The string of recent Navy incidents has us worried. The list includes: the 2016 capture of U.S. Navy riverine patrol boats by the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps Navy; the January 2017 grounding of the USS Antietam (CG-54) near Yokosuka, Japan; the May 2017 collision between the USS Lake Champlain (CG-57) and the fishing vessel Nam Yang 502; the deadly summer 2017 collisions involving the USS Fitzgerald (DDG-62) and USS John S. McCain (DDG-56); and the loss at sea of the lieutenant (junior grade) from the USS Lake Erie (CG-70) in August 2018.
In the meantime, the Glenn Defense Marine Asia (a.k.a. “Fat Leonard”) investigation continues to reveal corruption among senior officers, and commanding officers of Navy ships, submarines, and squadrons are relieved regularly for improper conduct. And hardly a week passes without a commanding officer, executive officer, or command master chief being relieved for one ethical issue or another.
This many incidents and problems in a short period of time should tell the Navy it has organizational-level problems. This is not to say that the Navy in which we served didn’t have its own share of problems. It did. Among these may be included the serious drug and alcohol problems in the 1970s and ’80s. There were race riots—actual race riots—on ships, and there was a near mutiny on a cruiser deployed to the Mediterranean. Moreover, there were cases in which commanding officers certainly abused their authorities. No, we do not suggest that the Navy of the past was without fault.
What we are saying, however, is that priorities have changed. The priorities of the Navy, and the surface force in particular, seem to have shifted away from the mission of the Navy and toward what appears to be an endless process of putting out political and moral fires. While this may be a symptom of a greatly extended period of peace in which the focus has been allowed to drift from the vital to the ephemeral—from that which is necessary to survive and win in war to that which may be deemed politically expedient—the Navy’s mission remains unchanged: to conduct prompt and sustained combat operations at sea. Despite the problems we faced in our years of service, there was no question about what mattered: We spent our time and energy preparing for combat.
Emphasize Realistic Training
During World War II, officers and sailors who survived the Battle of Guadalcanal and the Battle of the Coral Sea designed advanced training to prepare the fleet for combat. This was four to six weeks of simulated combat and battle damage. Long days started with a pilothouse readiness-for-sea check, navigation checks, simulated low-visibility sea details, swept channel, swept minefields, loss of steering drills, resupply, refuel, and rearm at sea, naval gunfire support training, and dodging surface contacts while doing a host of other drills sometimes while battle messing. The days ended with similar bridge training as the ship returned to port. A discrepancy list was left with the ship to be corrected prior to underway the next day at 0530. The trainers were experts who trained the ship’s team, not the ship’s training team. At the end, the commanding officer (CO) knew his crew and the crew knew the CO, and they had become a real team.
Our generation directly benefited from the experience of World War II Navy veterans. They knew the cost of mistakes, and they drilled us hard. For years, that experience was known as Refresher Training (RefTra), which was serious and tough training. Ships were essentially held hostage in RefTra until they were deemed ready to go on to more complex training. It was the basic blocking and tackling skills—damage control in particular—that would save lives in war.
Simulators can provide valuable training for an officer of the deck (OOD) and CO, but they do not stress the entire watch team, including lookouts. A simulator will not duplicate the experience of transiting the Strait of Malacca with five merchant ships, each having a closest point of approach of 500 yards or less within minutes of each other at night. It is worth noting that as valuable as simulators are, aviators still demand flight hours.
Navigation check rides usually are conducted under favorable conditions in daylight, coming to and from home port. Check rides at night or in foreign ports, on the other hand, require bridge teams to bring their “A-game.”
Division tactics (DivTacs), which we understand are now a thing of the past, are rapid-fire course, speed, and station changes in company with other ships at standard distances of 500 to 1,000 yards. These pose surface tactics and maneuvering challenges one right after another and teach the bridge team, combat information center, lookouts, and main control the importance of a fully integrated ship’s maneuvering team. There is no substitute for these drills.
Put a Premium on Experience
It is paramount that commanding officers have enough experience at sea before assuming command. The command selection process must ensure only the best of the best are selected for command. In addition, what an officer’s ship did during his or her tour should be evaluated carefully. Captains who recently completed command-at-sea tours should sit on these boards, and the board president should be a current or recent commodore or strike group commander who can best evaluate what strong performance at sea means.
As retired Admirals Mike Mullen and Robert Natter wrote in these pages last year, the surface warfare officer (SWO) officer career path was modified more than a decade ago to provide time ashore for joint qualifications, Washington experience, and master’s degrees. Without these, an officer cannot expect to be selected for command. Assignment to important afloat staffs—those billets that kept an officer in touch with ships and their crews and warfighting—were devalued. This came at the expense of SWOs honing their craft en route to the most important job they’ll ever have: command at sea.
At a recent Pentagon brief for retired flag officers, one briefer mentioned that the Navy now has an 11-step checklist to help COs recognize a developing dangerous situation. If COs need a checklist to do that, more training is needed. We often told our crews, “It takes 20 years to get 20 years of experience and it best not be one year 20 times.” Officers need to stay at sea or close to ships as they progress though their careers.
Do Not Overrely on Technology
Technology provides many advantages, but there is still a need for competent seamen who understand what they see on the electronic display. They must be able to quickly and accurately correlate electronic displays to the real world and the real world to the displays and then act correctly per the Rules of the Road. They must think ahead of the ship. Lookouts must be trained to give relative bearing, bearing drift, target angle, and be an extra resource for situational awareness; they must be a valued part of the watch team and trained and integrated accordingly.
In a crowded seaway, technology will not tell how and when—at a particular target angle, bearing drift, true and relative speed, and ship’s advance and transfer—an OOD must act to prevent disaster. Only proper training and experience will.
The most obvious proof of this is the emphasis on technology rather than on a fundamental and deep grasp on the maneuvering board. There is a difference between the basic understanding of how a moboard works and the deep internalization that yields what has long been called a “seaman’s eye.” Technology is easy, and not to train officers fully on the technology provided is folly. But what is needed are salty officers who have their eyes up. When in command, they are going to receive calls in the middle of the night, and there will be no time for anything except the use of their seaman’s eye if they are to rescue their ship from immediate peril.
Learn from Damage-Control Success
A bright spot from the Navy’s 2017 collisions was that the damage-control response was good. What sets those successes apart from the poor bridge performance, and are there lessons to learn and apply to bridge team training? All the technology, 11-step processes, and checklists will not help at 0200 in a crowded seaway if the OOD or CO cannot convert display information to actionable knowledge and correctly apply it.
Officers, chiefs, and sailors must be trained to think and act quickly, decisively, safely, and professionally all the time. It is not easy to keep that kind of focus. For much of our careers, the challenge of the Soviet Navy focused us and inspired us to be our best. The current challenges of a resurgent Russia and a growing Chinese navy that is throwing elbows require an equally robust response from the U.S. Navy.
Continue to Make Us Proud
The Navy does a thousand incredible things each day that most taxpayers are not even aware of. Sadly, the mistakes are what the public hears about most often. The nation needs a strong, ready, professional Navy—as much now as it did during the time we served. One thing we learned during our careers—often the hard way—is that when an organization makes a series of mistakes, it almost always needs to clear the decks of clutter and focus on the main tasks at hand. We hope the recent spate of Navy incidents will convince senior leaders to do just that.