John Paul Jones once described how a naval officer must be part warfighter and part gentleman. He felt it was important for a naval warrior to have a balance between the two. The carriage and manners of a gentleman were needed to earn the respect of subordinates and lead them into harm's way. On a larger scale, manners and social graces were essential to move in the diplomatic circles that naval officers often found themselves in, far from American shores, often acting on behalf of the government on treaties and other important negotiations.
Recent scandals reveal some officers' actions as anything but gentle. Tailhook, Naval Academy cheating scandals, drug rings, and even murder suggest a breakdown in the "good-citizen" side of naval personnel. Naval leadership has dedicated a large amount of time and money to correct this shortcoming. Annual ethics and sexual harassment classes were added to required training. There is no question that this was appropriate and needed, but at what expense? Have we tipped the scales too far in the direction of good-citizen training, or have we merely applied a course correction to a culture moving away from the ideal described by John Paul Jones?
The principal business of the U.S. military is to win wars. This has always been, and must remain, its raison d’être. Maintaining a combat-ready force requires a commitment to training—a commitment that trades training sweat for combat blood. Warriors need to be fully versed in the combat systems they operate and equally adept at tactics used in their employment. Balance must be maintained between warfighting skills and other demands foisted upon the Navy.
At the unit level many other demands compete with training in a zerosum struggle for time: maintenance must be accomplished, watches stood, stores loaded, and evaluations written. There also is competition for time within the training realm. Maintenance and in-rate training, equal opportunity, safety, hearing protection, electrical safety, physical fitness, and general military training all compete with warfighter training.
Exacerbating this competition for training time is that much of the goodcitizen training is required by instruction while much of the warfighting training is not. For example, sexual harassment, hearing conservation, and electrical safety training are all required to be conducted annually. However, no such requirement exists for tactical training, at least, not by instruction. It is understood that training will be conducted to maintain warfighting skills, yet it is not mandated.
Another problem is that additional training requirements continue to be levied from a variety of upper-echelon commands without a concomitant cancellation of previous topics. The already bloated required training list continues to grow without regard to the fixed amount of time a ship can devote to training. Ships are left with an option either of allocating more time to training at the expense of something else, or of prioritizing their training. Given a fixed amount of time, this may mean that some training will not be accomplished. With so much of the good-citizen training—as opposed to warfighting training—mandatory, it is easy to get the impression that warfighting training is secondary or optional. If nothing else, it causes greater imbalance between warfighting and non-warfighting training.
The Navy needs a training clearinghouse to establish and enforce a ratio of warfighting to non-warfighting training. New training requirements must pass the zero-sum test, only being added to fleet requirements if it has more value than an existing training requirement. The new training requirement then replaces it on the required training list.
We must maintain the balance between the warrior and the gentleman. Winston Churchill once said, "But after all, when you have to kill a man it costs nothing to be polite." Perhaps that is the essence of the delicate balance John Paul Jones was seeking.
Lieutenant Commander Bowdish is a Federal Executive Fellow at RAND Corporation in Santa Monica, CA. His most recent sea tour was as Executive Officer of the Hawes (FFG-53).