The "Crews Missile" is a scathing email written by retired parent Nick Crews to his three children in February 2012. As you will read, he takes them to task for what he perceives as their failures thus far in life, and essentially tells them to not contact him until they have sorted themselves out.
One thing that becomes apparent from the article is that Crews' children, while not making great strides in life, are far from basket cases. They have not (as far as I can tell) been arrested, or convicted of crimes. They are not drug addicts, neither do they have health issues or other intractable problems. They have relationship and career/work issues, but lots of people have those issues in the modern world.
The fundamental underlying cause of Crews' frustration appears to be the classical one that they have failed to live up to his own expectations for them.
So far, as a result, he has a poor relationship with one of his children, and appears to have dynamited his relationships with at least one of his other two children.
Here are some thoughts on the email and the underlying dynamics.

1. This email should not have been published
The contents of the email are incendiary, no matter what your point of view might be. The email clearly caused massive internal family friction at the time that it was sent. There was nothing to be gained by making its contents public. Most likely, the sender and the recipients will double down on their positions as a result.

2. Nick Crews was an absentee father (by his own admission)
In comments in the article, Crews alludes to the reality that he was an absentee father for a long time while his children were growing up. I sense that he now realizes that this was not a good thing, but he does not understand the impact that it has had on his children. He uses the fact that he paid for private schooling for them as a stick with which to beat them in the email, but that makes me wonder whether he and his wife used private schooling as part of coping with his being an absentee father.

3. This email is partly projection.
I sense that the expression of frustration is partly Nick Crews expressing his own anger at being an absentee parent.

4. Nick Crews spent his working life in the military
Without wishing to be too stereotypical, there are some common realities of life in the armed forces:
- Conformity and willingness to obey orders
- A lot of things are taken care of for you

Crews' basic character, based on the reading of the email, is that of an authoritarian, a patriarch. He is ill-equipped to cope with dissent and divergence, which he probably views as a form of disloyalty. He expresses little in the way of positive emotions in the email, merely a stream of censorious condemnation of what he sees as bad life choices. He appears consumed by the conviction that his children should live up to his expectations. Whatever those expectations might be, the bad news is that they are irrelevant in any case. He has no right to expect his children to conform to his own expectations of what they should be. He fails to appreciate that by demanding that they live up to his expectations, they would essentially be surrendering their personal and life autonomy to his whims. Or, to put it another way, he does not want his children to leave home. He seems to want them to exist in a permanent state of subservience to his worldview. To recycle an already-used pun, he appears to be distraught that they refuse to behave like his crew.
Crews himself has probably already gone through something of an epiphany over the email. While he claims parts of it were misinterpreted, and he still defends his initial decision to send it, he seems introspectively remorseful about some of the email and the overall impact.

I recognize this phenomenon in my own family. One of my uncles managed to become embroiled in a dispute with his eldest daughter, when she decided to marry a man who he disliked and distrusted. He basically dynamited his relationship with her over the marriage, which resulted in him refusing to speak to her, while my aunt was talking to her almost every day. One would have thought that he would have learned from this episode, but no...a few years later, his younger daughter became engaged to a man who was divorced, and once again, he argued with her over her plans, and they ended up not on speaking terms either. As far as I know, he died without having fully repaired his relationships with either of his daughters. He had a military WWII background also, complicated in his case by him being a Japanese PoW, with all of the privations and torture issues, which, like many WW II war veterans, he avoided talking about.

As other columnists have already noted, the outcome of this email was never going to be a positive one. People who are leading sub-optimal lives are almost never going to change simply because somebody blasts them for their life choices.
Right now, Nick Crews would do better to express regret for the email, and set to work on rebuilding his relationships with his children. After all, as the old saying goes, they may well be the ones who choose his retirement home....