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By Captain John L. Byron, U.S. Navy
Evil FitReps
Pay attention. In a few moments I’ll give you a single compelling, overwhelming reason the officer fitness report system must be changed.
But first, let’s look at why we are where we are. Our current system evolved of practical need. For reasons the Navy can be proud of, objectivity has driven Navy officer promotions. Linked with the boards that turn marks and words into action, the fitness report system we now have is the bedrock for decisions of who goes on, up, out.
The single most important fact about FitReps is that the system works. Anyone who has served on an officer board will say that board was entirely confident it had accurately ranked the officers under consideration. However lumped together the grading and however glowing all the words of the fitness reports being screened, a properly constituted Navy board will cohsistently and repeatedly pick out those officers who are best fitted to move forward.
The utility and the practical effectiveness of fitness reports as we know them makes us stick with the current system. Our last major change in the early 1970s was a horrible disruption and many officers were hurt by differing application of the new standards in the various officer communities. We’ve all learned since then to use the system with fairness, to avoid harming a decent junior officer whose only offense is working for a skipper who follows instructions.
We know the kubuki. We’re expert at the ritual dance of marks that places 95% of our officers in the top 5%. We speak in the wonderful richness of that special lingo that calls the average officer “outstanding,” puts all good people “head-and-shoulders” above their peers, and describes failure in the marvelous circumlocution of lesser praise. It’s all very proper. Don’t say, “she’s a drunk,” say “she’s frequently sober.” Don’t call him a klutz you can’t trust alone on the bridge but instead write in glowing terms how well he ran the Navy Relief drive. If he’s really a bozo, say he’s great but leave out the recommendation for early promotion.
And if he’s damned good, well here you get out your thesaurus and put your best skills to inventing some paragon halfway between John Paul Jones and Christ. It’s all enough to make anyone forced to read page after page of this drivel to quote Dorothy Parker in her review of a bad children’s book: “Constant reader thwow up.”
And it’s all necessary. Only the crudest reporting senior deliberately writes an honest fitness report. Only an inexperienced fool takes the words of the fitness report form to mean what they say. But although it works and though we know how to work it, our existing system of fitness reports is absolutely unacceptable to the naval officer’s code of honor.
The system is, at its very core, corrupt and corrupting. It has this fatal flaw: We must lie. It makes evil of honesty and virtue of untruth. We who live in truth in all else lie about our fellow officers on fitness report forms and sign our names to this fiction. In this most honest of professions, we who demand truth-telling in everything from deck log entries to after-action reports require of ourselves in the evaluation of officers’ fitness a dishonesty that would get us summarily relieved if practiced elsewhere in our business.
Have I offended you? Are words like “lie” too strong for your delicate stomach? All right, we’re merely “stretching the truth.” We’re only exaggerating accomplishments and leaving out shortcomings. These aren’t “lies” we put in fitness reports; they’re just deliberate falsehoods. And our intent isn’t wrong. What harm is there in misleading the junior officer we’re writing about and the seniors who must rely on our evaluations? We’re not cheating with our creative breakouts
and false competitive categories. We only aim to avoid the harm of honest evaluation and truthful comparison.
Call all that whatever you choose. I call it lies.
I’ve benefited from the lies others have written about me and am practiced in this phony art myself (and will continue until the system changes). But it increasingly troubles me, this ethics warp we must pass through as we shift from all else we do to writing fitness reports. It troubles me too that we play this deceptive game so skillfully, that we are inured to lying when we evaluate our fellow officers. The entire culture of fitness reports is pernicious and wrong in the profession we share. We need a new system, one founded on honesty.
And now the hand-wringing starts. “We can’t do it . . . we’ll hurt some officers . . . we’ll lose some officers ... we can’t come up with a fair system . . . somebody will cheat.” Translation: we can’t trust ourselves.
We put our lives and this nation’s honor in each other’s hands, but somehow give up on creating a system of evaluating officers that is both fair and honest at the same time. That’s crazy. Let’s remember who we are. We’re naval officers. We’re straight-shooters and we can do anything. We sure as hell can put together a simple, fair system for reporting the fitness of officers that requires reporting seniors to tell the truth. And we can police it and ourselves to keep it running true.
Nobody asked me, but I think the Navy’s most senior leadership needs to say something like this: “The current system of fitness reports requires good officers to lie. I will not accept that. Fix it.”
Captain Byron is commanding officer of the Naval Ordnance Test Unit in Cape Canaveral, Florida.
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Proceedings / December 1990