All-star baseball games are marvelous—the best players from both major both leagues provide fans with a contest characterized by extraordinary professional excellence. All-star football games, on the other hand, can turn into disasters when a league's best quarterback throws to its best tight end—who turns the wrong way.
Baseball players are no better at their game than football players are at theirs; it is the operational concept of training and game play that make the difference. Baseball procedures are essentially the same from team to team. No team, for example, chooses to turn a standard double play by throwing to first and then to second. In football, however, technique, execution and procedures have a far larger dimension of team-specific group actions. A good baseball player can play with any team at any time; the best of football players must practice extensively with teammates for the team to be effective.
The Navy should take a lesson from the baseball players and standardize procedures to enable ships from one fleet to fit in easily with another—an increasingly common way of life.
Consider a major war game at a U.S. war college in which a naval commander needed more Tomahawk-capable nuclear powered attack submarines (SSNs) but declined the offer of several nearby SSNs—on the grounds that that they "had not trained with the CVBG"—only to request two more CVBGs to get their attached SSNs. The perception seemed to be that the smallest quanta of U.S. naval power is a carrier battle group.
Unfortunately, such perceptions today are not far from reality. Today's carrier battle groups are far more like football than baseball teams, and pick-up units find it hard to fit in quickly. These idiosyncrasies further extend to the numbered fleet, theater commander-in-chief levels, and allied/coalition operations. Belgian naval officers who commanded minesweepers in the Persian Gulf during and after Operation Desert Storm, for example, indicated that things went well enough when an Atlantic Fleet carrier battle group was on station because of the NATO connection and procedures, but that they might as well have gone home when a Pacific Fleet battle group took over.
The writer went through a similar experience on an SSN deployed to the Mediterranean. The transit found us absorbed in searching for and digesting nuggets from thick volumes of special instructions, and the wardroom became plastered with sheets of paper summarizing many one-liners for officers to remember if the ship was not to be gigged.
Things came to a head, however, when the ship's reactor core life reached its mid-point. As sternly directed by one of the publications, our commanding officer duly sent a FLASH-precedence message informing Sixth Fleet that his ship was below 50% fuel. We remained at periscope depth for an hour, entertained by the flurry of activity as oilers and tenders were ordered under way, then recalled after a pen-and-ink ink change to the operations order: "except for nuclear-powered ships." As is generally the case for a good "Got'cha," nothing was ever said to our skipper. Perhaps things are better now.
In the early 1960s, each submarine had not only her own organization manuals, but also her own operating and casualty procedures. Because procedures varied so between ships, it took several months to qualify an engineering officer of the watch even if he had just reported as a qualified officer from another ship with the same propulsion plant. By the mid-1960s, heavy documentation permitted little if any variance on just how a reactor plant was to be operated or what actions were to be taken for a given casualty—but an engineering officer of the watch reporting from another ship could be on the watch bill in a matter of days. The organization and operation of the ship, however, were still a matter of command prerogative.
In the 1970s, when standard class-specific organization manuals and operating procedures were imposed by the Atlantic and Pacific type commanders, there was an uproar from the operators. How could this be, that one spent 14-15 years in apprenticeship to other commanding officers who "did it their way," only to be constrained to some imposed norms? In retrospect, the advantages of this individual freedom were illusionary. Skippers typically spent more than half their tours personalizing their ships' documentation, while their officers and crews struggled to assimilate (and produce!) the changes at the expense of practicing them. Officers of the deck or engineering officers of the watch were anything but interchangeable from ship to ship.
When a submarine is certified for an independent deployment by a squadron commander, she is considered ready to perform any of her missions in any ocean. If an Aegis cruiser or destroyer were to be certified for battle group operations, there is no intrinsic reason it should not be capable of joining any other collection of Navy ships, anywhere—even under combat conditions. Of course, this would oblige battle group commanders—and even fleet commanders—to accept a large degree of standardization for the good of the service. Is that asking too much?
Captain Patton, a nuclear submariner who retired in 1985 and now heads Submarine Tactic and Technology, Inc., commanded USS Pargo (SSN-650). He participates in major war games at the U.S. war colleges.