The concept of the generalist line officer is well embedded in naval officer administrative policies. Looking at the history of the operating forces, the line officer has readily been able to keep abreast of the material he employed. Considering that our officer career patterns and training implement the officers’ development for ultimate command, with its inherent responsibilities for all phases of activity within its structure, the policies we have followed have served us well. Our high ranking officers of today, who have developed under the generalist concept, are as well rounded, sophisticated, and prepared for broad command as any group of officers or officials anywhere.
As each of the possible areas of a line officer’s duties grow more and more complicated, mastery of each phase grows more and more time consuming. Gradually we approach not only the saturation of a man’s ability to acquire many different skills, but a crowding of his career time available in which to acquire them. There is a limit to the number of billets through which an officer may rotate in 30 years. This available billet time is cut down by the need to put an officer through some type of functional or refresher training en route to many new billets.
Nuclear-power billets impose at least a one-year training pipeline, missile billets are preceded by 12 weeks or more of functional training; command courses, antisubmarine warfare courses, Polaris training, all these become essential. The training line grows as postgraduate instruction and service college attendance becomes a part of the career officers’ needs. Now add to this a recent requirement for duty with Joint, Combined, Allied or Office of the Secretary of Defense Staff prior to selection to flag rank!
Performance in key billets is subject to pressures for extensions and more extensions; the pressures are well meant, for the aim behind them usually is to preserve continuity, to provide the needed technical know-how in this or that priority program, or to preserve travel funds through imposing longer tours, thereby reducing the number of rotations. But each extension in present assignment eliminates an equivalent amount of diverse duty for the officer concerned and precludes another officer from gaining an equivalent amount of experience in the frozen billet.
Evolution of the human machine seems painfully slow in comparison to the evolution of the mechanical machines he makes. We train the man up to employ the machine. Many say that we don’t do enough to gear the machine down for ease of use by the man. In any event, faster reflexes are needed to survive today, and reflexes are developed only through continuity and training. This is obviously true of personnel operating satellites; it is equally true for those operating aircraft, surface ships, and submarines. All of the pressures point toward narrower and narrower career patterns.
Improved screening and training techniques, careful attention to officer detailing, increased tempos of operations, all these aid in better development of many skills in a shorter period of time, for this is not a peacetime Navy but one nearly on a wartime footing all the time. It is not uncommon to hear a detailer use the term “sea-qualified ensign” or “experienced JG” and he is deadly serious in his searching out of such talent for significant assignments.
Considering the technological challenges hurled at us, we have done remarkably well in matching our capabilities to meet increasing complexities. But three factors have been crowding us in developing our line officers. We can meet the technological advances and the compression of time with better and accelerated training, both functional and postgraduate. In this fashion we can crowd the necessary skills into an officer’s career in preparation for broad command.
But the third factor, the shortage of middle experienced officers, has been dealing the Navy a blow difficult to withstand while meeting all the necessary high priority personnel commitments. The shortage of officers in the grade of lieutenant is well known. For the unrestricted line the shortage presently runs 25 per cent. It is also in this area that the heavy, time-consuming demands are being made, postgraduate school, nuclear training, and such like, which aggravate the shortages even further. Additionally, all vital programs are vying for the same type of individual, the above-average performer, and when some program gets him, it doesn’t want to let him go.
This shortage therefore makes it more and more difficult for officers to develop their careers in an orderly pattern, to be able to say “I need destroyer duty or staff duty or postgraduate school to stay with my contemporaries, to make par for the course.” The officer has needs, but so does the Navy.
How then do our policy-makers determine what really is meant by “best fitted for the Navy and for promotion”? What is best for the Navy might not be best for the officer’s over-all career. Conversely, what is best for the officer may not serve the best interests of the Navy. The past concepts of equality of opportunity, of the generalist line officer, and of the historic interpretations of just what experiences and qualities make an officer “best fitted for promotion,” are staggering under the load of too many urgent programs and too few officers to carry them out. The result is that these concepts, if not intelligently administered, could now harm our future progress seriously. We must be extremely careful not to limit the proper development of the Navy with the very line officer career and promotion system designed to serve it.
The Navy’s is the difficult position of executing a compromise situation. In doing this we must answer the darts of the right-wing protagonists of pure generalism and the leftwing boosters of pure specialization.
One camp says hold fast, the other says change. Neither has recognized fully the facelifting which has already taken place. Each sees today’s line officer as something that he is not. Too often he sees the line officer as a projection of himself as he was, as he is, or as he would like to be.
The dictates of our needs, then, have led squarely to the concept of a general line officer with as broad a background as is feasible, thoroughly trained in at least one specialty area through postgraduate training, functional training, operational experience, and repeated tours in his specialty. Seemingly of recent origin, this concept is new only in certain areas of application. Of necessity we have already done this for years in one important area, that of the 131X officer who devotes the greater portion of his time to his specialty, aviation. Through careful command development in the second half of his career, through qualifying assignments and commands, he ultimately achieves command of our most formidable ships and our fast striking forces and fleets themselves.
It is no longer quite so easy for a line officer to determine par for the course, to compare himself accurately against his contemporaries. He can no longer say for certain that he should have had such and such a duty by such and such a time. Par can change, depending upon the program the officer is in. This is a difficult fact to live with for those who like it simple, all black or white, without greys. But naval officers must realize that their professions cannot be designed like a multiple choice question where only one answer will be correct. We are, whether we like it or not, in a grey area where the sin of omission is easily committed. As an officer becomes proficient in one area or another and as pressures mount for his services it seems logical to many that both his and the Navy’s best interests are in his staying where he is. The pressures are applied by the officers too, for in many instances they are unwilling to enter abruptly a strange area where they are untried. At the pace of today’s accelerated promotion rate in the junior ranks, an officer’s seniority for promotion can overtake his ability to perform the duties of the next grade because he has been in a closed channel quite appropriate for a specialist but not for a general line officer. The burden of the grade assignment officer is therefore increased as he tries to maintain the delicate balance between service needs and safeguarding our officers’ careers.
When you are short in numbers you must take what you can get. Therefore, the very valley in our line officer personnel structure which is making the change in concepts necessary will continue to help us, because the lower promotion attrition can only aid the evolution toward more widespread acceptance of the narrower career patterns which are already with us. Witness the current unrestricted surface line lieutenant structure where over 45 per cent have experience in only one shipboard department and less than 10 per cent have been in all three. If we don’t have enough officers to start with, we are not going to let a reasonably good officer fall by the roadside because of a shortcoming in his career pattern. This is just the opposite of what has occurred in the recent line officer promotions to captain and commander where high rates of attrition have taken place and where a poor career pattern might be fatal.
Narrow career patterns then are becoming the common denominator; hence they must be all right. What assumption could be more natural or more subject to dangerous applications? Under such conditions, circumstance, not needs, may set the standard for assignment and promotion. This is exactly what appears to have happened already to a degree not fully appreciated.
It is essential that all officers recognize the changes which have occurred in career patterns. If the Navy is to adhere to its notions of what constitutes a general line officer, even one with a specialty, it can dilute its practices only so far, for, in fact, the protagonists of ultra specialization use the term “for the line officer” when the two are incompatible. If this dilution continues, the next, irrevocable step is a breaking down of our general line corps into staff officers, officers trained to use the Navy Tactical Data System, missile officers, engineer officers, communicators, operations and watch officers, ad infinitum, and whence then come our leaders? It is urged that we adhere to our present compromise situation and draw the line. We can go no further unless the line officer is to die. We suggest that he must not, for the Navy’s sake.
Even with the present compromise situation, one thing is certain. There will surely be no holding back of the top performers. It may eventually be necessary, among other things, to go to the qualifying duty assignment concept for certain outstanding 11XX officers to prepare them for greater command when, because of the multitudinous pressures at hand, they have devoted a considerable portion of their careers to certain specific areas such as nuclear power, ICBMs and guided missiles, engineering, operations, and so forth. This would be similar in concept to the practices applied to 131X officers discussed earlier. Whatever developments the future holds, we must insure that the development and employment of our line officers promotes the over-all development and fighting ability of the Navy, and that it continue to provide us with the fine leadership to which we have always been accustomed.
Lieutenant Leis, recently in the Officer Distribution Division of the Bureau of Naval Personnel, is now Executive Officer in USS Vesole (DDR-878). He has had service afloat in submarine chasers, in a destroyer, in a cruiser, on a destroyer flotilla staff, and ashore with MSTS.