Radar Piloting Tools, at Your Service
osco Busan sailed from Oakland Harbor in a dense fog. With a pilot and the master on the bridge, it was navigating primarily by electronic chart (ECDIS). As the ship approached the Oakland Bay Bridge, the pilot could no longer see. He became confused about the ECDIS display and made a late turn. The ship scraped along the bridge support pier, holing its port side in the process and spilling 53,569 gallons of fuel.Dozens of factors contributed to this disaster—not the least of which was the decision to sail in zero visibility. However, in reviewing the radar images from the voyage data recorder (VDR), there were clearly missed opportunities to make it safely through the bridge span.
Figure 1 shows a reconstructed radar image from the Cosco Busan’s VDR recorded minutes before she hit the bridge. The annotations in white indicate key items. We can see the RACON symbol from the radar beacon at the center of the bridge span. When compared to the heading line (HDG line 241), the RACON symbol shows that a sharp turn to starboard is necessary—but it would be almost two minutes before the pilot ordered the turn. Note also that a variable range marker (VRM) had been set to .33 nautical miles. This setting would have allowed the VRM to be used as a ranging mark off Yerba Buena Island since the center of the bridge span is exactly .33 nautical miles from the island.
In May 2007 a Navy guided-missile destroyer was returning to Norfolk, Virginia, on a clear, late afternoon. As the navigator plotted electronic fixes on a paper chart, he was unaware that the position source he was using was inaccurate. Figure 2 is a reconstruction of the ship’s position about six minutes before she missed her turn and went aground. The navigator’s plot was almost a mile from the ship’s actual position. The inset simulating a radar picture illustrates two radar piloting tools that could have prevented this grounding. A parallel index line has been set on a 290 degree heading and offset 1.2 nautical miles to port based on the predetermined desired distance off the Cape Henry shore. With the ship steering 318 degrees that line will soon be tangent to the shore line at which point the ship should be steering 290 degrees. As the conning officer observes the radar, this would give him a clear indication that it is time to start the turn.
“CH” is a RACON buoy. An observant operator, noting the “spoke” that appears about every minute, would have acquired “CH” as a tracked target and labeled it. Then, being aware that the desired track line passes just north of “CH” and toward the two buoys marking the entrance to Thimble Shoal Channel, he would have seen the need to turn much sooner than the navigator’s recommendation.
While we can fault the navigator and others for the many errors that led to this grounding, we can also blame the bridge watch for not providing “forceful backup” using basic piloting skills. Navigation and piloting are related and overlapping disciplines. The navigator “navigates,” and the officer of the deck (OOD) and the conning officer “pilot” by using buoys, ranges, and other visual cues to aid in confirming or deviating from what the navigator recommends. Incorporating radar techniques raises piloting to a more advanced level, yet one that is easily attained with knowledge and practice. On Navy ships we back up the navigator with a separate and presumably independent team in the Combat Information Center. However, in this destroyer’s case, both teams were relying on the same flawed position source, so there wasn’t a backup.
Here’s an overview of basic radar piloting tools that every surface warfare officer/OOD should know how to use:
Desired track course: Parallel index lines are not new. Modern radars include features to draw them electronically. They are drawn with a heading and offset so that if the index line is touching its reference (in the previous case, the reference was the distance off Cape Henry) then the ship is on the desired track course. Unlike plotted fixes, index lines can indicate in real time if the ship’s position has veered left or right of its planned track.
Electronic bearing lines: Similar to index lines, electronic bearing lines have many uses. One use is to point one of these lines to a desired new heading to see if the way is clear and/or if it would take the ship to a desired position, such as a pair of buoys.
Variable range markers: In 2009, a Navy cruiser just out of a yard period was conducting sea trials off Pearl Harbor. While setting up for a night boat launch near the harbor’s entrance, she crossed into shoal water and ran aground. Issues with electronic fixes were again the primary factors in this grounding. A look at the chart would have shown that the cruiser should come no closer than 1,600 yards to any land. Setting a variable range marker at that range and using it to mark a “danger range” could have prevented this grounding.
RACON buoys: How many times, I wonder, has a RACON spoke shown up on radar and not been reported to the navigator? This is an important correlation since a RACON is a positive identification of a fixed aid to navigation.
Acquiring buoys as tracked targets: We’re trained not to use buoys for fixes, which is a good practice. However, when there is a pair of buoys that we want to drive between, we can acquire them as radar targets, set vectors to relative, and make sure those vectors pass down the correct side of the ship. This is an especially useful tool when approaching a sea buoy or channel entrance in the presence of a cross current.
It’s not enough to have the knowledge and skills to use these tools. They must be used all the time and be part of every navigation plan and brief. That’s the only way true proficiency will be attained.
How to Run an Effective Operational Planning Team
By Commander J. Michael Cole, U.S. Navy
Leading an operational planning team (OPT) for deliberate and crisis-action planning can be a daunting and intimidating task, and facilitating and maintaining support for one can be challenging. To direct a more efficient OPT, personnel recently tasked with heading an OPT can consider the lessons learned by experienced leaders.
Deliberate planning is a long, time-consuming process, and crisis-action planning never occurs at a convenient time. Many times, the support you initially garnered begins to dwindle as soon as other requirements pile up and supervisors forget the OPT’s importance. To prevent this from becoming a problem, it is necessary to address the significance of their participation with OPT members. Since it is mandated by the commander or delegated authority, it is not simply a weekly working group or “just another meeting.” It’s a directed event that aims to achieve a high-priority end state. As the OPT leader, your challenge is to reinforce this point and make senior leadership aware when you are not getting the necessary support. If you are not getting a quality product from an OPT member, send them back to their parent organization and call on the chief of staff or other appropriate senior officer to have the member replaced.
Some of this pain can be avoided by implementing a few OPT best practices:
• Have the commander or representative sign an OPT designation letter that codifies OPT membership.
• Reinforce the significance of an OPT when anyone derides it as a routine meeting or working group.
• Remember that as the leader you are assigned by the commander and work directly for him or her in the execution of these duties.
Selecting Quality OPT Members
OPTs are made effective by professional contribution from the right personnel. Fill critical positions with people you trust. This will help you identify essential members, i.e., assistant OPT leader, breakout group leaders, and knowledge/information managers (KIMs). They will be your sounding board and help facilitate the OPT.
The assistant OPT leader, your principal support, will manage the day-to-day schedule and oversee product delivery. This individual will be your best friend throughout the OPT process. Choose a computer-savvy and well-organized KIM to develop the standard format template, version control process, folder structure, SharePoint, and Collaboration at Sea site. An effective KIM will save you significant time during the OPT and afterward when information needs to be retrieved.
Representation from staff directorates, subordinate commands, and adjacent commands is essential but not always feasible. Though seldom adhered to, the old adage about liaison officers applies: Send the person it hurts the most to lose. These OPT participants are more than subject matter experts; they know and represent their commander’s intent. Equally important, they will inform their commander on the findings of the OPT and the way ahead in order to receive their commander’s guidance. Early and frequent feedback from subordinate commanders goes a long way toward minimizing friction during execution.
Skilled planners from the following areas are a must: logistics, intelligence, communications, and each warfare area. You should also solicit representation from the low-density/high-demand designators, including Judge Advocate General, medical, and information operations. Without quality representation from the aforementioned designators, the rest of the OPT is left trying to fill knowledge gaps—or worse, is oblivious to vital information. Finally, bring in your force enablers, admin, and IT. They will solve your administrative and IT woes, significantly limiting unnecessary distractions.
Request higher headquarters (HHQ) representation at your own risk. If HHQ has written their orders clearly, then their representation should not be necessary. However, some circumstances (i.e., crisis action planning) will be more efficient with HHQ participation. If HHQ is present, ensure they are there in a supporting role to the OPT leader.
Working with Multinational Partners
In a combined environment, the OPT leader and participants need to understand the limitations of their multinational partners. Many allies and partners do not have a dedicated planning process, so it will be necessary to teach them each step. They may arrive with pre-approved products and an expectation that these will be included, no questions asked. Some military cultures may not allow multinational participants to speak for their commanders, constrain their willingness to push bad news up the chain of command, or even limit their participation due to culturally significant holidays.
When using translators, the OPT leader must understand his or her limitations. Take these questions into consideration: Is the multinational officer translating for himself, or is there a designated translator? Does the translator have operational experience? Specifically, does he or she understand what they are translating to correctly capture the context? Who does the translator work for: you or the multinational officer?
When using a translator, remember these three guidelines: First, look at your counterpart, not the translator, while you are speaking. The translator is not the person you are engaging—he or she is only the conduit. Second, break up a long explanation into concise segments for translation. Third, avoid the use of idioms and colloquialisms. Using a football reference to explain a problem or idea does not translate well when most multinational officers think you are talking about soccer.
Choosing a Meeting Space
The travel cost for all participating commands must be considered when selecting the OPT meeting space. Unfortunately, today’s fiscal constraints make this a larger consideration than you would like. Your admin officer may ask, “Why not use video-teleconference [VTC] for the OPT?” VTC is great for distant support for low-density/high-demand subject matter experts such as JAGs, but it not ideal for supporting the free flow of dialogue or breakout groups required to successfully facilitate an OPT. Additionally, VTC technology can be unreliable, especially at sea.
Pick a space that comfortably fits all of the OPT participants and meets the security-classification requirements. A cramped OPT space is counterproductive to the intellectual rigor required to get the job done. The space must also meet your IT needs. Some OPT leaders prefer whiteboards and perceive computers as a distraction, while others want everything captured on the computer immediately. The methodology you use is a question of style. What matters is ensuring that the data are recorded in a way that can be briefed to the commander and turned into an operational order.
Herding Cats
Going the extra mile to set up the logistical requirements for your OPT will make the participants happier and more willing to assist. For personnel traveling to your OPT meeting, try to place everyone in the same lodging; this will make transporting them to and from the OPT site easier. Arrange for group transportation so participants will arrive at the site on time and get back to their billeting when the job is done. Keeping the team together increases camaraderie in the OPT and will go a long way in seeing the plan through to completion, especially if you have significant breaks between planning steps.
You will frequently feel that you do not have enough time to get everything done. Use the Naval Warfare Publication 5-01: Navy Planning as a guideline and draft out a schedule of events (SOE) for your OPT. This process will help you do your troop-to-task analysis and determine how many breakout groups you need. A SOE will also help you manage your time and stay on task. The schedule will change daily. Take the time to meet with the core OPT at the end of the day to update your SOE and keep the OPT on task.
Heading an OPT is nothing short of awesome and will help you grow as a leader, but it comes with its own set of challenges. Taking these recommendations into consideration will help you run an effective and efficient OPT.
Training Ethical Warriors
By Lieutenants Russ Ferguson and Bryan Purvis, Chaplain Corps, U.S. Navy
In our current operational environment, Marines and sailors are asked to succeed in a complex, morally ambiguous setting with little guidance on how to make ethical decisions. Most Marines and sailors remember enduring a PowerPoint briefing about this as part of their induction pipeline. But without sustained emphasis, these lessons will wane, rendering virtuous behavior as nothing more than a perishable skill only revisited after a significant failure.
We noted this lack of dedicated attention to ethics training across a number of units and separately developed programs to open discussion and enhance thinking about honorable choices across our commands. Our “ethical warrior” programs provide a foundation upon which to develop and hone principled decision-making skills. To achieve real benefit, this training demands full integration into a unit’s battle rhythm. While there can be success in an isolated stand down, deliberate instruction must happen on a regular basis to become part of a unit’s DNA.
In order to accomplish this without adding unnecessary burdens to commands already taxed for time, we recommend a train-the-trainer model with pre-deployment, prior-to-redeployment, and post-deployment phases. This model doesn’t provide an easy answer, nor does it prevent every service member from making poor choices. However, if similar models are developed across the Sea Services, the increased discussion at the small-unit level will reinforce the importance of morality in everything we do as professional warriors.
Training Content
Our programs give non-commissioned officers (NCOs) the necessary tools to intelligently discuss ethics with those they lead. Chaplain Purvis used a battalion-wide operational pause to implement the program, while Chaplain Ferguson conducted his training in conjunction with a field exercise away from home station. Both settings coincided with the distribution of a command-wide assessment exploring four areas: how Marines and sailors formed their ethics; the individuals who shaped these standards; how they defined and internalized the concept of ethics; and moral issues they faced in their daily lives. Conducting the survey and compiling the results prior to the course allowed for specifically targeted case studies during the NCO discussion sessions. Results of the questionnaires were compiled and sent back to commanders, which set the stage for the second phase of our program.
We sought to instill an ethical decision-making mindset and provide a forum to address and alleviate stress resulting from continuous operations in challenging environments. Our goal is to provide NCOs with ways to identify the ramifications of their daily decisions and understand how their Marines and sailors would behave in those situations based on their personal ethics. A train-the-trainer approach is critical for buy-in from junior personnel, as it allows the commander to train his or her leaders while keeping the NCOs in a mentorship and small-unit leadership role.
Before discussing specific case studies, trainers must understand their own moral system as well as those of the Marines and sailors they lead. Becoming familiar with various ethical frameworks throughout history will allow leaders to understand the motivations of those they lead. This training should strengthen one’s ethical foundation by highlighting how each framework leads to our understandings of justice, rights, and responsibility. Realizing how this integrates into our daily decisions demonstrates how ethics permeates not just military culture, but the laws that govern our actions as warriors. Once this connection is made, we can explore military ethics and how our frameworks fit within the laws we swore to follow. To highlight this connection, we discuss just-war theory, the Geneva Conventions, and other international laws. Next, we explore how jus in bellum and jus post bellum relate to our multifaceted role in the present asymmetric conflict in Afghanistan.
But we cannot stop with an academic exploration of ethics; we must make concrete connections to the issues our junior personnel face. The training culminates with a discussion of how to present case studies of moral issues to Marines and sailors. We encourage using them in small-unit discussions on a continuing basis to focus participants on their individual decision-making process. To make this happen, we provide the NCOs with a number of case studies and encourage them to present issues they have faced in their careers to foster deeper connections with their personnel. Units can easily integrate similar case studies into after-action reviews and the end of regular training schedules.
Moving Forward
Both of us set out with a goal of ensuring that our Marines and sailors would approach combat confident their actions would not violate their moral codes. We also sought to help them recognize how they came to ethical conclusions each and every day by fostering an understanding that every decision has an ethical component. This model is not the only effective one for teaching junior personnel in use across the Sea Services, nor is it the single answer to developing ethics as part of a command’s culture. We developed our program with a specific audience in mind, but recognized the larger need across the services.
As chaplains who are tasked as ethical and moral advisers to our command according to paragraph 5(e),(3),(d) of the Secretary of the Navy Instruction 1730.7D, “Religious Ministry within the Department of the Navy,” we seek to start a discussion among the readers of Proceedings on how best to maintain and bolster programs that help Marines and sailors work through the ethical challenges they face daily. Unfortunately, many of them choose a path that leads to front-page headlines.
Every command has different ethical concerns and needs. Our worry is that in the wake of one of these sensational lapses of judgment, higher headquarters will mandate one overall program to discuss ethics across all commands in a service. This will most likely devolve into another “check-the-block” or “fire-and-forget” program with no real buy-in or passion in its execution, ultimately leaving us with a legalized ethical training program of little substance.
Our experience suggests we should develop NCOs as ethical mentors. While it is imperative that training be conducted and led at the lowest level possible, when conducted without clear guidance it can rapidly devolve into something tangential and aimless. As leaders, it is our responsibility to provide our NCOs with the tools necessary to spark a relevant and worthwhile discussion with their Marines and sailors. This requires a targeted program agile enough to meet the needs of each command while still serving the overall goal of fostering conversations about ethics as part of the command climate.
Both of us routinely engage our commands for improving and updating material as our Marines and sailors point out the ethical dilemmas they face and want to discuss. Beginning these dialogues improved the overall health of our battalions and opened the eyes of our junior personnel to the ethical ramifications of their daily actions. We have both seen Marines and sailors fail in their decision-making after participating in this program, but it lays the groundwork with an approach that doesn’t feel like typical training. This approach taps the creativity and intellect of our junior personnel, giving them a sense of ownership—not only of their own ethical behavior, but that of the command as a whole.
Lieutenant Purvis recently served as a battalion chaplain in 2d Marine Division at Camp Lejeune and is the chaplain of the USS Mesa Verde (LPD-19).