Train the Warrior, Educate the Officer

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Rub-a-dub-dub, seven men in a tub? Not quite. Sit-in trainers train student officers to manuever ships at sea. Just as educa­tion—at Naval Postgraduate School, Monterey, California, for example—should prepare the officer-as-officer to think and to learn, training should prepare the seagoing officer-as-warrior to use his shipboard resources—both men and material.

To “educate,” says the dictionary, is to provide “formal . . . instruction or study.” To “train” is to “direct in attaining a skill.” “Education” im­plies development of the thought processes, of the ability and willingness to think and to react creatively in changing circumstances. “Training,” on the other hand, aims to inculcate specific responses in specific circumstances, to substitute immediate reaction for calculated thinking re­sponses. Training is limiting and rigid; education is open and flexible.

To gain effective training and education, a naval officer must possess the ability to communicate. Communication is the most necessary ingredient in leadership and manage­ment. The ability to communicate in written and oral terms can be taught but too often is not. An officer’s pre­commissioning education in the Naval Reserve Officers Training Corps (NROTC) or Naval Academy must include a series of courses in composition and rhetoric. A specific number of hours should be devoted to these subjects at Officers Candidate School (OCS). It may be irrelevant to a junior officer’s performance whether his undergraduate major was physics or history, but if he cannot write a straightforward evaluation or issue a clear order, then his effectiveness will be severely diminished.

The question of an officer candidate’s undergraduate major is a much discussed one, and it is caught up in the need for nuclear power-trained officers, whose program has almost uniformly demanded engineering or hard sci­ence majors. This question has been resolved for the time being; nuclear power-trained officers occupy much of the Navy’s hierarchy, replacing their aviator predecessors. Their education philosophy is reflected in the high per­centage of regular Navy officer candidates required to major in engineering or the hard sciences.

The successful junior naval officer need not be an engi­neer, but he does need to be able to combine scarce per­sonnel and material resources to achieve a desired goal— the most important of which being combat readiness. The technical knowledge the junior officer needs to do his job can be instilled through in-service training. Precommis-. sioning education should ensure the prospective junior of­ficer can think clearly and flexibly and can communicate.

The goal of naval officer training is combat readiness. This may be a direct, straightforward proposition, as in training an individual aviator to fly a specific aircraft, or it may be complex, as in training a green ensign to obtain satisfactory results from a 15-year-old destroyer’s engi­neering plant manned by 60 or so disparate young men. Machinery knowledge is necessary but does little good if the operators and maintenancemen cannot be organized and motivated to operate the equipment effectively.

Training is the number one priority for the naval officer in peacetime. He must be trained himself, and he must be able to train his subordinates. And effective training, par­ticularly in the shipboard environment, depends more on 'effective communication by an officer than on his de­tailed, theoretical knowledge of equipment operation.

Just as significant as precommissioning education is the need to understand the high level of engineering sophisti­cation in today’s Navy. Advanced weaponry and electron­ics systems, not to mention the nuclear power plant, have raised this level to a point where the demands of mainte­nance requirements have overtaken those of operating skills. Systems are so automated that more personnel time is spent on maintaining them than on operating them. This phenomenon is ever more evident in new systems devel­opment and acquisition. The Navy acutely needs officers who are technically competent to deal with civilian engi­neers and designers, officers who can recognize “pie in the sky” proposals for what they are, and officers who can accurately recognize those proposed systems that will pro­vide unacceptable maintenance demands on the fleet. But

this need demands more nongeneral line specialists. The present ill-defined and diffuse effort to raise the “engi­neering consciousness” of the officer corps across the board will not suffice.

Individuals with the ability and the time to both main­tain and operate complex electronics and other state-of- the-art equipments are becoming increasingly rare as the Navy grows in size and technical sophistication. One method to compensate for the technical shortfall among enlisted personnel is to develop an officer corps educated and trained in both technical and operational aspects of naval warfare. However, precommissioning education can only provide a background in theory. After commission­ing, it is not practical to train a significant number of offi­cers to the requisite degree of technical expertise when the Navy is already falling short in adequately training en­listed specialists.

Officers should not be trained as maintenance special­ists in specific equipments or systems. They must be trained in using a spectrum of equipments as tools in fight­ing their ship. If enlisted specialists cannot be adequately trained to maintain their equipment, then the equipment needs to be reexamined. It does little good to purchase systems that work well ashore but are too delicate or com­plex to be kept in operating order at sea. Using replace­ment modules to minimize required repairs on the spot is viable only as long as the supply system is sufficiently funded to provide spares—also on the spot—a condition that does not exist for many systems.

After commissioning, the prospective surface warfare officer attends the 16-week Basic Surface Warfare Officer Course, a comprehensive but theoretically oriented school. During the officer’s career, this course is suc­ceeded by stops at department head, prospective executive officer, and prospective commanding officer schools. The commanding officer who emerges from this process, de­spite perhaps having attended short specialist courses, is very much a generalist. (He may, however, have a subspeciality in one warfare area.)

During this career training process, some officers do become specialists, shifting to the engineering duty, civil engineer, supply, or other restricted communities. Too often, this results in a dichotomy of effort; the fleet and the shore establishment corps march to their own drummers. The specialist becomes absorbed in micro-problems ashore, while his seagoing counterpart labors in the macro-world afloat. As a result, fleet officers often be­lieve the shore establishment lacks a sense of responsibil­ity and accurate perception of the real, seagoing world. This reduces the effectiveness of both sides. The inability of the people in the material command to supervise the production and introduction of reliable and maintainable systems into the fleet leads to frustration and reduced com­bat readiness at sea.

As a case study, we can examine the development of a state-of-the-art, electronic warfare “gizmo.” In the late 1960s, the Navy had recognized that the cruise missile age had arrived and that ships needed a means of rapid warn­ing of incoming missiles. Involved studies were con­ducted, specifications debated, subtle and blatant bureau­cratic struggles fought among various “beltway bandits” and defense contractors. Finally, specifications emerged and bids followed—low-ball bids, “my congressman, he ...” bids, bids realistic and otherwise. A contract was awarded for the gizmo.

By now, it is the late 1970s but, finally, the gizmo is here. Compact, automated, and—recognizing the diffi­culty of working on complex electronics gear at sea— maintenance is “plug and chug.” The gizmo doesn’t work? Pull out the offending part and stick in a new one from supply. Mail the bad part back to the manufacturer, where it will be repaired. But rising prices have intruded, and insufficient spares were purchased. Further, the man­ufacturer is not really interested in repairing malfunction­ing parts—which failed largely because of substandard manufacture—because his profit margin is so much higher for producing new gizmos than for repairing broken ones. Soon, the situation in the fleet is desperate. The ship has a nice-looking gizmo that reads well in its “welcome aboard” brochure, but it does not work. The shipboard technicians/operators are not permitted (even if they are capable) to repair gizmo parts. The nearest spare is in Pasadena; by the time the spare arrives on board, the im­mediate need for it—the operation then in progress—may no longer exist. Finally, there is no more than a 50-50 chance that the replacement itself will work anyway.