It is instantly recognizable to all—that shining moment of ultimate rapport between the true leader and the man who would cheerfully follow him into the mouth of Hell. Yet, too many of today’s leaders, beset by their everyday problems, torn by their own doubts, no longer have the time or the will to care about, much less look out for, their men.
A well-remembered DesLant Bulletin in the very early 1950s bemoaned the 3% re-enlistment rate then current. Thus, the retention problem is neither new nor more acute. What is new is the willingness of the naval establishment to recognize and publicize the problem.
How deep and how strong are the roots of the retention problem? Is it possible, with such a complex problem, with so many complicating factors, to come down finally to a single, simple cause of all the numerous dissatisfactions which turn tens of thousands of trained men and officers away from naval careers?
I believe there is a single cause. Furthermore, those regular and reservist enlisted men and officers whose opinions I have most respected over the years also believe there is a single cause: the lack of individual willingness to assume total responsibility for those serving under them.
The key words, “individual” and “responsibility,” have been so often used that they are almost trite. Because the definitions of these words have been so blurred, distorted, and corrupted, let us try to re-define them by citing examples of their effective and ineffective application.
May we begin with an admiral? Everybody enjoys dissecting the top brass, even other admirals. In immediate naval history, there was once—before 1970 and after 1945—an admiral who was, and who remains, a great hero to most of us. A charming man, and a genius in one or two respects, he rose to high naval office, where he promptly allowed love of country and dedication to his President to blind him to the fact that it was largely ensigns and enlisted men who were making his wracked-up ships go.
I recall, as a division operations officer, sitting in his quarters with the COs and XOs of the squadron. He expressed the highest confidence that our beautiful ships could go anywhere, anytime, and do anything that was required of them. He harked back to World War II days, in which the identical ships had done magnificent things under forbidding circumstances. He was inspiring—I do not say this cynically—for here was an authentic hero striving to uplift us to greater things.
Following this, he outlined the latest additional assignments which a distraught State Department and a harried President had advised him were absolutely necessary to bolster our national security. They involved sending a squadron which had just recently returned from overseas right back over for an indefinite period.
The admiral then looked about the compartment into the faces of his COs—it was evident that he considered them to be a latter-day Nelsonian band of brothers—and asked if anyone felt his ship was less than equal to the task.
Well—cuss it!—in that squadron, I happened to know because I processed the paperwork and heard the afterhours grousing, the situation was this:
► One ship had only one qualified steaming watch—not just inadequate in ratings, but inadequate in breathing bodies!
► One ship had no feed pumps aside from the emergency up-and-downer wheezing in each fire room—that’s two pumps vice six.
► One ship had troubles so bad that only the yard could help, but they were hoping blindly for a week of tender availability to borrow some baling wire.
► All ships had severe problems of personnel shortages, urgent need for leaves and liberties, schools, and other people-type things.
To a man, the captains swallowed, smiled, and assured the admiral that they, their crews, and their ships were ready to go—anywhere, anytime, for any duty.
Now, let us speak in a whisper about pragmatic things. The COs were all well along in the second half of their 20-year minimums. Their admiral had got across to them, very strongly, what he expected. And don’t you know that it’s harder than somewhat to lay a career on the line when your leader is a certified tiger who has accomplished the impossible not once, but many times?
As we ponder that question, let us ask ourselves some others about individual responsibility:
Should the admiral have couched his discussion in terms that would invite, rather than discourage, disagreement?
Should the admiral have told State and the President, via his superiors, that the new commitments were too much?
Should the admiral be blamed for not knowing all the grubby, nasty, unpleasant things about his not-so-glorious ships?
Should the admiral, and his several predecessors, have done something in anticipation of such a call, so there would be enough extra ships, and enough personnel, that the call would not wreak perhaps irreparable damage on the ships, not to mention the crews?
Should the captains have risked their careers to stand up and deny the admiral’s wishes?
Were the captains in any measure responsible for the admiral’s ignorance of the true state of affairs?
Should the XOs present have taken their COs outside the compartment and remonstrated with them?
Should the chief engineers back on the ships have refused in writing to take their ships out when their COs returned with the bad news?
Should the Main Propulsion Assistant of Ship X, which was dangerous to steam in, have logged his objections to firing up the unsafe boilers?
Should Lieutenant (j.g.) Smith, of Ship X, have refused to relieve as OOD, knowing that the single four-hour watch was being augmented by the deck force in order to steam the unsafe plant?
Should the eight-year EN/1, with a 4.0 record, have risked the court-martial he got by jumping ship to get the first hours with his family in over seven months?
Should the fireman apprentice who got drunk and beat up his wife have acted that way in front of his infant children?
Did the 2,200 men who ate iron rations the following week, when they were abruptly sent to sea, realize the importance of their mission and the value of their deprivation in the greater role of the Navy?
Did the 15-year-old wife of one of the swab jocks, living in a World War II-vintage, peeling-paint, veneer trailer (government-furnished EM quarters) truly understand the contribution her 19-year-old husband was making at sea while she wondered what had happened to the eating money which young Jack Tar had said would be forthcoming as soon as he got to the base and straightened out some paperwork?
Did the recruit the Marine military police manhandled in another city for missing ship ever figure out how his simple AOL turned into missed ship where his faith in officers rested partly on being able to calculate to a nicety the penalties and rewards of minor transgressions?
Where does individual responsibility end?
If some of the foregoing questions seem fanciful,” perhaps because the reader cannot relate the incident to his own day-to-day world—let us turn the situation around and apply it to the reader’s world, the world of the U. S. Navy at this very moment.
Is it possible, without harmful result to many people to deploy any group of eight ships of any type, right now, to contend with a diplomatic emergency in, say, the Mediterranean or the far Pacific?
If the answer is “no”—and the perturbations existing from the recent emergency deployment of a carrier indicate that is the correct answer—then who, at what level in the naval structure should be storming the halls of Congress right now, today, proclaiming that the Navy’s commitments are a direct and excessive abuse of the men who have to carry them out?
Do we really have a right to expect that not one but many high officers would exercise the enormous courage required to tell those who impose commitments upon the Navy: “No, sir, the U. S. Navy not undertake this without the following additional personnel and physical resources. Either give them to us, reduce our commitments, or relieve me.”
These are shocking suggestions, smacking of insubordination by high officers before their civilian seniors. Perhaps it would be good to table them for a few minutes, devoting our attention to easier matters accept, on a lower level. We shall come back to this subject of nay-saying admirals, however.
Let me now introduce myself as a reserve officer only because the referee’s chair which a reserve officer occupies these days gives a view of the game which generally is not observable by the regulars playing out on the court. The U. S. Naval Reserve recruits youngsters, trains them for a year, sends them to the Fleet for two years with the regulars, and then takes them back in for either two or three obligated years of additional inactive reserve service. This situation gives us a good standard to gauge the Fleet by, for we see the differences, good and bad, the Fleet effects in these young enlisted men. And we hear their stories.
Again and again, the single plaint emerges: nobody cares; nobody looks out for the enlisted man. It grows repetitious, then finally overpowering, this crescendo chorus of true tales of neglect and abuse. Primarily, it is the officers who neglect the welfare of their men, although there are plenty of petty officers who follow faithfully the example of their gold-braided superiors.
But there are worse things than neglect. A black is beaten up on board a carrier and thereafter locks himself in his work compartment at night. The CO is told about this man and other minority group members who are being beaten and threatened by a small coterie of whites aboard his ship. He brusquely denies the existence of any prejudice on board his ship—end of matter; end of naval career for several enlisted men.
The hospital at a major naval base is filthy. The bulkheads are black with dirt for about a foot up from the deck. Sailors have to wait in long lines, seated next to persons coughing with undiagnosed, but probably contagious ailments.
Dependents at another large naval station rarely buy at the commissary. The lines are too long, the variety too limited, and the savings substantial only on a few items.
The stories go on and on. Each is a minor annoyance that could be cleared up by some one person in the right place of authority—except that person doesn’t do anything. And there are so many who do so little about so much that the total effect is of a great, uncaring organization which treats a man as if he were a sack of flour.
This monstrous impersonality, this abysmal lack of care for one’s men is the factor which is cited again and again by officers and men returning from active duty. This is a blunt truth, and an unpleasant one, but it must be faced up to before we can proceed to undo the harm which too many little acquiescences over the years have built into our system.
How did the system get this way? What has happened to change the Navy of 1935 (small, tight, sharp) and the Navy of 1945 (big, efficient, professional) into the Navy of 1971 (big, strangling, nigh desperate)?
In my own career as both a regular and a reservist, I have seen the changes during the period from 1947 to the present. They have been small changes, insignificant changes, changes akin to those which subtly alter the face and figure of a beautiful young girl into those of a wrinkled old woman. These changes occurred, step by small step, as individual officers acquiesced to thousands of little degradations of time-honored standards.
In the late 1940s, for example, blocks of unoccupied rooms in the BOQ and the EM barracks in Newport, R.I., were held reserved for the Schools Command. At the same time, the ships’ men and officers confined by fog to the Fleet landing shack had to look elsewhere for a night’s needed sleep. Who failed in his individual responsibility to look out for those weary sailors who had to be on watch the following day at sea?
In the early 1950s—1954, I think—a clever officer somewhere in BuPers decided that the spirit of the Navy would be uplifted if the officers again were required to wear swords. Good thought. But the married ensigns (of whom I was not one at that time), viewed their take-home pay of between $200 and $300 a month, and cursed the order when they learned the price of swords. Why didn’t some equally bright BuPers boy recommend that, if the Navy bought a few thousand swords and engraved each one “From a grateful nation to her defenders” (or some such thing), those swords would have cost only $20 or $30 apiece and could have been given free to every officer in the Navy, thereby really gaining some of that desired spirit? Such swords would have become treasures not burdens.
These incidents, and thousands like them, are but the symptoms of something far deadlier and harder to accept than the mere minor derelictions of faceless multitudes over a quarter century. The illness, of which the symptoms are only surface indications, could be called the inexorable peacetime decay of a military organization.
Put in the baldest terms, there is a tendency for many (but not all) of the best people to leave the military profession during a time of peace when the civilian opportunities are good. This has always been the case. As in Gresham’s Law, wherein “Bad money drives out good,” the bad officers drive out the good. For example, when coins containing little silver are circulated with others of the same denomination with more silver, the high-silver coins will be withdrawn from circulation by hoarders. (How many silver quarters or pure-gold commanders have you seen lately?)
Similarly, after the war is won, many of the sharpest young enlisted men and officers will examine the necessary rigidity and measured promotion progress of the peacetime environment. They decide to leave—not because they dislike the Navy, but because they see faster, larger rewards in money and status outside.
Once this process starts, those remaining fall into two general types, the less effective who prefer the security of Mother Navy, and a smaller number of sharp fellows who feel that the nobility of their calling outweighs the tangible rewards of the civilian world.
At this point, some several years after a war, the military organization has become imbalanced. It has a disproportionately high ratio of merely adequate personnel (plus some “bummers”) to the sharp people.
A thriving civilian organization would have more of the sharp ones and fewer of the others or it wouldn’t thrive very long.
A further consequence of this degenerative process is that the standards for promotion become subtly lowered. Since there are still a certain number of CO billets to be filled, but the requirements in peacetime are not so demanding and the number of “hot shots” available not sufficient any more, we begin to get some bad COs.
Because the absolute leadership demands of battle are no longer present, it becomes less important for a ranking officer to be effective (though perhaps gruff, mean, unconventional, etc.) than it is for him to be “diplomatic,” or “acceptable,” or even “dependable,” translated to mean one who refrains from rocking the organizational boat.
As more of the politicians-in-uniform wend their way upwards, more and more little discrepancies begin to occur on the lower levels. Meanwhile, the eye of the underling is all-seeing. More of the good ones, officers and men, governed now by Gresham’s Law, begin to leave, and the situation worsens.
If anyone doubts what we are saying, let him put on civilian clothes and go to any household, bar, or club where former Navy personnel (or current Navy personnel of lower officer and enlisted levels) congregate. Let him listen. If doubts persist as to the extent of the problem, let the doubter read any history of any country during the period when it enters a great war. With rare exceptions, many of the top officers who were running the show one year before the war will have been replaced by “deep selections” within one year after commencement of the war.
One quickly recalls, for instance, that Dwight Eisenhower and George Patton (to steer safely clear of our own service) were not exactly household words in 1939. They were, on the other hand, known within their service—but mostly for their “heretical” views. Had it not been for World War II and the genius of George C. Marshall, who made pure ability the determining factor for Army command, Ike and George surely would have retired as colonels—with Ike perhaps trying to sell real estate or mutual funds, and George living off his inherited wealth.
It is probably true, then, that the task of peacetime leadership is two or three times more difficult than that of wartime leadership. The relatively few sharp men at all levels, therefore, must somehow inspire and indoctrinate the relatively dull bunch who staff their organization.
Let us return now to that earlier-mentioned unpleasant, almost unthinkable subject. We were speaking of the admirals who say to their civilian masters, “Certain things are necessary. Give them to me or relieve me. I shall not save myself at the cost of those under me.’
This, of course, is not just one way of doing it—it is the only way. And it is a very hard, almost impossibly hard, way.
Yet, the admiral’s courage and dedication determines the seaman recruit’s courage and determination. There is a straight, unwavering line between the highest and the lowest, and those in between only reflect—each in his own way, according to his situation—the images of the leaders above them.
I am saying such things as this:
The Pueblo incident is a deed of the top leaders in exactly the same way that the OOD’s grounding of a ship is a deed of the captain, who may have been in his bunk, asleep and unknowing of the shoal.
The rule that a ship being deployed to WestPac must have a full complement is a good one. But the fulfillment of this rule by transferring men from ships just returned to ships just being deployed is bad. The enforcer of that role is obligated to make sure that a good rule is not implemented badly.
The superiority in numbers of Russian submarines (and how soon in types?) is not so much a credit to the Soviets as it is a discredit to the Americans. Most of all, it is a discredit to whomever has the individual responsibilities for seeing that the balance does not overturn. Which submariners will sacrifice their careers to make the point unmistakably clear to our Congress?
The payment of a bribe of $15,000 to nuclear submarine officers is a blot upon the records of non-submarine and non-nuclear officers who may be every bit as dedicated and as capable. Even if it were to be effective, would we want to entrust our nation’s survival to mercenaries? Who will stake his professional future on making a strong protest, with an even stronger advocacy for the hard measures necessary to solve this particular problem.
If this is an indictment—and I fear it is—it is a mitigated one. Human beings are weak, and we are all human. We have been human to the extent that we have feared to look at ourselves with the innocent clarity of the little boy who saw—and announced loudly—that the emperor was wearing no clothes.
But we have a saving grace. We know well, because of our training, our perception and our consciences, that there is a correct—a right—way to go. We may be sloppy because those around us are sloppy, but we know that sloppiness is wrong. We may fail to care for our men because those all around us fail to care also, but we know that this is wrong, too.
Most of all, we may find acceptable excuses to avoid doing the wrenching work of looking out for those under us because work is bothersome, and it makes one look odd to be dedicated, or patriotic, or—by George! Let us use an almost forgotten word—noble.
The word “noble,” with its connotations of self-sacrifice, humility, and commitment, describes a kind of magic which has retained and inspired more men than any pamphlet, speech, or directive. The magic is best expressed in the phrase “For the Good of the Service,” which we honorably borrowed from the British, along with their signal book, phonetic alphabet, tactics, and a lot of other stuff.
When we ask a man to give all he has to give, when we take him away from his wife and children, when we ask him to be ready to give his body up possibly to be blown apart—yes, even when we make him work long hours at horrible work (sometimes) for a pittance—what we are really asking him to do is rise to nobility.
The noble man deserves a noble cause. Thus, we dare not cheapen the product, water the milk, or put sawdust in the bread.
The leaders of the Navy must constantly remind themselves that it is the believable ideal that inspires enlisted men and junior officers to give their bodies, family life, and futures over to the Service. No civilian organization asks as much; therefore, we must realize that the Navy can never compete with civilian organizations only by offering more money, more comfort, more amenities. Our Navy can have but one course: to go back to the unchanging incentive which is the basic attraction to military service in all countries, in all ages: the believable ideal.
The ideal is still here, but too few believe in it any more. As we have tried to hammer home again and again in this article, the almost infinite number of very minor abuses of our most precious resource, men, have spoken louder than our words in defining how well the Navy’s leaders support the ideal.
Yet, buffeted and bent, the framework still stands and, because it does, defining the task ahead is easy. We have to start from the top downward to look out for our men, in every little detail.
On this note, what about the Z-grams? Many welcome them as a sign of a refreshing new attitude at the top, but also note that it is a brute-force attempt for the top naval officer to change, directly, the most apparent abuses at intermediate and lower levels. “Z” is the last letter and, in the Navy, he is now also the last word. But, because there is only one “Z,” he cannot possibly effect all the changes needed, if for no other reason than that one man cannot possibly learn what they all are. Every officer and every petty officer in the Navy is capable of neglecting or abusing his subordinates. Can the CNO stand looking over the shoulder of each?
Still, the CNO has a mighty lever. If he can so lead his admirals that they come to follow certain precepts, those admirals will then lead their captains, the captains will lead the commanders, and the new approach will speedily filter down. Then, and only then, the hundreds of major barriers and tens of thousands of minor barriers to retention will disappear.
How might these precepts be stated? May I try?
► I shall weigh my every action against its ultimate effects on each man and officer in my command.
► I shall not hesitate to risk or sacrifice my personal welfare in order to gain the well-being of those entrusted to me to lead.
► I shall lead my immediate subordinates, not command them impersonally, and I shall demand that those subordinates in turn lead their own subordinates.
► I shall never forget that I owe to each subordinate an amount greater than that individual owes to me.
► I shall bear individual responsibility for each person under me.
► I shall realize that no one must believe my words, but that all will believe my actions.
Can the U. S. Navy solve its retention problems? It must. This, then, is a call for volunteers for what will eventually be a rather large working party.
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A graduate of the U. S. Naval Academy in 1951, Commander McIntosh served in PhibLant and DesLant as a deck officer until 1955. He obtained an M.B.A. from Harvard Business School in 1957, and worked as an engineer and marketing manager at Litton Industries and the Clary Corporation before forming his own advertising and public relations firm. He now works as an independent writer of technical press articles for industrial firms, as well as a free lance writer for general magazines. A Naval Reservist since 1955, Commander McIntosh has held most of the surface division and staff positions at the Santa Monica, California, Reserve Training Center, where he now is assigned as a specialist in retention and war gaming.
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Mix Thoroughly
As a Reserve officer, I have often been asked what exactly is the purpose of the U. S. Naval Reserve. My reply is, “The U. S. Naval Reserve is the instant navy—just add water.”
—Contributed by Lieutenant Robert J. Clark, U. S. Naval Reserve (R)
(The U. S. Naval Institute will pay $10.00 for each anecdote published in the Proceedings.)