The career goal of all surface warfare officers (SWOs) is supposed to be command at sea-but there is a problem with this equation. There are more than 8,100 officers in the surface warfare community and only 242 surface ships for SWOs to command. The number of ships will increase gradually in the next several years as a result of the war on terrorism, but the fact remains that the majority of midshipmen choosing surface warfare every year never will have the opportunity to command a ship. Of the surface warfare officers staying in the Navy past their division officer tours, nearly 60% will be passed over and deselected between 0-4 and 0-6 under current Department of Defense promotion parameters. Only about 40% of eligible SWOs who have completed department head and executive officer tours will be selected for command at the first opportunity.
In the SWO career path and in the career tracks of other Navy communities, career survival is played out in zero-sum games. The playing field is the system of evaluations and selection boards. On every ship in the Navy, department heads are competing with other department heads to attain the coveted early promotion on their fitness reports. Commanding officers in a squadron compete with other commanding officers for the same. Ironically, teamwork is one of the areas upon which everyone in the Navy is evaluated, yet the system of forced rankings in evaluations tends to foster incentives that discourage teamwork at all levels of the organization.
In The Knowing-Doing Gap: How Smart Companies Turn Knowledge into Action (Cambridge, MA: Harvard Business School Press, 2000), Jeffrey Pfeffer and Robert Sutton of the Stanford School of Business acknowledge that zero-sum games sometimes can inspire people to work harder, and the winners of those internal competitions often benefit personally from their victories. "In our research, however, we uncover case [after] case where the costs of such individual victories were borne by those people, groups, and units that lost the contests," according to Pfeffer and Sutton. "And these internal competitions just didn't harm the losers. They harmed everyone who had a stake in the organization."
The surface warfare community works hard to convince highly qualified officers to stay beyond their initial commitments, rewarding those who do with $50,000 in SWO continuation pay. Those who submit their letters of resignation often receive personal calls from senior officers trying to convince them to change their minds. Unfortunately, many of the officers deciding to stay past the initial commitment will be deselected for promotion later in their careers.
Creating an alternative surface warfare career track would decrease the amount of internal competition and would mitigate the current shortfall in junior officers. In the 2001 junior officer survey sponsored by the SWO community manager, the 2,113 junior SWOs who took part offered these results:
- 43% of junior SWOs aspire to command at sea; 38% do not.
- 81% of junior SWOs make their career decisions by the end of their second division officer tour.
- 60% of junior SWOs believe that SWO continuation pay is an insufficient motivator to stay on active duty or not enough money, compared with 14% who say it is a highly positive motivator.
- 83% of junior SWOs say they would definitely or will likely attain a postgraduate degree.
- 82% of junior SWOs would rather attend a civilian university than Naval Postgraduate School.
The traditional SWO career track is designed to develop future commanding officers and flag officers by diversifying shore and afloat experiences throughout officers' careers. The junior SWO can choose to follow the traditional career path, transfer into another naval community, or become a civilian. In the past several years, an alarming number of junior SWOs are choosing the last two options. But what if SWOs were given two career options?
- SWO Command Candidate Option (20- to 30-year career). SWO completes the traditional SWO career path. Must receive endorsement from a commanding officer during division officer tours, complete the necessary qualifications, and screen for command later in career. Completes the fully funded graduate program of choice before the first department head tour.
- SWO Specialization Option (20-year career). SWO completes division officer tours and, like the command candidates, attends the fully funded masters program of choice. Must complete two department head tours following graduate studies. Has the option to get out after ten years of service, transition into the reserves, or stay in for ten years of specialization assignments.
The specialization track acknowledges that not everyone will have the opportunity or desire for command at sea, and that the large majority of junior officers value a graduate education at a civilian institution much more than continuation pay. This track has the advantage of retaining a larger percentage of those female SWOs who otherwise might choose to leave the service to start families. SWOs on the specialization track would serve with SWO command candidates in the proportionately higher number of division officer and department head billets, and then continue to specialize in an area of concentration such as engineering or operations to provide predominantly shore-side expertise in a given field for the rest of their careers. This option would fulfill the desire of many to homestead in one area without adversely affecting their careers. Those who take the specialization option would either leave the service after ten years or retire at the 0-5 level after 20 years, but could transition easily to a second career after retirement from the military.
Selecting and grooming SWOs for command at sea during the early stages of their careers may sound like an unrealistic goal, but contemporary management theorists like Elliot Jacques have been able to predict with very high correlations which junior executives will succeed in the higher levels of organizations—including the military—many years into the future. The SWOs who aspire to command early in their careers are the ones who will perform best once in command. Selection for command still would be competitive, but everyone in the SWO community would not be competing for something that not everyone desires or can attain. By identifying future SWO commanders in the early stages of their careers, efforts would be focused on ensuring that those officers continue to receive diverse leadership tours and experiences throughout their careers.
Of course, junior SWOs still would have the option of leaving the Navy after serving their initial obligation. But many more SWOs would choose to stay in if they were given a choice of two career paths. The new option would help get the right people in the right jobs, reduce much internal competition, and eliminate the shortage of junior officers. Funding issues and the restructuring of shore duty billets would be challenges, but these obstacles are worth overcoming for the long-term benefits to the surface warfare community and the Navy.
The coauthors, all recent graduates of the MBA program at George Washington University in Washington, DC, completed this article as part of a group project for a management consulting class. Lieutenant Dillender recently completed assignments at Military Sealift Command headquarters, and with the Chief of Naval Operations staff/Deep Blue in Washington, DC, and is enrolled in a department head class at Surface Warfare Officers School. Mr. Pattie is a management consultant at a large national firm in Tysons Corner, VA. Ms. Rohrer is assistant director of the Carlos Rosario Career Center and Charter School in Washington, DC. Ms. Shaw is a civilian employee of the Department of the Navy and is a contract specialist in Washington, DC.