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By Thomas C. Joerg
Navy civilians—the silenced service
The only time one seems to read anything by or about Department of the Navy (DON) civilian personnel is when there is a scandal or an arrest. The civilian side of the Navy, the backbone of fleet preparedness and operations, should have at least a passing interest in voicing its concerns about U.S. naval affairs. But does it? Articles by DON civilians are noticeably missing in local or national print. Statistics gathered from 18 randomly selected issues of Proceedings show a dismal number of articles or letters published by DON employees as compared to others dealing with the U.S. Navy. Many issues contain no articles by DON civilians, and overall about 300% more articles published were written by foreign authors than by U.S. DON civilian workers. This extremely low ratio says either that DON personnel do not care to support the professional body of knowledge of U.S. naval affairs, or that they have been cut off from this public forum for some reason about which the public should be made aware. The former makes no sense; so the latter must be true.
I believe that DON civilians are subject to a sociopolitical climate at work totally different and more repressive than that faced by their military counterparts. Interviews with DON civilians who have attempted to publish even the most innocuous or highly laudatory articles about the U.S. Navy reveal general psychological flaws in the Navy hierarchy that can—and continually do—hinder input from the civilian.
The civilian system penalizes rather than rewards bold, decisive thinking. Moreover, it puts people who have limited leadership abilities into management positions.
The military system, on the other hand, encourages a bolder, more vibrant leadership personality. Military persons can point to a more dramatic result of the success of their written ideas, such as a great military victory or lives saved, but the positive feedback available to a governmental writer’s material is comparatively mild.
Often mired in statistics that few outside their realm understand, governmental writers are doomed to write for a limited audience, and then are castigated for drawing attention to the subject by timid managers who shun publicity of any type, good or bad.
Because the logical response to an article or book is to write a rebuttal or a supporting statement, an article published by a DON civilian causes paranoia and consternation among managers; it forces them to defend their opinion in print where they are vulnerable, or not at all.
Another reason why military writers prosper while their civilian counterparts suffer is that the military has certain intellectual levels for each rank, whereas often a DON civilian employee has far more education than his or her supervisors. The fact that an underling has been published intimidates the superiors all the way up the line because of the precarious position the less-educated managers see themselves in. Moreover, by showing an outside intellectual curiosity, DON civilians jeopardize the managers’ spare time by inferring that they too should be spending time beyond their usual 40-hour week.
True, the subjects available to civilian writers are partly to blame for the failure of DON employees to write. A U.S. Navy SEAL story or the detailed description of what happened on board the USS Stark (FFG-31) during her attack by missiles is inherently more dramatic than a civilian’s discussion of procurement or of a flaw in the logistics chain. This need not be. If the civilian is courageous enough, and if publishers are receptive enough to print provocative articles about serious and controversial problems, civilian articles can be just as gripping.
However much the “dirty laundry” may threaten civilian managers, it needs to be aired. If problems were allowed to be addressed in the public forum when they first reared their heads, many national embarrassments to the Navy surely would be averted long before they exploded on the front pages of our largest newspapers.
Articles on positive subjects are also important to the Navy’s image and to its serious writers. Unfortunately, prying even the most basic information from DON managers about their operations is as difficult as penetrating the KGB. This resistance to divulging routine statistics to anyone, much less allowing them to be published, makes writing positive articles next to impossible. The only information readily available to the civilian writer is that picked up in roundabout ways.
Of course, once the first byline is given to a DON civilian writer’s work, another major obstacle appears.
Whereas military writers improve their careers by being published, DON writers often ruin theirs. For one thing, military personnel are reassigned every two or three years and are therefore less vulnerable to attack by any one command. The DON civilian, however, may work under the same group of persons for 20-30 years. Once a “whistle-blower” label is attached to a writer, it is extremely difficult ever to get a promotion anywhere in the Navy. It is easier—and safer—for the DON civilian manager to attack the writer through the old-boy network than it is to step forward boldly and confront the ideas in print; thus one never reads follow-up articles by other DON writers. The hapless DON authors who feel good about their personal and professional achievement are doubly dismayed when they discover the insidiousness of their supervisor’s behind-the-scenes attacks on their character for having put the work in print. These attacks include poor appraisals, negative responses to all personnel requests, informational isolationism, and false references.
The management’s intent is not so much to stop the author from writing as to show other prospective writers what awaits them. But the farther writers are driven underground, the more acidic they become when they resurface in print.
Mr. Joerg is a GS-9 Procurement Analyst for the Nuclear Reactors Logistics Support Department of the Navy Ship Parts Control Center in Mechanics- burg, Pennsylvania. In addition to government work, he runs his own business and writes extensively on a variety of subjects.
Proceedings / July 1990