Every year, the U. S. Navy is building surface ships in ever increasing numbers. These new ships will require several hundred officers to man them. To many officers, duty in a precommissioning detail will be a new experience, and they often lack a clear understanding of their future role in the building of their new ship. They are concerned about what they may expect and what will be expected of them. The Bureau of Ships provides an orientation pamphlet which is helpful, but it lacks a personal touch. The inexperienced officer is curious about problems, personalities, theories, and philosophies identified with new construction. These things are not normally covered in official Navy publications. This article will not attempt to enumerate the entire spectrum of these subjects. Rather, it will present some general principles and specific examples that will provide the inexperienced officer with a greater awareness of what he will encounter in his new billet.
The precommissioning detail must cope with an environment totally dissimilar from that confronting personnel reporting aboard a commissioned ship. The latter is an organized entity. She has a regular routine, standard operating procedures, and a trained crew whose varying lengths of service on board provide at least a modicum of experience and continuity. Her past performances have established a reputation of some sort and hopefully some degree of esprit de corps. The newly reported individual initially accepts the ship as he finds her. If certain aspects of the ship do not meet with his approval, he can change them to the extent that his rank and available time will allow. Should the ship be reasonably well run and basically well organized there is no compelling reason for the newly reported officer to disturb drastically the status quo.
In direct contrast, consider the nucleus crew reporting for duty at the building yard. The first arrivals must begin with essentially nothing. They are allocated a few empty desks and filing cabinets in some sparsely furnished office space, and the ship they have come to commission is found to be semi-completed, dirty, covered with patches of rust and red lead, and adorned with staging, hoses, and cables. Their new shipmates are for the most part complete strangers. In a few short months, they must transform an inert mass of steel and aluminum into a living ship. They must organize and train, and mold themselves into a smooth, cohesive team, ready and able to take their new ship to sea as an integral part of the U. S. Navy.
This evolution is difficult and demanding. Yet it provides the creative, conscientious officer with unlimited opportunities to attain excellence and to realize meaningful satisfying goals. After a few years in the Fleet, an officer should have formulated his conception of an ideally run and ideally organized division or department. Possibly the division or department he inherited during a previous tour of duty failed to measure up to his standards. Naturally he decided to institute needed changes. A common reaction from his subordinates were protests of “that’s the way we’ve always done it.” He found that long established precedents and routines were difficult to alter, and it required more effort than a single order to change them. He may have inherited inadequate files and incomplete records whose history could never be reconstructed. Spaces and equipment that had suffered from neglect over the years may have proved impossible for him to restore.
Conversely, as a precommissioning detail officer he is not burdened with these handicaps. He has both the opportunity and the responsibility to create a ship whose organization and equipment are so ideally conceived and established that they will be effectively perpetuated for the life of the ship. Indeed, his efforts during the precommissioning months will result in a legacy that will forever influence the ship’s battle readiness, reputation, and traditions.
There is a clear need for capable officers able to shoulder the responsibility implicit with new construction, and the Navy chooses them with care. They must be high-caliber personnel with demonstrated, proven qualities, such as effective leadership, a flair for organization, technical competence in a subspecialty, unflagging determination, and aggressiveness. Department heads usually have had extensive experience in the same department in a similar type ship. A postgraduate education and previous precommissioning experience are desirable but not necessary.*
A precommissioning crew is divided into two groups: the balance crew and the nucleus crew. The balance crew comprises about 65 per cent of the total crew. The officers normally include the executive officer, operations officer, communications officer, first lieutenant, damage control assistant, and the new ensigns. They are assisted by certain older, experienced petty officers who fulfill the necessary leadership, training, and administrative functions. Most of the men are junior petty officers and non-rated personnel, and they are all assembled about eight weeks before commissioning at a Fleet Training Center. The balance crew is intensively trained and indoctrinated by both local training commands and by the officers and senior petty officers. The executive officer also co-ordinates the preparation of the ship’s organization manual and certain ship’s bills.
The nucleus crew comprises about 35 per cent of the total crew and includes the commanding officer, the weapons officer and key weapons department junior officers, the chief engineer, the main propulsion assistant, the electronics maintenance officer, the CIC officer, the supply officer and senior enlisted personnel. They are chosen because their experience and professional skills enable them to make a significant contribution to the total effort of producing the best possible ship for the Navy. They report to the district commandant four to six months before their ship’s commissioning for temporary duty at the building yard.
With regard to this temporary duty, nucleus crews are often financially hurt if the ship’s delivery date is significantly delayed. Sometimes such personnel make major financial commitments assuming that they will receive considerable per diem payments. If, as a result of the slippage, they are detained at the builder’s yard in excess of six months, their orders may well be changed to permanent duty and per diem payments terminated. If there is any possibility of a delayed delivery date, nucleus crew personnel must be aware of the implication; per diem payments can be, and frequently have been, terminated with little or no notice.
Such financial fluctuations become a minor annoyance to the career officer, however, when he understands the significance of being ordered to the precommissioning detail. The orders imply that the Navy has trust and confidence in his ability to tackle a difficult and challenging assignment requiring the utmost in professional skill and competence. This de facto recognition most certainly enhances his service reputation.
The nucleus crew officer soon recognizes certain limitations inherent in his role as a future plank owner. Probably the most frustrating is the realization that he has no official capacity that permits him to influence the building or design of the ship directly. The responsibility of supervising the ship’s construction and outfitting rests with the shipyard commander in a naval shipyard or the local U. S. Navy supervisor of shipbuilding in a private building yard. In concept, these activities will ensure the delivery of an acceptable ship to the Navy, at which time the crew can assume operational responsibility. The supervising authority is staffed with personnel qualified in all aspects of the shipbuilding process. The over-all design, of course, rests with the Bureau of Ships and Bureau of Naval Weapons. Logically, then, the members of the crew can occupy themselves during the construction period with their internal organization and with becoming oriented with the ship and with her equipment.
In concept, the crew will have a minimum participation in the areas of construction and design. This concept usually is not realizable, however, because most nucleus crews will not accept a passive role. The crew that must man the ship often has a different interpretation of what constitutes an acceptable ship from those who design and build her. A ship looks entirely different to those who must fight and sail her than she does to those who will never bear the responsibility of taking her to sea. The nucleus crew has an emotional involvement with the ship that the supervisory personnel will never have. The crew must live with the ship for a long, long time. The supervisory personnel will probably never see her again. To the crew, their ship is the only ship in the Navy, while to the supervisory personnel she may be an impersonal object, one among many with which they must deal. There are exceptions, of course. On the building ways, there are men who are justly proud of their craftmanship and skill, men who put their whole heart and soul into the ship. And there are supervisory personnel who conscientiously do their best to make each ship the finest possible. Still, they do not have the same motivation as those whose lives are dedicated to going down to the sea in ships. Few can match the devotion, the zeal, and the determination of the proud crews of our new Navy ships. Thus, it is not at all surprising that the nucleus crew insists on an active voice in the affairs of their ship before she is commissioned.
This active voice can be made manifest in a number of ways. By virtue of experience, training, and knowledge, the crew can provide informal advice, information, encouragement, and assistance to help resolve technical problems, to co-ordinate individual efforts, and to promote a maximum combined effort by all concerned to deliver the best possible ship. If such help is offered in a spirit of genuine and sincere co-operation, it will probably be readily accepted. Of course, the builder and the supervisory authority (hereafter called the supervisor whether a shipyard commander or supervisor of shipbuilding) can accept, reject, or ignore this advice and assistance as they see fit. The relationship between the crew, the builder, and the supervisor will vary with the locale and individual personalities.
There are other ways in which the nucleus crew can affect the design and construction of the ship. The first thing a nucleus crew officer should do is to read and learn the detailed specifications for the building of his ship. The builder is obligated to build the ship in exact compliance with these specifications. A thorough knowledge and familiarity with the specifications is mandatory if the nucleus crew is to deal intelligently and effectively with the construction of the ship. It is interesting to note that almost everyone concerned with building the ship except the nucleus crew is provided a copy of the specifications and the subsequent change orders.
The specifications, written many months before actual ship construction begins, often have sections that are incomplete, ambiguous, or unsatisfactory in some other respect. A needed change to the specifications in a particular area may be obvious only to the nucleus crew. Again, this is because the ship looks different in the eyes of the man who takes her to sea than it does to a desk-bound naval architect or design engineer.
The nucleus crew officer should not take anything for granted in the design of his new ship. In a recent class of ship, some of the design errors included fuel oil tanks that could be filled but not emptied, a CPO head with no urinals, insufficient bitts and chocks to tie up the ship properly and an allowance of hundreds of library books but no bookshelves for stowage.
Other shortcomings are perhaps not as obvious. The specifications and contract plans must be exhaustively studied. The nucleus crew must be clairvoyant in visualizing the end product depicted on the blueprints. A print may be studied time and time again before a serious defect, previously overlooked, is recognized. Generally, design deficiencies are the result of a human error of omission, a lack of understanding, comprehension, or knowledge on the part of the designer, or a development of new concepts after an existing design has been incorporated into the building specifications.
Once the prospective commanding officer is convinced that a change is needed in the specifications, he submits a change order request via the supervisor, and usually the type commander, to the Bureau of Ships. The request must be well written if it is to have a reasonable chance of being approved. It must be factual, accurate, logical, and persuasive. The Bureau usually takes several months to act on the request because most change orders add extra cost to the ship and may delay the delivery. The prospective commanding officer and the Bureau may have different interpretations of the advantages to be derived by adding the proposed change into the design of the ship. The Bureau seems to be more conscious of the increased costs while the prospective commanding officer is more conscious of increasing the combat readiness, operability, or habitability of his ship. Obviously, a compromise often must be reached, and a change order review board at the Bureau of Ships is charged with the responsibility of passing final judgment.
Less frequently, the prospective commanding officer is able to propose changes to the specifications that decrease the cost of the ship without impairing her combat readiness. This type of request is processed much more expeditiously, often at the supervisor’s level. Most change orders, unfortunately, do not fall into this category and are subjected to months of deliberation before they are approved, rejected, or deferred.
These protracted decision-making processes are a maddening frustration to a line officer accustomed to prompt, decisive action. A change order request may be submitted at an early stage in the ship’s construction. Rapid approval would enable the design change to be incorporated into the working plans before actual construction or installation in the affected area begins. By the time the request is approved months later, however, construction in the affected area may be totally or partially completed. The subsequent added expense and possible delay brought about by having to halt work and rip out what has already been accomplished seems inconsistent with the Bureau of Ships’ efforts to minimize shipbuilding costs.
The Navy employs civilian inspectors who are responsible for inspecting the ship during construction and informing the builder of specification violations. The nucleus crew members can be of immense assistance to the inspectors by recognizing and pointing out violations that have been overlooked. Their training and experience often enable them to interpret the specifications or give technical advice to inspectors lacking an equivalent degree of knowledge in some areas. For example, a builder normally is required to provide stowage for all uninstalled equipment. The hull inspector may not know what material must be stowed, where it should be stowed, or what special stowage arrangements are needed. The nucleus crew, on the other hand, does know all this, and by supplying this information to the builder he is able to provide adequate stowage.
The builder must normally locate equipment for ease of operation and accessibility for maintenance. If the civilian inspector has had limited experience with a particular equipment, he may not recognize an unsuitable arrangement. The knowledgeable crew member should perceive that an installation is unsatisfactory. He should also be able to offer a practical alternative. As the ultimate user, he is very highly motivated to desire the best possible arrangement of equipment for his future use. Within certain limits, the crew can greatly influence the ship’s construction in this respect.
The crew can also profit by comparing the builder’s working drawings with the specifications. If these drawings do not comply with the specifications, and if the builder can be made aware of this before installation has progressed significantly, the discrepancy can be rectified without the expense and delay of rip-out and repetitive labor.
The tempo of testing and fitting out rapidly reaches a furious, round-the-clock pace during the last few months before delivery. An inspector cannot, by himself, keep track of every activity, and many specification violations may escape his attention. The crew, unofficially augmenting the inspection force, provides valuable assistance in ferreting out glossed-over, last-minute discrepancies.
There are any number of official and unofficial methods of notifying the builder of a specification violation. The important thing is to see that he gets the word. A record should be kept of all discrepancies, and those that are still outstanding by commencement of preliminary acceptance trials should be submitted as trial items to the Board of Inspection and Survey.
It is not surprising that problems may seem to increase in magnitude and complexity with the passage of time. Supervisor and builder personnel, being human and faced with the awesome responsibility of building and delivering an incredibly complex man-of-war, sometimes become discouraged and pessimistic. In this case, the nucleus crew members can be effective morale builders, because their confidence, enthusiasm, and optimism can be contagious to those around them. A psychological uplift can be just as effective at times as technical advice and assistance. Above all, they should never hesitate to help in any way, at any time, or in any capacity. It is axiomatic that anything the nucleus crew members can do to help build a better ship will benefit them after the ship is delivered.
Another duty of the nucleus crew is to report to the Chief of Naval Operations the progress and readiness of the ship. In the early stages of construction this is a monthly report by the prospective commanding officer, but as the delivery date draws near it becomes bi-weekly. The reason for this report is that the CNO desires an objective appraisal of the ship’s status from a person who is intensely interested in the ship yet is not officially responsible for her construction—the prospective commanding officer fits this role admirably. The report should state the prospective commanding officer’s judgment of the ship’s current state of construction and readiness, making special mention of those factors which may influence the delivery date. This report has considerable influence despite its being a non-action document. A point sometimes forgotten is that the progress and readiness report is just that—a report and not an action document. If the ship’s prospective commanding officer desires action on a particular problem he should initiate separate correspondence.
One of the most time-consuming yet vitally necessary tasks is to organize and train the officers and men so that the ship is operational and ready for limited duty upon commissioning. Before any real organizational work can begin, pertinent instructions, notices, directives, and technical manuals must be obtained. The initial increment of the nucleus crew should immediately request delivery of their initial allowance from the Bureaus, the type commander, and anyone else who holds needed documents. It will not take long for the paper deluge to begin. Weapons department personnel should review the allowance and availability of BuWeps and NavShip technical manuals as soon as possible. In times past, considerable distress has been experienced because many needed manuals simply were not available. This problem has improved in recent years, but the allowance list should still be reviewed to insure inclusion of all applicable manuals. Omitted manuals should be ordered immediately, so they will be delivered before commissioning.
Once the needed reference material has been collected, the crew may begin formulating their shipboard organization on paper. This organization should include the Ship’s Organization Manual; Battle Bill; Weapons Doctrine, CIC Doctrine; Safety Precautions; Operating Procedures; Watch, Quarter, and Station Bills; Standing Orders; Departmental and Divisional Organization Manuals; Ship’s Instructions; CSMP: Equipment Histories; and Logs, Records, and Reports. The sheer bulk of this material may justifiably cause some apprehension in those who have to produce the shipboard organization in final written form before commissioning. Fortunately, the reference material is plentiful, and plagiarizing documentation from earlier ships of a similar class is helpful and expedient. Even for the first ship of a class, much of the organization is standard and applicable to virtually all ships. On the other hand, there is extensive latitude for originality, and the precommissioning crew has the opportunity to organize its ship on a sound, effective basis that will prevail throughout the life-time of the ship.
The prudent crew should complete the formulation of its organization as early as possible. When the crew first arrives, there is a period of relative calm and tranquility because the ship is still in a comparatively routine installation phase of construction. During this period more time is available for research, contemplation, and creative literary effort. As the delivery date approaches, crises of varying degrees begin erupting with increasing frequency. The crew members must spend most of their time “putting out brush fires,” and they would be hard pressed to find additional time to devote to organizational efforts. Another advantage to early completion is that the printer requires lead time. A ship’s crew that waits too long may find itself going to sea with its organization manuscripts still being printed.
Another consideration is the precommissioning training of the officers and men. Such a need is obvious; the personnel are strangers to each other and to the ship. By commissioning time, the crew must be able to take the ship to sea and operate her equipment. This training is accomplished in several ways.
Certain individuals will have had previous experience with similar ships and equipment, while others will have been sent to schools for formal training in equipment to be installed on their new ship. Therefore the crew should have a broad background of training and experience even before reporting for duty.
Personnel at the building yard have a marvelous opportunity to become intimately familiar with the ship and her equipment. They have time to study the technical manuals in great detail, to conduct intensive intraship classroom instruction, and to gather information from vendor service engineers and building yard technicians. Most important, they can observe and monitor the installation, testing, and operation of their equipment. By the time the ship is commissioned, they should know virtually every intricacy and idiosyncrasy of their equipment and should have a solid over-all feel for the ship herself.
If the ship is built in a private yard, the crew is usually not permitted to operate the equipment before delivery; in contrast, the Navy crew often directly assists yard personnel in a naval shipyard. In any case, the crew can observe every test and operation over a long period of time and should be able to assume responsibility for the equipment upon delivery.
Before the crew takes the ship to sea for the first time the engineering department should have practiced lighting off and operating the plant. The special sea detail should have been manned and exercised. This can be done by securing additional mooring wires to the pier, turning the engines over at one-third speed, checking out interior communication circuits, and familiarizing key personnel with their duties while on station. This type of training will better enable the ship to get underway with a confident, prepared crew.
A note of warning is in order at this point. The naval crew of a ship built in a private yard sometimes becomes apprehensive during builder’s sea trials and preliminary acceptance trials when a civilian crew is in charge. This is understandable, because a civilian crew has methods of operating a ship that appear to be in conflict with certain standard naval operating procedures. Despite its unorthodox ways, however, the civilian crew always seems to manage to get the ship out and back safely. This record can be a source of comfort during anxious moments underway.
The final phase of the ship’s construction includes the builder’s trials and the preliminary acceptance trials. The timing of these two events in relation to commissioning differs depending on whether the ship is built in a private or a naval shipyard. Most new construction is in private yards, so this aspect will be presented. (In a naval shipyard these trials are held after commissioning.)
Briefly, builder’s sea trials are held six to eight weeks before the ship is delivered to the Navy. These trials are the first opportunity for the builder to see what the ship looks like and how she operates as a complete unit while underway. A significant point is that the builder is, in essence, soon to proclaim the ship to be complete or nearly so. The Navy can now make its first critical evaluation of the quality of the ship it will shortly be asked to accept.
Not surprisingly, many discrepancies become evident. The ship has been stripped of all construction paraphernalia and trash, and defects previously hidden or camouflaged are laid bare. For the first time, the ship is operated in her natural environment, and flaws become apparent as she is put to her first real test away from the pier. The discrepancies, which are discovered by builder, supervisor, and nucleus crew personnel, are tabulated, and usually number in the hundreds, some major and some minor. The builder has about three weeks to correct those for which he is responsible because at that time the preliminary acceptance trials will begin.
The preliminary acceptance trials are the moment of truth. The builder presents the ship to the Board of Inspection and Survey as being complete and ready for delivery to the Navy. This is rarely the case. The Board will find unsatisfactory items as a result of their own inspection. Others will be brought to the Board’s attention by the crew and the supervisor. The crew members should be fully prepared in every respect; if ever their homework should be done, this is the time. They have lived with the ship for months and should have recorded every uncorrected specification violation, design deficiency, and uncompleted change order. All this information should be ready for the Board to supplement its own investigative findings.
The kind of ship that the Board finds will depend in large measure on what the nucleus crew has done during the preceding months. An outstanding ship will result if the crew has studied the specifications and insisted that they be followed to the letter. If the crew has taken care of all the little details and has striven day and night to work, to plan, to study, to train, to expedite, and to sacrifice, that crew will have an outstanding ship.
After the Board decides what action is to be taken on each discrepancy noted, the builder has about three weeks to correct those that are his responsibility. Then, on the day of delivery, the builder takes the ship to a naval shipyard and turns her over to the Navy. Commissioning is now about two weeks away. During these two weeks, the nucleus crew and the balance crew meet for the first time. All hands turn to in a massive effort to cleanse the ship of the grime accumulated in the building yard so that she will be sharp and sparkling on her commissioning day. This feverish activity is a labor of love, for all hands know that the ship is finally theirs.
The ship’s commissioning is, for many of the crew, very emotional and very satisfying. They are her brains, her blood, and her spirit, and through them the ship is transformed into a living personality from an inanimate hulk. The nucleus crew remember how she looked months before—dirty, cluttered, and disheveled—and there was little resemblance to the ship now before them. Now their efforts are climaxed in the ceremony of the ship’s commissioning. This admission of the ship into the Navy follows an unchanging ritual derived from centuries of customs and traditions. No man can help but be stirred by the military pageantry and patriotic symbolism.
Each member of the original precommissioning crew, in one way or another, will have imparted his personal contribution to the ship’s later life and reputation. Perhaps it was a division officer who originally organized his division so well that his methods will be used for years after. Or maybe it was a storekeeper who recommended a modification to the provision issue room that will make it the supply officer’s delight for the next 20 years. Or the machinist’s mate who insisted that the machinery foundations be painted properly so that sailors in later years would not be plagued with rust and corrosion. Each man in that original crew has had a part of that ship. That is why the Navy calls them plank owners.
Their work is far from being over. Ahead lies a long period of fitting out, shakedown training, and post-shakedown repairs and modifications before the ship is ready for unrestricted naval operations. The past days were long, the pace was frantic, and the responsibilities were demanding, but the reward is a handsome, efficient, new Navy ship, a ship for which they will always have a close personal attachment. In the years to follow, they will always be able to look back with pride and a sense of personal accomplishment for having done a difficult job well in the finest traditions of the Navy. THE END.
* In the earlier DDG-2 and DLG-9 class ships many of the division officers had been previously qualified as conventional destroyer department heads. When they were prevented from fleeting up because of an excess of senior officers, they were ordered to new construction and provided a wealth of talent for the new surface missile ships. On one DLG, 19 of the 22 officers were career men, and out of 16 normal watch standers, 11 were previously qualified destroyer officers of the deck and command duty officers.