By Roger Misso

We all know the drill. It is 0700 on a Tuesday. The command has been secured. Your division officer, perhaps slightly sheepish, hands you the slip. Your name is on it. You, a trusted technician, a decorated watchstander, a pilot trusted with a hundred-million-dollar aircraft, are now required to march down to the command’s makeshift collection facility.

There, you will wait. Perhaps for two minutes, perhaps for two hours. You will wait alongside Chief Petty Officers, junior Ensigns, and seasoned maintainers. You will wait until your body cooperates with the demands of a computer-generated random selection process, overseen by a fellow Sailor – the Urinalysis Program Coordinator (UPC) – whose primary duty today is to watch their shipmates urinate into a plastic cup.

The Navy’s commitment to a “drug-free force” is noble in concept. But in practice, the random urinalysis program has become a hollow ritual – an immense, quantifiable drag on warfighting readiness, and, most critically, a systemic outsourcing of command judgment. With active hostilities across multiple theaters today – and as we prepare our forces for the unforgiving realities of Great Power Competition in the Pacific and beyond – we must ruthlessly evaluate any program that takes Sailors away from their primary warfighting duties.

The argument for keeping the status quo is simple: deterrence. We are told that the omnipresent threat of the cup is the only thing standing between good order and discipline and a fleet compromised by narcotics. But if we are truly honest with ourselves about the cost-benefit analysis of this thirty-year-old artifact of the “War on Drugs,” the equation doesn’t hold water. It is time to dismantle the random urinalysis program for active and reserve Sailors and return to a Navy built on trust and command accountability.

The Accession Filter

Before the screams of “zero tolerance” begin, let us be clear about what is not being advocated. This is not a proposal to turn a blind eye to illegal substance abuse in the ranks. We must absolutely continue to perform urinalysis testing for all new accessions. Boot camp, Officer Candidate School, and the Naval Academy are filters. They are the gateways through which we invite civilians into the lifelines of the military profession. When a new person walks into a Military Entrance Processing Station (MEPS), we know very little about their history beyond what they report. It is entirely appropriate and necessary to ensure that those entering the service are not bringing substance abuse issues with them on Day One. Testing at Great Lakes, Newport, or Annapolis must remain.

But once a Sailor crosses that threshold, once they have been trained, vetted, security clearance granted, and assigned to a unit, the dynamic must shift from suspicion to trust.

Consider that the Navy invests tens of thousands of dollars into background investigations to grant high level security clearances, and entrusts these Sailors with cryptographic material, maintenance of nuclear reactors, and the lives of their fellow shipmates. Yet, paradoxically, our administrative posture suggests that we do not trust them to make basic, lawful decisions over a liberty weekend. This cognitive disconnect undermines the very foundation of mutual respect and accountability required for a lethal, professional, and ready force.

The Quantifiable Drain

The single greatest operational argument against random urinalysis is its cost – not in dollars, but in the most precious resource we have: time.

We are a Navy that is perpetually overworked, undermanned, and struggling to meet its maintenance and training cycles. Yet we deliberately impose a mass-casualty event on productive work hours several times a month in every command in the Fleet.

The current system doesn’t just waste the time of the Sailor selected, it wastes the time of the UPC, usually a Petty Officer First Class or Chief, who must secure their actual job – the mission-critical job they were trained to do – to manage a logistical nightmare. It wastes the time of the observers as well, who are required to support the evolution and perform no other task but to “observe.” It requires complex shipping logistics, documentation tracking, and legal hours to manage the inevitable procedural disputes.

If a typical unit conducts random testing twice a month, pulling twenty Sailors away for an average of ninety minutes each, that command is losing three thousand productive manhours a year to the collection facility alone. This does not account for the administrative overhead of the UPC, the supply costs of the kits, or the legal resources. Across the entire Navy, we are talking about millions of manhours sacrificed on the altar of a bureaucratic process.

For the Reserve component, the situation is even more dire. A drilling Reservist has roughly sixteen hours per month to achieve readiness. Those sixteen hours are already cannibalized enough by medical and dental readiness appointments, mandatory general military training (GMT), and other administrative tasks. Dedicating two, three, or even four hours of a single drill weekend to a urinalysis cattle-call is a dereliction of leadership. It directly harms retention by signaling to Reservists that the Navy does not value their limited time or their professional civilian lives. We are driving away highly skilled talent because we insist on treating them like parolees instead of partners.

The Ground Truth

If we step back from the PowerPoint slides and Navy instructions to speak candidly with unit leaders, a different reality emerges. Many of the commands I have been in have been filled with high-performers, and the feeling on the deckplates is clear: the program is simply a bureaucratic box to check. The number of illicit drug users who “pop positive” on a urinalysis are absurdly small – less than 1% out of over 2.5 million urine specimens annually. When a program is universally recognized as a performative administrative burden rather than a genuine security measure, that program is ripe for elimination.

This brings us to a complex reality regarding the UPC Program and our true priorities. What if someone is a high performer and taking a non-prescribed drug, like Ritalin or Adderall, to maintain or increase performance? The cognitive load on the modern warfighter – whether they are an intelligent analyst poring over satellite imagery for twelve hours, or a staff officer managing a crisis action team in a Sensitive Compartmented Information Facility (SCIF) – is immense. The military itself has a history of utilizing “go pills” in specific, tightly controlled operational contexts.

If a high-performing, overworked Sailor is self-medicating with stimulants to meet the punishing demands of their billet, is a punitive, random drug test the appropriate intervention? By relying on a randomized cup, we treat a potential medical, mental health, or command-climate issue as a purely criminal one. We lose the opportunity for intervention, medical support, and leadership counseling. We strip the nuance from the situation, preferring an outdated, binary, automated punishment over engaged leadership.

Outsourcing Command

The deepest, most insidious cost of the program, however, is cultural. The random urinalysis program is a symptom of a command structure that has lost faith in its commanders.

We tell Commanding Officers they are responsible for everything that happens within their hull or unit passageway – except, apparently, for whether their Sailors are abusing substances. For that, we rely on a randomized algorithm and a lab technician a thousand miles away.

This is a failure of leadership.

A Commanding Officer should know their people. They should know if a Sailor’s performance is slipping, if their appearance is declining, or if they are suddenly making “destructive or questionable decisions” on or off duty. If a Sailor is abusing drugs, those behaviors will manifest. They will manifest in missed watches, failed physical fitness tests, sloppy maintenance, and fractured domestic relationships.

A CO does not need a random lab test – they need to empower their Chief Petty Officers and Division Officers to lead.

If a commander suspects drug use, they already have the authority to order a “for cause” drug test based on probable cause. The mechanisms exist. We need to trust COs to use them.

By automating this process through randomization, we have created a leadership crutch. We are allowing commanders to defer the hard work of monitoring their unit’s health to a lab report. We are teaching junior officers that good order and discipline come from a computer program, not from knowing the Sailors under their command.

Bias and Safeguards

Critics will rightfully point out the potential for the abuse of power from COs on “for cause” testing, or the risk of a biased CO unfairly targeting specific individuals. These are valid concerns. The military justice system must always guard against unlawful command influence and targeted harassment. But shifting to a probable-cause-only model does not eliminate oversight – it actively demands it.

A “for cause” test requires legal justification. It requires a paper trail. It requires consultation with the Staff Judge Advocate (SJA) to ensure that the suspicion is rooted in articulable facts – erratic behavior, physical evidence, or credible reports – rather than personal animus. If we cannot trust a Commanding Officer to exercise legal, unbiased judgment in ordering a drug test in consultation with the JAG, why do we trust them with Non-Judicial Punishment (NJP)? Why do we trust them to write evaluations and fitness reports that determine careers, or to order Sailors into harm’s way? If a CO is fundamentally biased or abusive, that toxicity will manifest in far more destructive ways than a drug test. The solution to toxic leadership is to hold toxic leadership accountable and fire them, not to burden the entire Fleet with prophylactic, randomized bureaucracy instead.

Reclaiming the Watch

The future fight demands a Navy that is leaner, more agile, and built on trust. We cannot afford the logistical and cognitive drag of a system that treats every Sailor as a suspect.

To senior leadership, the task is clear: Reclaim that authority. Reclaim those manhours. Have the courage to trust the commanders you have placed in charge of your multi-billion-dollar assets. End random urinalysis for the active and reserve Fleet.

Ditch the cup and get back to the mission.

CDR Roger Misso is a Commanding Officer in the Navy Reserve with multiple deployments, mobilizations, and assignments across both the active and reserve force. The views expressed here are his own.

Featured Image: Navy Operational Support Center North Island conducts a monthly urinalysis test, July 14, 2019, on Naval Air Station North Island. (U.S. Navy/Mass Communication Specialist 1st Class Shannon Chambers)