When I first joined Patrol Squadron Four (VP-4), the rank of chief warrant officer suggested little more to me than a pair of collar devices sporting a peculiar set of colors. Shortly thereafter, I found myself sitting in the wardroom next to one of this odd lot. I couldn’t help but betray my ignorance by interrogating him: “How did you get here?” Within a few minutes, my curiosity had been outweighed by awe at this “flying warrant” who had more experience on top of a submarine than any fellow officer in the wardroom, including the skipper. A year later, as the squadron’s readiness officer, he directly influenced the performance and built the résumé that would earn VP-4 the coveted Battle E.
Flash forward one more year, and another anomalous creature joined the wardroom. They called this one a “super JO.” After completing his first sea tour as a traditional junior officer, he had honed his tactical superiority at the Fleet Replacement Squadron before rejoining the Fleet as an expert in his trade, antisubmarine warfare (ASW). As the mission commander of Combat Air Crew One, he led his crew to win the 2012 Maritime Patrol and Reconnaissance Aircraft Fleet ASW Challenge, a multinational, multi-event competition featuring the premier ASW combat air crews in the world.
These are the characteristics that the super JO and the flying warrant officer shared: economic efficiency, tactical proficiency, and proliferation of pedigree.
The current “golden path” in the VP community requires that newly commissioned, freshly winged aviators complete one squadron sea tour followed by a tour at the Fleet Replacement Squadron and then a disassociated sea tour (sometimes dubbed condescendingly by community outsiders as the “Navy Appreciation Tour”), typically spent as a shooter onboard a carrier. By the time the standard VP aviator returns to a squadron as a department head, his appreciation of big Navy has increased, but his capability to fight the platform for which he earned his warfare insignia—and instruct those junior to him to do the same—has deteriorated considerably. When every VP aviator follows this career-progression path, the resulting vacuum of tactical experience reverberates through every squadron and the VP fleet. Indeed, success of the P-8A is threatened by the reigning P-3C mantra: by valuing progress over proficiency, performance is compromised.
The Navy made two excellent decisions in the face of this dilemma. The Flying Warrant program, initiated in 2006 (and used by foreign navies in various forms), brought high-performing noncommissioned officers to the front of the aircraft to make decisions as mission commanders, patrol plane commanders, and tactical coordinators, based on years of tactical experience and naval maturity. Likewise, the Super JO program, initiated in 2011 and used by every other aviation community, enabled post-FRS weapons tactics instructors to improve squadrons from the inside out. Unfortunately, both programs landed on the chopping block in 2013, and all of their benefits died with them.
Training a VP pilot from Aviation Preflight Indoctrination to winging (a year-and-a-half pipeline that is still two and a half years short of qualification in the platform) costs more than $170,000, so the monetary and temporal benefits of keeping aviators in-role at the squadron is blatantly apparent. As one of my colleagues admitted forlornly, “I just got fully qualified, and now I’m leaving.” Flying warrants and super JOs collectively represent not just profound knowledge, they also provide continuity to squadrons that would otherwise have to reinvent themselves incessantly due to the turnover of traditional JOs seeking qualification and department heads seeking that elusive number-one rating on their fitness reports.
Any training officer knows that the effort required to upgrade and mentor individual after individual only to lose every single one of them and repeat the cycle detracts from the overall squadron mission. Finally, both of these programs afforded squadron personnel the opportunity to learn from the geographically diverse, heterogeneous challenges endured and overcome by flying warrants and super JOs. Without this know-how, a squadron’s memory of all but the most recent deployment fades into nothingness.
The Navy’s cancellation of these two programs was a short-sighted failure on multiple levels. To boot, canceling them almost simultaneously during the critical transition from the P-3C to the P-8A was a blunder almost beyond reckoning. Thankfully, the service recently pledged to reinvest in the Super JO program, rebranded under the name Squadron Maritime Tactics Instructor. This pledge is certainly a nod to the truth that the Navy needs flying CWOs and super JOs seeding its maritime-patrol wardrooms across the Fleet.