Make the Word Become the Vision

A marvelous descriptive phrase for what we need is “rhetorical leadership.” Our message must come from the top down, and it must be repeated again and again by both our uniformed and civilian leaders, singing in chorus. Any question from any source must get the same clear answer. Every time a Navy leader gets in front of a microphone or picks up a pen, the same message has to come out. No message—even a brilliant one—can endure without the full commitment of all the Navy’s leadership.

>■ Build the message the right way. This thing can’t be put together by a committee or a bureaucracy. Every time we try this, we get pablum. The way we’ve built sound mes­sages and plans, from the beginnings of War Plan Orange to the full flower of the Maritime Strategy, has first been to task a few smart, experienced mid-grade officers: to draft the product; to pulse simultaneously the fleets, schools, and staffs; and then personally to move it up a very short, vertical chain all the way to the top. Then the Navy’s top leaders must sell it collectively and gather sup­port for it among senior leadership of those same fleets, schools, and staffs, including those of the Marines.

• Package the message properly. We need a secret ver­sion, to show the insiders we’re serious. We also need an unclassified version, to shape the debate everywhere we can within the Navy and outside the service. (Admi­ral Sherman’s failure lay in not presenting his message outside of a tight security circle. Our message should be the engine pulling the Navy forward. This won’t happen in a vacuum.)
• Keep the message simple. We have a lot to put in this message but it has to be understandable on its own terms. This argues for simplicity, as we had in the basic outline of the Maritime Strategy. Eschew obfuscating prolixity and gratuitous redundancy—please!
• Don’t get bogged down in hardware. The beauty of the Maritime Strategy was its use of “warfare areas” as the basic coin, with platform-think subordinated. Geogra­phy, geopolitics, global interests, national character, the military value of freedom of the sea, and the unique na­ture of war at sea and from the sea are proper elements of the message, either implicit or stated explicitly. Keep the hardware on the sidelines.

>■ Be resonant with shared naval concepts. The March 1992 Proceedings article “It’s War With Anastasia” at­tempted to capture in a structured way the shared beliefs that Navy officers bring to strategy and warfare. Such themes are broadly understood in the Navy, and should form the foundation on which the message is built.

• Be resonant with history. This period of Navy confu­sion is not unprecedented. The historical record suggests that the dear-threat, clear-response character of the Navy in the Cold War was much rarer than today’s milling about. But the Maritime Strategy, as a vehicle for the Navy message, itself had precedents. Mahan’s polemics created the modern Navy and gave us shared values that persist today. War Plan Orange corralled Navy thought for at least 35 years. The visions of Admiral Sherman and his con­temporaries set the Navy on course for the Cold War. In this century, the Navy always has had a message—or has had the need to articulate one. We need to articulate one right now. History can help us start.

>■ Speak with one voice. In crafting our message and get­ting it out, we will be forced to deal with the most per­nicious evil of today’s Navy: community-ism. When it was raining nickels and there was plenty of money for everyone, platform primacy did not affect survival. But now in this time of scarcity we face a certain choice: ei­ther community or Navy. The answer for the United States must be “Navy,” of course, but that need not sub­merge totally our community interests or identity. Instead we need to do within the Navy what Goldwater-Nichols has done among the services. To use a wonderful term from a Naval Postgraduate School lieutenant, we need inner jointness, which advocates a cross-functional ap­proach (recognize the term from Deming?) that subordi­nates community themes to a broader blue-suit under­standing. If we continue to put community interests above Navy, we are dead. The message that each community needs is the one we should be crafting; a single Navy mes­sage for one Navy.

• Answer the critics; address the automatic doubts. Crit­ics will have two strong comments. One is that the Navy is too fractionalized for anyone to believe a putatively co­hesive single message from the Navy. The answer to that is inner jointness, which puts all the communities and all the leaders in harness. The second certain criticism is that—whatever our words—the Navy really intends to go it alone. To respond to this we need a distinctly joint mes­sage. Jointness is here to stay. America wants its Navy to fight jointly, so every paragraph must tip its hat to joint­ness. We have to demonstrate the truth: that we are part of the overall defense, that we support the broad defense interests of the nation, that we are fully integrated with and part of the overall military strategy; and that we com­plement the other services, not rival them.

>■ Be resonant with the current winning message in de­fense. The theme of the Maritime Strategy was defeat of the Soviets at all levels of conflict. It meshed perfectly with overall defense policy, intelligence estimates, and na­tional strategy. Its themes were absolutely resonant with the messages of higher echelons and those of sister ser­vices and agencies. We always gain strength when we can link to higher messages, to prove what we’re saying is worth hearing in broad context. Seamless coherence with overall defense themes also is a necessary characteristic of the message. (The articles, testimony, and speeches of Secretary of Defense Dick Cheney and Chairman Colin Powell of the Joint Chiefs of Staff offer a strong archi­tecture. General Powell’s vision is an especially lucid ar­gument for a sound defense plan. We should seriously consider adopting the structure and vocabulary of these formulations in developing the Navy message. Dr. Jim Tritten showed us how in July’s Submarine Review.)

• Anticipate potential changes to the current winning mes­sage in defense. But let’s not link it too closely to higher themes. We’ll need to detune the Navy message ever so slightly, so it doesn’t depend critically on politics or the precise formulation it’s tied to, and so we can let our mes­sage evolve to stay with changing world conditions—in­cluding changes in the senior defense leadership. We must

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avoid being torpedoed by our own message, as we would be if we failed to build in a certain amount of flexibility and resilience.

• Stay the course. Our message should reflect broad and enduring naval themes, not the narrow views of a specific set of incumbent Navy leaders (recall that the Maritime Strategy advanced through at least three Secretaries of the Navy and as many Chiefs of Naval Operations). The Army’s successful and continuously updated message, Air­Land Battle, has been around since 1982. It is institu­tionalized in the field manual FM 100-5 and in every train­ing and education course in the Army. We must do the same with our message. We need to write a “keeper.” Then we need to keep it until world events and national secu­rity policy mandate a change.
• Get everybody on board. Internal marketing and tight discipline are paramount to success; we must bring the entire Navy leadership into support of this message. In practical terms, this means that we let all leaders provide inputs and chop on it—coordinating with, convincing, and coopting the fleet commanders, the Marine Corps lead­ership, the Unified commanders, and the new OpNav staff before we go final.
• Market the message. We need to push the message into every place that can support it. We need: to get the Navy informed about the game plan and the need for all to get on board; to connect with key congressional leaders, Hill staffers, media elites, academics, defense writers, et al., to focus external thinking on the message; to institution­alize the message in Navy schools, service colleges, training courses, warfare publications, and war plans; and to be singleminded in pushing this vision in joint dealings at both CinC and JCS levels, to wire the message into higher-level plans and documents.

^ Drive everything with the message. Is the Navy mes­sage a strategy, a force-planning guide, a resource allo­cation model, a research and development template, an operational scheme, a public-relations message, or a congressional argument? Yes. Our message, beginning with strategy, becomes the way all other arguments are made. It’s a tiebreaker. It’s the theme and the vision for all our planning. It’s the way we decide where money goes and what the money goes for—so it’s the way the smart guys argue for their programs. It’s the reinforcing wrap­around for all our dialogue with the other services, the Joint Staff, Congress, Office of Secretary of Defense, and the public.

^ Protect the message. One beauty of the Maritime Strat­^egy was that the entire Navy felt the ownership of it. We ^need that spirit for the new message, too—a protective ^Sense that this is our collective statement and that we should not undercut it by shooting at our own feet. But what of the improvements, the evolutionary refinements the message that we experienced with the Maritime Strategy? Yes, we will need constant review and tor- Ward movement because this should be a living mes­^Sage, and continually adding better ideas is important. But ^We must move it forward very carefully—not at the ex­pense of Navy solidarity. Free-lancing will kill us. The ^way to improve the message is to improve it internally.

and not have senior officers argue with it in public or chal­lenge it with a different product. The various elements of the Navy should let the message evolve through a dy­namic but orderly process of continuous improvement, resident in the OpNav staff. We must resolve our prob­lems with the message from within the system and main­tain a united front to the outside world. Here again, lead­ership will be critical.

• Only one tnessage. It seems that the entire naval estab­lishment is in the message business today—with nearly every Navy power center and bicycle shop in the Penta­gon and the Fleet writing its own version of what the Navy should be saying. Fleet commanders float their trial bal­loons. Senior speechwriters labor independently. The sub­marine force has produced a new vision statement of its own. The Total Quality Leadership office has a vision statement. The CNO Executive Panel has published a Navy Policy Book with little fanfare. Deputy Chief of Naval Operations for Plans, Policy and Operations (OP-06) has toiled for years to get out its version of the message, with drafts cascading upon drafts. Other baronies have circu­lated their own rival claimants. Let’s face it: we are building a Tower of Babel—but there’s no architecture. Little thought connects one document to the next. Each seems to have been written on its own planet. The authors come from tribes that have seldom met, except in battle.

• Timing is everything. Navy Secretary John Lehman launched public discussion of the Maritime Strategy at the very start of the Reagan-Weinberger-Lehman era. Gen­eral Powell had the Base Force Concept on the street by the end of his first year in office, Joint Pub I on the street at the end of his second year, and the National Military Strategy out with almost two years left on his watch. Both had lots of time to repeat—and institutionalize—their mes­sages. Our timing was fine on “The Way Ahead” article (Proceedings, April 1991), but the Navy Policy Book had the bad luck to be signed out by Secretary of Navy H. Lawrence Garrett just months before he left office. It can do the Navy little good to launch its message in the midst of a major convulsion—such as Tailhook—or shortly before major changes in our National Command Author­ity or Navy leadership. But if that’s when the message must be released, then the requirements to be loud, con­sistent, and repetitive become all the more powerful. And any document with yesterday’s signatures on it will have to be updated, turned around, and put back out on the street immediately, if it is to have lasting effect.

To sum up—multiple messages are no message at all. We must form ranks and march as one Navy, with one message and one vision. Our uncertain future hangs on it.

Captain Swartz recently completed duty as Special Assistant to the Chair­man of the Joint Chiefs of Staff and is now a fellow at the Center tor Naval Analyses. In earlier tours he participated in the development o the Maritime Strategy and NATO’s Concept of Maritime Opeiations.

ain Byron is the Commanding Officer, Naval Ordnance Test Unit ipe Canaveral. Previously, he served on the faculty of The Nationa College, teaching military strategy.