Comment and Discussion

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The Selected Reserve—Problem in Readiness

John D. Stempel, Lieutenant, U. S. Naval Reserve.—The mobilization of Selected Re­serve units in 1961 brought forth several claims on behalf of the Navy’s Selected Re­serve program. The four most prominent con­tentions were: 1) that the Selected Reservists were “Ready for the First GQ”; 2) that person­nel were happy to come back to serve; 3) that the “2-by-6” and 8-year inactive reservists are the “backbone” of the program; and 4) that when the Selected Reserve ships returned to reserve status, the Selected Reserve program would continue as before.

Based on experience first as an active duty Operations Officer of one of the DE’s in ques­tion, and later as a called-up CIC Officer, I feel that each of the statements is open to serious challenges going right to the heart of the Selected Reserve program.

Were the Selected Reserve crews “Ready for the First GQ?” As a matter of record, the first ships called up on the Pacific Coast were not deployed until four months after their crews reported for duty. Most of that time was spent undergoing repairs of an extensive nature, caused by the fact that the ships had received lowest priority for Shipalts, Ordalts, and repair work in general while assigned to the reserve program. In addition to this, the Group-I ships and their skeleton crews con­stantly steamed for training and public rela­tions purposes, which meant that the reduced crews did not have time to perform the main­tenance that the condition of the older ships demanded.

The material delays covered up more fun­damental defects, however, The four months repair time enabled personnel to reach a level of training which they did not even approach prior to their call-up. Many of the imbalances in rate structures aboard the ships were cor­rected during this time by personnel transfers.

The delays in deployment reduced morale, and the primitive living conditions in the 18- to 20-year-old ships, the lack of adequate training, and the apparent unreadiness of the naval establishment to utilize the ships once they were called to duty all could not be off­set by the relative ease with which the regular and reserve crews became an effective team.

Concerning the second and third claims on the attitudes and usefulness of personnel, it should be noted that there was less griping in the Navy than in the other services. Neverthe­less most of the personnel had been told that the Selected Reserves would be the last re­serve units to be called up. Thus most of them returned to active duty feeling that they had been “sold out,” an impression which was in­tensified by the obvious unreadiness of the ships. Family men began to re-evaluate the possibility of a call-up in terms of whether they should risk jobs and home life, if they were to be kept on tap for every future Cold War crisis.

Obviously the fourth contention, that the program could go back to what it had been, deserves strong reappraisal in light of existing conditions. The insistence that things were running smoothly and that 70 per cent of the recalled personnel would reaffiliate have sim­ply not been borne out by events. The surface ASW program is scarcely a program at all to-

ENTER THE FORUM

Regular and Associate Members are invited to write brief comments on material published in the Proceedings and also to write brief discussions on any topic of naval interest for possible publication on these pages. A primary purpose of the Proceedings is to provide a place where ideas of importance to the Navy can be exchanged.

day, just a few months after mobilization. The reasons for this deserve study.

Recruiting in the Selected Reserve pro­gram has been relatively ineffective, and not because recruiters have not tried. The pros­pect of being on call for each Cold War crisis has caused serious second thoughts on the part of those not guaranteed government re-employment. Fear of being shunted aside in the civilian promotional race, plus the in­direct pressure of many superiors, has led many qualified men to reject reserve affilia­tion. The whole question of efficient use of the Ready Reserve in the Cold War should be reconsidered and resolved.

The difficulty of maintaining 18- to-20-year- old ships should also indicate that special material problems, such as parts availability, should be anticipated if instant and continu- mg response is to be the goal.

The lack of training, particularly in the ‘2-by-6” and 8-year inactive groups, was a serious obstacle to readiness, at least in the earlier phase. The most valuable personnel were returning regular Navy men who pro­vided most of the requisite technical knowl­edge and organized the training of the others.

The problem of training those with limited active-duty experience, coupled with the seri­ous doubts many have about continuing their affiliation makes it questionable that they will provide the backbone of the Selected Reserve program as desired.

Training should be increased at the ship­board level and recruiting passed to another phase of the reserve program. The shipboard units should not spend their limited time re­cruiting, but should spend it getting badly- needed shipboard training, particularly in tech­nical fields.

The real problems should be met. It is not enough to place the load squarely on the over­used shibboleths of patriotism and leadership. Intelligent appeals to patriotism and demands for effective leadership must be preceded by an accurate understanding of the problems inherent in the concept of reserve readiness, and this understanding can only be developed 102

when the answers to the questions, readiness for what and how soon are explicit. Any other approach will negate the combat effec­tiveness of the ready reserve.

The FY ’64 Budget and the "Facts of Life”

Robert J. Massey, Lieutenant Comman­der, U. S. Navy—Most naval officers will find scant grounds for rejoicing in the released ver­sion of Secretary of Defense McNamara’s statement to the House Armed Services Com­mittee on 30 January concerning the FY ’64 defense budget and the five-year program projections.

The whole message verifies the validity of the assessment Captain White and I made in “Program Packaging—Opportunity and Peril” in the December 1961 Proceedings (see pages 23-35). In that article’s conclusion we wrote:

In short, the determination of requirements, the key process in shaping the nation’s fighting forces, will no longer be decided unilaterally by the Services or jointly by the Joint Chiefs of Staff based upon a master Joint Strategic Objectives Plan and the best joint intelligence estimate of the enemy threat.

It is evident from Secretary McNamara’s statement that in the preparation of the FY ’64 budget, Navy military requirements were challenged, and in many cases rejected. Where in the past, civil authority would say in effect, “Budgetary ceilings preclude fund­ing all your requirements,” the modern ver­sion seems to go, “We have analyzed your re­quirements and find them invalid.” For in­stance, after stating that numbers of Navy aircraft requested for FY ’64 were to be “fewer than we estimated for 1964 in the five- year program and fewer than the number we plan to buy during the current fiscal year,” the Secretary stated,

Further study of Navy and Marine Corps aircraft is urgendy needed. In our review of the requirements, we found in several cases that new aircraft scheduled for procurement were only marginally better than the ones they were to replace, and, in still other cases, the numbers planned for procurement ex­ceeded the requirements.

Even though the total budget request is, at 53.7 billion dollars, the largest peacetime budget in the history of the nation, the budget proposes only $1.6 billion for procurement of Navy aircraft compared with $2.2 billion for FY ’63.

In case there are any lingering doubts about the “facts of life” in the new environment, the following candid remarks by Deputy Secre­tary of Defense Roswell L. Gilpatric to the National Defense Committee of the National Association of Manufacturers on 25 January 1963 should dispel them.

Much has been said during the past twelve months about the trend toward centralization of decision-making within the military estab­lishment. Some comments have been critical, others have been approving. What I have to say here today will be explanatory.

As I see it, there are basically only two choices open today to a Defense Secretary as to how he should go about his job. One is to con­ceive of his function as primarily policy­making with his determinations backed up by fiscal sanctions, that is, budget ceilings. Under this concept, most of the decision-making in such important areas as military planning and programming would be handled by the Joint Chiefs of Staff and the principal com­mands and in other significant areas such as research and development and procurement would be delegated to the Service Secretaries and their staff. Under the other concept of the role of the Secretary of Defense, he retains in his own hands, assisted by his civilian and military advisors, the basic decision-making power in all of the areas just mentioned, leav­ing to the military and civilian components of the Services and the Commands the responsi­bility for executing his decisions and perform­ing the operations called for by them.

There are several reasons why, in my judg­ment, the second concept of the Secretary of Defense’s role is, under today’s conditions, more in the national interest than the first.

In the first place, in contrast to the state of affairs which existed when I was Under Secre­tary of the Air Force over a decade ago and Mr. Lovett was in my position, the principal roles of the military generally cut across Serv­ice Department lines. This is true for example of the strategic mission in which the Navy POLARIS operation now plays such a large part, also of the forces for conventional wars— that we call General Purpose Forces—where each of the Services has a part none of which can be performed independently of the other, and of counter-insurgencv operations to which, again, each of the four Services has a

contribution to make. Moreover, also in con­trast to conditions in earlier periods, all com­bat operations, as distinguished from support and training, are now in the Unified and Specified Commands functioning directly under the Joint Chiefs of Staff who, in turn, derive their authority from the President, as Commander-in-Chief, through the Secretary of Defense ajid do not report to the Service Secretaries. Accordingly, it no longer makes sense, as it did ten years ago, to leave to the Service Secretaries some of the major deci­sion-making except insofar as a Service Secre­tary acts as executive agent for two or more Services.

Secondly, the machinery, for gathering, analyzing and presenting the data necessary for decision-making has, due largely to the ex­tensive and imaginative use of automatic data computing by the military, advanced to a point where centralized decision-making is both efficient and effective. Nevertheless, it has been said that unless the office of the Secretary of Defense is to be occupied by an individual with the managerial genius of a Robert Mc­Namara the present system of centralized deci­sion-making would break down. In my opin­ion, this does not follow; let me tell you why.

In the last budget go-round leading up to the $52.5 billion Defense budget for FY 64 which the President recently submitted to Congress, there were in all about 630 subject/ issues presented to the Secretary of Defense and myself for determination, following which the Services came back with some 70 reclamas requiring further Office, Secretary of Defense consideration. We dealt with these 700 issues over a period of several months. They ranged in character from such major questions as whether the NIKE-ZEUS system should be scheduled for immediate produc­tion and deployment, whether the SKYBOLT program should be terminated and whether the RS-70 program should be enlarged, to minor issues involving only a few hundred thousand dollars in appropriations, such as whether the new hospital addition at Andrews Air Force Base should have 150 or 175 beds, or whether new barracks construction at Fort Jackson should be funded next year or de­ferred for a later period.

The data necessary to reach a conclusion on these budget issues, whether they be large or small, is capable of being compiled and pre­sented with all the pros and cons and alterna­tives in such succinct and readily assimilable form that it was no unbearable chore for Mr. McNamara and myself to make these deci­

sions, within the time allotted, personally and

without delegating the task to others.

The plain “facts of life,” as I see them, are that the old era is forever gone; the “rules of the game” have changed. The Navy’s future depends upon the ability of its professional officers to respond to the new challenges and compete successfully in the new environment.

Success for the Navy in this new environ­ment depends upon two essential capabilities on the part of its officers; management effec­tiveness and the ability to operate effectively within the new decision-making framework.

By management effectiveness I mean the ability to conceive, produce and operate pro­grams which are competitive in terms of mis­sion effectiveness in relation to cost. Mission effectiveness here means effectiveness in support of basic national security objectives as set and inter­preted by the civil hierarchy.

While our top leadership can orient pro­grams toward this “market,”—and most of our programs rate highly on this point—it requires an all-hands effort to ensure that our programs support those goals with optimum effectiveness in relation to cost. In other words, to stay competitive in today’s environ­ment requires management effectiveness at all levels—from top to bottom.

Before achieving this all-pervasive manage­ment effectiveness, we of the line are going to have to disabuse ourselves of a most unfor­tunate—but widely held—line prejudice. Too many line officers regard any officer “checked out” in management as a “nest builder” and not a “real line officer.” It is even not uncom­mon to find line officers who view manage­ment as a “staff function.” If management— the art or technique of optimizing mission effectiveness in relation to cost—is a “staff function,” then the Navy line had better master it while there is still a Navy left to “command.”

The second prerequisite to Navy success in the new environment is for the naval officer corps to be able to operate effectively in the new decision-making framework. It is not enough to have programs which are “best buys”; we have to be able to “sell” them within the new decision-making framework. This means that professional officers must de­velop a widespread competence in quantita­tive analysis. Mastering these techniques is well within the intellectual capabilities of most officers, but it cannot be accomplished without some honest “homework.”

In closing, I . repeat what Captain White and I wrote a year and a half ago.

. . . without professional military competence in this “new way of looking at military prob­lems,” it will be virtually impossible to bring mature military judgment and experience to bear on the decisions which will shape the Nation’s future fighting forces—the deter­mination of military “requirements.”

"The Paper War—Quo Vadis?”

(See pages 34-41, May 1962 and pages 104-107, October 1962 Proceedings)

John D. Alden, Commander, U. S. Navy -—As a former line officer turned bureaucrat, I have always been most sympathetic to the anti-paperwork outcry of forces afloat. After reading the long string of letters in the Pro­ceedings during the past year commenting on this subject, however, I am forced to conclude that some of our young officers must have been driven into derangement by the flood of paperwork these letters describe. Otherwise they would not have made some of the com­ments attributed to them in cold print. Let’s not flail about wildly against paperwork per se lest we cut off our own noses. There is good, useful paperwork as well as the useless kind. I would like to rise in defense of the former and argue that some of the examples cited in the letters referrred to above are probably of more value to the Fleet than their detractors seem to think.

Dear Mr. Kiernan: I am one of those Wash­ington bureaucrats who requires special re­ports. When I get them I do indeed keep them in what you might call a private hoard, which is to say that I have them processed within a very small and select circle. The reason I do this is that responsibility for taking corrective action on the facts revealed by these reports is mine alone. These reports— which I solicit, not require (they are required by the Force Commanders, however)—tell me of the failures and deficiencies in certain critical components which are quite essential to the operational missions of the ships in which they are installed. For over a decade the forces afloat complained bitterly of their problems in my area, but did little to docu­ment their complaints with facts. Now that they are telling me their troubles, I am begin­ning to find cures for them.

When the problems are solved, my private paperwork empire will collapse, because when my parts no longer fail, there will obvi­ously be no need to fill out failure reports. So much for one kind of paperwork. I think it is the useful kind.

Incidentally, my civilian assistant, a Navy veteran crippled in service, is a true servant of the Fleet who does not need a steady influx of paper to justify his salary. And just one more item, please. The Bureau of Ships builds ships in compliance with characteristics established by the operating forces and budg­ets for alterations only when the Chief of Naval Operations supports them. I might suggest that the split-level bridge you cite as “requiring action by ‘old fuds’ in BuShips” may not be desired by the unrestricted line officers who have the final authority to say “yea” or “nay.” In fact, I recall reading a few strong arguments by seagoing officers oppos­ing this concept. Surely when the operators cannot agree on operational arrangements, you would not want technical people making the decisions for them.

Captain Beach wants to re-establish the chain of command as the only channel through which directives may flow. On a recent cruise, I was chided because my bureau was so slow taking corrective action on tech­nical problems. The ship had even prepared a list of their unanswered letters. I noted that a number of these letters, according to the ship’s records and the personal knowledge of its officers, had still not cleared the operational chain of command. The record showed de­lays of three, four, or six months at the squad­ron and force levels. Can you think of any­thing more useless than a copy of a forwarding endorsement on a failure report without the failure report itself? I receive these every now and then. The reports may or may not come through several weeks later. I believe in by­passing the chain of command at times.

Commander Fisher, too, wants to channel all directives through the already-clogged arteries of the chain of command. Talk about useless paperwork, such as “newsletters that clutter the mails.” Those of obviously no

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interest (few of which I have run across in my career) could be quickly consigned to the circular file. I noticed one shipboard yeoman not only routing some items of no interest but typing out file sheets and cross references on them. He agreed that he could weed out such “junk” mail but was forbidden to—not by any bureau directive, but by ship’s orders. An­other time our mail room erroneously sent copies of a directive pertaining to a specific type of ship to a number of other types where it was obviously not applicable. Two over­worked destroyers came back with formal letters complaining of the paperwork caused by their receiving this misaddressed directive!

Mr. Whittaker, do you really mean what you say? I gather that you consider written policies and procedures unsound and condu­cive to instability, since you state that such an “astounding conclusion” has now been “sensibly” eliminated from NWP-50. I prefer my policies written, and a good many pro­cedures, too. Operating under unwritten policies is a bit messy, don’t you agree? How­ever, if you wish to eliminate unnecessary policies and procedures, I will be happy to enlist on your side.

In conclusion, gentlemen, I note a repeated tendency to blame your proliferation of re­ports and paperwork on “the bureaus” or “vested interests” in Washington. I am sure there is fault in these places, but let me state that in the worst cases I have observed on board ship, the requirements had originated in the operational commands or on the ship herself. So how about taking an honest look at those papers you are griping about? Find out who requires them. Maybe if you suggested to the originator a simpler way of meeting the requirements, he would be delighted to ac­cept it. But before you advocate the sweeping abolition of all these pieces of paper, better make sure you will not be worse off without them than you were with them. Good luck.

★ ★ ★