It is expensive to educate the Navy workforce. Costs include tuition, fees, and salaries; but the real cost is time. As we often hear, time a Sailor spends in a program is time not spent on the job. Residence programs can take one to four years. Part-time, off-duty courses can take six. For the past decade, the Navy has worked to establish an opportunity-based strategy that would offer every Sailor a chance for increased education. A continuum of primary, intermediate, and advanced professional military education (PME) has been implemented, with curricula delivered by numerous means: in residence at the Naval War College; during off-hours at locales near Fleet concentration areas; via an award-winning Web-based distance-learning program; and at sea, using CD ROMs and print correspondence courses. Additionally, the Naval Postgraduate School offers more than 70 degrees and several certificate programs. More than 50,000 Sailors are currently participating, taking 140,000 classes as a result of the Navy's voluntary education programs.
Given all this opportunity, it is strange that the requirement for education in the Navy has never formally been established. Education is viewed as little more than nice to have when it is seen as competing with operational requirements. Navy Professional Reading, Navy Knowledge Online distance learning, and various certificate-based programs all lack a direct link to the competencies needed to be ready for work. Investment in the education of operational warfighters should have a well-defined requirement to maximize the return on investment and produce the needed capabilities.
Intuition Is Not Enough
Because education is intuitively a good thing, perhaps it should be a simple mandate. But intuition alone is not sufficient to set requirements. Sailors' time and the Navy's budgets must be the priorities. Unlike standards for a kinetic weapon system such as a ship's gun (accuracy, range, firing rate), there are no standards that translate education into warfighting capability.
Sailors are in themselves weapon systems. They have characteristics not unlike those of gun. In fact, in his 2008 memorandum on the vision for joint forces, U.S. Marine Corps General James N. Mattis, Commander, U.S. Joint Forces Command, stated that the operational level of war—command and control—is "foremost a human endeavor." Our ability to understand this environment rests squarely, he said, on a confidence achieved only "through well-educated leaders and trained staffs, working together with a common purpose and supported by reliable systems that provide relevant information."
General Mattis explained: "Command and Control must support the decision-makers' ability to 1 This assessment points to the need for education at the operational level that a two-week course is unlikely to satisfy.
command,' rather than suffer the constraints of technology control.' It is a leader's personal capability through rigorous training and education, combined with the experience of directing flexible, adaptive forces that is germane to the art of command."For more than 200 years, educational standards in the Navy have evolved solely as policy. Officers must have a bachelor's degree, and, via congressional legislation, senior Navy leaders must complete joint PME. For a short time, senior chief petty officers had to earn at least an associate's degree. Prioritization is another factor, especially in times of fiscal constraint. Simply offering and requiring all levels of education to everyone is unaffordable and inefficient.
Determining Requirements
During the past several years, the Naval War College has partnered directly with the Fleet to determine ways to establish the education requirements for developing leaders. Working with several other stakeholders, the college is now implementing a methodology to determine which human competencies lead directly to the joint warfighting capabilities mandated by a maritime operations center. These abilities will then be mapped to preexisting education and training courses—find redundancies, or where there are gaps, generate new requirements.
Sailors must be ready for the call to action. This is our objective, based on the words of Pacific Fleet Commander Admiral Robert F. Willard, who said at a PACFLEET training symposium in 2008: "We need to be ready to fight tonight if called upon."
Two recent studies confirm the Navy's need to better prepare people for the latter half of their careers, principally at operational levels of command. This is where leaders and planners must direct joint forces to accomplish the Quadrennial Roles and Missions.2 Results of the first study (2007) showed that eight of the top ten priorities at Navy maritime operations centers were related to personnel readiness. Better preparation was needed, it was found, to conduct operational-level planning among joint, coalition, and interagency elements. Often, more than six months in the job were needed for Navy members to fully understand complex duties of their new assignments.
These are smart Sailors who learn fast—yet that was not enough, given the new concept of operations. Complicating matters, after the Fleet signaled the need for more people, initial analysis showed that instead of more people, it was rather people better prepared for the work that was the core of the requirement (quality as much as, if not more than, quantity).
The second, the Joint Staff Officer Study (2008), was conducted across the nine combatant command headquarters.3 Its purpose was to identify competencies that minimized the learning curve of new staff officers and improved job performance. A survey generated 1,550 responses, 63 percent of which stated that it took seven months or longer to learn a job. Cases might exist in which seven to nine months is a reasonable time for learning a job, but probably not at the combatant or numbered fleet command level.
Traditionally, after a requirement has been established, the Navy has demonstrated a world-class ability to meet it. This is the case at the tactical level, where metrics for success are clear through repetitious tasks, honed technical skills, and outcomes defined in a course of training. If this were so at the operational level, staffs would be ready any day.
Personnel are often involved in advanced education, at this operational level. And yet the studies show less than optimum metrics for how well an individual meets the requirement of a billet and being ready for work. This points to competencies that are not being attained in the right combination or at the right time. How do we determine what they are?
The Essential Competencies
Over the years, several sources have identified which competencies are required in different combinations at different times. In 2007 at a Joint Force Maritime Component Commander's Course in Newport, Admiral Willard named eight sets of skills essential for command of a numbered fleet. They are:
- Accomplished military leader
- Expert in the operational art
- Knowledgeable of joint doctrine
- Well-informed of other components' contributions
- Skilled joint planner
- Proficient in both supported and supporting roles
- Accomplished in command and control
This is a comprehensive list of what might be viewed as the ultimate goal of career development: the ability to lead at the operational level of command. In March 2008, a Center for Naval Analyses study found that Navy officers reporting to assignments at operational staffs needed, but lacked, the following abilities, among others.4
- Critical thinking
- Knowledge of other services
- Proficiency in joint operations
- Cultural awareness
Together, these two lists work nicely to frame the domain of what might be required. Yet they still do not tell us how much, when, and in what combination. Many more examples exist. But one factor missing in all such enumerations is how these competencies relate to warfighting.
Defining Capability-Based Competencies
Building from the bottom up, the sum of education, training, and experience produces skilled individuals who work in teams, with systems, in an organization. The organization conducts a mission, thereby making use of capabilities that achieve a desired effect. To determine the needs for education, then, we need to put all that in reverse. This is what is meant by top-down requirements.
One method being used in the Naval War College Fleet partnership is called Capabilities-Based Competencies Assessment (CBCA). The CBCA methodology was built on foundations set by the human-resource component of the Navy's Sea Power 21 transformational effort, Sea Warrior, over the past seven years. OPNAV N1's Sea Warrior October 2007 concept of operations stated that it was the Navy's objective to develop "capability-driven manpower," such that workforce requirements would be based on current and future joint warfighting needs as dictated by national defense strategy.
Sea Warrior states that personnel need to be linked directly to mission-essential tasks to understand the effect of manpower decisions on readiness. Further, studies of a workforce assigned to specific positions based on competencies show that this practice directly supports a unit's ability to accomplish the mission. CBCA was designed to do this.
The Navy is an essential element of our nation's ability to influence others. Capability-based requirements begin with a keen understanding of each area's political, military, economic, social, infrastructure and information situation. The desired strategic and operational effects represent a change in an area's situation and our military operations. When we use our military to produce the desired effect—in combination with diplomatic, information, and economic sources of power—we look in the joint-capability areas and establish a mission-essential task to conduct operations.5
This is the process that produces organizational requirements such as those for a combatant commander, joint task commander, or numbered fleet. People and systems perform the tasks that, together with the processes, define what characteristics are needed in humans and technology.
Human-systems integration takes this a step further, to determine what constraints the systems and people place on each other. The characteristics that an individual brings to be ready for work are called competencies.
They are discovered not by occupation, designator, rate, or rating; they are determined by the work that produces warfighting capabilities. They are identified by roles that people play in teams in an organization such as a numbered fleet. Tasks such as those of a planner, leader, briefer, or negotiator establish the metrics for which skills are needed as well as their priority for development. After that, competencies are mapped to occupations; preexisting designators; subspecialty codes; additional designator qualifications; and courses in language, regional expertise, and cultural competency.
In fact, they are perhaps more instructive for career development after the initial tactical tours. Occupational-centric management is critical for the first half of any career. But without a clear plan for the latter half, community-centric management inhibits the development of leaders ready to lead a 21st-century Navy.
The CBCA methodology mentioned earlier determines workforce requirements and produces a role-based activity manning document.6 This includes billets determined through understanding first the warfighting capability required of people by role and in work processes, and then what skills are needed to do that work. Usually people perform multiple roles. But they can only fill one billet. Therefore, each billet must often state competency needs for several roles to cover the complete requirement.
This is how competencies reveal requirements, or what is needed from the three areas of development: education, training, and experience.
Education with Purpose
During the CBCA process, experts at the operational level of war undergo a series of events to determine which competencies are essential, as well as the training, education, and experiences that help to produce them. That data can then be placed in the billet, thereby driving requirements for career management that account for the multiple roles a person will need to fill. The same information can also feed, for example, the Navy's Credentialing Opportunities Online program intended to capture educational value from Fleet work experience.
The skills such as those Admiral Willard and the CNA study listed are developed from all three career interventions—training, experience, and education. But research has demonstrated that education (which, again, does not necessarily mean a terminal degree) is a critical enabler. Instead of placing only an additional-designator-qualifications or subspecialty code in a billet, role-based competencies should be put in the billet, and the additional designator qualifications, subspecialty code, or degree mapped to them, as we have seen throughout this article.
Such a relationship ties the warfighting capability requirement through the billet to the education requirement. Curricula will then be expressed not only in terms of educational objectives, but competency outcomes. Thus the link from education to capability is complete.
Yes, it is expensive to provide education for the Navy's workforce. Nonetheless, if it is essential to providing the warfighting capabilities that our nation needs, not providing it is unaffordable.
1. General James N. Mattis, USMC, "Command and Control Vision," Memorandum for U.S. Joint Forces Command, 7 May 2008.
2. "Quadrennial Roles and Missions Review Report," Department of Defense, January 2009, http://www.defenselink.mil/news/Jan2009/QRMFinalReport_v26Jan.pdf. See part 3A, Core Mission Areas: Homeland Defense and Civil Support; Deterrence Operations; Major Combat Operations; Irregular Warfare; Military Support to Stabilization Security, Transition, and Reconstruction Operations; and Military Contribution to Cooperative Security.
3. Dr. Linda Fenty, Joint Staff Officer Study, April 2008, available at www.dtic.mil/doctrine/education/meccwg0908_jsostudy.doc.
4. David. M. Rodney, Christine H. Fox, Samuel D. Kleinman, Michael J. Moskowitz, Mary E. Lauer, "Developing an Education Strategy for URL Officers," March 2008. The essential competencies cited were critical thinking, written and oral skills, knowledge of other services, knowledge of joint operations, broad knowledge of the Navy, expertise in operational planning, cultural awareness, and expertise in fiscal issues.
5. This framework is most helpful in respect the to directive that the Joint Capability Integration Development System directs all requirements documents to be associated with appropriate JCAs. This allows the Navy to even reference their activity manning documents and the associated manpower requirements to JCAs.
6. At the core of the CBCA methodology is a highly validated Mission Essential Competency (MEC) process developed by the U.S. Air Force Research Lab, Mesa, Arizona. The MEC process is explained at http://www.wpafb.af.mil/news/story.asp?id=123084540.