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Manning the Carriers
The U. S. Navy has never manned carriers well, yet we claim that they are our primary major combatants. Almost every officer community shuns carrier duty. This may be because we are so caught up with tradition that we cannot see some of the obvious ways of dealing with carrier duty. Six years of personal experience have provided me with a little insight into carrier duty that I would like to share.
The Navy should establish a carrier officer community that can generate its own challenging career path. There is no reason why a major division billet on a carrier (which may include several officers and more than 100 enlisted personnel, not to mention an extensive array of sophisticated equipment to operate and maintain) should not be considered as challenging as a department head tour on a smaller ship. Likewise, the principal assistant billet on a carrier should be equivalent to an
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executive officer tour on a destroyer, and a carrier department head billet should be equivalent to command of a destroyer.
The commanding officer (CO) of a carrier is almost totally at the mercy of his department heads on any given subject. Many of a carrier’s department heads have already had a command or other major responsibility elsewhere and were selected for carrier duty because of superior performance. For many, this is their first and only carrier tour and is considered something to be tolerated for a couple years. They spend their first year on board the carrier learning how to manage their large-scale jobs. But “super talent” prevails, and these department heads are usually successful if they have a few good people working for them. Are they successful only because we equate success with survival?
Why not employ the man who has seen carrier duty before, has a very small learning curve to overcome, and can be motivated to sustain all his carrier experience? We should lace his carrier career with the department head, prospective executive officer, and prospective commanding officer courses, and give him a command pin when he assumes a carrier department command. The average “top performers” should be included in such a program. The best “top performers” should be saved for something more exciting than the carrier learning curve, which most officers are trying to avoid anyway.
In addition, subsequent carrier tours must not necessarily be in the same department. The important goal is to keep the experience on board the carrier so that the carrier wardroom contains at least the depth and flexibility advantages found in smaller ships. This would ease the carrier learning curve significantly, especially for nonroutine events and evolutions.
Carrier duty as a junior officer is largely “dead time” for a surface warfare officer trainee, because he learns little about the cruiser/de- stroyer force. Survival is possible if the tour is limited to two to three years; but after the tour, the carrier force loses a lot of experience, and the officer must gain a lot of new experience quickly. He is essentially starting over in the cruiser/destroyer career path, competing against officers with more relevant experience.
The fitness report system also prompts many to avoid aircraft carrier duty. Any surface warfare officer who has served on a carrier has probably been lost in the “pack” at one time or another at fitness report time. It would certainly be more appropriate for the officers in a carrier to be compared only within their command departments. Special recognition may be afforded the few junior officers whom the ship’s CO may wish to honor by use of the remarks section of fitness reports.
There are some obvious benefits in developing a carrier department career path. With more experienced and confident carrier department heads, more effort can be expended in supporting the smaller ships in the task force. Cross-decking of people occurs when necessary, but what about responsibility? Better task force coordination can be achieved by taking one more dramatic step! Staff officers now assigned to the group commanders should work for the command department head to support and inspect the smaller ships in matters of engineering, weapons, operations, medical, and supply. An admiral should spend his at-sea tours thinking about such things as tactics, enemy capabilities vs. his own resources, and whether his task force is prepared for the various situations it might encounter. He should not be deciding which ship should get the last spare potable water pump shaft.
The best capabilities in almost every technical or specialized area exist on board a carrier. The most experienced enlisted personnel are also available. It should be much easier than it currently is to seek out task force problems and match them with task force capabilities, but a lot of potentially productive effort and initiative are lost with key officers struggling to master their environment. Why not link supply and personnel computer banks? Why not establish continuous departmental data/message links for informal task force problem liaison? Perhaps the frigate can help the carrier. The technology is already on board most ships, to say nothing of the talent.
Putting the carrier departments in
control of routine task force matters will also relieve COs of smaller ships from excessive dependence on their own expertise and that of their relatively inexperienced officers and crew. Commanding officers of ships should focus their attention on the tactical situation, making sure the ships are used to their best advantage. Any increase in efficiency in routine matters allows the CO and the ship to be more effective in combat. Even if such a carrier-oriented environment were initiated, the CO would have nothing to lose and could gain significantly.
Employing these recommendations would encourage more officers
to specialize in a single technical field by opening up avenues for a successful career that better serves the Navy as well as the man. Almost daily, we see how unrealistic it is to expect an officer to excel in all areas of our increasingly complex combat and support organizations. Even those who survive increased performance expectations do so only in a relative sense, having fallen on their sword less frequently, having stayed out of the fray to avoid mistakes, or even having hedged on reports to place themselves in the best possible light. Currently, a lot of ships look good only because the standards are so low.
Book Reviews
Why We Were in Vietnam
Norman Podhoretz. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1982. 240 pp. Ind. $13.50 ($12.15).
Reviewed by Lieutenant Michael N. Pocalyko, U. S. Navy
The title Why We Were in Vietnam is slightly misleading; this book-length essay neither excuses nor equivocates the U. S. presence in Southeast Asia. The author analyzes the war in detail and with exactitude, assessing the complex “political and moral issues of Vietnam, to discover if “the policies that led the United States into Vietnam deserve the discredit that has been attached to them.” Podhoretz’s arguments and history are striking, solid, and very conservative. His style and substance are clear and resonant.
In 1956, Harry S Truman wrote, “What a nation can do or must do begins with the willingness and the ability of its people to shoulder the burden.” His words are central to Podhoretz’s primary argument that given the “noble cause”—quoting President Ronald Reagan—of the war in Southeast Asia:
“. . . the United States demonstrated that saving South Vietnam from Communism was not only beyond its reasonable military, political, and intellectual capabilities but that it was ultimately beyond its moral capabilities as well.”
The author examines the policy of containment begun in the Truman Administration and brought to its fullest measure with John F. Kennedy’s inauguration—"We shall pay any price, bear any burden, meet any hardship, support any friend . . . .” The author concludes that the intensity of national commitment never reached the level Kennedy enunciated. Podhoretz views U. S. entry into Vietnam partly as a consequence of the Kennedy and Nikita Khrushchev meeting in Vienna, two months after the Bay of Pigs incident. Khrushchev maintained that the Soviet Union had a right to intervene in “sacred” wars of national liberation, but that the United States did not. “It will be a cold winter,” remarked Kennedy on leaving Vienna. The author adds “a show of effective resolve was now necessary.” Podhoretz sees that show of resolve, of course, as the real beginning of Vietnam.
While Podhoretz does not suggest that egotism was to blame for Vietnam, he does subtly tell of the effects that various egos had on the national Democratic leadership. Secretary of Defense Robert S. McNamara, for instance, believed “that he could devise a system for dealing efficiently and successfully with any enterprise, whether an automobile company . . . a government bureau ... or a guerrilla war.” National Security Advisor McGeorge Bundy’s "... arrogance had been legendary.” Lyndon Johnson had a “flamboyant personality” and a “rhetorically hyperbolic style,” which during his tenure as President would lead to “the point where charges of outright lying would replace the more delicate allegations of self-deception and subtle misrepresentation.” However, in 1969, Republican Richard Nixon had become the victim of “liberal demonology.” A salient factor in all of Podhoretz’s ruminations is their failure:
“If. . . Kennedy tried to apply containment in Vietnam on the military cheap, and Johnson tried to make it work on the political cheap, Nixon tried to salvage it on the strategic cheap. All three failed. That these were failures of leadership is certain.”
Podhoretz makes no pretense of balancing his views with the ideology of the antiwar Leftists. He is honorable in stating a position and staying with it. This volume is an acutely discerning perception from the political Right which indicates that implementing worthwhile moral causes failed. The force of containment