122nd Annual Meeting & Sixth Annapolis Seminar
The Navy has been responding to crises around the world this past year in a very effective and outstanding way. Our job is to provide the capability to conduct prompt, effective, and sustained combat operations. Our people are out there every day, prepared and demonstrating it.
If you watched what happened near Taiwan recently, you saw the Navy mobilize, moving the carrier Independence (CV-62) and her battle group 100 miles or so east of Taiwan. They sent a signal that needed to be sent by a combat-ready battle group. You saw the Nimitz (CVN-68) carrier battle group move from the Persian Gulf through the Indian Ocean, through the Strait of Malacca, and on to the area near Taiwan, also sending a signal of mobility and combat readiness that nobody could miss.
And then, because General Benny Peay [Commander-in- Chief, Central Command], in the best Goldwater-Nichols fashion, said, “Wait a minute, my theater needs a little bit of help here and I don’t want to be without a carrier right now,” the George Washington (CVN-73) battle group moved at high speed from the Mediterranean into the Persian Gulf, ready to do whatever was required—no questions asked.
Today, off the coast of Liberia in West Africa, our Sailors and Marines in the Guam (LPH-9) amphibious ready group, who thought they were going to be in the Mediterranean, are ready and able to do whatever is required of them.
Nobody writes about that much, but our sailors live it.
There is a hell of a lot right with the Navy. When Secretary of Defense William Perry returned from visiting the Pacific Fleet not long ago he said, “Let there be no mistake, this is the best damn Navy in the world”—and he was right.
Do we have problems? You bet. An organization that does not realize that it can improve is an organization designed to fail. We must listen to criticism. We must figure out which criticism is real and honest and which is not—and there is some of each. That which is real must be seen as a signal, to be examined and corrected.
If we can’t do that, we won’t be better. If we aren’t getting better, we are getting worse. You won’t hear me lament reporting about the Navy. It may be painful, but it is also helpful. Sometimes it makes you go look, and quite often you come across things that need to be worked on.
A few years ago we found some things that needed to be worked on at the Naval Academy. After a lot of discussion and with a lot of forethought. Secretary of the Navy John Dalton decided—with my advice and complete concurrence—to ask Admiral Charles Larson to return to the Naval Academy as its 55th Superintendent. That was an unusual thing to do. It did not reflect the Secretary of the Navy or the Chief of Naval Operations saying, “Everything is wonderful; aren’t we pleased; please continue as before.” Rather, it reflected our belief that we needed some special attention from somebody who knows what he is doing.
Does that mean that everything here is perfect? If anybody ever stands up here and tells you everything is perfect, you ought to stop listening to them. Does it mean that everything here is broken? Does it mean that we are not moving forward because we are satisfied? The answers, of course, are no. We have a good leader and a good staff at the Naval Academy. They are working together to solve the problems and making progress while they do.
There will be disagreement about that, of course. There will be different ideas about how that progress should be made and about how fast it is going.
I once heard someone say that we really needed Goldwater-Nichols because the Joint Chiefs of Staff can’t agree on anything—they argue and fuss, and then you get the lowest common denominator kind of advice. Maybe that was true, maybe it wasn’t; I wasn’t a service chief before Goldwater-Nichols. But then somebody else said, “Wait a minute. Does the Senate or the House of Representatives vote unanimously on every subject?”
The answer is, only if the subject is not important, only if it is a vote that nobody really cares about or that has been decided in advance. When it is a real issue, when there is something to be concerned about, there is debate and dissent and discussion and argument and acrimony—all of those things result in the best answer.
The Navy and the Naval Academy are important. They both cost a lot of money. In the case of the Navy, doing the job right contributes to a better nation, and at times, has made a difference in the survival of the nation. In the case of the Naval Academy, future naval leaders come from here. Although some leaders rise to very high positions in the Navy without going through the Academy, they too are affected by what goes on here because the tone is set here.
Because this is important and we should care about it, there will be debate and argument and acrimony and differences of opinion—all leading to the best possible answer.
Everything is not perfect, but we are moving to be better, and we are moving in the right direction. From debate, controversy, and even acrimony comes improvement.
Is this institution broken? I don’t think so. Sit down and talk to the midshipmen. They have ideas, and their ideas are important. They also have criticisms, and those are important, too. The recent Naval Academy standdown took place because the Superintendent decided, wisely, to say, “Wait a minute, we’re hearing from lots of other people. Let’s talk to the people who are living it. Let’s get their ideas.”
It is still a little early to talk about those ideas, and it is not my place to do that, but one of the things the midshipmen told Admiral Larson was that they would like more discipline, more order, more rigor, in what we do. That is extremely refreshing to me.
We are hearing these young people, our future naval officers, say “Give us more responsibility and hold us more accountable for what we do.” Therein, in my opinion, lies the path to continuous improvement.
You must explain to the midshipmen what is right. You must try to inculcate in them the values you want them to have, and then you must hold them accountable and responsible for growing from the first day they come to Annapolis until their first day in the fleet as new officers.
That’s the course that the Naval Academy is on. That’s the approach that Admiral Larson is taking, and that’s the approach the entire faculty and the midshipmen want it to take, because it is the course that leads to mission accomplishment: producing the very best officers that we can for the Navy.
Let me shift from the Naval Academy for a minute. The Navy gets in the papers a lot. I’m sorry to say, most of the time, we’ve done something to get there. But what we have in the Navy now is an extremely open organization that deals with its problems in order to improve. We listen to what is said, and we try to respond.
Computers have made the situation more interesting. Today, when there is a problem, you need only push a button and there can appear a laundry list of Navy problems for as many years as you care to go back. Every article and every discussion can include a bulleted list of every problem that has ever happened, written as if nothing was ever done about them, with this next thing as just a continuation of the past. Nothing could be further from the truth.
What we have now is a Navy that is rooting out its problems and attempting to solve them. You will see us continue to be open and aggressive in solving problems, and if that causes us to look less than organized, so be it. We cannot ignore things we must work on, and if we hide them, we do everyone a disservice.
If you fall into the trap of not looking into problems and feeling sorry for yourself because your problems are getting reported, you don’t get better. I’m not going to fall into that trap and neither is Admiral Larson. Write what you will. We will make it better, and we will do that with the whole Navy.
But make no mistake, the vast majority of our Sailors—and I mean everybody from the most senior admiral to the newest recruit—are doing the very best they know how to do, and they deserve the very best leadership we can give them. They are the people who produced that readiness I talked about earlier. They are the people who are producing the improvement here at the Naval Academy. They are the people who are producing articles of thought and dissent and new ideas that are published in Proceedings. They are great people.
Vice Admiral Yogi Kaufman, when he received his award as the Naval Institute’s book author of the year for his new book on carrier aviation, talked about the widow of a captain who was his inspiration for that book. When she finished reading the book, she said, “I am so proud.” And he saw that as the highest accolade he could receive for the work he had done.
Well, we have more than 500,000 people in the uniform I am wearing right now, and nearly all of them are doing a wonderful job. Let me echo the words of that widow of a Navy captain by saying to them, I am so proud.
Question and Answer Session
Question: I have a lot of young friends who are either currently midshipmen at the Naval Academy or recent graduates. They visit my home on the weekends, and they have taught me to care a great deal about this school, even though I'm not a graduate.
One of the brightest of these young people, a graduate, said that the recent Washington Post article by Professor James F. Barry ["Adrift in Annapolis," 31 March 1996] was substantially correct. But what the professor missed was the fact that the problems are not, for the most part, the problems of the institution, but the problems of society—that candidates are tested for intelligence and athletic prowess, but that no one has yet discovered a way to test for a moral compass and that the problem is that the society has lost its moral compass.
I don't think that the problems are unique to the institution or to the Navy and Marine Corps. I think what these institutions are trying to do is to build leadership out of material that hasn't had the kind of guidance that it had in years past.
Admiral Boorda: I don't disagree with what you said. It may well be the root cause for some of the things we're seeing both in the Navy and at the Naval Academy. But the good old days weren't all that great either. The good old days gave us lots of problems in the Navy and in the nation, too.
By and large, the enlisted people and the officers we bring into the Navy are good people. If they aren't, and we recruit them, shame on us. We need to look at what we are doing, and believe me, we are.
Whatever society gives us is the raw material we are going to have to use to produce good leaders and good people for our Navy. We have to think about what you said, decide if we agree with it—and I do, in large measure—and then deal with it. You can't lament it and say, well, that's the way it is; it's not our problem. It is our problem, and every leader has to deal with it.
With half a million people, a Chief of Naval Operations must deal with it on a macro basis by writing messages. You call have Navy-wide good order and discipline stand-downs and try to learn what you can from them, but they aren't what makes a difference. What makes a difference with a person is the people they are with every day and their immediate leadership.
My concept is not new; it's the chain of command, but I want to put a new twist on it. I call it simply one-on-one leadership, and the concept is this: every leader cannot have the luxury of being responsible and accountable for only one person, but every single person in the Navy should have one leader he or she can look to and say, that person is responsible and account able for me. Under those conditions, can a Sailor be a member of the Ku Klux Klan and not have the leader know it? No. Can the Sailor be committing sexual harassment and not have the leader know it? No. Can the Sailor commit suicide and not have the leader know that he or she was in distress? No.
If we can institute a no-nonsense, one-on-one leadership approach to this business, we will solve the majority of our problems. And we are going to do that.
Question: Every person who graduates from the Naval Academy is familiar with John Paul Jones's note, “I wish to have no connection with ships that do not sail fast, for I intend to go in harm’s way.”
That is not simply a recipe for combat; that is a recipe for life. It was interesting to hear your comment that the midshipmen want more rigor and discipline. That is the nature of the life and the mission of the military.
The important thing is that the people in the naval forces understand this: / have got to be better; I have got to strive always to meet the standard, because I intend to go in harm's way.
Admiral Boorda: Every week I put out a message to all flag officers, and it gets pretty wide distribution in the Navy. With your permission. I’ll just take what you said and quote it, because all I can say to that is. Amen.
Question: The increasing number of noncombat aircraft losses concerns not only the military but also the general population. Is this because of the stress of limited resources? Is it a stress on repair and maintenance? Are we getting less plane for the dollar from the manufacturer? We have a limited budget, but you can limit it only so far. When it starts costing equipment and lives, somebody has to speak up.
Admiral Boorda: Let me try to set the record straight on aircraft safety. Nineteen-ninety-four was the safest year in naval aviation since at least the 1950s—that’s by measuring Class A accidents. Either $1 million worth of damage per 100,000 flight hours or loss of a life gets you into the Class A business. Nine- teen-ninety-five was a little bit behind that, but we’re talking hundredths of a point difference.
Nineteen-ninety-six, as of a couple days ago, was on a par with 1995. If we keep on going like we’re going, we will have either the second- or the third-safest year in our history.
Now, you wouldn’t get that from all the stuff you read, nor should you. We had a real spectacular accident in Nashville, and it deserved all the press that it got, and it deserved the honest open way we looked at it. But please put this all in perspective. In carrier operations, in dog fighting, and in practicing and doing air combat and weapons delivery, we are going to have some accidents, as tragic as that is and as much as you don’t want to have them.
We are having fewer accidents than we had during the years when we had a little more money, such as 1981 to 1985, because of training. If you look at the crew members from recent accidents, you will notice that the air crews had had 25 hours a month or better. They were qualified to fly what they were going to fly, and we have enough maintenance money to do what we need to do. Otherwise we are not going to fly the airplanes.
We put money on near-term readiness when we had to make a choice between today and the far distant future. That is not constraining us, because we’ve consciously made a decision to put the money up front.
Do I want to get to a safer, more capable airplane than the F-14 quicker? You bet. That is why I am pushing the F/A-18F as hard as I can. I want to get our pilots in newer aircraft. By 2004 we will be out of the F-14A, and I would like to do it just as soon as possible.
Question: Antisubmarine warfare seemed to go off the page when the Soviet Union declined and the Cold War ended. / understand there is a refocus in the Navy on ASW. Could you outline what that is?
Admiral Boorda: Antisubmarine warfare, during most of my time in the Navy, was thought of as a deep-ocean, blue-water issue. Now, as the Navy and the Marine Corps have teamed more closely in thinking about fighting in the littorals and supporting troops ashore, we realize that we are going to have to do a better job in much tougher conditions against ever quieter submarines.
Quality diesel submarines are proliferating around the world, and the Russians—although they are not our enemy today have developed very quiet submarines as well. It’s time for our Navy to renew its interest and emphasis on ASW, and we are doing that.
In the very near future, we will announce a way to create that emphasis on my own staff and to get the synergism of bringing all the parts of the Navy together.
Sometimes we make the mistake of looking at ASW and saying, let’s compare our submarines to their submarines, or our destroyers to their destroyers, or our airplanes to their airplanes- That is not the way ASW is done, and that’s why we need a better, central focus on what we’re doing, because antisubmarine warfare is a combination of lots of things that have to work together to produce the desired results—detection, tracking and, in the event of combat, a kill. It isn’t this one-on-one kind of approach to life; it is an all-on-one kind of approach that we need to better coordinate in the Navy, and you will see that happening.
Question: Could you enunciate your vision for the Navy for the remainder of your term as CNO and what you see as some of the greatest challenges to achieving that vision?
Admiral Boorda: My vision for the Navy for the rest of my time is continuous improvement. I want to leave it better than I found it.
And I know I’m not going to do that by anything I do. I'm going to do it because we have wonderful people in the Navy.