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In January of this year, Admiral James L. Holloway, Jr., U. S. Navy (Retired), died at the age of 85. A colorful officer whose naval career spanned the period from 1915 to 1959, he was a contributor to the Proceedings and a long-time friend of the Naval Institute. One of the hallmarks of his service was the concept of ‘ ‘special trust and confidence,” the phrase in each officer's commission. In the following oral history excerpt, Vice Admiral Miller explains the way in which Admiral Holloway’s style of leadership was manifested during his tour as Chief °f Naval Personnel. This is an edited version of part of an interview with Admiral Miller conducted on 19 February 1976 by Dr. John T. Mason, Jr.
After 1 completed a postgraduate course in personnel administration and training, the Bureau of Naval Personnel (BuPers) expected some pay back for the education. There was a pretty hard line about what kind of tour you owed the Navy. Furthermore, Vice Admiral James Holloway had just recently become the Chief of Naval Personnel. He had plans to give more attention to the enlisted sections in the bureau. He wanted to get more naval aviation in BuPers and was looking for people who had combat experience. When the admiral punched all the buttons on the machine, my name fell out. So I got orders to report to the Enlisted Distribution Division, which was pretty far down in the echelon of the Bureau of Naval Personnel.
My function was to distribute—assign in wholesale numbers—105,000 enlisted personnel in the aviation ratings, what we called Group IX ratings. In other words, when a young man completed recruit training and was assigned to an aviation school, I picked him up as an asset. After graduating from that school, 1 would assign him to the Pacific or the Atlantic fleet, the Training Command, or some other wholesale distribution center. Then he would get a final set of orders to a particular squadron or unit.
It was a bookkeeping job in many ways. In fact, I learned to operate an adding machine rather well, because at the end of the day I did my own computations. It was an archaic system. I was quite surprised and a little bit shocked at how archaic it was. I must confess 1 was pretty bitter about the whole operation.
After about three or four months of this, I became disenchanted with the Navy. We had a conference one morning to discuss how we were doing and how we were running the operation. The captain was a black-shoe cruiser
James L. Holloway, Jr. (1898-1984)
sailor named Barney Smith—very smart, good trooper. I cannot remember the details of the meeting, but I do remember getting fed up. Finally, I stood up and said that if I could not run the operation 100% better with a couple of IBM machines, I would eat my hat, or something like that. With that I walked out of the room, slammed the door, and left the building. I figured that was it. I would accept one of the job offers I had received and leave the Navy.
I have got to give the Navy credit— it is very forgiving. It understands youth, enthusiasm, exuberance, and overreaction. To me anyway, it has been very forgiving over the years. It was that night or the next morning that Captain Smith called me, and asked me to come in and talk. He was very straightforward. He opened up with, “I agree with you. I think we could do this job a lot better than we’re doing. We don’t have the right facilities. The system is not organized very well. We’re stuck with archaic equipment. The enlisted section is well down the echelon in priorities. The officer section gets all the glory and all the good people.”
He then added, “Now what are we going to do about it?” Of course, that is the greatest management challenge you can get. I had registered my gripe and he was calling for my solution.
1 was not without an answer. I told him that I had seen many examples of how the organization itself was confusing the issue and keeping us from doing an effective job. I could write a speed letter and distribute 4,000 technicians from the Pacific and Atlantic fleets to the shore establishment and not even know whether the Pacific and Atlantic fleets had those 4,000 men to transfer. It was that bad. It was poor accounting in the distribution system. Captain Smith suggested that I put my views on paper, and we would take it to the front office.
Well, that was a perfect challenge. Within about two weeks we were in Admiral Holloway’s office. I had some charts worked out and explained how we had some 50 or 60—1 can’t remember the exact figures now—different commands around the Navy that could distribute people and had authority to write orders on enlisted men. Only one agency had authority to write orders on officers, the Bureau of Naval Personnel. But there were more than 50 offices that could order enlisted men. 1 showed one classic example where 13 chief petty officers received a total of 28 sets of permanent change of station orders within a two-week period of time! Two of them got three sets of orders!
Admiral Holloway was a man of great stature—one of the biggest men I have ever met. To make a long story short, the admiral asked for the solution we proposed. At this time, digital computers were starting to come into the world as management tools. The Navy had installed an IBM digital computer of fairly decent size in the aviation supply office in Philadelphia.
It was operated by the Navy Supply Corps and was just getting started. Everybody interested in digital com-
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Proceedings / April 1984
puters, whether in military or civilian life, was going to Philadelphia to see what the Navy was doing. 1 had been reading about this and knew something about IBM machines and what to do with punch cards.
I pointed out to Admiral Holloway that we ought to use digital computers to help us handle data and give more attention to each enlisted man in the distribution business. At this time, Frank G. Jameson, who later became the head of the Navy League, was interested in electronics. Admiral Holloway was listening to Jameson quite a bit, and Jameson was telling him about new things coming along in electronics and that digital computers were great, and he had better get somebody on it.
Finally, the admiral called me in one day and said that he was going to take me out of the phone book and off my desk; that he would get somebody else to relieve me; that I was to take six months to go around the country and find out what digital computers were all about. Then I was to come back and advise him.
I was given carte blanche to go out and look. And I did exactly what he said. Someone was ordered in shortly thereafter and took over my desk. I moved to a little side desk, put my stuff in it, locked it, and I started going to all the computer schools around the country. I went to IBM’s courses in Poughkeepsie and Endicott, and to Remington-Rand and other outfits that were breaking into the digital computer field. IBM was the only one that really had a going operation at that time.
At the end of six months, I wrote a report to Admiral Holloway. I stated that such computers obviously had great applications to the personnel business. I wasn’t really sure (at that time) whether we could keep one big computer busy or not, with the bureau’s functions, but it could certainly help the distribution business. I also told Holloway that in order to give him a suitable recommendation on how far we ought to go, what the nature of the operation would be, and what kind of equipment we ought to get, I would need ten men for a year. He said okay. I picked five civilians and four military professionals (three officers and one chief petty officer) to join me. We got an office in the bureau and a year to analyze the Bureau of Naval Personnel from a functional point of view.
At the end of the year we gave the Admiral a report on how much of the bureau’s operation would be adaptable. We put it all together in a “red book.” You can go to the Bureau of Personnel today and ask for the “red book.”
They can show you how they have been implementing it ever since. We laid it out in phases.
Admiral Holloway bought the idea. I asked for 100 people, and two to three years to actually get all of the details worked out, to get the equipment selected and installed, so that we could set up a system. He gave me the people, and after some study, we showed him that one large computer in the Bureau of Naval Personnel and three medium-scale computers (one for each fleet, and one for the shore establishment) would be necessary. We would have to have what we called “transceiver hookups,” telephone lines through which you could send the holes in punch cards. I even got him to agree to trying an overseas radio hookup. We needed these “writers” in all the recruiting stations so that when a man was recruited, we got the basic personnel data on paper tape. The data were sent into the bureau and became a master magnetic tape record. We had to design that record, for officers and enlisted. We had to design the output products such as the officers’ register, distribution sheets, accounting sheets— the whole layout. But it would take us a couple of years to get ready to go.
Although there were some difficulties along the way, we got the idea approved all the way up the Navy chain of command, then had a sticky time of it in Congress. Some of the congressmen were not very well aware, and thought it was another wild military scheme. But Admiral Holloway carried the day. He was magnificent. He once said to me, “Miller, I don’t really understand what you’re doing, but my intuition says you’re going in the right direction, so go ahead.” He operated that way. He operated on special trust and confidence, a fundamental of the profession. That is the greatest pressure you can be under, when a man turns to you and says, “I’m not really sure I know what you’re talking about, but go ahead and do it,” boy, you go back and check the books again. You go back and make sure that what you are going to do is right, because now it is on you, not on him alone. You do not have his approval to fall back on as an alibi if it fails. I found him a great man to work with, and his support is what brought this program into being-
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Proceedings / April 1981