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Administrative Clearinghouses:
Take the Heat off the Fleet
In July 1978, shortly after he had become the Chief of Naval Operations, Admiral T. B. Hayward published a list of 12 objectives for the Navy. I have a proposal which could do much toward meeting four of these objectives: ensure that our ship and squadron commanding officers have all the tools and authority they need; achieve a balance between the resources available to operating units and the requirements levied upon them; improve job satisfaction for Navy people; and reduce the administrative burden on fleet units.
1 propose the formation of a number of administrative clearinghouses to which a fleet commanding officer could send those individuals in his ship’s company whose situations are creating a large administrative problem for the command. The list of these kinds of cases could include administrative discharge cases, serious disciplinary and/or civil infraction cases, those whose clearance/access status with regard to classified matter precludes the command from making any use of the individual, some candidates for hardship discharge or transfer whom the deploying ship would prefer to leave behind, some personnel on forms of limited duty who cannot perform for some period, etc. In some cases, an individual would be returned to the original sea duty command after the resolution of an administratively complex situation involving him or her.
The need for a clearinghouse service results, in part, from the rapidly changing character of our society and the increasing complexity of handling human resources-related problems.
Countless sea duty man-hours are routinely devoted to these knotty problems, which involve obscure and intricate regulations and policy, as well as hard-to-reach, faraway offices. And these man-hours are now lost at the expense of fighting the ship or flying the airplane.
Clearinghouse activities, which would be located near major fleet concentrations, would represent an extension and formalization of programs and trends already in existence. (Examples are the Pay/Person- nel Administrative Services System (pass), with its Personnel Services Detachments (PSD), or the Armed Forces Examination and Entry Stations (afees). Indeed, the AFEES concept is an excellent example of the sort of approach intended here. The station is composed of a group of experts in the induction field whose primary duty is to examine, screen, interview, classify, and complete the paperwork for all of the inductees in a given geographical area.)
A clearinghouse would combine the functions of and/or control the flow of Navy members to such existing activities as Transient Personnel Units, Medical Holding Companies, the new Behavior Skills Training (BEST) program, Counseling and Assistance Centers (caacs), Chaplain Centers, Alcohol and Drug Rehabilitation Centers, Navy Legal Services Offices, etc. With a center like this, staffed with experts in the complete processing of each kind of difficult case and a few carefully chosen senior petty officers to act as company commanders, a fleet commanding officer would never have to struggle with keeping a person on board he couldn’t or wouldn’t gainfully employ. In this sense, the fleet CO could
regain some of his eroding authority’ autonomy, and the ability to contr
events, and the idea is in keeping with Admiral Hayward’s objective
of
“ensuring that our ship and squadr° commanding officers have all the tools and authority they need • ■ ■
A center like the one proposed would be ideal duty for officers hav ing human resources subspecialty ^ codes and an excellent command °P portunity for those who are proven subspecialists. g(
There is a reluctance on the Paft many host units to accept, for ^ ' porary additional duty, anyone r fleet unit who has an administrat discharge pending or disciplinar)' ^ proceedings under way. There nt^esS to be some place other than the ^
decks of a deploying ship where
people can await the outcomes
of
be
,ecif
their cases and at the same time
usefully employed in activities sp1 ically planned for them. As it stands, it is all but impossible 0 many fleet units to do other tha° } tain such individuals on board un ^ lengthy and complex decision-ma^
process is complete. The continu^s presence of many of these indivi among their productive and pr0 ing shipmates is often injurious ^ the morale of the latter and coun^ee[ productive to the mission of the
of
unit.
re-
set
It would be necessary that a
" £
member to such a center be set an
well-defined criteria for sending
clearly specified, for use by the ^ commanding officer. Only °ne . tion is voiced here for the desig of such criteria: Don’t make the dards too tough for the fleet tg manding officer to send a mem one of these centers; that’s part problem now.
88
Th •
°ppQere ls bound to be objection and advaSltI<?n t0 a proposal like the one in ^ere- There are professionals who h *3ersonne* management field the be3Ve ^e^*cate^ huge effort and ducin<_ttC|I" ^arts °h their careers to rein,-® C e Pat'ent, prisoner, and ent (pp&t) “pipeline,” in which
transi
1 truly lar
annua)] ^ num^er man-years is it are . y ^0st> since the individuals in the fig11 *’rnbo and are not helping It cj] 5° Set on with its business. Would k 6 arSued that the pipeline clearin u SWo^en by the creation of by.pro? 0uses> but some desirable that 0UrUCtS Would accrue. The first is iiApraccounting procedures would e’ We would know better
where more of our people in limbo are located, know that something is being done about their cases, and know in advance about how many people will be available for duties which could be regularly performed. This latter point could very well take some additional heat off the fleet in the ever-controversial area of temporary additional duty support from fleet units to their host stations for general military duties.
Given the wide variety and number of seemingly unrelated, disconnected human resources programs, centers, and facilities which have sprung into Navy life in the past few years, it seems that the smartest
thing we could do would be to pull them all together into a funneling point which a clearing house would represent. It would be a big-picture move to create such centers, because it would help fleet readiness and the fleet commanding officer as well as the individual with a problem. Because so many of these different centers and facilities already exist, not many new billets would be required to execute this proposal.
We really must get the ship and squadron commanding officer out of the social work business and provide him with a workable alternative as these never-ending problems arise at an apparently increasing rate.
Book Reviews
Industry
*'fiT pr ansler. Cambridge, MA.:
Sl9-95($S17195)°' 346 PP' B‘b' Ind' ..ev‘eWetl bv r ■
^■ S. m y Captain James G. Abert, . Naval Reserve
1“Plain al .
“val Am W lS Executive Officer of
^Mp gPersonnel Command—4. idem r Washir‘Z‘on, D.C. and Vice
S«lcns
S'c;‘
rheK„-,alh'nV°n’ D-C His article
"'^al r rtSearch and development for the fa,edin tyterfor Resource Recovery, Inc. ThtKv ,a*h'n&on' D c Hisarticle " ^ Ee/>riJesen‘e Should Work" appeared
The
tailed
ary 1980 Proceedings. Defe,
Tense Industry is the first de- CritiCaj s°st'^ietnam analysis of this f Usefu 1 e^,rnent of the economy. It is
X a<ialv
atialysiat‘on of data, buttressed ^ describes the interaction
tnse Department and a sur- ttact0rsSrnall number of prime con- F>arts rapidly shrinking base of
and subcontractors.
^ itiarl^red are C^e cyclical nature
et> inflationary impacts, the
Pro
'Ual
tionary impacts,
o >Verbent^UeSt f°r technological im- 0tf*er 'n weapon systems, and
Stst0P°rtant ‘ssues. The author at- teUte these topics to the basic
factors of production: money, equipment, materials, and labor. The relationship between competition at the research and development stage and sole-source negotiated procurement of the larger production and support contracts is given special treatment, as are the structural differences between the aircraft and the shipbuilding industries. There is also a brief description of how our allies handle their defense industries. All of this goes to make Gansler’s case that it is not correct for the defense industry to apply rules based on laissez faire economic theory.
Gansler goes so far as to attempt a rough quantification of the excess costs associated with current practices. For example, lack of production competition costs $1.75 billion annually; design for maximum performance also costs $1.75 billion; very low production rates S.7 billion; large design teams and excessive data requirements demand $1.0 billion, and so on. His total for excessive costs are S5.0 billion by one method of estimation and S4.5 billion by another. Based on this, he suggests that $3.0 billion would be a realistic target for annual savings if his
prescriptive measures were applied. This, of course, brings the reader to the crux of the matter.
Gansler calls for coordinated policy—sector by sector. He favors a meaningful integration of civilian and military operations within the defense firms. More attention should be paid to parts suppliers and subcontractors. He expresses concern for the growing dependence of the U. S. defense industry on foreign military sales. Another area that requires additional attention is improved planning for production surges. Industrial-base considerations must guide procurements in terms of timing, source selection, separation of research and development programs, budgets, etc.
After 256 pages of setting the stage, Gansler deals with the proposed solutions in 28 pages. One may have hoped for more definition, even a “work book" approach to the solutions paralleling his extensive earlier development of the problems. Perhaps, however, the fleshing out of the solutions will be the focus for the author’s next book. 1 hope so, because many of his recommendations have merit.
89