Foreword
The numerous articles appearing recently relative to various phases of naval organization have seemed to the writer to justify the submission of the following notes originally prepared some fifteen years ago. From time to time since, generally in connection with some proposed amalgamation of all staff corps with the line, they have been revised, hence the numerous references to amalgamation.
In their present form they present some aspects of naval organization not hitherto noted by the writer in any of the discussions that have come to his notice. They also stress from a different point of view certain aspects covered by other discussions. These different aspects which are considered of especial weight are as follows:
(a) The differentiation of production engineering from operating engineering. (See especially paragraph 6.)
(b) The constructive value of criticism (and of friction as a means of arousing criticism) and the necessity for isolating production in order that criticism may lodge most effectively. (See paragraphs 7, 25, and 26.)
(c) Comments on industrial management as a super-specialty. (See Paragraphs 9, 10, and 26.)
(d) The need for a large minority group with a production engineering 'deal in order to attain the best results of criticism and of balance. (See Paragraphs 12, 23, and 26.)
(e) The necessity that the Department organization be established by aw, but that the legal provisions be restricted to the minimum possible consistent with proper functioning. (See paragraphs 30 and 35.)
(f) The necessity for placing absolute responsibility on the head of each major function and giving him assistants having no personal prerogative and no responsibility to any authority higher than their immediate superior. (See paragraphs 32 and 34.)
The scheme as set forth is not submitted with the idea that it is a cure for all the Navy’s ills or that, even if such were the case, its adoption would be immediately possible; but as a statement of what the writer believes would be the fundamental elements of a practicable organization.
1. That the profession of the line officer is too extensive for complete mastery by a single individual seems to be demonstrated by the development within the line of specialists along various lines; as for instance, strategy, tactics, radio, ordnance, gunnery, fire control, etc. The specialty of “Engineering” (by which word is meant in service parlance, “Propulsive Machinery”) is also, by law, within the line but its fundamental character as a separate profession has compelled its being placed in a special status which gives to the body of officers specializing in it many of the characteristics of a corps, and these characteristics seem to the writer to be increasing rapidly.
2. In civil life the professions of naval architecture and civil engineering are considered too broad to be covered as a whole by single individuals and there are specialists in .yacht design, cargo vessels, passenger vessels, small boats, etc., by naval architects; and in hydraulics, bridge construction, architecture, building construction, road building, railroad engineering, etc., by civil engineers. The fact that there is such specializing under conditions of commercial competition argues for the adequacy of even these subdivisions as fields for exclusive endeavor; in other words, for the equivalent of corps organization in the Navy.
3. .There have been, in the line of the Navy, officers of such outstanding ability that they were capable of performing their line duties acceptably and of making an excellent showing of efficiency in one of the staff corps specialties. Similar statement might be made relative to the ability of certain staff officers to perform line duties in addition to their staff duties had opportunity for demonstration ever been permitted; but it seems to the writer to stand to reason that officers of such outstanding ability would, in the long run, accomplish more for the country by following lines to which they had given undivided attention than could possibly be the case if their experience were interrupted.
4. In an organization as large as the Navy, especially if it be a government organization where success must often be measured in terms less tangible than dollars and cents, special attention must necessarily be given to developing an organization adapted to the average attainments of the personnel. There will always be officers who by virtue of natural ability, personality, and dogged persistence in their natural bent, will acquire outstanding position and reputation as specialists under any condition of service but in practically all cases this will be the result of exclusive devotion to the specialty. The number of such officers will at no time be sufficient to perform more than a small part of the routine technical work of the specialty, and the remainder must be performed by officers of only average attainments both as to technical ability and as to persistence in application. Average attainment in any specialty will be raised by an organization which prevents digression from the main path on the part of those who have not the persistence to fight for uninterrupted experience as specialists, and also by an organization which throws them into continuous close association and competition with others in the same restricted line of endeavor. This argues strongly for corps organization and applies as well to the line as to the staff.
5. Esprit de corps is high among naval officers and should be recognized as a strong force towards efficiency but there is lacking to naval officers, from the very necessity of the case, that condition which in commercial life makes income almost a direct measure of efficiency. In the Navy, income is fixed by rank and length of service alone; and so long as conduct is satisfactory and professional reputation as measured by service standards is high enough to insure selection, income increases with promotion as a matter of routine. It is therefore highly important that service standards be made as nearly as possible comparable with those which in outside life produce what might be called “bread and butter” efficiency. This also argues for corps organization since the service standard of reputation is thereby brought to a focus in each special activity with its own measures of efficiency instead of having to depend, as would be the case of the amalgamated specialists, on reports of fitness submitted by officers of whom few have specialized in the particular specialty and of whom many have no ability even to appraise in that specialty. Under amalgamation, fitness reports submitted under these unsatisfactory conditions must later be interpreted by a selection board working under the same limitations, and the net result must be adverse to the specialist unless he has been able to acquire a Position of such outstanding preeminence that the board’s action is virtually only an expression of service opinion; and such cases are rare.
6. Engineering, in the broad sense, has two branches, namely: production and operation. In the Navy, operating engineering must of necessity be confined almost exclusively to seagoing officers and all seagoing officers should therefore be operating engineers, but the method of recruiting line officers falls far short of insuring that this is the case. There has, unfortunately, been an almost universal confusion in the Navy of operating engineering with engineering as a whole. While operation and maintenance of a mechanism or structure involve a considerable element of engineering as a whole, they are, after all, only, a minor portion. The major part, in the strictly professional sense, is production. Operation will give the operator a very definite and exact knowledge of the suitability or unsuitability of any construction and of the results which ought to be obtained, but it does not, by any means, necessarily (although under the confusion above indicated it is very prevalently assumed to do so), qualify him for taking charge of production. The knowledge of suitability or unsuitability need not, and generally does not, result from a study of fundamentals of production. As a matter of fact the essential knowledge special to the operator, in so far as it affects design and production, may be communicated in great completeness during a short interview or in relatively short correspondence, whereas production, depending as it does on knowledge of materials, formula and processes, as well as on experience in shop methods and supervision of personnel not subject to military discipline, is a vast field in which, in most cases, the operator is without experience. From its magnitude no one may hope to have a comprehensive knowledge of it unless he devotes his whole time to it. This consideration, in the writer’s opinion, argues strongly for specialists in production (in other words, for corps organization). The lack of appreciation of this essential difference between the two branches of engineering is not by any means restricted to the line but its prevalence in the service is almost wholly responsible for failure to realize the impossibility of attaining the highest efficiency under amalgamation. It has been demonstrated times without number that the production engineer may with little delay become an accomplished operating engineer, but the reverse is rarely the case and when true implies ability so much above the average as to constitute an exception to prove the rule.
7. An argument often advanced for amalgamation is that it would reduce friction. Line-staff friction has often been carried to such excess that it temporarily injured the service, but the writer strongly disagrees with the idea generally to be inferred from argument of the subject, that friction in itself is lastingly harmful to the service. On the contrary he considers criticism (the source and often the essence of friction) the nearest possible substitute, in a service such as the Navy is, for the “bread and butter” efficiency of civil life. Efficiency growing out of criticism only is not of the ideal type but it is incumbent on the Navy to conserve every possible incentive to efficiency, and criticism is one of the most important. In itself and within reasonable limits it is extremely constructive. The fact that it is carried to excess does not disprove its constructive value; and the ideal organization for the Navy is one which recognizes it at its true value and provides a segregation of activities so that criticism by the user shall land absolutely and without the possibility of evasion upon the producer. This consideration also argues for corps organization since the line, being preeminently the user, is therefore the natural critic of engineering productions and only by corps organization can the producing engineering function be sufficiently isolated to prevent evasion of the line’s criticism. If at times criticism is unjust and temporarily harmful to the service, such a condition would imply only the frailty-of human nature and should be accepted as such. Unfair or partisan criticism could not, in the writer’s opinion, begin to do the harm that would be done by abridgement of criticism or by making its evasion possible.
8. While the measure of efficiency by pecuniary standards is not generally practicable in the Navy there are certain production activities which so closely resemble commercial activities that comparison of costs is possible. Comparison of costs in these particular lines gives to members of Congress, in many cases, their conception of the efficiency of the Navy as a whole. It therefore behooves the Navy, both as a matter of expediency and as a matter of duty to the taxpayers, to adopt an organization that m these respects will permit costs comparing as favorably as possible with those obtained by commercial establishments. The organization for doing so would increase the certainty of taking advantage of economical developments growing out of industrial competition and would decrease the “apartness” of the Navy from the civilian population. Both these results are most desirable.
9. In civil life industrial plants are headed by managers who have arisen to their positions (except rarely in cases of special favoritism due to capital investment) through demonstrated efficiency along strictly production lines. They may have frequently changed positions but it is rare (so rare as to be negligible) that they have not been continuously and intimately associated with production engineering for long periods. Such managers are preeminently the product of training superposed on inborn “faculty.” Our navy yards are essentially industrial plants and they have not as a rule been efficiently managed for the reason that we have never had in the Navy a sufficient number of officers qualified both by natural bent and by training to fill all the managerial positions. A few line officers have shown outstanding ability in this direction but their efficiency would have been much higher had they come to the position through years of intimate connection with production engineering. A few naval constructors have likewise been notably efficient but a commission in the construction corps, even though coupled with years of industrial experience, does not, ipso facto, qualify a naval constructor as an industrial manager in the highest sense despite the general belief in the Navy at large that all naval constructors think so and in spite of the too prevalent opinion in the construction corps itself that it does.
10. Industrial management is a super-specialty, the talent for which is likely to develop rather late in life. Since it depends to a large degree on special bent, only a small percentage of production engineers in the wider sense ever attain the highest efficiency in it. Officers of the line assigned as managers, have generally been so detailed because they happened to have the rank assumed to be necessary for the particular position to be filled and happened to be available, or because they had acquired some reputation as operating engineers or in the very limited amount of production engineering possible afloat. Their efficiency has almost invariably suffered, even when they possessed native ability, through lack of experience; and by the time they had acquired a modicum of experience they were ordered to sea and the cycle, in so far as it affected industrial management, was repeated. Naval constructor managers have generally been chosen with better judgment but some limitations have been imposed by considerations of rank and still greater limitations by the fact that the corps has never been large enough so that the percentage of its members possessing natural bent for the super-specialty would supply an adequate number of super-specialists to fill the positions. At the same time, under the conditions existing, civil engineers even though they might be competent both by bent and training, were not available. Thus on the whole the efficiency of line officer managers was reduced or destroyed by lack of experience even when (as was not by any means always the case) they had the bent, and the efficiency of the constructor managers was often not what it should have been because the corps was too small to produce the number of men who had super-specialized to fill the places. Experience can be given by training; natural ability and bent come by birth. Therefore, neither the line nor the construction corps, nor both as at present constituted and administered, can be depended upon to supply efficient managers in sufficient numbers. Under amalgamation the conditions unfavorable to high efficiency now inherent in the considerations governing detail of line officer managers would be extended to all managers and average efficiency would suffer. The above comments argue strongly for a large group of production engineering specialists from which by natural and voluntary super-specialization a sufficient number of those born with the bent will graduate from the school of industrial experience as competent managers. Those not attaining excellence as managers would still be amply employed in other production lines and failure to qualify as manager would not imply failure in efficiency. One of the ablest design engineers I have ever known was so lacking in the faculty for management that while he was senior assistant on an enormous enterprise not connected with the Navy, his senior could leave the job only in fear and trembling as to what condition he would find when he returned. Yet in his own field as a designing engineer this man was a wonder and never received one-tenth of the credit he had honestly earned.
11. The question of who shall perform duties ashore during war times has a weighty bearing on the subject. A line officer qualified to command, or qualified in duties leading to command, is necessarily imbued with the feeling that his maximum usefulness, to say nothing of his maximum opportunity for glory, lies in duties afloat in time of war and he has a right to feel aggrieved at being confined to industrial duties at such a time. On the other hand, the member of a corps trained to the thought that his value to the government lies in production engineering, will be satisfied to continue his regular duties in time of war. No one who had the chance to observe the disorganization of navy yards at the outbreak of the Spanish-American War or the World War, due to the perfectly natural and laudable desire of line officers to get to the front, could fail to recognize the need of having a body of officers possessed of the ideal that their glory, in time of war as well as of peace, lies in the efficient performance of production engineering work.
12. There is another strong argument for a large and separate production engineering group, whether consisting of one corps or several corps, based on the consideration that there should always be a strong minority ideal in every organization to act as a balance wheel on the majority. Its value is proven by .history throughout the ages. Lack of progress results from unopposed or only slightly opposed supremacy almost as quickly as from actual inefficiency. The line while possessed of the highest ideals is, after all, only human and the writer considers the maintenance of such a minority point of view (absolutely necessary also to insure segregation for criticism) especially a need in a military organization in a country where the military function is fundamentally conceived as being subordinate to the civil authority.
13. It is insistently argued by proponents of amalgamation that all the benefits of specialization may be safeguarded by provisions such as govern assignment to engineering duty only of certain officers in the present line. The writer has long held the opinion that such a status was illogical and dwarfing of efficiency in the specialty. Advantage has therefore been taken of every opportunity to learn the attitude of mind of these officers towards their status insofar as it affects their profession and their relations with other line officers. It is found that they may .be divided roughly into four classes.
14. The first class is made up of officers who were more or less passively injected into the status by circumstances. These could hardly be expected to attain more than a modicum of efficiency even if they were held absolutely to their specialty and served uninterruptedly in a corps of similar specialists, but their present status in the line so fails in imposing the best conditions of development on them that they are much less efficient than they should be.
15. The second class consists of men often of excellent ability and with considerable faculty for their specialty, who, through failure to clearly distinguish the difference between production engineering and operating engineering, fail to visualize the magnitude and importance of either and conscientiously believe in amalgamation. Such officers frequently become dissatisfied when they attain the higher ranks because they conscientiously feel they are qualified to command and should be allowed to do so if they desire.
16. The third class consists of officers with a vision of the magnitude of their specialty who have accepted their present status as being the one permitting the nearest approximation to ideal conditions now possible but who are constantly chafing under the present limitations on purely professional development and resent their inability to achieve the highest results, without possessing personality enough or persistence enough to achieve their ideals despite the limitations. The state of mind of such officers may be gathered from a statement by one of them to the writer to the general effect that he was inclined to be sorry he had applied for engineering duty on account of lack of freedom to follow it and moreover was not at all sure he liked the company he was in on account of the large number of those similarly assigned who fell under the heading outlined in paragraphs above.
17. The fourth class consists of those with a vision of the magnitude of their specialty and possessed of enough personality and persistence to be able to actually follow it fully. Their number is small but they are almost invariably pointed to as a proof of the success of amalgamation. They should be considered only as the exceptions proving the rule to the contrary.
18. The above are the outstanding arguments for corps organization as the writer sees them. Carried to their extreme limits of application they would call for a corps of strategists, a corps of tacticians, a corps of command officers, a corps of fire control officers, a corps of radio experts, a corps of powder experts, a corps of electrical engineers, a corps of accountants, a corps of disbursing officers, a corps of storekeepers, a corps of industrial managers, a corps of naval architects, a corps of civil engineers, and for many other corps. And to make these corps theoretically most effective each corps would culminate in a bureau. Such an organization while ideal from the strictly specialist viewpoint would be so difficult of coordination as to be utterly impracticable. Discussion of these difficulties is reserved for a later paragraph and will not be pursued further here. There are, however, certain functions of such magnitude and so essentially critical of each other that regardless of all rules and regulations they will virtually segregate themselves into independent organizations. Therefore the fundamental question of concentration (amalgamation) resolves itself into the question of how far amalgamation may proceed and along what lines without killing the efficient performance of the various functions.
19. In the writer’s opinion the most practicable method of approaching, as nearly as the numerous conflicting elements will permit, to the ideal organization is by doing away with the present Supply Corps, Construction Corps, and Corps of Civil Engineers and by establishing a corps made up of all the officers now specializing in production engineering in its various forms. These would include in addition to the present supply officers, naval constructors, and civil engineers, those officers who have specialized in the production phases of the duties now under the cognizance of the Bureaus of Ordnance, Engineering, and Aeronautics. There would be some room for argument as to the desirability of including the officers of the present Supply Corps but after careful consideration the writer is of the opinion they should be included for reasons set forth in a succeeding paragraph.
20. Some officers of the experience outlined above might not be willing to be transferred to such a corps and should be given the privilege of remaining in or transferring to the line but only on condition that they qualify for line duties.
21. The proposed corps might be logically referred to as either the Engineer Corps or the Industrial Corps. The personal preference of the writer is for the title of Engineer Corps and that title will be used during the rest of this discussion.
22. The duties now performed by officers of the Supply Corps cover four well defined specialties in civil life, viz.: storekeeping, purchasing, disbursing, and commissary management. The three first named are common to duty ashore and at sea. Duty as commissary manager would be almost exclusively performed at sea. It might, therefore, be argued with considerable show of logic that the principal duties of the present supply officers are in connection with operating functions and that they should either be retained as a separate corps or amalgamated with the line. Retention as a separate corps is undesirable on account of difficulty of coordination. Amalgamation with the line would be unwise on account of the responsibility of these officers to the Treasury Department additional to their responsibility to the Navy Department. This additional responsibility grows primarily out of their accounting and disbursing functions and has resulted in the promulgation of a mass of laws, regulations, Treasury Department decisions and legal decisions so great that in themselves they constitute the most vital governing condition of service and more than any of the strictly naval duties of these officers set them apart unescapably as specialists. No officer could afford to take the financial risk attaching to the disbursement of naval funds and materials without continuous service in those lines for he would be absolutely within the power of his subordinates. This primary argument for segregation as specialists has no bearing on the question of whether or not the present Supply Corps officers should be included among those of the proposed Engineer Corps but it seems to the writer that those activities common to duty ashore and afloat have a more vital relation to the efficiency of production engineering than to that of operating engineering and for that reason and in order to avoid a separate corps it is deemed that the greatest efficiency of the service would result from inclusion of the present supply officers in the proposed Engineer Corps. The question as between inclusion in the Engineer Corps and retention as a separate corps is admittedly open to argument but the special character of the duties is so fundamental that to his thinking the only alternative to including them in the Engineer Corps is to retain them as a separate corps, which as stated above is most undesirable on account of difficulty of coordination.
23. The protagonists of amalgamation of staff with line stoutly maintain that the separateness and opportunity for development of the various productive engineering specialties could be as absolutely assured under amalgamation as by separate corps existence and would naturally apply that argument against the proposed Engineer Corps. The two conditions necessary in the Navy to insure the highest efficiency of the various individual specialties are: first, some common concept or ideal sufficiently strong and universal within the group to which the specialist belongs to give appreciation on the part of all the members of the group of the need for freedom of each specialty to develop and to function freely; and, second, a group large enough to constitute a strong minority in professional ideals as compared with the line. This common concept in the proposed Engineer Corps would be supplied by the common ideal of production engineering and its possession by all members would be automatically insured by the fact' that assignments to the corps would be made only on application growing out of natural inclination and after special training to permit accurate judgment of suitability before admission. The line is necessarily made up of all the graduates of the Naval Academy for whom vacancies exist and there is no condition for entrance except satisfactory completion of the Naval Academy course. The graduates will, of course, include many, possibly a majority, who have no production engineering bent and many who will not seek to specialize at all even in specialties logically falling within the line; hence the universal possession of the engineering concept by line officers is impossible and unless the universally common concept exists the specialty will suffer. There have been numerous orders and regulations specifically setting forth the Department’s wishes that specialists be given opportunity for development and providing machinery intended to make them effective, but these cannot provide the productive engineering atmosphere and the ideal will not thrive other than in the proper atmosphere, which, to the writer’s thinking, can be supplied only by restriction of the production engineering specialists by law to a group universally possessing that concept and with a status as a group coordinate with that of the operating engineering group, the line. That the proposed Engineer Corps must be a creature of law will be apparent to anyone who has kept track in a critical way of the cycles through which every policy of the Navy Department not specifically defined by law has traveled even when, as has been far from always the case, the stated policy was not practically ignored by the service.
24. The establishment of an Engineer Corps as outlined above would be worthwhile under any conditions but its value would be only a fraction of what it should be unless the organization of the Navy Department were radically changed and consideration of this phase of the matter is therefore necessary.
25. A material advance in ideals of Navy Department organization and administration was made when Secretary Meyer approved the establishment of the Divisions of Operation, Personnel and Material in 1909. There was complete failure on the part of those responsible for preparing the details of the scheme to appreciate the separateness of, and the essentially critical relations of production and operation to each other (the criticism growing out of which is the highest possible form of “inspection”) so the Meyer scheme called for a Division of Inspection coordinate with the other three. The function of inspection is extremely important and should be amply provided for in any organization but its existence as a coordinate division of the Navy Department was illogical and the natural logic of the case caused its discontinuation as soon as its existence ceased to be necessary to preserve the “face” of the protagonists of the organization as a whole; in other words, as soon as logic and not partisanship came into play. The bitter controversy incident to the establishment of the organization did much temporary harm to the service but is the most outstanding demonstration the writer knows of the assertion made above that criticism ultimately results in good and should never be abridged. The full discussion which the system received could not have occurred had there not been corps organization- in fact the divisional organization was the direct, though unacknowledged, outgrowth of the efforts of the Construction Corps to establish functional organization at navy yards and was the line conception of what the corresponding Department functional organization should be. It fell far short of what it should have been for two reasons: the minor one of a coordinate inspection division (involving unnecessary correspondence) and the major one of failure to abolish the bureaus. So long as the bureaus existed they were answerable to the law for expenditures and the chiefs of divisions had no real authority, hence the Meyer organization in reality added four offices to the already too many through which correspondence had to pass, and corresponding delay and red tape resulted.
26. Failure to abolish the bureaus was doubtless due to opposition of the naval constructors and of the Bureaus of Construction and Repair and Supplies and Accounts and this opposition was expressed, as was the sentiment on the other side, in far too partisan a spirit. However, even had the bureaus been abolished at that time the organization would still have fallen short of ideal efficiency due to its failure to even conceive, to say nothing of recognize, the existence of operating engineering as an entirely separate branch from production engineering and a branch essentially critical of it. This failure was natural when it is remembered that almost without exception all of the aides under Secretary Meyer represented the extreme military conception of naval activity, a point of view essentially incapable of possessing the production engineering concept.
27. It may be stated positively that the ideal organization must provide for isolating the function of providing material (of which the largest and most important element is production) from the other two logical functions recognized by the Meyer scheme and for so fixing its relation to them that their criticism shall land absolutely and without possibility of evasion. It is equally essential that the head of the material division (in whom all the production engineering functions head up) shall have the highest technical and managerial ability and experience. This absolutely demands that he be a member of the Engineer Corps. The principle of strong minority representation, the necessity of which I have tried above to make clear, is also fulfilled by this condition. The line as the ultimate means of making the fleet effective as an operated agency should dictate policies and should enunciate the ideals which the material should meet but, having done that, it should leave the technical details of providing the material to be worked out as a strictly production engineering problem under production engineering specialists but still subject to operating engineering criticism (inspection) of results.
28. The three proposed heads of divisions in the Department together with the Assistant Secretary would logically form a cabinet to the Secretary of which a majority in technical naval matters would properly be line officers and in which the civilian nonpolitical point of view would be represented by the Assistant Secretary. It would be rare that any secretary would not instinctively defer to line opinion as representing the heart of the Navy and this would reinforce the line’s numerical majority in his cabinet as it should do, but it would be a sorry day for the Navy in the writer’s opinion, should there be failure to have the production engineering specialists represented in this cabinet by a production engineering specialist, preferably the most able of all these specialists and of the most judicial temperament.
29. In the reorganized Navy Department as proposed above it will be noted that the Assistant Secretary is retained but his status should be changed so that he would be a permanent nonpolitical appointee in order that he might carry over from Secretary to Secretary in a more authoritative way than is now possible through the Chief Clerk (who is now the senior permanent nonpolitical civilian official) the policies and the ideals of the Department from the non-political civilian point of view. While the details of his responsibilities would naturally and logically vary with different secretaries he would necessarily represent to a large degree the civilian ideals of the government, especially the right of the civilian authority to exercise supervision over efficiency of expenditures and over civilian personnel. This would mean that fundamentally the Secretary would represent the political will of the people as exemplified in the party in power; the Assistant Secretary would represent the will of the people in business matters and would be liaison officer between the civilian political dominating power and the technical naval organization maintained by that power for sea protection; the aides would represent the technical naval organization, having nothing to do with politics and actuated by the ideal that technical results in the extreme event of war would be more important to the nation than absolute economy at any time but with the element of production engineering effectively represented both as a means of obtaining the most efficient tool for the nation’s naval protection and as a means of obtaining it at the smallest practicable cost to the nation.
30. The idea that the bureau is the theoretically logical focus of each specialty has been set forth above, but the number of bureaus now existing is not logical from a practical standpoint, due both to the illogical distribution of cognizance causing much paralleling of effort by different bureaus and to difficulties of coordination growing simply out of the number of bureaus. A minor cause of this difficulty is also the very human tendency for each bureau chief to exalt his bureau’s specialty to a position not justified by the general good. As now existing each bureau is charged by law (as embodied principally in the appropriation acts) with responsibility for expenditures of certain definite appropriations to accomplish work largely detailed in the acts; and although the Secretary has power to distribute duties among the bureaus this does not prevent the condition that in the matter of expenditures the bureau is fundamentally answerable to the law and not to the Secretary. It is out of this condition that almost all of the power of the bureaus, and a large percentage of the red tape in the Department, grow. The law, by imposing penalties for dereliction, implies the liability, at least, of criminal acts on the part of every government official. Partisan politics has fostered the assumption on the part of a large percentage of the citizens of the country that every government official (or at least all those with whom the particular citizen is not personally acquainted) is a grafter. The net result is to place the government official in the position of being popularly and often legally, though informally, adjudged guilty of grafting unless he can prove the contrary. Out of this condition and the resulting necessity for each official in primary responsibility for expenditure of an appropriation to have written records to prove his innocence of malfeasance, grows nearly all the complication and delay known as “red tape.” Observation indicates that the amount of red tape increases more nearly in geometrical than in arithmetical progression as the number of coordinate establishments increases. Hence the more bureaus, the much more red tape. Avoidance of red tape therefore means reduction in the number of coordinate agencies with responsibility directly to the law. This does not however mean that all the functions of the Navy may be handled efficiently without legal authority for certain bureaus or divisions subordinate to the Secretary, and even if this were possible it is inconceivable that Congress would be willing to keep its hands off the department organization to that extent. The adoption of the organization based on the three logically coordinate divisions of operations, personnel, and material would effect an enormous reduction in correspondence and red tape and would be, the writer believes, a minimum on account of the essentially fundamental character of the functions and their mutually critical relations. By making the appropriations in lump sums under these three heads, a maximum of operating efficiency would be obtained with the minimum of accounting complications and even more absolute control of expenditure than is now the case could be reserved to Congress by placing a limit on details of expenditures from those lump sums instead of, as now, making detailed appropriations.
31. The exact distribution of present bureau and independent activities among the three proposed divisions would in some cases have to be more or less arbitrary but if the clear distinction between production and operation is kept in mind an entirely practicable distribution can be made. Personnel and material are in the largest sense the producers for the use of operations but operations and personnel would in some matters be the producers for material; and operations and material the producers for personnel; and each would be the inspector of the others’ work. Each would therefore maintain a more or less well developed inspection organization as a component part of its makeup.
32. It would be exceedingly important that material production and maintenance should be absolutely under the cognizance of the Material Division by law but this does not mean that in minor cases the Material Division should not delegate the performance of minor production and maintenance functions to the head (not to any subordinate) of a particular operative establishment. This would always be the condition in so far as maintenance of equipment afloat by the ship’s force is concerned but in all such cases the material function should rest in the immediately responsible senior. When members of the Engineer Corps were ordered to duty in connection with essentially operation or personnel activities (as should be freely done and vice versa) it should be in subordinate or consultative capacities and the detail should be considered as the loan of special experience to the other activity and not the extension of the activity constituting the main responsibility of the division to which the personnel belongs.
33. The Medical Corps and Chaplain Corps might be maintained as separate bureaus without very great difficulties of coordination so long as construction and maintenance of hospital buildings was always recognized as a material function, but they should be essentially subordinate to the Personnel Division. The Judge Advocate General would logically pertain to this division also as would the Selection Board and Examining and Retiring Boards and the hospitals and Naval Home. The solicitor would represent more a civilian than a military function and might be answerable directly to the Secretary or Assistant Secretary as coordination would not be difficult on account of his limited contact with the three main functions. The General Board and Board of Inspection would logically belong to operations. The functions of the various staff departments of the Marine Corps would be merged into the appropriate main division if the corps were not retained in its separate status as at present (for which there is considerable argument) and all functions now exercised by the various bureaus not an essential element of production would be transferred to the appropriate operating or personnel division.
34. Certain specialties such as Marine Corps (if not retained in its present status), Medicine, Chaplain’s work, Judge Advocate General’s work, Design of Ships, Propulsive Machinery, Aircraft, Ordnance, Civil Engineering, Purchase and Issue of Materials, etc., are of such outstanding and fundamental importance that they are entitled to special recognition and dignity in carrying out the scheme and this recognition could be accorded by preserving to them the present titles and rank of the chiefs of the bureaus to which they now pertain but they should be definitely and permanently deprived of their present direct responsibility to the law for expenditure of appropriations and should be simply assistants to the head of their division and with no power or authority other than that delegated to them by him as his assistants. Then if the ordnance function had special interest in a hull construction problem the Chief of Ordnance and the Chief Constructor would confer verbally and work out the plan jointly either in person or through their assistants; their conclusion would (without correspondence between them) be embodied in the appropriate letter and would be signed by or in the name of the Chief of Material to whom would attach all the responsibility to the law for the expenditure involved and who would have to suffer for their dereliction just as now the Captain of the ship must suffer for the dereliction of his watch officers unless there is actual fault on their part of a kind which is personal rather than administrative.
35. The consolidated industrial management now in effect at some navy yards would be, under this scheme, the standard navy yard organization and would be answerable to the Division of Material (details handled by an assistant to the Chief of Division occupying exactly the same relation to him and having the same rank as that of the other chiefs) in much the same way as is now in effect. Numerous officers not belonging to the Engineer Corps would be attached to the yards and would be given appropriate duties by the manager under general direction of the Commandant and not by the orders of the Department. To assign officers to any subordinate position in a yard by specific orders of the Department results in somewhat the same anomalous relation between the Commandant and the Department as now exists between the bureaus and the Department in that such officers would be answerable more or less to the Department instead of to the Commandant, just as the bureaus are now answerable to the law instead of to the Department. The principle of concentrating all responsibility and authority absolutely in the immediate head of each activity and of so wording every communication as to recognize his subordinates only as his assistants with no independent authority or responsibility is exceedingly important—so much so as to be fundamental to the reduction of red tape to the minimum.
36. The idea of organization as set forth above has been discussed freely with many officers. Two objections to it have frequently been made. One was that presumably the officers of the Engineer Corps would object to going to sea and would therefore fail to get the viewpoint of the operating branch of the service. The other was that, by virtue of control of appropriations, the head of the Material Division would exercise undue power in the Navy.
37- The objection last mentioned would seem to be answered by the fact that under the scheme of appropriations above advocated operations and personnel would each have control of appropriations equal to, possibly larger than, that pertaining to material and in addition two of the three Chiefs of Division in the Navy Department would represent the combatant branch of the service. N in spite of these two facts the Chief of Material were able to dominate the situation unduly, the situation would call less for his suppression or the suppression of any of the functions of his division than for a change in the chiefs of the other divisions. The argument seems to the writer to be without force.
38. The objection based on assumed lack of sea service for officers of the Engineer Corps is much more valid. It has been unfortunate both for the Navy and the Construction Corps that naval constructors have not in the past had more sea service. That they have not done so has been due more to lack of numbers 1° adequately cover the duties which must be covered on shore than to a lack of appreciation of the benefits to be derived from sea service and, in the writer’s opinion, every officer of the proposed Engineer Corps should have regular sea duty. That does not admit however that it should be distributed as most of the advocates of it propose or as has been proposed in most of the Printed discussions of the subject. In the line, whose specialty is operation of ships in accordance with the best available principles navigation, tactics and strategy so that they may most efficiently serve the interests of the country, it is a well-recognized principle that as officers advance in the service and gain a wider administrative experience the ratio of their sea service to their shore service decreases. The same principle should govern as relates to officers of the Engineer Corps but the argument for a greater percentage of shore duty at all times, and especially with advance in rank, is much stronger. The officer of the Engineer Corps who had arrived at the rank of commander or captain should never go to sea for a period long enough to seriously affect the continuity of his strictly productive engineering experience nor (of course) should he go except on the staff of the commander- in-chief or the commander of a large section (division or squadron) of the fleet (a possible additional exception might be as Engineer Officer of capital ships). His sea service should be partly in a consultative capacity and partly to permit him to absorb at first hand the personal relations and vital characteristics of the seagoing point of view. A maximum of six months at a time repeated about once in four years ought to be ample for a captain or commander. Junior officers should go oftener and stay longer for the reason that in addition to acquiring the benefits outlined above they should have direct and personal responsibility under the captain for maintenance work which is strictly in the line of their specialty. They should never go to sea for more than a year at a time however.
39. This discussion would not be complete without some consideration of the method to be adopted for recruiting officers for the proposed Engineer Corps. It was unfortunate that all of the older officers of the Construction Corps were assigned permanently to the corps almost immediately after graduation and in a few cases before they really knew their own minds or had had a chance to strongly develop even in embryo the production engineering bent. There was sometimes a lack of feeling of responsibility on the part of commanding officers in making recommendations for assignments to the corps, an extreme illustration of which found utterance to the writer by one commanding officer relative to one cadet whom he had recommended “because I thought he might make a good naval constructor. The Lord knows he was absolutely useless aboard ship.” The seniors in his prospective corps were then entirely without opportunity to judge his probable efficiency from actual observation.
40. Every consideration of conservation of productive engineering as a profession and of its best relation to the service as its efficient servant dictates that the following questions shall be definitely and affirmatively answered by or for each candidate for assignment to the proposed Engineer Corps before he is commissioned therein:
- Has he the mental characteristics which will make him more useful to the service as an officer of the Engineer Corps than as an officer of the line?
- Is he convinced in his own mind that as a life activity he would prefer duty in the Engineer Corps rather than duty in the line?
- Has he the strictly professional fundamental education necessary as a ground work for his duty in the Engineer Corps?
41. The opportunity for obtaining the correct answer to all three of these questions would it is believed, best be afforded by the routine outlined below:
- At the end of the second class year at the Naval Academy give each midshipman the privilege of applying for a commission in the Engineer Corps for a particular specialty and continue the Privilege to ensigns until they have had eighteen months service as such.
- Until the applicant has reached the end of his second year of service as an ensign permit him at any time to change his application to a different specialty from that originally named.
- Permit the applicant to cancel his application at any time prior to actual commissioning in the Engineer Corps, the cancellation resulting in his continuing in the line for strictly line duties subject to examination.
- Send all applicants to sea on actively cruising ships for their three years’ service as ensign.
- Assign applicants to strictly line duties for the first year of their service afloat and after that give them progressively more continuous and more responsible duty in their chosen specialty in so far as it is possible to do so aboard ship, taking care that this duty shall include a fair proportion of routine drudgery along the line of the specialty.
- At the completion of three years at sea as an ensign send the applicant to a civilian technical school for three years to pursue a course in his chosen specialty taking care that he is placed in classes with men who are studying for the practice of the specialty in civil life. (This is for the purpose of giving him some insight into the considerations which lead to “bread and butter” efficiency in civil life.)
- Send him to some shore station for routine drudgery work in his specialty during his first vacation from his educational course and to sea for the same type of duty during his second vacation.
- For two years after graduation from the educational course send him to a shore station for routine work in his chosen specialty (to as great an extent as possible, these activities to be in the nature of drudgery).
- Then send him to sea for one year with the privilege of ' serving either on deck or in his specialty.
- If he then still chooses to follow his specialty, commission him in the Engineer Corps provided he is recommended for it by all his commanding officers both line and staff. Otherwise, unless the Chief of the Division of Material recommends to the contrary, do not assign him to the corps.
- Promote him regularly under a line commission until his commission in the Engineer Corps is given him.
- After being commissioned in the Engineer Corps, give him the privilege for three years to return to the line provided he passes the regular line examination for the rank he then holds.
- Give to all line officers of not less than nine and not more than twelve years commissioned service the privilege of transferring to the Engineer Corps as extra numbers and without loss of rank or precedence provided their transfer is recommended by the Chief of Material and provided they pass a satisfactory examination before a board composed of officers of the Engineer Corps.
42. The net results of this procedure would be as follows:
- It would be unfair to the line in that it would throw back into the line those who failed either through vacillation or lack of bent to get commissions in the Engineer Corps. This unfairness would however be offset to some extent by the special training received by those officers who made application and took the course but then declined to accept commissions in the Engineer Corps.
- It would compensate the service at large for the expense of the special training of those not commissioned in the Engineer Corps through their wider usefulness as operating engineers.
- It would insure that no unsuitable candidate would be commissioned by requiring favorable reports on his suitability by all seniors in both the line and the Engineer Corps.
- It would insure that the candidate had had sufficient service m both branches to give him assurance in his own mind that he really desired assignment to the Engineer Corps but would give opportunity still for three years to change his mind.
- It would give a limited opportunity to get into the Engineer Corps to the men whose special engineering bent developed late, as is sometimes the case.
- It would insure that all officers of the Engineer Corps were possessed of sufficient sea service to appreciate the seagoing point of view. This would be continued by progressively shorter and less frequent tours of sea duty in later life.
43. Each officer in the Engineer Corps would train for and continuously function primarily in the specialty for which he was trained and the common ideal of production engineering throughout the membership of the corps could safely be trusted to insure that he were left free to attain the highest development of which he was capable in this specialty. The specialists of all kinds would be carried on one list, their places being fixed by general rules of promotion, rank and precedence and their numbers being determined for each specialty according to the estimated requirements at time of entry. The character of each officer’s specialty would be indicated by some reference mark opposite his name on the list. Each officer regardless of his specialty would be considered as in training for voluntary super-specialization in industrial management and as being eligible under general rules as to rank and service (not specialty) to the positions of Manager at navy yards and Chief of Material at the Department.
44. Details of procedure to care for maintaining the precedence, etc. of candidates have not been discussed as this is a matter of detail rather than of principle and could readily be worked out. Nor has the question of how many officers should be assigned to e Engineer Corps nor the possible development of operating specialists in the line been discussed. These questions are interesting but are not sufficiently vital to the present discussion to justify increasing its length.