Pier sentries are inspecting a vehicle. Just before letting it proceed, a sailor asks the driver to lift a mat originally mistaken for the trunk floor. In the commotion as the bomb is casually exposed, the driver makes a break for it. The nearest sailor wrestles him to the ground as a fellow sentry yells, “-Expletive-! That’s a bomb!” The team scrambles for the gate. The driver stands, grabs the bomb, and sprints screaming after the panicked sentries. The concussion wave kills the sailors before the shrapnel can tear them apart.
This is not complete fiction, but rather a force-protection drill for a sister ship’s inspection in which I played the terrorist. The ship was certified; the sentries’ failure and my actions were declared outside the scope of the drill cards with which the crew had been meticulously trained. A single deviation from the paper fiction uncovered the deadly deficiency of the ship’s readiness, but was ignored.
Critical inspections are becoming choreographed executions of checklists, nothing more than theater to check blocks in a PowerPoint presentation.
Administrative process, which should ideally aid success, now defines success. Notably, increasingly higher levels of authority are replacing frighteningly lower levels of decision-making. The simplest aspects of training are mandated above the unit level. There is an ever-rising tide of Navy-knowledge online exams, PowerPoint training presentations, and infantilizing measures such as required supervisor inspections of personal vehicles before 300-plus-mile trips. Processes are becoming the focus of unit-level leadership in lieu of the real-world capabilities they are meant to build. Paperwork is being confused with actual work.
What drives a process-fulfillment mentality is the fear that a lack of control will spawn mistakes. “Operational risk management” is the Navy’s way of mitigating risk by implementing controls for all possible deviations from a plan. The perceived risk of training failures has been “mitigated” by low-level decision-making becoming absorbed by processes from higher authority. New mistakes prompt new processes, adding to the sea of mandates that minimize the capacity of unit-level trainers to make decisions and to lead. Our programs are now internally uniform, predictable, and reliable at fulfilling their own introspective process benchmarks.
Not everyone agrees. Defenders of process claim they’re spreading best practices and that officers provide the necessary flexibility. However, unit-level officers, as the curators of this system, are more constrained by shore directives than are the enlisted. Officers are neither omnipresent nor always technically proficient; on-scene personnel need the ingrained flexibility to deal with emerging problems. The training materials we enforce are produced by chop chains far from the newest realities, disseminating material often obsolete, useless, and too voluminous for shore assets to quickly update or correct. For example, the force-protection training for Navy passengers on commercial aviation mandates a pre-9/11 “wait-out-the-hostage-taker” mentality. While this is known to be ineffective, the training is still required. This indicates that executing the training process carries more weight than executing real-world capabilities.
Proponents claim the consistency and control guarantee universally good results. In fact, the rigid obsession with internal consistency overlooks the organization’s efficacy against the unpredictable world beyond the mandated program. Such a focus yields sailors who first reach for pre-planned responses during a security drill or who wait to pass along vital information until the proper format is found in the binder. They hesitate not from a lack of knowledge but from training that emphasizes checklists over action. When a tire blows out at 80 mph on the track, does a driver grab a manual for answers? Rigid checklist systems work for regular maintenance, operation, and tasking, but not for emergencies.
Oversight can be defined as either control or failure. Excess of one results in the other. The 1967 fire on the USS Forrestal (CVA-59) taught us that standardization was necessary, but we have forgotten the equal value of independent decision-making. If we cannot trust our veteran personnel to train, we must admit we have failed as a community. Individuals versed by school and time can be trusted to independently train others, building their own innovative programs teaching sailors how to decide, not reach for a checklist.
Leadership must hold trainers accountable, but truer assessments could be found through task execution in unexpected, variable, and realistic scenarios rather than cookie-cutter drills that fit easily into binders. It is time to identify the priority training that should be common and minimize the invasive minutiae that stunt good decision-making habits and adaptability on the deckplates.