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Today’s post-Vietnam peace may prove dangerous, because with it comes a tendency toward contentment with the status quo. The captain of a Spruance-c/<*J5 destroyer, for example, has sumptuous quarters in which to do the paperwork current Navy practices force upon him. How much better it would be if he and his counterparts could escape that prison of paper so that the Navy would be better prepared to sail immediately into combat if the need should arise.
In this era of prostration to the gods of technology, it is necessary for the surface navy to pause long enough to heed the call of history. History may not repeat itself, but naval leaders are about to duplicate some of our past mistakes. Before both World Wars, there were warnings that prolonged peacetime service had atrophied thoughts and actions required to employ warships effectively at sea. This is another such warning. We have come far enough from Vietnam and the immediate concerns of rebuilding the material and administrative structures of the surface navy to focus now on becoming so proficient at fighting the battle at sea that we can deter the other side from ever testing our mettle.
Our current troubles are not so difficult as those that faced the Navy around the turn of the century. The ponderous bureau system, promotion based solely on seniority, and ill-conceived designs of warships all complicated the task of those who wanted to bring the U. S. Navy from the age of sail and smooth-bore guns to that of steam and rifled guns. As a lieutenant, William S. Sims was the driving force behind reforming the Navy’s gunnery practices around the model developed by Sir Percy Scott of the
Royal Navy. It is hard to believe it has been only slightly more than three quarters of a century since the fire control of naval guns has taken the roll of the ship into account! Collectively, these sorts of troubles led the highly respected Admiral George Remey, Commander in Chief of the U. S. Asiatic Fleet, to say >n 1902, . I am satisfied beyond the slightest
doubt that we are inferior to foreign navies in gun mounts, sights, protection and marksmanship to a perilous degree.”1
It is clear in retrospect that, during the peace before World War II, naval officers again lost sight of the objective of battle proficiency. The following could be a page out of a surface navy junior officer’s diary today; instead, it represents the considered opinion of the late Vice Admiral Morton L. Deyo (1887-1973) concerning the state of the surface navy prior to World War II:
“. . . gradually the means became the end. Thus, while everyone worked hard, we began going in circles. The Fleet became more and more tied to bases, operating out of Long Beach-San Diego on a tight fuel budget, chained to the increasingly artificial, detailed mandates of the Office of Fleet Training whose word was law. The pencil became sharper than the sword, everyone
Fleet gunnery practice, so essential to the development of battle proficiency, is too often neglected. Practice uith the highly automatic Mark 86 fire control system sometimes frightens captains off by its very accuracy; because of its tendency to seek out the biggest target, we need to invest in drone control of reasonably-sized surface targets.
tried to beat the target practice rules and too many forgot there was a war getting closer. There was a waiting line for top commands, and tenure of office was so short—often only a year or less—that high commanders came and went, leaving little impression. Paper work wrapped its deadly tentacles around cabin and wardroom. Smart ship handling, smart crews, eager initiative received little attention, as did the reverse. Glaring defects in guns, ammunition, torpedoes, battle tactics, went unnoticed so long as the competition rules made due allowances and gave everyone similar conditions.”2
Fortunately for the later war effort, the fleet began to practice under more nearly wartime conditions, commencing after the Chief of Naval Operations curtailed the battle efficiency competition in 1935.3 Again, blessed with a prolonged period of peace, the cutting edge of the sword of the fleet has been dulled. The honing stone of the battle efficiency competition has gradually reversed its usefulness and worked to dull tactical readiness because of the bureaucratic connotations it has been allowed to encompass. The battle efficiency competition has been useful in providing worthy comments for officers’ fitness reports and perhaps a modicum of tactical awareness for the sailors. The competition now has little other utility than providing an account against which an allowance of time, effort, and ammunition can be drawn. The drills themselves resemble any realistic situation only in the remotest sense. The competition is so far off the mark that instant corrections would do no good. Therefore, the exercises should be continued to provide a slight competitive tive urge until the fleet’s training can be rearranged to provide for realistic training under increasingly more difficult environments. It is obvious that the type commanders and the fleet training commanders will not be able to shake off their bureaucratic inertia to solve a problem that they do not even acknowledge exists. There has been an almost imperceptible move toward increasing concern for tactics over the last few years. However, it has not had a dramatic effect on the fleet’s fighting ships. The move away from the comfortable complacency of peacetime will not be
easy for the existing structure of the Navy to accept. For that reason, a special effort must be initiated to deal with the transition to increased readiness.
Faced with a bureaucracy dedicated to the important annual budget fight in Washington, priority of directing tactical thought through the fleet commander is, of necessity, low. In any peacetime period, high priority must be given to the competition for and the allocation of valuable budget dollars. The time has come to change priorities enough so that top talent is also focused on increasing tactical thought. Responsibility to reorder priorities should be given to an individual at the level of a special assistant to the CNO. The office, perhaps taking the old name of the Inspector of Target Practice, would be able to accomplish its primary purpose within the first five years. It should then die a decent bureaucratic death under the axe of some future reorganization. The rank of the person placed in charge matters little, but since it will soon attract the attention of Congress and the Secretary of the Navy, a captain will probably be demanded. The purpose will be to keep the tactical warfighting efficiency of the fleet constantly in the eye of the CNO to ensure that the Washington hierarchy is ever mindful of this current weakness.
Recent combat experience and their Top Gun school excuse the aviators from immediate attention. Similarly, the submariners’ extremely realistic
peacetime missions and ample training budget leave them without major tactical problems. The surface navy, as the warfare speciality showing a renaissance in its professional attitude and capabilities, should be the first focus. The solution will not take any great genius; indeed, there are many good naval officers who could come up with a reasonable plan in a few months. The Inspector of Target Practice (ITP) would merely have to evaluate and organize the many ideas that would come his way. Most naval officers and enlisted men will be happy to give their ideas on how better to fight our current systems. The rice bowls of Commander Training Command Atlantic/ Pacific Fleets, Operational Test and Evaluation Force, Destroyer Development Group, and Naval Surface Weapons Center Dalghren will be at least chipped, if not broken, by the ITP. These groups have failed to make the necessary dramatic improvements. They will have to put up with the existence °f a seemingly vestigial organ for a few years.
Those of the ITP office should be allowed to spend only half their time in Washington. Constant travel to the fleet would establish the ITP team as a liaison (rather than inspection) team to work the transition from the current quagmire of annual battle efficiency competitive exercises to a series of more realistic challenges graduated in offensive and defensive difficulty. The philosophy would then change from trying to achieve scores in the 90s in a number of basic exercises to trying to complete satisfactorily as many of rhe more advanced tasks as possible. Grading would not only indicate tactical competence, but also give Weight to innovative flair for solving battle problems. The uniformity of the system that now allows che commodore to determine easily the top ship in the squadron will be lost to the worthwhile cause of Increased battle readiness. If the subject is taken seriously, the first few years should probably produce several Battle Deficiency “D” losers signifying ships needing to overcome some basic problems to be able to fight effectively. There are three levels of knowledge that can be viewed as the framework of any program to improve the tactical readiness of the fleet: the level of warfighting knowledge the average crew tnust have if it were required to sail immediately for combat; the knowledge a crew acquires through association with a major exercise, usually extending from several weeks to as long as three months; and the knowledge required to win an engagement at sea in Wartime.
On the first level, the individual ship focuses on the day-to-day battle with the two real enemies: paperwork and inspections. The one man in the Navy who is held responsible for the fighting of his unit, the commanding officer, worries only about the tactical problem when forced to shoot from the hip in a trainer or in an exercise at sea. This should not be surprising, for he is never expected to discuss tactics with his commodore, group commander, or anyone else. Why? Very simply, neither his nor anyone else’s priorities for tactics are high enough. The exercises in the Fleet Exercise Publication (FXP) series are universally recognized as being but the basic building blocks of any ability to fight. Why then do ships constantly have to invent clever ways around the rules to ensure a passing mark to qualify for the hollow honor of a Battle Efficiency “E”? Why do so many ships have such a traumatic experience at the fleet training groups’ version of refresher training? Since these are such basic drills, should not our advanced ships and superbly trained men handle them with ease? Of course, they should; however, they will continue to hover at the margin of success until the priorities of the leaders change to make the job of the commanding officer that of fighting his ship rather than managing her while waiting for a “real” job in Washington. A perfect example of the inverted priorities is when a ship returning from deployment finds a vice admiral routinely sending a captain from his staff to the piers, not to ask how the staff may help, but rather to check for running rust on the bullnose of the ship. Because of the close attention to material and administrative details by the staffs, or perhaps despite the staffs, today’s ship is generally safe to steam, comfortable for the crew, without running rust, and up to date on her vast list of inspections. Yet, she is capable of executing only the most basic tactics without long workup periods.
The second level of expertise is that sought after completing these prolonged workup periods. They are first spent in the tactical trainer (usually attended by the operations and combat information center officers with a skeleton crew of operations specialists). Finally, about five days at sea are used to practice before the exercise begins. Workups are meant to refresh tactics, test the operation order, and experiment with new concepts in preparation for a major fleet exercise. Theoretically, we should be testing our methods of fighting in future wars. In reality, we are relearning the endless variations of lessons which usually start with the litany of communications problems and end with a call for improved rules of engagement that can be used by a real ship. Fleet exercises are useful, for they do push the ship away from the incessant focus on the battle readiness competition or the next inspection. Exercises are meant to help us refresh existing tactical knowledge and explore new boundaries, but they should do more.
Simple knowledge is not enough. Exercises must promote the wisdom that spawns vision. This vision is the abstract capability to raise the banal artificialities of the immediate environment and synthesize the requirements of the future. The U. S. Navy’s greatest weapon, even above that of our marvelous technology, is the flexible thought process of the naval officer’s mind. Peacetime has turned the inventive talents of too many creative minds to winning the wars of paper and budgets. Exercises must be designed and executed to develop the difficult task of orchestrating the many individual talents to achieve a harmonious blend of the strengths of each, in order to bring order to the fleet faced with the cacophony of the real world.
The real-world battle problem is the one that would be fought if the ship were actually attacked today and therefore forms the standard by which all efforts have to be measured. This level of expertise is obviously the most important and the one to which the entire Navy should be directed. The only part of the Navy that can have any real, immediate effect is the combat forces. The threat is real and is perceived rather clearly through the eyes of trained tactical action officers.4 Yet, seldom do they see how their day-to-day actions are helping to solve the problem of winning a war at sea. They feel current threats will be met by equipment that either still is in development or will not be installed in their ship until the next overhaul. Lack of the newest equipment can be rationalized even to the junior officer by explaining that dollars are limited. But a lack of thought toward filling the gap until that equipment arrives should not be excused by anyone. The three levels thus become the framework of the solution; current battle problems must form the focus of each ship through the medium of our exercise and training structure. With the overall backdrop of the need to solve real-world battle problems, let us explore the problems of the ship and the medium of the exercise.
One of the great certainties of the exercise environment today is that it is almost always thought of as being unrealistic. These thoughts are not the mere complaints of junior officers; they are routinely heard from executive officers and commanding officers. Often, the actions of the force commander and his staff appear stupid. For instance, during a recent transit in strict electronic silence, the task force was suddenly required to make a periodic transmission on high-frequency communications which could have given the position of the formation away each time it was sent. The view from the junior officer level was simply that the staff had again lost the bubble. Despite the desire that juniors should be seen and not heard, it appears that the sobriquet of “staff puke” is sometimes all too appropriate. The story appears to turn out well, of course, because the admiral knew all along that the new reporting requirement laid upon him from an ashore command was destroying the value of the silent transit. Unfortunately, the junior officers’ lack of faith remained, because they were never told that the test, although unrealistic, was still thought to have good training value.
This is not a plea for all admirals to explain every decision to each junior officer. Rather, it is a call for the realization that tactical thinking is present on board every ship and it must be fostered through an exchange of information, not stifled by hiding behind seniority. There are valuable training lessons that can be gained by getting a peek at the way senior officers perceive a tactical situation. Where else can the future flag officer serving his indenture as the junior officer of the deck begin to grasp his eventual responsibilities?
Frustration with the exercise and staff preparations are not merely the perceptions of junior officers. A recent major fleet exercise workup revealed that even so basic a detail as the TACAN (tactical air navigation system) assignments were not included in the operation order, nor did the pre-exercise letter of instruction leave the staff until Friday in preparation for an early Monday underway time. This last-minute guidance caused most operational message traffic to arrive during the weekend and severely limited effective planning. Similarly, the drill, which progressively heightened conditions of readiness, affected only the weekend command duty officers. Problems with rules of engagement and identification exist peren- ially, as exemplified by the frustration apparent in this statement by a surface warfare officer with 19 years’ experience:
“I have never known who the good guys are, who the bad guys are, and how to tell them apart- How do I tell immediately whether I’m being flashed by a signal light with a terrible signalman behind it or I’m being shot at by a simulated gun system. Just once I’d like to know.”
The frustrations are magnified at the end of an exercise when the mandatory message listing lessons learned is called for. Countless operations officers have wasted many reams of paper in repeating the same shibboleths that we have lived with continuously: poor communication procedures and security, weak coordination between forces, restrictive rules of engagement, poor parts support, and the list goes on. The lessons-learned messages are sent, but rarely do ship’s officers receive feedback about either their comments or their specific tactical performance
which might give the exercise some real learning value. In place of superficial post-exercise critiques or detailed analyses that reach the fleet a year after the exercise, a one-to-three-page report written individually to each commanding officer within two months would provide valuable feedback. More complete data could be provided in addenda or later in a more complete study.
There are a few encouraging signs that the top Navy thinkers may be concerned about the lack of tactical thinking on the ship level. The surface forces °n the East Coast have designated squadron commanders to review the same hypothetical wartime tactical situations that are given to senior officers. Unfortunately, because of the press of seemingly more important business, very few ships regularly receive the benefit of their commodore’s tactical thoughts. Again, the problems of priorities are seen, exacerbated by the discomfort of a commodore matching wits with some of the sharp fleet tactical action officers. Another hopeful sign is provided by the meetings now being held about every six weeks to update the fleet on the latest intelligence data for their tactical notebooks and to explore in more depth a U. S. or foreign naval system.5
With the current practice of more years between promotions and fewer early selections, additional means are needed to recognize outstanding performers.6 While each ship has her tactical action officers who have memorized prodigious quantities of information, there is little routine thinking done about how best to use all the intelligence data on that particular ship. Therefore, an especially appropriate job for one of the most promising officers, regardless of tank, would be that of tactical thought officer. He Would spend time thinking about the employment of his ship, discuss his thoughts with the captain, Wardroom, and other tacticians and strategists off the ship. The aggregate group of these officers would make an interesting forum for providing an independent critique of operations or exercises from the squadron to the fleet level. Many will immediately febel and fall back on the old saw that it is the commanding officer’s exclusive prerogative to fight his ship. Since the main focus of the commanding officer’s job seems to have been shifted toward the maintenance and administration of his ship, most should svelcome this bureaucratic device to refocus the priorities of their seniors on the real aspects of preparing for war at sea. Additionally, the tactical action officer has already diffused the formerly exclusive domain of the commanding officer. While •deafly more than another pro forma collateral duty )°b on board ship, the concept would need full-time billets at the numbered fleet and fleet commander in chief levels. These officers would be an integral part of the organization headed by the Inspector of Target Practice, who would be concerned more about the macro-trends in the Navy’s tactical development. The fleet and commander in chief tactical thought officers would be able to tap the resources of the war colleges, Center for Naval Analyses, Operational Test and Evaluation Force, and similar organizations to help answer the hard technical questions the fleet is likely to produce when encouraged to think tactically. With the disestablishment of the old OP-03 (Fleet Operations and Readiness), there is no focus for warfighting in Washington; the ITP would provide an interim solution.
The surface navy should not feel too bad about its current lack of concentration on tactical thought because after a war period such as the one in Vietnam, the primary concerns have to be to put the pieces back together. The Navy was faced with a particularly difficult task. The presidential decision to buy both guns and butter had allowed the Navy to fight the war. Yet, it left the Navy in terrible material condition: overage ships and serious morale problems in the wake of the social upheavals of the late 1960s. By now, however, the scar tissue has set, and although a far smaller number of ships is asked to do the same tasks, the rough structure has been set for the next decade. Excuses will no longer do for lack of tactical thought.
Faced with a Soviet Navy which is becoming larger and more capable by the year, the allied navies must extract every last advantage from their hardware. Dramatic changes in the battles of the future will be caused as often by innovative thought as by sweeping technological change. The situation is much changed from that experienced by Admiral Horatio Nelson “. . . whose flagship at Trafalgar was forty years old but equal in fighting capacity to the majority of the ships engaged, [and] could spend his life learning and perfecting the art of the admiral without fearing that its foundations would shift under his feet.”[1] Today, changes in intelligence, technology, relative threat, and flexibility in mission, all make the foundations of war at sea shift constantly. Faced with the new technology of the aircraft in 1926, the Chief of the Air Corps used the officers of the Air Corps Tactical School to draft doctrine because “. . . the institution at Langley proved to be the only common location of Air Corps officers who had enough time for creative thinking.”[2] Creative thinking may be going on in the Pentagon, war colleges, and professional schools like Surface Warfare Officers School; however, it is so well disguised that the fleet will not recognize it for some years to come. The unfortunate solution of attempting to form another bureaucracy to solve the problems of the larger bureaucracy is nevertheless necessary if we are to be able to let the fleet do what it does best— operate. The structure of tactical thought officers in the ships and on the staffs combined with the office of the Inspector of Target Practice will not have any immediate, dramatic effect, for it will take time to separate the vital and non-vital functions. Within two years, the effects will start to be felt, and it would be surprising indeed if the positive impact on our offensive capabilities were not great. The particular medium of tactical thought officers is not important in itself. The attention on warfighting capability at the unit level is. More immediate gains might be realized from an examination of the peacetime employment of our weapon systems in training for combat.
Fleet gunnery training is but one example. Thomas Truxtun’s warning to “practice daily with guns” is sound advice to a fleet which does not routinely come close to expending annual training allowances. Those rounds that are fired are usually used for exercising the gun loading system with little thought to their tactical application. Little wonder then, with the paucity of services available for target practice, that the average surface ship is unprepared to fight any realistic engagement. The employment schedule for a recent quarter for one of our home waters fleets scheduled only 37 days of at-sea target services provided for by a fleet tug (ATF) along an entire coast. Predictably, a major casualty reduced this unacceptable figure even further. We have far fewer places to practice naval gunfire support. In the last ten years, political actions have closed primary ranges in the Mediterranean, East and West coasts, and the Pacific. Actual practice time is severely reduced by interference of local fishermen. In some cases additional delay is caused by the wait until acoustic conditions are right so the noise of the gun blast does not travel too far!
Not only is the time allowed to practice inadequate, but also the conditions themselves are unrealistic. Surface-to-surface gunnery is usually conducted within close visual range of the target and rarely beyond seven miles. Air and surface targets are too slow, do not maneuver significantly, and seldom present quick-reaction scenarios. We have structured our targets to match our capabilities, not those of our potential enemies. We do not practice at night or in bad weather and must hope any potential enemy has been practicing his offense only in fair weather. Naval gunfire support ranges offer only targets that are well known to everyone before firing. New fire control systems—such as the Mark 86—with their highly automatic tracking capabilities that make them superb for warfare frighten the captains of the firing and the towing ships because of their tendency to seek the largest target, obviously the towing ship- The recent practice round that scored a direct hit on the ATF has indelibly etched a new set of safety precautions on every skipper’s mind. Safety, of course, is the primary reason for all these artificialities. As honored and important consideration as that is, it must not stand in the way of progress of warfighting capability beyond the most elementary stages. Since we clearly cannot risk the lives of those on the towing ship, money must be spent for drone control of reasonably sized surface targets. To continue to fire 5-inch projectiles from close range at a 2-foot-high wake generated by a target towed by a destroyer is i* waste of time and effort. We owe the fleet sailor the right to practice one of his primary means of waging war in realistic circumstances.
An interesting sidelight of the gunnery problem is posed by the obvious question of “What are we shooting at?” Are our systems designed to score a mission kill by destroying the enemies’ radars and topside equipment, or are they solving the fire control problem for a point on the waterline to attempt to sink the ship? I have asked the question of many naval officers, including the admiral in charge of weapon systems at the Naval Sea System Command headquarters. No one provided the answer on the spot or followed up with it. Perhaps it is unimportant. However, I think the operator ought to have the option of biasing his own fire control system the way he wants it for the tactical situation at hand.
The Inspector of Target Practice is the logical candidate to coordinate the efforts to make safe, realistic targets available to the fleet as well as to ask the hard tactical questions of our superb technical branches of the navy. Now, with no office being held individually responsible for innovative tactical thinking, there always seem to be insurmountable problems that make the shift to the more pressing immediate concerns of existing problems and budgets easy. Existing organizations can answer the questions; indeed, most questions are undoubtedly on somebody’s list of things to do “as soon as things quiet down a bit.” The ITP must change the priorities so that in °ur quest for future systems we have not mortgaged away our present warfighting capability.
The problems and suggested solutions for the gunnery problem are not far different for the surface-to-air and surface-to-surface missile or the antisubmarine warfare areas. They too suffer from lack of target services, unrealistic target presentations, and low missile and torpedo allocations for practice. Again, the problems do not take any technical advances to solve. The classic trade-off between readiness and procurement must tilt toward readiness for a while. Spending the Navy’s share of the defense budget must be more fully weighted to allow ships to attain and maintain fighting proficiency with their Weapons. Trainers and simulators ashore will go far in establishing the basics of employment, but there will always be a need to test the entire system at sea with the average fleet operator at the controls.
The proposed solutions of recreating an Inspector °f Target Practice with subordinates at the fleet and commander in chief levels, backed up by collateral duty tactical thought officers is obviously only a niodel to stimulate a resurgence of tactical thinking after the impressive recovery of our material deficiencies following the Vietnam war. The material problems and administrative requirements will, and should, continue to play an important role in our daily routines. They can now be comfortably placed behind the need to refocus our priorities to ensure that every ship clearly understands her wartime re- sponsibilities—and can execute them—today.
We need a perceptual leap into the present. Tactics are important now. Realistically, either we will have to give up something or we will need more money, talent and time. I hope we can justify the importance of the tactical resurgence to the Department of Defense and the Congress to continue all the vital tasks of planning for the future and solving other current problems. If, however, we are forced to make do with what we have, the choice is clear. We must start now to reorient the priorities of the fleet. All ships must be so ready to fight, and present themselves as such formidable foes, that the U. S. Navy surface forces will join with the rest of the Navy to deter any potential enemy from even starting a war.
Lieutenant Commander Libbey is a 1967 graduate of the Mav.il Academy. After .1 summer .is .1 scientific intern at NASA, he served as damage control assistant k'^ ^ and combat information center officer in the USS Con-
yngham (DDG-17). Following a tour as aide and flag ' - lieutenant t0 the Commander Sixth Fleet, he attended
Destroyer School and became weapons officer of the USS Waddell (DDG-24). While serving in the Bureau of Naval Personnel, he was selected as the CNO Fellow and worked with the Chief of Naval Operations until July 1976. During this tour, he acted as the or officio member of the Naval Institute's board of control. Recently relieved as executive officer of the USS Spruance (DD-963), he is now attending The Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy as the first recipient of the Navy's Samuel Eliot Morison scholarship. A number of Lieutenant Commander Libbey's contributions have been published in the Proceedings, including the article "Time Out for Tactics,” which was in the January 1979 issue. He has been selected for commander. [3][4] * 8
“Bernard Brodie, Strategy in the Missile Age (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1959), pp. 16-17.
[2]Robert F. Futrell, Ideas, Concepts, Doctrine: A History of Basic Thinking in the United States Air Force 1907-1964 (Maxwell Air Force Base, Alabama: Air University, 1974), p. 32.
‘George C. Remey quoted in Elting E. Morison, Admiral Sims and the Modern American Navy (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1942), p. 118 “Morton L. Deyo quoted in Samuel Eliot Morison, The Two-Ocean War: A Short History of the United States Navy in the Second World War (Boston: Little Brown and Co., 1963), p. 12.
“Ibid.
The time has come to place the extensive material course for senior officers in Idaho Falls back in perspective. It should be a review held in Newport, Rhode Island, lasting no longer than two weeks. These senior officers should know how to fight their squadrons and groups; they should spend several weeks relearning the threat and our defenses. Another week must be spent solving force battle problems under the aegis of the Naval War College or possibly the Surface Warfare Officers' School. A senior TAO school is now more important than the material training.
“This sort of update must even be increased, because TAOs are losing their edge rapidly through long in-port periods and infrequent exercises that challenge their skills.
[4]Despite the legal limit of from 5%-15% early selection, recent practice has been for selection boards to recommend no more than 2.5%-5% for accelerated promotion.