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By Captain John L. Byron, U.S. Navy
Tough Questions for a New Navy
We are a Navy in transition, ruled by change. Powerful forces transform our service, bringing into question everything but the color of our uniforms. We are involved in the U.S. Navy’s most profound sea change since World War II. At its conclusion, we will have a new Navy.
This is no time to have others hand us the final solution—neither the Congress nor the Joint Staff nor the press nor anyone else. Defining our service is our job. We must satisfy those who pay for it and those who employ it, but we’re the ones whose primary duty it is to protect forever our nation’s freedom of the seas—and we know more about this than anyone.
We have two tasks, we Navy officers. First, we must acknowledge the ongoing change around us. Then we must meet our profound obligation to drive and manage such change to benefit the nation. We must confront serious issues.
Strategy
The nation’s overall strategic approach to defense stands at a crossroads. Our global view, which prevailed over recent decades, must contend with isolationism once again.
A vision of economic competition vies with a military approach to national security, and, within the military, we argue sincerely whether we need strong naval forces or should rely predominantly on land-based capability. Perhaps less sincerely, we also see narrow service issues raised once more as strategic ones, revisiting the ancient roles-and-missions contests of the late 1940s. We debate whether to have a force-in-being or a force-in-reserve. We ask to what extent visible threats define our defense needs, how many and what kind of contingency forces we should have. Within the Navy, the telling question is where our forces should be: should we continue forward deployments or just surge as needed?
The broadest question: should we advocate actively and ardently a Navy position—or merely wait for the answers? I believe that we should weigh in heavily.
Missions
The Navy we’ve operated in this century has been a main-force Navy, designed to contend with similar fleets in Mahanian battles at sea. This Navy has been focused on sea control, and our force has been defined by this mission. But, we face a new world, one without current blue-water adversaries. We see no other actor on the world stage ready to challenge U.S. mastery of the seas and bent on doing so. We also encounter the attractiveness of sea- based force as a means to project power onto the land, enhanced by the marvelous flexibility and mobility inherent in modem U.S. warships. Power projection—our second major mission— appears spring-loaded to overshadow sea control as the Navy’s raison d’etre.
Should it? What risk should we assume in allowing our mastery of blue water to atrophy—in order to play a role on the beach and thus better contend in the roles-and-missions boutique recently reopened by the Joint Staff? Where do we focus? What is the core mission of the new Navy? Has it in fact changed, amidst all this other change?
Forces
The Navy’s resource base is shrinking rapidly—officially by 25% in the current five year period, but almost certainly by much more. We are downsizing by 550 to 450 ships—probably another optimistic projection. We face lean times. And yet we are creating ships and aircraft at the edge of technology, crafting second-to-none designs of extraordinary capability. We’ve bet on quality over quantity as the central design theme. Our newest platforms are the most costly ever.
But have we hit a wall of affordability? Something is out of kilter here.
How can we spend less on fewer ships and aircraft and yet continue to pursue the highest-cost option? And where do
we trade off between current ownership and future designs? Where is the right place to draw the line between research and current operations?
We continue to rely on the aircraft carrier battle group as the premier naval force, but we also seek high-tech designs that rival the aircraft carrier, while at the same time denying naval aviation the support it needs to pull itself out of a deep hole. We do all this inside a Navy staff that upholds the positions of the three platform barons as the most powerful forces inside the Navy—pitting surface, aviation, and submarine interests against each other and almost certainly against the best interests of the Navy. How long can all this continue? Can we keep pushing for high-end solutions exclusively, or is it finally time to search for cheaper options, bringing back Admiral Elmo Zumwalt’s high/low approach?
Can we allow threats from within our own service to endanger the carrier-battle-group paradigm so central to our current operating concepts? Alternately, can we afford to center the Navy on the carrier battle group or should a more distributed force be created? Can we still allow our three navies—surface, air, and submarine—to pursue independent solutions to Navy missions? Can we afford the super ships and aircraft we’re now developing? What is the right balance between the Navy now and the Navy of the future?
People
Perhaps the Navy’s most significant change is in its people. They’ve always been good, always motivated—but now the Navy’s sailors and officers are smarter, better educated, more professional, and more a part of the mainstream of American life than ever before. This is a force to be proud of, the best Navy in history.
Today, our people respond to leadership differently than they did in the past. They want to be an active part of the process; they know they have a positive contribution to make. How do we offer a better brand of leadership?
How do we change the way we deal with
Proceedings / July 1992 ,
our people, to show full respect to this new crop of bluejackets and junior officers, to best kindle their contributions.
How do we quit turning off junior officers and transmogrifying our most enthusiastic people into cynics? How can we exploit fully the extraordinary competence of our female professionals? How do we winnow the force for quality, keeping only the best for our new Navy? And, how do we properly support personnel programs as Navy dollars become most scarce.
Finally, how do we best organize our Navy? Who’s in charge—the producers °r the consumers, the engineers or the operators? Which Navy is paramount, the business Navy or the operating Navy? What should be the role of the Chief of Naval Operations? His staff? Program managers? System commands? The Navy Secretariat? Who runs the show?
Loyalties
Navy loyalty has three dimensions: loyalty to country, loyalty to service, and loyalty to warfare community. Let ns stipulate that loyalty to country is unchanged and unchallenged. But the other two loyalties require much deeper examination if we are to deal with the changes before us.
Is one to be more loyal to the Navy 0r to the Joint Staff (or unified command)? In times past, there was no argument: the Navy always came first! °ut we do see change here, in the form °f powerful forces driving loyalty to an ahegedly higher good at the combined- arms level. And how does one better express Navy loyalty within our ser- VlCe—by subordinating the interests of °ne s own warfare community or by mising these narrow, parochial interests to the highest level? Both these questions go so much to the heart of the current debate that we must sort out °yalty before we can drive change Properly. The answers aren't easy.
Human beings always seem to per- 0rm well in the role of advocate. Our c°urt system, our form of government, a.nd °ur role in the affairs of the world rely on advocacy, not balance. One Can argue that we serve best as strident Proponents rather than team players.
rthermore, abandoning the advocate’s p e ‘s a foolish thing to do unilaterally.
an the other players be trusted to re- ^P°nd in good faith? Will our sister ervices play the game as objectively? th * Leach "mrfure community within tge Navy willingly sacrifice its own inrests to support overarching Navy
Proceedings/July 1992
goals? Our blue uniforms and our breast insignias cast us in roles. What role best serves our loyalty to our nation as we craft its new Navy?
Tensions
As we deal with this swirling collection of issues, we should see the tensions and contradictions that underlie them are not new. The role of the Navy has been debated and challenged for more than two centuries, most recently in the dark decade following World War II. Similarly, mission arguments have been a constant feature of our Navy—too often with the explicit choice matching neither true strategic needs nor employment realities. This holds true as well in discussions of ship types, sizes, and complexity, as well as the perennial wrangles over organization, over producers versus operators, over future programs versus current operations, and over people versus iron. We’ve been here before; we need to keep that in mind. We will be both comforted and prepared if we read the Navy’s history closely before we attempt to write the next chapter.[1] [2]
Answers and Opportunities
Navy First
The process of finding answers must start with a rock-solid stand on loyalty. Let our loyalty to the nation continue paramount. The other loyalty goes to the Navy—Navy, not joint, is first.
Within this new joint world, we keep alive for the nation a critically important strategic flame: freedom of the sea. No twinky legislation or pressure for “loyalty-up” to a boss from another service should steer us from wholehearted advocacy for command of the sea. It is part of our loyalty debt to the nation—one not served at all if we let others less knowledgeable of war at sea to decide the shape or fate of the Navy.
The harder question is where to place loyalty within the Navy itself. Again, my answer is: to the Navy. By this I mean ahead of community and platform loyalties—even ahead of the self-interests now served best by strict community provincialism. Let those few in billets that clearly cast them as community advocates continue to function as such. The rest of us must broaden our view to accommodate a full grasp of Navy needs unhampered by narrow community interests. No one is going to get everything he or she wants in the new Navy. We must place choosing wisely ahead of the blind advocacy that lies in platform parochialism.
Neither of these loyalty stands—the Navy over jointness and the Navy over community—will be popular, but both share this vital characteristic: they best serve the national interest.
With the question of loyalty addressed, we have even tougher tasks ahead of us: to see the transition, to understand its historical antecedents, to make the choices, and to drive the necessary change. We won the war. It’s time to get ready for the next one. □
'Officers would profitably consider the history
contained in these four books:
- Power and Change: The Administrative History of the Office of the Chief of Nava! Operations. 1946-1986 (Naval Historical Center, 1989) by Tom Hone
- Origins of the Maritime Strategy: American Naval Strategy in the First Postwar Decade (Naval Historical Center, 1988) by Michael Palmer
- This People's Navy (Free Press, 1991) by Ken Hagen
- On Watch: A Memoir (New York Times Books, 1976) by Admiral Elmo Zumwalt, U.S Navy (Retired)
Captain Byron is commanding officer of the Naval Ordnance Test Unit in Cape Canaveral, Florida.
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Traveling around the Navy these days, one encounters dismay and despair, a woe-is-me attitude in the officer corps, a deep and pervasive sense that all this change is just plain bad. I say this is nuts, that we instead should see both victory and opportunity in our circumstances. We’ve won the Cold War, and we face change as the result of victorious perseverance. We should rejoice in such an outcome.
We should see grand opportunity to forge and shape the new Navy. The threat aspect is quiet. Technology offers rich options. We’ve never had better people. We have welcomed a total- quality philosophy designed specifically for improvement through change. This is a time for aggressive competence.
[2] offer no comprehensive formula to deal with the questions above; I raise no vision of the proper outcome. No single person can bring forward the final answers. Rather than a Burning Bush, what we need today is a group consciousness within the Navy’s officer corps that massive change is in the wind. It is most important now to see the scope of the transition we face, identify the questions we must answer, and engage in honest, soul-searching debate on the overarching question: “Whither the Navy?”