A rampaging technology demands a tight- reined professionalism. Such competence can best be obtained by continuity on the job. The Navy’s civilian employees are hired to provide this continuity in prescribed areas of technical competence.
Thus, today’s naval officer comes ashore to assume a transitory executive position in a civilian/military structure and may often discover that his immediate superior is a civilian employee. When this occurs, civilian control of the military must seem to many an inexperienced young line officer to have taken on a sinister, extra-Constitutional dimension.
When naval officers pause to consider the intimate role that civilian employees play in the defense establishment, many discover that they have long harbored a blind spot, an ignorance of the roles and conditions of service of civilian employees.
Just as Vannevar Bush wrinkled his scientific nose, when discussing the military, and said (in Modern Arms and Free Men) “There is something about the word ordnance that produces stodginess in its adherents ...” the naval officer has often summarized his total appreciation of the Civilian Navy with a neutral, other-worldish “the Civil Service.” All this is surprising when one considers that civil servants have been an integral— there are those who would say indispensable— part of the Navy from the very beginning.
The origins of this civilian/military relationship are recounted in Rear Admiral Julius Furer’s Administration of the Navy Department in World War II. In 1798, we are told, the newly created office of the Secretary of the Navy assumed direct charge of arranging “ . . . for ships, their officers (crews were enlisted locally) and their supplies. He (the Secretary of the Navy) gave general instructions as to the missions to be performed. ...” The Secretary ran the Navy for 17 years, with the help of a small civilian staff. It was not until 1815 that three senior captains were appointed commissioners to help him. From the beginning there was unhappiness:
The Navy Commissioners held their first meeting on April 25, 1815 and within a month clashed with Secretary of the Navy Crowninshield over their respective spheres of duty, the specific question being whether the Secretary was obliged to communicate to the Commissioners “the destination of a squadron.” The disagreement was finally settled by President Madison who decided that the Navy Commissioners were to handle such matters as the building, repairing, and equipping of ships and the superintending of navy yards, but that military functions were to remain in the hands of the Secretary of the Navy. The latter included the appointment of officer personnel, the assignment of officers to duty, the employment and movements of ships, and the discipline of the Navy. In other words the responsibilities of the Secretary were to lie principally in the field of naval command; those of the Navy Commissioners principally in the field of logistics.
It is interesting to note, of course, that something of the opposite arrangement evolved as the Navy progressed into the age of steam propulsion, although the Office of the Chief of Naval Operations was not established until 1915.
It was the ineptness of the Navy Commissioners, in their heavy-handed procurement of ships, that led Lieutenant Matthew Fontaine Maury to take up the pen under the pseudonym Harry Bluff and argue for what eventually became the overthrow of the Commissioners and the establishment of the Bureau system in 1842. To quote Harry Bluff:
The Commissioners had their own way in the building of the Columbus (74). They undertook to make her the model ship of her class for the Navy. They failed. It is said that Eckford (a private shipbuilder) insisted on having his way in the building of one ship. He produced the Ohio (80). She is to this day the crack ship of her class in the Navy. . . . Shipbuilding and ship sailing are entirely distinct and separate professions. . . . The holding of officers of one profession responsible for the duties of another which they have never studied and do not understand is not only unwise, but mischievous. . . . Ordnance, supplies, and the equipment of vessels for service, each of itself constitutes a separate and distinct department. . .
These and other grumblings of a growing Navy dictated a new organizational structure rebuilt from top to bottom on the cornerstone of technical expertise—and therein lay the basis for extensive civilian involvement.
An insight of civilian involvement in the Navy can be gained by looking at the Personnel Compensation section of the Federal Budget where the many jobs that collectively make up the Civilian Navy are listed. Examination of this listing for FY 67 reveals that the Executive Branch plans for the Department of the Navy to employ 349,670 permanent civilian employees during that period. By way of comparison, the average estimated military personnel strength for the Navy for FY 67 is 727,873. (Note: Marine Corps military and civilian personnel and some 717 professors and teachers on the Navy’s payroll have not been included in these totals.) Using these figures, it is evident that almost a third of the personnel required to accomplish the mission of this nation’s naval forces afloat constitutes the civilian employees.
Civilian employees scheduled for “Personnel Compensation” by the Navy in the FY 67 budget are distributed among the 18 Civil Service General Schedule (GS) grades as indicated in the accompanying table. The total number of persons in each GS grade in the table has been sub-divided to indicate the numbers working for: (1) the Secretariat (SECNAV); (2) the Office of the Chief of Naval Operations (CNO); (3) The Naval Material Command (NMC), i.e., the Office of the Chief of Naval Material and the former bureaus of Naval Weapons, Ships, Yards and Docks, and Supplies and Accounts, which have recently been reorganized into six functional system commands; and (4) the other bureaus and offices. (These are the Office of Naval Research, the Office of the Judge Advocate General, the Bureau of Medicine and Surgery, the Bureau of Naval Personnel, and MSTS.) No distinction is made in the table between departmental (i.e., Washington-based) and field activity personnel. The lower and upper per annum salary limits for each GS level are indicated, as established by the Federal Employees Salary Act of 1965. The top civilian salaries in the Department of the Navy, of course, are within the secretariat. They are: Secretary of the Navy— $30,000; Under Secretary and three Assistant Secretaries—$27,000, each; General Counsel —$26,000.
As can be seen in the accompanying table, the Federal Civilian Service Part I prefers this terminology when referring to the totality of civilians employed by the federal government —is divided into two categories: the “competitive” or “classified” service, and the “excepted” service. The first category, which covers about 97 per cent of the Navy’s civilian employees, has acquired the “competitive” label because, technically, open competitive examination is required for employment and promotion, a principle first enunciated by the Pendleton Act of 1883 in freeing federal service from a heritage of patronage and spoils. As a matter of practice, however, promotion examinations are rarely used in the Civil Service and written examinations for employment are used selectively. Instead, oral examination, merely examination of the application form, or no examination at all is required—the choice depending on the category of job being filled.
It is the function of the U. S. Civil Service Commission to translate Congressional legislation and intent into government-wide regulations and policies for the “competitive” system. First, the Commission must formulate standards whereby each job in the system is meticulously “classified” according to the tasks to be performed and the level of responsibility required. Properly classified jobs, now more accurately called “positions,” must also be fitted into one of the 18 levels of graded (i.e., white collar) employment or be ruled ungraded (i.e. blue collar) positions. Graded positions are paid an annual salary established by the latest revision to the General Schedule. Area wage boards determine ungraded employee wage rates on a geographic, regional basis to allow for comparability with private industry. Reference to the table shows that approximately 58 per cent of the Navy’s civilian employees are ungraded. Most of these man the Navy’s considerable in-house industrial facilities. The Naval Material Command employs 86 per cent of the ungraded and 75 per cent of the graded employees.
In controlling the affairs of a system of two- and-a-half-million federal employees the Civil Service Commission necessarily must look to each government agency to handle much of the detail of execution. Thus, day-to-day operation of the Navy’s civil service personnel system is accomplished by elements of the Office of the Secretary of the Navy. As an example of the delegation of authority that is present in the management of the civil service, the Secretary of the Navy classifies all Navy positions up through GS-15 without Civil Service Commission approval.
The unique personnel requirements of certain federal agencies have resulted in Congressional legislation that has “excepted” all of the employees of these agencies from the rules and regulations of the competitive service (for instance, the Atomic Energy Commission and the Tennessee Valley Authority). In addition, the President has authority to place positions in the excepted service and, to complete confusion on this point, he has delegated part of his authority to the Civil Service Commission. Presidentially-excepted positions are usually higher-level political and confidential administrative positions in the Executive Branch. Commission-excepted positions include a wide variety of unusual situations. Some examples are—the almost 80,000 foreign nationals serving in overseas positions; alien scientists hired to work for the Department of Defense and the National Aeronautics and Space Administration; (of special interest to the Navy) all of the professors, instructors and teachers at the U. S. Naval Academy, the Naval Postgraduate School, and the Naval War College. Only about 3 pet cent of the Department of the Navy’s civilian employees fall into the excepted category, although close to 14 per cent of the total federal civilian service is excepted.
The only term in the table left to be discussed is the so-called “PL 313-type.” These are federal civilian service positions of a type originally created by the 80th Congress to bring high level scientific and engineering personnel into the competitive service without the complications of fitting them into the labyrinth of salary levels and rules that surround the “supergrade”—GS-16, 17, and 18- levels of the civil service. Other positions similar to those of PL 80-313 have since been created by Congress, hence the category “PL 313-type.” With positions of this type available the government is in a position to enter the salary competition with industry for a man’s services, and an accepted agency personnel management technique is to keep a certain number of PL 313-type positions free for in-hiring purposes. This is accomplished by transitioning PL 313-type employees into supergrade vacancies as they occur.
The data of the accompanying table permit a comparison of the relative civilian and military executive strengths of the Navy. Using the standard VIP honor code of equivalents between civil service grades and military ranks, a count shows that the Navy has 423 flag-rank equivalent civilians as opposed to 311 admirals (recall, the basic civilian-to- military ratio in the Navy is about one to two). It must be remembered, of course, that these data concern only civilians within the Department of the Navy. The Office of the Secretary of Defense and its agencies house another 350 flag-rank equivalent civilians.
Extending this comparison into the next lower levels of executive structure, there are 4,165 captains versus 1,432 captain-equivalents; 7,992 commanders versus 3,502 commander equivalents; 13,766 lieutenant commanders versus 8,851 lieutenant-commander- equivalents, based on representative military manpower figures. Navy-wide there exists, then, roughly a two-to-one ratio of field grade officers to civilian equivalents, which is in keeping with the ratio of component strengths, military to civilian. The naval officers must, however, also man the operating forces as well as serve in the Shore Establishment. The potential for naval officers being in the executive minority in certain shore duty situations is, thus, quite evident— particularly in the NMG.
The touchstone of the Civil Service system, the reason for its great strength and, necessarily, its source of weakness, is the Position Description (PD). The PD renders, in carefully chosen officialese, all of the duties and responsibilities that make up a specified job in an agency’s organization. Everything in the civil service structure—organizational planning, budgeting, setting of performance standards, pay—focuses on the PD and its codification of position rather than on the incumbent, the particular man occupying the job.
In the PD and the attendant formalism of classification the civil service system admittedly has built in a potential for neglecting the variations of individual talents from the norm. There is the possibility of neglecting the unusually competent person who may bring something to his job that the PD does not cover. Conversely, a tendency towards inertia exists, of carrying mediocrity on the rolls. There are, of course, many incentive and appraisal mechanisms that have been added to the system to help compensate for these possibilities but, in general, these mechanisms are ponderous. Before rendering harsh judgment on this point, however, it is prudent to recall that the Civil Service was institutionalized on a merit basis in 1883 as an antidote to spoils and political corruption in the filling of government posts. A system based on rigorous rules of description and qualification for the job, and not the vagaries of personality or background of any particular applicant, was a good Puritanic solution.
There are many critics of the Civil Service job classification system. These critics (many of them in the service itself) charge that it only encourages the status quo, no change good or bad, and that it is inherently opposed to economical operation. Certainly, the oft-heard charge of Civil Service empire building has a germ of truth that can be traced directly to the classification system. For example, consider a civil servant occupying a GS-13 position, say, as an electronics engineer. To become a GS-14, he has available only two courses of action. One, he can compete for vacant GS-14 positions that appear elsewhere, either in his own organization or perhaps in another agency. Two, his present position can grow in complexity, say, with more management and administrative responsibilities, so as to warrant being re-written as a GS-14 position. In the filling of this new position there is always a formal “competition” but a fleeting-up incumbent quite understandably has the inside track because of his intimate knowledge of the job and his tailored experience. This second course of action is the basis for the charge of empire building, a practice that often has to be condoned or even encouraged by management as the only way to recognize (or sometimes, retain) a deserving worker.
Because of the approximate numerical parity between field grade, and senior naval officers and their civilian equivalents, a comparison of the “corps” system of the commissioned military to the position-oriented mode of employment of the civil service is very important to an understanding of the roles of each in the Navy. Several important points can be established by comparing two equivalents, a GS-14 and a commander, by way of example. Thus, a GS-14 is on the government’s payroll because he possesses a certain specific competence to perform a certain well- delineated job. In theory, he could be occupying the only GS-14 position of its type in the Navy. His military equivalent, a commander, works from a much broader charter as one of a large group of fellow commanders, individuals with similar backgroupds and experience, who are progressing through a well- prescribed career pattern. Physically, day after day, the GS-14 usually operates within the confines of certain echelons of his part of the Navy. The commander literally can roam the world in his service, occupying a diversity of assignments. His job performance is monitored by a highly personalized fitness report system. He has built a very definite service reputation, a summation of his social and professional impact on his contemporaries. On occasion, the commander works around the clock, without additional compensation.
The GS-14, conversely, receives an annual rating of either “outstanding” or “satisfactory” or “unsatisfactory” for his performance on the job. Rarely is anything but “satisfactory” used because the other two modes carry with them a burden of additional paperwork. Socially, the GS-14 usually enters another world when he leaves work. Rarely does the camaraderie of work spill over into his after hours. If the GS-14 has to put in more than a 40-hour week, he is eligible for overtime pay.
The foregoing comparison highlights only selected aspects of the two personnel systems and this has been done at only one common level, the threshold for senior executives. Since certain weaknesses of the Civil Service system have been suggested, it would be well to recall some of its strengths, particularly in the Civilian Navy. Foremost among these is that the presence of the Civilian Navy lets technical programs be carried forward to completion by the same personnel who initiated them. A variation of this theme is that programs can be better conceived, with more meaningful and mature goals, if responsible people can expect to stay with them. Contrast this with the personalized bents and disruptions of previous policy that each new naval commander sometimes brings to organizations every two or three years.
An additional important strength of the Civilian Navy is that certain of its members are national resources, in every sense of the word, as the Free World’s experts on many aspects of naval and aviation warfare systems. Catapults, Doppler radar, turbine machinery, sonar, nuclear reactors—a technical understanding and ability to carry forward the state of the art in these and similar systems resides, numerically, in a very few civilians in the Navy. These men are a cherished resource.
As civilian workers reach the status of the “higher civil service” (GS-15 and above), they become generalists—managers—and they tend to lose identification with their previous working disciplines. In this circumstance many individuals have felt themselves poorly served by an employment system that zeroes in so singularly on job classification. Members of the higher civil service have long felt voids in their system that vestiges of the corps concept would help to fill. Various proposals have been put forth to help give the higher civil service a feeling of status, of having arrived, in an environment in which the highest positions are filled by “excepted” political appointments, or as in the Navy, by another group such as senior commissioned officers. An interagency supergrade elite corps has been proposed with focused leadership emanating from the White House. A vigorous interagency transfer policy has been suggested. Presently the governmental civil service is highly compartmentalized, with each agency exercising strong control over its own personnel program. These programs tend to be ingrown with little interagency personnel transfer, such as between Washington headquarters and field activities. If any of these proposals to improve the lot of the higher civil service are executed, they will have an impact on the Navy. Changes tailored for an all-civilian agency will need careful implementation in a civilian/military context.
With the need for more and more technical competence at the highest decision levels, more and more of the Navy’s civilians are being thrown into direct competition with naval officers in the executive management arena, the traditional domain of the senior naval officer. Difficult morale and utilization problems are created. PL 313 Technical Directors earning $24,000 a year work for naval captains earning two-thirds of that amount. A commander has a GS-16 deputy.
While this is happening within the Navy, an all-pervading civilian control pushes down from above on the same traditional domain of the senior naval officer. In decades past the Navy’s officer corps has adjusted to the impact of technology by creating special staff elements within itself, the supply and civil engineering corps and pseudo-staff elements like the EDOs and WEDOs of the restricted line—all in an effort to maintain taut the reins of naval officer executive management ashore as well as command at sea. In this context the civilian contribution has always been important but well-defined and contained. Today the requirements of technology are pushing aside this traditional command and management concept.
A civilian director of the Navy’s in-house laboratories has been appointed. Under the pressures of the Vietnamese war, military billets have been coded as to their replace- ability by civilians.
One of the more newsworthy of the defense manpower adjustments put into effect in the Southeast Asia build-up last year was the announced hiring of 60,000 civilians to replace 75,000 military men.
Almost half-a-million military billets in the Department of Defense are earmarked for conversion to manning by civilians. It is not difficult to envisage a day in which the man in uniform will only be the operator who, because of some design shortcoming in the weapons system, must on occasion die in battle.
The pitfalls on the road that would lead to such an eventuality are obvious, one can be sure, to conscientious national leadership, both military and civilian. What may not be so obvious though, indeed that may be overlooked in the whining gears of a 50-billion- dollar-a-year machine, was perceptively set forth by Eugene M. Zuckert when he was Secretary of the Air Force:
An environment must be created in which the dignity of military service is maintained