Young nuclear submariners are as good as it gets when it comes to engineering and nuclear safety, but they need more exposure to tactics, basic seamanship, and intuitive decision making in the early years of their career.
The February 2001 collision of the USS Greenville (SSN-772) with the Japanese merchant vessel Ehime Maru forced U.S. submariners to ask what went wrong. The general conclusion was that too many of them lacked the experience, instincts, and rapid decision-making skills necessary to navigate and fight their ships safely and effectively.
They were right, and things got worse. The Greenville went aground near Saipan in August 2001 and hit another ship in January 2002; the USS Hartford (SSN-768) went aground in 2003 followed by the USS San Francisco (SSN-711) in January 2005. Then the USS Philadelphia (SSN-690) collided with a Turkish freighter in September of that year. The feedback provided to mid-grade officers in the submarine community has sometimes been harsh. One senior officer routinely sent submariners off to their command tours with verbal or written notice that although they were the best the U.S. submarine force had, they were not really what was needed and would be readily replaced if they proved unable to cut the mustard.
Efforts to address these shortcomings have taken a top-down approach. The Submarine Officer Advanced Course (SOAC), required between the division officer and department head tours, has been made somewhat more rigorous, but the prospective commanding officer (PCO) and prospective executive officer (PXO) courses have been beefed up significantly.
The PCO course, renamed the Submarine Command Course (SCC) and which now includes PXOs, is no longer refresher training, characterized by camaraderie and freewheeling torpedo shooting. It has become a survival exercise, largely mimicking the "Perisher" courses conducted by the Royal Navy, Royal Australian Navy, and the Royal Netherlands Navy.
It includes more rigorous instruction and evaluation in operational planning and risk management, periscope employment, and navigation. Students are forced to operate under pressure to help them discover and address their own limitations. The increased pressure also weeds out officers whose bellies do not burn with the fire required for submarine command. Whereas failures during the PCO course have traditionally been very rare, attrition for the SCC appears to hover around ten percent, a figure that includes those officers who undergo remedial training—up to six months—and eventually get back on track. The historical failure rate for the Royal Navy's Perisher course is about 25 percent.1
The new course is also a laboratory for improving undersea warfare and mariner skills; instructors have spearheaded important changes in operational risk management. In their recent Proceedings article, a group of PCO instructors concluded that many students fail because "[they] did not make the most of their (sea) tours and did not seek out experience. . . . These officers have little 'actual experience' and are not well suited for command."2
The authors additionally surmised that the lack of real experience dramatically stunted the ability of prospective COs and XOs to make intuitive decisions in fluid environments where information is incomplete and ambiguous. The authors noted that, although the weak officers were often "solid analytical decision-makers," they floundered when there was neither the time nor the detailed information necessary for meticulous decision-making, e.g., a rapidly developing crossing situation on the bridge or while looking through the periscope at a destroyer bearing down with malice.
The author does not disagree with the observations expressed by the SCC instructors, but believes that the failure of many submariners to develop into competent mariners and steely eyed killers of the deep may have less to do with their lack of passion for command than with the way they were trained as junior officers. The emphasis on engineering over warfighting and mariner skills during the submarine officer's formative years can ingrain an overly strong reliance on analytical decision-making that often lasts an entire career.
Rickover's Legacy
Admiral Hyman Rickover designed engineering excellence into the nuclear propulsion program as part of his strategy to wrest the hearts and minds of the submarine force from the irreverent diesel boat Sailors who fought World War II in shorts and on a first-name basis. He created a new type of naval officer, shifting from reliance on fuzzy seat-of-the-pants leadership and on-the-job training to a system of rigorous formal training, indoctrination, and personnel management centrally controlled by his office.
The well-documented formal training provided to submarine junior officers is extremely skewed toward engineering. From the start of initial training to the end of the first sea tour, approximately three-quarters (58 weeks) of required formal schools focus on engineering.
The portal to the submarine officer career path funnels into the nuclear pipeline of two 24-week courses: Nuclear Power School (NPS) and Nuclear Prototype Training.3 The graduate-level NPS curriculum addresses the theoretical underpinnings of nuclear propulsion systems—thermodynamics, electrical engineering, chemistry, and mathematics. The next stop is 24 weeks at a prototype. It is hands-on stuff. In addition, students must pass several written tests and hundreds of oral checkouts. During the 1990s, 20 percent of the students failed. Although the attrition rate is now lower, the course remains demanding. It is a fierce crucible in which officers must internalize the culture of profound technical knowledge, attention to detail, rigorous procedural compliance, meticulous decision-making, unflagging work ethic, and low tolerance for mistakes that have become the hallmark of America's naval nuclear propulsion program and the keys to its phenomenal success.
Successful officers then attend ten weeks of Submarine Officer Basic Course (SOBC)—their brief introduction to the forward end of a nuclear-powered submarine. "In the old days," submarine school, the gateway to submarine service, lasted six months. Upon graduation, officers had the tools to qualify quickly for their first two "forward" watches: contact coordinator and diving officer of the watch.
Now, however, the curriculum has been drastically abbreviated. It includes much less hands-on training in the areas of tactical plots, periscope employment, target motion analysis thumb rules, and tactical sensor and weapon employment—the basic brush strokes of submarine warfare. As just one example, my generation of young submarine officers actually manned the tactical plots and other minor positions in the Fire Control Tracking Party during several weeks of SOBC, while the senior positions were manned by prospective executive and commanding officers. This interaction was very valuable in bringing the young officer into the submarine culture and emphasizing the importance of tactical training.
Granted, during his first 18 months on board today, the junior officer will also attend four to six one-week courses that help compensate for the abbreviated SOBC. Even so, these 14 to 16 weeks of initial formal schooling in submarine warfare pale in comparison to the past norm of 26-30 weeks. Although all of my junior officers on the USS Pennsylvania (SSBN-735) (Blue Crew) were satisfied with the quality and enthusiasm of instruction delivered by junior officers with four to six years of service, their overall impression can be summed up by what one of them said:
SOBC is an ineffective and inefficient method to introduce officers to basic submarine knowledge. It attempts to teach subjects [of] which the students have no knowledge in a very short period of time, unlike the nuclear pipeline where six months is spent teaching the new material and another six months at prototype before ever seeing an operational submarine propulsion plant.
Focused on Engineering
By the time a junior officer reports to his first submarine, more than 80 percent of his budding career has been devoted to engineering. After the brief interlude of SOBC, the focus of his existence shifts back to engineering, and he requalifies on his own ship's propulsion plant. During his first six months on board, the junior officer will spend the lion's share of his time studying engineering manuals, standing under-instruction watches, and passing oral checkouts from enlisted crew members and other officers. Once qualified, he will stand about six hours of engineering officer of the watch a day.
Figure 1 illustrates the notional way a junior officer spends his working hours until he leaves his first submarine. The two mutually constrained bar graphs do not add up to 100 percent at every point because the graph does not display time spent completing other tasks. This progression was derived from modeling a typical junior officer SSBN sea tour and then verifying the model against actual time-employment data gathered from a dozen junior officers on board the Pennsylvania (Blue Crew) from 2003 to 2006. The junior officers catalogued their work days, in 15-minute increments, across several different categories (e.g., EOOW watches, OOD watches, engineering training, message reading and writing, engineering qualification self-studies, warfare qualification self-study, etc.). It may lack scientific rigor, but it provides a ballpark estimate of how submarine junior officers spend their time. (Although the progression would be different for junior officers serving on nuclear-powered attack submarines, it is likely similar.)
The model assumes 12 junior officers per wardroom and a nominal patrol cycle of 16 weeks of "on-crew" (refit and at-sea operations) and 16 weeks of "off-crew" (leave, formal schools, and training in classrooms and simulators). The model also assumes that the SSBN junior officer progresses through five full patrol cycles, starting with his first off-crew and ending with his fifth deterrent at-sea patrol. While in off-crew, a work-week is about 40 hours, exclusive of time for meals and physical fitness. While at sea, the average work-week is about 85 to 95 hours, depending on the seniority of the junior officer and is exclusive of meals, physical fitness, sleep, and recreation.
Even after 2.5 years of commissioned service, almost 70 percent of the typical officer's time has been invested in becoming a naval nuclear engineer. The accumulation of "forward" training slows after he pins on his dolphins as, once again, he shifts his focus to engineering as he prepares for the formidable Prospective Nuclear Engineering Officer (PNEO) exam administered by the Bureau of Naval Reactors. An officer must pass the examination before he can transfer ashore.
Officers receive about ten weeks of dedicated PNEO classes and self-study off the ship and spend scores of hours in unstructured study. Passing the examination is so important that officers are given what is essentially a three-month sabbatical during which most shipboard responsibilities are suspended. Each junior officer schedules several extensive oral examinations with his CO and other mid-grade nuclear-trained officers. In contrast, they are unlikely to have anywhere near this interaction with other commanding officers in conjunction with their warfare qualifications.
After passing the exam, participation in engineering training and operations declines significantly for most junior officers. They will spend the majority of their time leading divisions in the weapons and navigation departments, standing officer of the deck, and mentoring younger officers. However, at least one PNEO graduate will serve as assistant engineer and dedicate 40-50 hours per week supporting engineering readiness.
The Cost of Developing "Good Nukes"
The emphasis on engineering training and experience during a submariner's formative years can have a lasting impact. It encourages a strong reliance on analytic decision-making. The skills and values required to operate and maintain a nuclear propulsion plant are not intuitive and, therefore, must be ingrained. Engineers are indoctrinated into a mindset where facts, precedent, and strict adherence to procedures dominate intuition, common sense, and what feels right. This does not mean that nuclear-trained submariners are automatons. On the contrary, they are trained and encouraged to probe and ask questions when something does not seem right. Hunches and gut-feels take a clear, and altogether appropriate, back seat to analysis and procedures when operating and maintaining the nuclear propulsion plant.
The indoctrination must be strong indeed to convince "20-somethings" that finding the amount of loose contamination equivalent to the natural radioactivity of a banana is cause for alarm.4 On the other hand, no one can quarrel with the service's nuclear safety record.
Being a "good nuke" includes reaching instinctively for a procedure, technical reference, or checklist when confronted with either routine or casualty situations. The SCC instructors' Proceedings article correlates poor performance in their courses with the impulse of officers "to look for 'checklists' even in situations for which written guidance does not cover all the bases."5
Our submarine officers learn to rely on checklists and procedures because they are both ubiquitous and mandatory in the engine room, where that approach works well. It is much less effective in the ambiguous and highly variable situations involved in warfighting and ship driving. Unfortunately, "judgement and decision tasks in natural settings are rarely straightforward and can only be successfully completed if the many nuances of the context are perceived and understood," according to Professor Gary Klein, author of Sources of Power: How People Make Decisions.6 Procedures simply cannot substitute for this level of complex understanding.7
Since the vast majority of nuclear propulsion candidates are drawn from engineering and other technical undergraduate majors, it is quite plausible that they already have a talent and predilection for analytical reasoning and decision-making.
The emphasis on engineering also tends to crowd out learning and experience in seamanship and undersea warfare. The competition between engineering and ship-driving excellence is largely a zero-sum game, which is one reason why other nuclear submarine forces divide their wardrooms into engineers and navigators/weaponeers, with separate career paths. While it is true that nuclear engineering teaches some extremely important general watch-standing principles and definitely helps develop the command presence that is as essential in maneuvering as it is on the bridge, only a small percentage of engineering knowledge and expertise is directly transferable to the forward end of the submarine. When exercising his engineering responsibilities, the submariner is adding little to the library of mental models that are essential to rapid and intuitive decision-making as a conning officer. Research psychologist Martin Seligman concluded after studying the intuitive leadership and decision-making of military officers in combat that experience was the second strongest predictor of success, after empathy or "emotional intelligence."8
Today's career planners wait until an officer decides to stay in the Navy for a department head tour to start investing heavily (i.e., the six-month SOAC curriculum) in his warfighter and mariner skills. While this may be cost-effective since only about one in three junior officers decides to become department heads, it is a risky strategy. Junior officers often have the conn and are usually the OOD when a submarine goes aground or collides with another vessel. Ironically, the most experienced conning officers—the department heads—are considered by many commands too valuable as managers and administrators to spend much time as ship drivers.
The bottom line is that many submariners never learn the forward part of the ship as well as they know the engineering spaces and do not have the same "profound knowledge" to draw upon when they are driving and fighting the submarine.
Solutions
To complement the very laudable progress that has recently been made in the training of executive and commanding officers, the submarine force should consider the following:
- Return SOBC to its traditional 24-week length. This will help young officers hit the decks running—outside of the engine room. This will cost time and money, but will likely reduce the rate of submarines swapping paint and bouncing off the bottom.
- Identify and assist weak intuitive decision makers. Psychologists have developed tests that accurately evaluate an individual's natural ability to make intuitive decisions in stressful, fast-moving situations. The submarine force could use these tests to identify those with weak intuitive decision-making skills, and then provide these officers more training and practice in simulators.9 Professor Klein and other research psychologists strongly believe that a person's natural intuitive decision-making capability can be significantly enhanced through training on pattern recognition. SCC and other senior submariners seem to agree.10
- Acknowledge the tensions between analytical and intuitive decision-making. The submarine force should acknowledge that there is a time and a place for both analytical and intuitive decision-making. It would be a mistake to overlay the nuclear engineering training and operational model, despite its undeniable success, on seamanship and warfighting. This encroachment of the engineering culture, sometimes referred to as "creeping nukism," can stifle the development of intuitive decision-making. Officer training and development should include explanations of when to employ different decision-making techniques.
- Reinforce submarine training facilities. Consider hiring retired submarine officers to serve as instructors and mentors at training commands. The increasing demands of manning submarine inspection teams and pushing upwardly mobile mid-grade officers through educational and "broadening" assignments do not allow for training commands to be populated by seasoned active duty submariners. Most of these tasks are currently assigned to junior officers who are too inexperienced to provide quality training, which includes helping officers to recognize decision points and patterns.
Clearly, one might argue that the majority of service pilot training is conducted very successfully by junior officers. Such assignments, however, especially in Fleet Readiness Squadrons, are highly coveted and essentially reserved for the most competent young pilots. Not to disparage the quality of junior submarine officers assigned to training facilities, but the author has seen no indications that they are selected based on their demonstrated prowess as OODs. Nor are these billets prestigious or highly coveted. In contrast, the screening for junior officer assignments as nuclear propulsion instructors is quite rigorous and has been historically rewarded with special access to graduate school and early departure from their first sea-tour.
- Improve the number and quality of simulators. The nature of submarine operations precludes spending significant time on the surface and also limits the amount of time dedicated to hunting submarines and surface ships. This is especially true for SSBN operations, which make up about one-third of all submarine commands. Simulators should be more realistic and made available at sea.
Over the last few years, the submarine force has made tremendous strides toward improving the training of its mid-grade officers as they head toward command responsibilities. More, however, needs to be done to set junior officers on the right path toward excellence as ship drivers and undersea warriors. Although naval nuclear propulsion is rightfully a jealous god, more room should be made in the undersea pantheon for warfighting and mariner excellence from the start of a submariner's career.
Commander Dobbs, a nuclear submariner, commanded the USS Pennsylvania (SSBN-735) (Blue) when the crew won the Battle "E" in 2004 and 2005. He is a Ph.D. student in international relations at the University of California, San Diego and a senior analyst with Solute Consulting.
1. See LCDR Stephen Mack, "Perisher Submarine Command Training in the Royal Navy," Undersea Warfare, Spring, 2003, p. 8. The SCC has also been expanded to include PXOs. back to article
2. Captain Emil Casciano, et al., "What Makes A Good CO?" U.S. Naval Institute Proceedings, April 2005, pp. 76-78. back to article
3. See Norman Polmar and Thomas Allen, Rickover: Controversy and Genius (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1982), pp. 294-304, for a dated, yet essentially accurate, description of the Naval Nuclear Propulsion training pipeline. back to article
4. Federal regulations set the limit for surface contamination as 1,000 disintegrations per minute (DPM) over a 100 square centimeter surface for beta-gamma emitters. The amount of radioactive Potasium-40 found in a large banana generates about 1,300 DPMs. See Appendix D to 10 CFR Part 835: Surface Contamination Values (http://www.lbnl.org/ehs/orps/pdf/radContamination.pdf) and Radioactivity in Nature, Idaho State University, (http://www.physics.isu.edu/radinf/natural.htm). back to article
5. Casciano, et al., "What Makes A Good CO?" back to article
6. Gary Klein, Sources of Power: How People Make Decisions (Boston: MIT Press, 1999), p. 169. back to article
7. Klein has discovered that many modern organizations erect obstacles to the development of intuition. In addition to significant institutional reliance on procedures, these include rapid turnover, increased pace of change, diminished experience, and widespread use of information technologies to make decisions. Many of these obstacles are common place in the Submarine Force as well as in many other military organizations. See Klein, The Power of Intuition (Currency Books, 2003), pp. 33-34. back to article
8. David Wood, "Army Uses Experimental Training to Bulk Up Brain Power," Newhouse News Service, 8 February 2006. back to article
9. Faculty at the University of Washington developed the test, which takes about an hour, and its predictive value was validated by the subsequent performance of test subjects in simulated scenarios, such as air traffic controlling and public safety dispatching ("911" operator), that stress rapid decision-making. See Susan Joslyn and Earl Hunt, "Evaluating Individual Differences in Response to Time-Pressure Situation," Journal of Experimental Psychology: Applied, March 1998, Vol. 4, No. 1, pp. 16-43. back to article
10. Klein, Sources of Power, pp. 166-179. back to article
The submarine force should acknowledge that there is a time and a place for both analytical and intuitive decision-making.