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Like navigation chores, long since assumed by quartermasters, many other operational routines can be adequately handled at lower levels of management. This would free the line officer corps to focus on the Navy’s true bottom line: warfare training.
When was the last time you had an urgent, compelling need to use a sextant for navigation at sea? There’s a good chance you haven’t used one in years. Such a skill—for hundreds of years the hallmark of a master mariner—is no longer an essential primary warfare skill needed by seagoing officers in today’s Navy. No longer dependent on the sextant to steer our ships at sea, naval officers now use complex and reliable electronics. SatNav, GPS, Loran, and handheld navigation computers provide in minutes the same information that John Paul Jones could have worked out only after hours of painstaking effort.
What really has changed is the focus. Navigation—the positioning of a vessel—still is required, but the warfare skills needed to make it happen are entirely different. As a war-fighting element, navigation is simply an integral, automated part of overall battlespace management. No longer can the navigator simply bring his ship to a rendezvous with the enemy, where the captain takes over to do battle. He instead must dodge satellite sensors, unfriendly shipping, sonar arrays, and lousy weather, to bring his vessel undetected and unscathed to within engagement range of the enemy, all the while attempting to convince the Old Man that the weather and atmospheric conditions predicted by on-board computers will support the precise targeting and location needs of phased-array radars, antiship missiles, missile seeker patterns, and digital communications nodes. On top of that, the navigator most likely must maintain a required speed of advance, save fuel, and make allowances to keep the aircraft and helicopters flying. Clearly the professional skills required to be proficient in this business extend far beyond mastery of the sextant, and today’s navigator no longer has the time to spend on the rigors of celestial navigation.
But how much time does today’s navigator spend mastering his complex craft? In too many cases, not nearly enough. Unlike his antecedents, the navigator’s job pulls in many different directions, and markedly dilutes the time available to master the required warfare skills.
In another era and in dealing with another complex process, Henry Ford recognized the costs of such dilution of skills, and made his fortune building Model Ts by specialization of effort in the car assembly line. Ford recognized the substantial benefits in breaking down the skills needed in building cars and teaching his people specialization.
Is there a lesson here for today’s Navy? Where Henry Ford instituted specialization and division of labor, the Navy requires its officers to gain integrated, broad knowledge of all areas within their warfare branches.
So we find the navigators on our frigates, cruisers, aircraft, and submarines working very hard to maintain expertise in many complex skills: electronic navigation, satellite communications, computer technologies, tactical battlespace management, and numerous operating procedures, guidelines, and war-fighting doctrines. In addition, as department heads, our navigators retain line responsibility for administrative, personnel, and material management duties.
The demands of technology, procedures, and infrastructure threaten to overwhelm our navigators, our seagoing department heads, and our junior officers. Our experience in Desert Storm bears out this view. Much has been written of commanders abandoning too-complex warfare doctrine and logistics rules and adopting, on the spot, highly effective and much simpler methods. In the heat of battle, on-line leaders specialized in what was really necessary to get the job done.
The demands placed on our officers’ time are immense; unfortunately, far too many of those demands stray far afield from our central task—excellence, knowledge, and proficiency in the application of strategic and tactical war-fighting skills. Much more specialization is in order. As we did with sextant skills, we need to identify and shed those demands on seagoing officers’ time that do not contribute to the study of battle group tactics, regional warfare, and other warfare specialties that constitute the core of our military capability.
As part of this process of reducing demands, we need to address the issues of people-and-training and technology-and- hardware—and tie them together. Tactics and warfare training are driven by existing hardware and the knowledge and experience of our people. These elements, combined with managing the existing material and administrative infrastructure, take up the great bulk of our time.
Tactics-and-hardware should be tailored, wherever possible, to ease the demands placed on people-and-training. For example, the joint operational tactical system on many surface ships and the software programs on the HP9020 computers on submarines are fleet solutions to inadequate system designs installed on our warships. In most cases the design was adequate initially, but as technology evolved, existing equipment could not be updated because of time or because of contracting or budget restrictions. The outcome is an increase in the time necessary for our people to master the skills to maintain, operate, and integrate the capabilities of numerous, not-quite-com- patible systems.
How can the naval service best focus on the dual objectives of reducing time demands on people and providing time to concentrate on the mastery of warfare
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Proceedings/April 1993
skills? The total quality leadership program has done much good throughout the fleet to date. However, it was born from experience in economic enterprise, where the fundamental concern is profit, and we must recognize the Navy has a different concern in using TQL to enhance its bottom line.
Our bottom line is training, organized to teach our officers and sailors the technical, tactical, and strategic knowledge needed to effectively employ a marvelous array of equipment to meet national mil- itary/political objectives. It is not defined in terms of dollars, but in terms of productivity and efficiency in learning and execution of war-fighting skills.
This is an easily accepted premise, consistent with our enumerated Navy policy elements of deterrence, forward presence, crisis response, and force reconstitution. But translating these objectives into the use of manpower on a day-today basis on board ship is not so easy. In many cases, our primary objectives are swamped by other demands, and we run out of time to teach or learn war-fighting skills to the degree of expertise we would like. We are too busy with other important tasks: maintenance, evaluations, equipment repairs, quality assurance, basic training, shipboard preservation, etc.—in short, “overhead.”
Our overhead at the shipboard level is so great that it takes an inordinate amount of our people’s time to administer to its requirements. This was less of a problem during the build-up years, but new budget priorities demand that we improve productivity and efficiency so we can minimize overhead and still improve our bottom line—our war-fighting capabilities. The fundamental issues are these:
>■ Distribution of workload among officers, chief petty officers, and non-khaki service members. Today’s officers spend too much time on infrastructure and not enough on war-fighting skills.
^ The demands of maintenance, repair, and preservation efforts for equipment, both at sea and ashore. Up to 50% of our day-to-day hours are devoted to these efforts; administrative demands add another 10%-30%. Significant reductions in these percentages are sorely needed.
>• Basic and technical training—though both valid and necessary—demand too high a percentage of our officers’ time. More time must be made available to line officers and supervisors to study our principal trade: warfare.
How can we accomplish these goals?
First, a fundamentals-based review to identify potential improvements in our division of labor is needed, to spread the Workload. We need to look at the divi-
sion-of-labor benefits used so effectively by Henry Ford to boost productivity and efficiency in maintaining our infrastructure and basic training programs, while freeing our officers to improve their warfighting skills.
Second, we must continue and expand the current trend toward shifting a variety of shipboard tasks to non-crew, dedicated organizations (for example, health and pay records servicing ashore by support organizations). These support organizations should be fully responsible for their work.
How will this free time for the practitioners of warfare skills—the line officer corps of our seagoing ships, squadrons, submarines, and aircraft? As an example, let’s look at one major function common to all war-fighting units: maintenance of equipment. We spend a lot of time attending to its demands; our system requires it. We need to reduce the total management time devoted to maintenance and infrastructure. TQL and Henry Ford both would tell us that in most cases it is the system that needs to be changed to gain significant improvement. We must define our fundamental output in words and in a context understandable to our seagoing men and women.
To do this, one obvious change would be to increase the productivity and efficiency of our chief petty officer and warrant officer communities. In too many cases, all levels of management—including department heads and commanding officers—have to be involved daily in the nitty-gritty details of reviewing and approving maintenance tasks; important work, but expensive in terms of time. Why not remove department heads and commanding officers from this process and give the warrant officers and chief petty officers real responsibility and authority to make maintenance decisions? With appropriate guidelines and accountability, our repair officers, warrant officers, and chief petty officers could independently plan and conduct much of the maintenance that now demands the day-to-day attention of our junior officers and department heads.
Most of the manhours required for a given maintenance task go to making out the paper, explaining it, getting it approved (by the wardroom), and then clearing up the paper once the repair has been done. The actual repair is rarely so time consuming. The real inefficiency comes from the multiple layers of review and approval required.
It is time to reevaluate the system and find out why it requires so many layers of approval. Could it be because the multiple demands placed on our work center
supervisors have made it impossible for them to properly specialize in maintaining the equipment for which they are responsible? Have we made our system so complicated that we can no longer trust them to make correct decisions on their own? If so, on whom do we rely when it comes time to deal with battle damage, when the department head and quality assurance officer are occupied with fighting the ship?
It is possible to change our system to eliminate multiple layers of supervision to free up officer time to concentrate on warfighting skills. The benefits could be significant. Putting maintenance largely in the capable hands of the chief petty officer and warrant officer communities would result in less overlap of responsibilities, less officer time devoted to infrastructure, and more time available to train. And maintenance supervisors would be better prepared to make independent decisions under battle damage conditions, which represents an improvement in our bottom line—warfare skills expertise—and better damage control decision making.
It can be done, but senior naval leadership must provide the direction. As a first step, management has to decide which of the infrastructure programs currently managed in great detail by our seagoing officers can be adequately managed at a lower level. Some programs for consideration include enlisted evaluations, some aspects of repair work preparation and execution, enlisted warfare and watch-station qualification programs, and numerous operational routines. As with navigation chores, long since assumed by quartermasters and simply reviewed and checked by navigators, many other efforts could be effectively delegated to lower levels of management. Then, the senior naval leadership needs to determine which war-fighting skills we most want our officers to maintain as primary areas of emphasis.
Navy policy and the realities of the post-Cold War era, new budget priorities, and a smaller Navy all dictate a need for redefining primary goals and objectives in terms of the Navy’s bottom line—tactical, strategic, and material military readiness. Our primary focus must remain on warfare training and tactical proficiency. Our seagoing officers deserve nothing less.
Commander Severinghaus, a 1973 graduate of the U.S. Naval Academy, is commanding officer of the USS Annapolis (SSN-760). His previous tours include executive officer in the Alaska (SSBN-732) (Blue), engineering officer in the La Jolla (SSN-701), and the staff of the Director. Naval Nuclear Propulsion Program in Washington, D.C.
Proceedings / April 1993