The War on Paper

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By Lieutenant Ralph T. Soule, U. S. Navy

The Navy must navigate in a sea of paper mountains and self-made obstacles before it can ever expect to put ordnance on real targets

The enormous administrative burden placed on the U. S. Navy personnel who man the ships, aircraft, and submarines essential to this nation’s security has recently received great publicity. Meanwhile, many prominent Congressmen and women, and the general pub­lic, have expressed concern that U. S. military forces, including the Navy, would be unable to operate effectively in combat. Are these issues separate and unrelated? Or, are they in a cause and effect relationship?

The Secretary of the Navy (SecNav), clearly alarmed at all the time naval aviators devote to paperwork, told the entire Navy in AlNav 137/85 that he is seeking “a 50 percent reduction in all administrative-related reports and duties imposed by SecNav directives .... The test for retaining any directive will be its tangible and important correlation to real combat readiness.”¹ Are paperwork and administrative tasks more of a burden to naval aviators than to surface warfare or submarine officers? Have the paperwork, inspections, and programs necessary to con­duct even routine naval operations gained ascendancy over training and tactical proficiency? Are the already under­way, highly publicized efforts to reduce the Navy’s paper­work load sufficient? To evaluate the efficacy of the cur­rent paperwork reduction effort, the roles of the Navy in peacetime, the state and size of the administrative work­load, and the extent of any resulting degradation to combat readiness must be examined.

The mission: The Navy’s primary peacetime mission is to ensure that the bulk of its operational units can conduct prompt and sustained combat operations at sea. This is what the civilians expect their tax dollars to buy. Continu­ous, imaginative, and thorough training of personnel on their own platforms is the key to operational readiness. Nothing should interfere with training toward combat pro­ficiency—all other considerations pale in significance.

The problem: The current administrative and opera­tional requirements that naval units must satisfy are al­ready felt throughout the Navy, yet they continue to grow daily. The problem can be divided into the following six groups: instructions, programs, teams, inspections, re­ports, and operational requests. Regardless of how they are grouped, each of these requirements is relentlessly time consuming, largely unnecessary, and too compli­cated to manage effectively.

As any naval officer can tell you, the binders containing the SecNav, Chief of Naval Operations (OpNav), Com­mander in Chief of a fleet (CinCFlt), Type Commander (TyCom), Immediate Superior in Command (ISiC), and unit instructions that each naval unit is required to have fill several bookcases in every administrative office. These instructions cover subjects ranging from automated data processing security requirements, to radiation hazard guidelines, to drug abuse policies. Many of these require a unit instruction on the same subject that often parrots the parent instruction. Therefore, each organization in the administrative and operational chain of command has its own instruction on the same subject that passes on the requirements of the original instruction or, worse yet, creates more requirements. No individual could be ex­pected to be even reasonably familiar with all of the in­

structions. Obviously, the commands that issue the in­structions do not expect anybody to read them because numerous messages are transmitted weekly to remind op­erational units of the arcane requirements. The practice of writing separate, independent instructions to implement each new program or address the problem of the week is completely unworkable.

The time spent by a unit on implementing the numerous administrative programs and preparing for inspections is awe-inspiring. A brief list of the tasks includes: the Planned Maintenance System (PMS) with required sched­ules, spot checks, and weekly accomplishment reports; the Personnel Qualifications Standards and associated assign­ment sheets, qualification letters, and progress charts; the unit safety programs, most often assigned to an already overburdened junior officer, that must include not only all safety aspects of the unit work environment, but also auto­mobile, motorcycle, and home safety as well; and the numerous, but famously uncoordinated, security programs dealing with top secret and secret material control, com­munications material security, and physical security. This list does not include the numerous engineering programs required for Light Off Exams (LOE) and Operational Pro­pulsion Plant Exams (OPPEs).

Each administrative program also requires a program manager, usually an officer, and a staff to implement the required action by preparing the reports, updating the progress charts and schedules, and updating the instruc­tions. The time spent to support these programs detracts from the time available for warfare training.

Granted, teamwork is essential in the Navy, but is it necessary to have so many different teams to get things done? There are Command Retention Teams, Ship’s Si­lencing Teams, Damage Control Evaluation Teams, Link- 11 Teams, and Ship’s Electronic Readiness Teams—to name just a few. And the only way to assemble and to train all these teams is to have many time-consuming meetings. It seems that a special team is formed to combat every little problem area or training deficiency.

Most of the teams are utterly superfluous. For example, what is the goal of the Command Retention Team? Is it not to counsel personnel to convince them to remain in the Navy so that the Navy can benefit from their expertise and they can benefit from all that the Navy has to offer? Why not have the personnel near the end of their obligated ser­vice receive reenlistment counseling from someone who has the time to become an expert, such as a shore career counselor, instead of expecting all the khaki in the com­mand to become reenlistment experts? Then the unit can concentrate on creating a satisfying working environment that will do more to encourage people to reenlist than words ever could.

The current inspection system, which resembles a series of hurdles to be cleared by every operational unit, is overly burdensome and fails to encourage the same readi­ness it purports to evaluate. The inspections include: Sat­urday morning inspections, OPPE, LOE, refresher train­ing (RefTra), command inspections, PMS inspections, occupational safety inspections, medical inspections, and dental inspections. Each inspection team must certify to its

The Navy’s myopia for paperwork prevents it from seeing the inadequacy of its JOs’ combat training, its lack of team-training, and the re­sulting deep scars in the morale and motiva­tion of its officer corps.

shore authority that the naval unit meets prescribed re­quirements, which frequently conflict from one inspection to the next. (OPPE and RefTra requirements for engineer­ing casualty control are a notorious example.) These in­spections are conducted piecemeal, resulting in knee-jerk shifts in unit priorities from one inspection to the next. RefTra supposedly assesses a ship’s ability to perform its assigned missions in a simulated combat environment, but the benefits are diluted by the infrequency of the training and the large number of other inspections that require preparation. As units wildly switch priorities to prepare for each new inspection, money is wasted and valuable training time is lost because of the daily administrative workload. These priority shifts keep commands under a constant strain, negatively affecting the morale of both the officers and the crew.

The most time-consuming requirements are the many administrative and operational reports each unit must make. There are so many reports required in so many dif­ferent situations that various administrative commanders publish instructions listing their particular subset of re­ports and referencing the applicable instruction! And these guides are of nominal value at best because the frequency of most of the reports is so situational that the list must be reviewed item by item to determine if the report applies. Some of the most time-consuming reports are Unit Readi­ness Reports (UnitReps), Casualty Reports, Movement Reports (MovReps), Operational Summaries, RAIN- FORM Reports (for intelligence collection and aircraft tasking—soon to be replaced by the more abstruse JIN- TACCS), legal reports, supply and accounting reports, fuel usage reports, Automated Data Processing Security Program compliance reports, pre-deployment readiness reports, and air controller proficiency reports. The re­quirements for most of these are buried in seldom-used Operation Orders (OpOrds).

Many administrative and operational reports require special text formats and serialization so they can be read hy computer and entered into a data base. (Woe to the

drafter of a computer-formatted report who commits an error in format or content and is detected by the com­puter!) Obviously, the computers used in this way are not saving any time or effort for the thousands of people draft­ing these reports. The commanding or executive officer, or even the department head, rarely understands the infor­mation being transmitted because the format is designed to make entry and manipulation easy for the machine, not the person. The efforts extended to keep statistics and write these reports drain even more precious time in which units could be conducting mission-related proficiency training.

There are also operational messages that must be sent to coordinate and request services for training: quarterly air service requirements that paradoxically assist higher eche­lon planning without committing either the requester or the prospective provider to do anything (a poor incentive for any of the drafters to bother to reflect actual require­ments accurately in their reports); the real air service re­quests that do represent scheduling commitments; quar­terly schedule submissions; team trainer requests; tactical air navigation channel requests; operating area requests; pre-exercise instructions; and miscellaneous service re­quests. For a single ship to conduct antiair warfare and antisubmarine warfare training with fixed-wing aircraft, some helicopters, and one submarine during a five-day underway period, the minimum number of required mes­sages to coordinate and to schedule these services can eas­ily exceed 15. Fortunately, these 15 messages usually fall into five of the above groups, but each of the groups has a different format, priority, and authority. While all these messages are being written, read, and interpreted, there is little time remaining to conduct realistic training to achieve tactical readiness.

The impact: Taken together, the bulk of the mandatory paperwork stemming from administrative requirements and operational reports cannot be justified—it has only created a crushing workload. The conscientious junior of­ficer spends an extraordinary amount of time to complete his assigned share of the paperwork—time then unavail­able for enhancing his own warfare specialty or ensuring the combat readiness of his area, men, and equipment. The concept of “management by walking around (MBWA)” is impossible to practice in the Navy because paperwork chains the officer to his desk. The chain of command rarely notices if a unit is tactically ready for combat—only whether it passes inspections and makes no errors on its computer format reports. The Navy’s myopia for paperwork prevents it from seeing the inadequacy of its JOs’ combat training, its lack of team-training, and the resulting deep scars in the morale and motivation of its officer corps.

A good example of the Navy’s attitude toward cultivat­ing tactical proficiency in surface warfare JOs is Tactical Action Officer (TAO) school, considered to be the surface community s premiere warfare training course. As a means of teaching surface warfare officers (SWOs) how to fight their ships in combat, the course is seriously flawed because it falls back on ease of instruction, rather than cultivating innovation or tactical skills in the students. A ridiculously high priority is placed on rote memorization

With all due respect to those senior naval offi­cers who speak of the importance of placing ordnance on target, that concern will never be transformed into action at the deckplate level until fleet administrative reporting require­ments are pushed into the background.

of number-filled matrices because numbers are easier to grade than evaluating student performance in tactical situ­ations. But memorizing matrices rings hollow three to six months after graduation because the memorized informa­tion cannot be retained in the face of report writing, in­spection preparations, instruction implementation, and team meetings that pervade shipboard routine. Beyond the inadequacy of TAO school, the number of warfare- oriented courses available to JOs suffers by comparison to the abundance of quotas available for Maintenance and Material Management Administration and Operation and other similar programs.

The Navy’s mind-set—most prevalent in the surface community—on administrative requirements hinders the effective use of all the available training facilities. The naval tactical game training system (NavTaG) is a power­ful instrument for evaluating the tactics and the capabili­ties of Soviet, Allied, and U. S. warships and airplanes in combat. How many officers not assigned to a destroyer squadron or staff get to use these trainers more than once a month? Or how many even know they exist? Most SWOs probably do not use the NavTaG trainers even once a year— if they use them at all. This situation will not improve until squadron-sponsored NavTaG competitions among ships receive the same priority that is devoted to in-port radio, signal bridge, and combat information center (CIC) training.

Most team-training facilities, or “team trainers,” avail­able to ships’ crews are conducted at shore training facili­ties. The equipment in most trainers bears little resem­blance to ships’ equipment—thus requiring trainer-unique watchstation assignments, and training that must be re­aligned back on the ship. Good team trainers are notori­ously scarce, causing fierce competition among the ships to schedule them. Usually, if a ship is not deploying within the next quarter, it is unable to get team trainers at all. And on the ships that do procure good team trainers, the COs and XOs seldom participate and balk at releasing more than a bare minimum of officers to attend because of the ship’s administrative workload. Once again, many JOs sacrifice the training they so desperately need in order to appease the administrative demigod.

It might be interesting to determine just how many offi­cers know how to employ their ship’s weapons according to current doctrine, or even how many know where that doctrine is located. The Navy has spawned so many naval warfare publications and tactical memos through its count­less reorganization attempts covering so many different topics that its basic fighting doctrine is lost in the file cabinets. Even the fortunate few who happen to stumble upon it (through perseverance or luck) have no time to practice with it. The OpGens (specific tactical doctrines for each warfare commander) and training objectives for each major exercise are so inflated with platitudes such as “know your job” and “destroy the enemy at maximum weapons range” that the truly useful information is hope­lessly obscured anyway. Most OpGens also make the mis­take of attempting to plan responses to all possible threats— an impossible task. Is it that so few naval officers have the time to become proficient at fighting their ships that they ward off their combat insecurities by wrapping themselves in a paper security blanket of verbose and tactically trite OpGens?

The personnel costs of the current ascendancy of the administrative over the operational in the U. S. Navy can­not be reduced to numerical figures or summarized with three-color bar graphs. Therefore, it is an area that is largely overlooked. The bright, energetic, and highly mo­tivated JOs reaching the fleet, as well as the second- and third-tour officers, are caught in the midst of conflicting priorities. Long-term planning of personal and profes­sional goals is almost impossible because of constantly shifting priorities for the next inspection and the weight of the day-to-day paperwork. Many young officers become cynical and disillusioned because they are forced to spend the majority of their time occupied by concerns unrelated to real combat-readiness. The Navy’s JOs are constantly reminded of the importance of maintaining tactical combat skill by articles in professional journals such as this one.

The administrative workload and various reporting re­quirements are especially hard on the smaller ships, such as destroyers and frigates. These ships have only a handful of JOs to complete all the work and perform the required collateral duties. This high-intensity workload steadily wears them down until even the most highly motivated JOs begin to suffer emotional and professional burnout.

To assist their ships in achieving combat-readiness, naval officers should have a keen knowledge of the tactics and capabilities of both U. S. and foreign navies, and be able to engage hostile forces on a moment’s notice. But in the current Navy bureaucracy, naval officers are forced to become more proficient at being administrators and pro­gram directors than skilled warriors: study and shipboard training to develop and maintain bare tactical skills must be done in their spare time, after all the paperwork is fin­ished. If anyone doubts this conclusion, ask a few SWOs when they last had time to study cruise missile profiles, seekers, or chaff employment techniques; their answers will convince you.