canceled a Naval Academy flyover and stood down. Its commander, Dave Koss, resigned four days later. He cited that maneuver and “other instances of not meeting the airborne standard.” The squadron hasn’t lost a pilot since 2016.

Grounding yourself over an incident in which nothing happened is hard. Robin Dillon-Merrill and Catherine Tinsley of Georgetown University’s McDonough School of Business have built a body of research on why organizations fail to learn from near misses. In a 2008 Management Science paper, they found that such events get filed as successes rather than failures averted by luck, and that people given near-miss information went on to make riskier choices. People feel like near misses are proof that the system works when they’re evidence that it’s failing.

Rules look pointless when they work. The crashes stop, the reasons recede, and what stays visible is the nuisance. Every bank has a risk officer whose job is to be unpopular during a boom.

Scott Snook, a retired Army colonel who teaches at Harvard Business School, reconstructed how two American F-15s shot down two American Black Hawks over Iraq in 1994, killing 26 people. Almost two years of investigations found no culprit. Instead, he found what he called practical drift, or the slow uncoupling of what people do from what the rules say. Someone bends a rule, nothing happens, and the bent version becomes the standard. Nobody sees the whole of it until it kills someone.

No one understands the importance of maintaining standards better than the United States military. The modern military is the creation of George C. Marshall, most famous today for the Marshall Plan. But in 1927, long before he was Secretary of State and later Secretary of Defense, Marshall was a lieutenant colonel who took over the academic side of the Infantry School at Fort Benning in Georgia. He spent five years rebuilding how the Army taught officers. Out went long lectures confined to approved doctrine, exercises with elaborate maps, and beautifully detailed orders that left a subordinate nothing to decide. Get down to essentials, he told them, and “expunge the bunk, complications and ponderosities.”

Marshall didn’t get favorable headlines. But 150 of the generals who won World War II were students at Benning during Marshall’s tenure and 50 more taught alongside him. Marshall became chief of staff on the day Germany invaded Poland, inheriting an Army he described in his own biennial report as roughly 174,000 enlisted men scattered across 130 posts. By the end of the war, he had built a force of 8.3 million.

And while building, he cut. He found a War Department where a decision about one infantryman traveled to the Chief of Infantry, back through the General Staff, and up past eight assistant secretaries. Sixty-one officers reported directly to him. In March 1942, inside a month, he took the 61 down to six.

But he never lowered standards to chase popularity. In August and September of 1941, Marshall put 472,000 troops through an exercise across Louisiana and east Texas. Of the 42 corps and division commanders who took part, 31 were relieved or moved to career-ending duties, three months before Pearl Harbor. A removal board helped him force at least 600 officers out of the Army by his own estimate before America entered the war. When members of Congress protested his relief of one general, Marshall replied: “If he stays, I go, and if I stay, he goes.” They weren’t forced out for breaking rules, but for falling short of the standard, which is what the Blue Angels judged had happened over Pensacola, until Washington informed them it didn’t care.

Standards don’t defend themselves and upholding them is rarely popular. But chasing popularity is for teenagers, not George Marshall’s successor. An institution takes generations to build and an afternoon to break. The Pensacola incident hurt nobody. Neither did Lynchburg. But in 2011 a squadron read a clean landing as a warning and its commander gave up his job over it. And in 2026 the Secretary of Defense applauded a near-disaster and called it morale.

____

This column reflects the personal views of the author and does not necessarily reflect the opinion of the editorial board or Bloomberg LP and its owners.

Gautam Mukunda writes about corporate management and innovation. He teaches leadership at the Yale School of Management and is the author of "Indispensable: When Leaders Really Matter."

©2026 Bloomberg L.P. Visit bloomberg.com/opinion. Distributed by Tribune Content Agency, LLC.