Experienced Technicians Matter
By Commander Matthew T. Ventimiglia, U.S. Navy
There are many aspects to aviation readiness. None is more significant, however, than having experienced aircrew and technicians. The mission of the Naval Aviation Enterprise (NAE) is to “sustain required current readiness and advance future warfighting capabilities at best possible cost.” Current and projected fiscal landscapes demand efficiencies and maximum return on investment more than ever before. Not only are our people our most expensive resource, but they also have the most impact on generating combat readiness. Ensuring the NAE uses its people most efficiently is an obvious means to maximize cost-effective readiness.
Detailing Problem
The Navy’s current distribution paradigm does not leverage proficiency among its technicians. It is based on two key metrics: FIT (fitness) and FILL (people). Navy Enlisted Classification (NEC) is a numeric code associated with the specific job a technician has been trained to do (for example, F/A-18 engine technician or H-60 avionics technician). FIT is the percentage of NECs on board (that match required NECs), divided by the total number of NECs required (per squadron manning document). FILL is the number of personnel on board relative to total funded billets. Neither of these metrics takes into account type/model (T/M)—in other words, platform (e.g., F-35 or P-8) experience—and therein lies the root of the problem.
Further challenging the FIT/FILL construct is the distribution policy that Naval Admin 226/12 established, which states that “a single set of sea and shore billets, as established by manning control authorities, will be advertised and filled each month via the Career Management System—Interactive Detailing (CMS-ID).” This prioritizes filling the vacancy versus placing the most experienced technician in the vacancy. Moreover, it limits a command’s ability to forecast the length of time required to fill with an experienced technician if none is available that month. Commands, under the current procedures, cannot defer a fill advertised in CMS-ID to await an experienced technician. The demand signals at the squadron level, and the projected rotation dates of those best suited to fill squadron billets routinely are misaligned.
Aviation enlisted distribution policies and career paths lack effective mechanisms to reuse T/M experience. Doing so will build proficiency and platform-specific aviation maintenance experience (AMEX). Advanced proficiency fosters high-quality maintenance, supervision, and safety, which contribute to high-end readiness. Squadrons with high AMEX exist, but this occurs more by chance than by design.
While enlisted detailers often try to build AMEX through detailing, as do placement coordinators, neither controls fill priorities, which limits the command’s ability to build AMEX. While the NAE recently began tracking AMEX, it has yet to incorporate it into the distribution process. The Navy cannot afford to leave a squadron’s collective maintenance experience—and thus, to an extent, its readiness—to chance.
During the past decade, various forces have continued to make it difficult for technicians to stay with the same aircraft, beyond the constraints of detailing. Technicians change T/M multiple times during their careers for four reasons: a reduction in shore-duty billets because of training squadron contract maintenance; consolidation and automation of maintenance technical training; reductions in permanent change-of-station move budgets; and overvaluing career diversity at the E-7 level and above. These conditions reduce the collective experience and technical proficiency in the squadrons. As a result, readiness and operational excellence are stressed. In addition, the cost of sending technicians to NEC schools as they switch T/M overburdens schoolhouse resources and puts technicians in training when they could be in the fleet. The Navy must review these constraints and their subsequent influence on distribution.
An Enterprise Approach
The naval aviation officer-manning construct recognizes the importance of experience. From aircrew to ground officers, career paths are designed to ensure return on investment and to build technical expertise in one’s trade. The aviation maintenance duty officer career path is a true “enterprise” approach. The warrant officer and limited duty officer career paths also retain and use technical expertise.
In addition, if looking specifically at naval aviators and naval flight officers, the first sea tour builds proficiency for an instructor tour; T/M experience is used at training squadrons, weapons schools, the Naval Air Warfare Development Center (NAWDC), and flight test. That experience is reinvested during training officer, department head (DH), and command tours.
Changing T/M during an aviator’s career is rare and only done based on the needs of the Navy or aircraft sundowns. This model facilitates cost-wise readiness and is quite effective at arming squadron leadership with the tools to maintain tactical proficiency, while providing proper organizational oversight, training, and mentorship.
We must consistently give our leading petty officers, chiefs’ mess, and maintenance master chiefs the same opportunity.
New Metric and Force Multiplier
The NAE recently began tracking AMEX to facilitate a better understanding of the maintenance production health of a squadron. AMEX measures the experience levels of E5–E9 sailors in the production rates (engine mechanics aviation electricians, avionics technicians, airframes/structural technicians, and ordnance technicians). This metric and its influence on distribution have yet to be codified. Individual AMEX is a numerical value that correlates to the years of experience a sailor has in a particular T/M, as well as how recently that specific T/M experience occurred.
AMEX is calculated by awarding a sailor credit (1 point=experienced) for having 36 months of T/M experience within the past five years. If a sailor has had 36 months of experience but has been away from the T/M for more than five years, the point is taken away (AMEX of 0=not experienced). Unit AMEX is the percentage of experienced E5–E9 in the production rates relative to all E5–E9 billets in the production rates. Thus, a squadron that has a basic allowance of 100 E5–E9s in the production rates, of which 40 are considered experienced, would have an AMEX of 40 percent. Squadrons with greater than 70 percent AMEX are “Green,” greater than 50 percent but less than 70 percent are “Yellow,” and less than 50 percent are “Red.”
FIT and FILL remain valid metrics, but incorporating AMEX and its appropriate influence on enlisted distribution will ensure collective intentional squadron proficiency is achieved through the distribution process. The following demonstrates how two squadrons with similar FIT/FILL can be working with relatively different maintenance teams:
• Squadron X has a FIT/FILL of 90 percent/95 percent and an AMEX of 67 percent.
• Squadron Y has a FIT/FILL of 89 percent/94 percent and an AMEX of only 23 percent.
Making a naval aircrew comparison to enlisted aviation manning, Squadron Y is similar to having a majority of your CO/XO/DHs flying a new airframe trying to lead first-tour aircrew. Squadron Y’s composition would be comparable to a majority of a destroyer’s CO/XO/DHs, having recently transitioned from submarines, leading junior surface warfare officers. The basic concepts of watch-standing, navigating, and seamanship are the same, but the ability to effectively maintain the ship and employ combat effects would be hindered.
The value of in-platform experience cannot be overstated. Below-average AMEX affects planning, estimating, training, and individual confidence and credibility. Furthermore, lead petty officers and chiefs inexperienced in T/M spend a disproportionate amount of time learning the aircraft, eating into the time available for divisional deck-plate leadership. This can challenge the entire management balance of a squadron. Moreover, low AMEX decreases safety margins and slows maintenance evolutions.
The force multiplier effect of AMEX is amplified in non-fleet concentration areas and overseas. In the former, there often are limited, if any, platform-specific technical training resources, type wing staff, sister squadrons, or technical representatives onsite. When overseas or deployed, strong AMEX can mitigate some of the difficulties longer logistics lines present through advanced troubleshooting and experienced planning. This effect is amplified further if logistics lines are contested. In addition, outside continental United States (OCONUS) tour lengths typically are two to three years compared with four to five years stateside. After investing an average of 18 months in a new technician to achieve an inspector/instructor level of knowledge, the return on investment OCONUS often is limited to 6–12 months. The same investment inside the United States would yield a return on investment of two to three years. Arming our OCONUS squadrons with high AMEX is an exponential force multiplier because of DOD OCONUS tour length policies.
Enlisted Aviation Distribution Fix
Incorporating AMEX and other NEC utilization mechanisms into enlisted aviation detailing processes supports the NAE’s goal of cost-wise readiness. Incorporating AMEX into distribution would ensure our mid-level and upper-level enlisted aviation maintenance leaders are technical experts in T/M by realizing the following gains:
• Improving material condition and maintenance readiness across the NAE
• Fostering airframe ownership, facilitating long-term care of our assets• Reducing technical training requirements and fill more fleet seats
• Decreasing supervisor time learning the aircraft, allowing more time to instruct, mentor, and lead young sailors
• Facilitating high-velocity learning in young technicians
• Improving supervision, leading to increased safety margins
• Producing consistent, advanced troubleshooting, saving time/cost in the supply system and decreasing material readiness gaps
• Better supporting Sailor 2025 and the CNO’s Design for Maintaining Maritime Superiority.
Although factors other than AMEX also affect maintenance effectiveness and efficiency, it is clear AMEX is a tangible and feasible area for improvement in our operational readiness and it supports “warfighting first.” The NAE should:
• Expedite policy for codifying the AMEX metric
• Incorporate the AMEX metric into readiness reporting
• Work with Navy Personnel Command, OPNAV, and U.S. Fleet Forces Command to establish distribution policies that incorporate AMEX
• Reevaluate promotion values and messaging so sailors who stay in platform compete equally with those who may not
• Conduct a study to explore the impact of technician tour length on squadron maintenance readiness.
Our biggest advantage over our enemies is not our equipment; it is our people and the ways in which we use them to generate combat effects. To maximize our lethality in the high-end fight, we need to build our maintenance teams more deliberately by integrating AMEX into the distribution calculus.
Back to eLoran Reduces GPS Vulnerability
By Lieutenant David S. Radin, U.S. Coast Guard
The global positioning system (GPS) is a single point of failure for global positioning, navigation, and timing (PNT). The United States and its allies depend on GPS as the only mature, deployed global navigation satellite system (GNSS) for both military operations and civil infrastructure. This dependency is a recognized widely as a weakness and one that would be exploited immediately as a first-strike target for enemies seeking to harm allied critical infrastructure or to enter contested battlespace. With terrorism and cyber warfare at the forefront of U.S. politics and culture, the nation must find solutions to adapt to and meet these threats.
Sometimes the answer to the greatest challenges lies in a redesigned or emerging form of an old technology. In this case, the solution may be enhanced long-range radio navigation, commonly known as eLoran. Admittedly, in the context of ultra-fast fiber-optic communications, global satellite networks, cyber warfare, and vast cloud-based operations, a high-power, low-frequency transmission may appear a bit lackluster. But eLoran is an unsung and extremely promising tool with tremendous potential to disrupt an enemy’s current antiaccess/area-denial (A2/AD) battle plans and greatly reduce the threat to civil infrastructure in the absence of GPS—while providing PNT services for civil and military needs. It offers resiliency, interoperability, and force multiplication to warfighters and contingencies, opportunities, and cost savings to homeland infrastructure.
There have been multiple, well-publicized events during which small GPS jammers have caused major interruption of commercial activity.1 Ninety-nine percent of the volume of overseas trade, valued at $649 billion annually to U.S. gross domestic product, is conducted through the U.S marine transportation system, which would make the loss of GPS to the maritime domain alone immediately crippling to the U.S. economy.2 The International Maritime Organization (IMO) requires a minimum of ±10 meter precision to be considered an acceptable harbor entrance navigation tool. Thus, aside from shooting visual bearings to fixed objects, there currently is no valid navigational replacement for GPS.
Navigation, however, is just one aspect of the PNT value of GPS; the timing component also is essential to maintaining our electrical grid and ensuring the integrity of banking transactions at global financial institutions. The New York Stock Exchange recorded roughly 1.8 billion stock transactions in 2015.3 The integrity of trading volume of this magnitude relies on the precise timing GPS ensures; its loss would bring global financial markets to a screeching halt.
On 2 January 2010, as a result of budget cutbacks explicitly proposing to terminate Loran-C because of its expense and “obsolete technology,” the U.S. Coast Guard posted in the Federal Register its intention to begin decommissioning its Loran, marking the end of one of the most successful international navigation systems and the most efficient and effective terrestrial backup to GPS.4
What Is Loran?
At its pinnacle, Loran-C (the dominant Loran version after 1980) was a high-power, low-frequency (broadcast on a 100 kHz carrier frequency) hyperbolic radio navigation system that provided PNT coverage to much of North America, Europe, and Asia through 75 transmitting sites located in countries and territories around the globe. Later generations of Loran had an accuracy of one-quarter mile. When GPS became available for commercial use in 1997, its ±4 meter precision relegated Loran-C to an ancillary system.
In an effort to modernize, researchers developed eLoran in the early 2000s, improving on Loran-C primarily through the addition of a data channel that makes differential corrections to Loran fixes. eLoran provides a reliable positioning accuracy of ±8 meters, in addition to meeting the long-term precise timing requirement, 1x10-11, for primary reference clocks. With proven availability of 0.999-0.9999, eLoran was poised to serve as the primary PNT backup to GPS when the Department of Homeland Security announced its intention to sponsor eLoran technology development in February 2008.5 Despite efforts to integrate Loran and GPS receivers into common infrastructure, however, the prevalence of GPS navigation systems overshadowed eLoran and ultimately led policymakers to the hasty decision to halt the development of further research and decommission the legacy Loran-C infrastructure in 2009.
Today’s Loran
Given that eLoran has not yet been demonstrated to achieve the same quality of PNT as GPS, is it meant to be a backup or simply a complementary system to GPS? As a backup, it should provide the same caliber of service as GPS, allowing the operator to seamlessly switch between both systems with no break in performance. If one system failed, the other could provide identical services and sustain U.S. infrastructure. Physical security standards also would match those of GPS, requiring the land containing eLoran towers to be highly secure facilities to discourage the threat of physical attack.
On the other hand, if eLoran were used as a complementary system to GPS, the PNT standards might be required to meet only the most critical or sensitive infrastructure components. Much like a common generator for a building or home, a complementary power source typically runs just the electrical circuits to support a structure’s safety, security, food, and water. A complementary PNT system would have the same design requirements for the services it provides and the security standards required to protect it. Beyond the obvious point that any contingency is better than none, using eLoran as a backup or complementary technology provides critical advantages to both civil and military sectors.
Military Advantages of eLoran
The importance of mitigating A2/AD challenges is well documented in strategic literature, which its “page-one” status in the March 2015 edition of the joint A Cooperative Strategy for 21st Century Seapower attests. The strategy articulates a need to “prioritize capabilities that gain and maintain access, when and where needed, across all warfighting domains.” Because PNT services are critical to U.S. state-of-the-art joint command-and-control systems, the threat of anti-GPS electronic warfare tools (spamming, spoofing, and jamming) threatens the warfighter’s ability to safely access the battlefield, let alone successfully operate inside of it. GPS and all GNSSs are vulnerable to denial because of their low-power narrowband transmission characteristics. Because the received signal strength of a GPS transmission is far below the noise-floor, an authentic GPS signal easily is overwhelmed and drowned out by a perpetrator.
eLoran primarily brings contingency PNT support in an A2/AD environment. It is produced by a high-power transmitter (to the tune of 1 MW), which is virtually impossible for an unsophisticated adversary to jam. Any enemy jamming attempt on an allied eLoran broadcast would be easy for friendly forces to detect and target.
A challenge to the feasibility of using eLoran in contested areas is the system’s dependency on large, power-thirsty transmitters and its supporting infrastructure. These structures carry a large electromagnetic and thermal footprint and would be visible and easily targetable by the enemy. This is an excellent argument against using eLoran as the primary method of PNT in a GPS-positive environment. Given the option of the two, a GNSS clearly is the more functional choice. eLoran cannot and should not replace GPS or other GNSSs in that capacity, but it currently is the best available supplement.
The second tactical advantage of eLoran is the diversity of delivery domain it provides. GPS and fellow GNSSs are space-based, and eLoran is terrestrial. With an eLoran chain deployed downrange, an A2/AD-committed adversary would need to target two independent systems in two vastly different domains simultaneously to successfully eliminate friendly PNT capabilities. Not only is the domain separate, but it is also agile. Tactical Loran systems can be developed to offer mobile solutions (as the Air Transportable Loran Stations used in Vietnam and Libya prove) in support of focused tactical environments. eLoran can be constructed with modular technology that is rapidly installed, repaired, and removed independently of a global infrastructure. While multiple GNSSs, such as the European Union’s GALILEO, can offer warfighters a redundant capability, eLoran offers an agile and independent contingency.
Civil Advantages of eLoran
Stated simply, eLoran provides a complementary PNT system to U.S. critical infrastructure. In the event GNSSs are rendered unusable, eLoran can keep the nation’s power grids running efficiently, cellular networks operational, and international banking systems coordinated. ELoran can fill the PNT gap until GPS service can be restored.
eLoran also is an excellent choice for domestic contingencies because it is resilient in the event of isolated terrorist events. Since Loran networks are built in a chain, the loss of a single or even a few stations would not cripple the system. Furthermore, eLoran can conduct its synchronized timing operations on its on-board data channel, thus protecting against foreign and domestic cyber threats. The cost of implementing an eLoran system, although significant, would be magnitudes smaller than the economic cost of trying to reestablish services without GPS.
Challenges to Adopting eLoran
One the greatest obstacles to the U.S. government in developing a nationwide (and potentially global) backup system such as eLoran is the massive budgetary hurdle involved in appropriating funds to set up the necessary infrastructure. GPS has been integrated so deeply into everyday commercial use that it is practically unrecognized in most applications. Its apparently reliable nature and the absence of a visible, immediate threat to the general public has created complacency. Financing a backup system would be a nearly impossible notion to get through Congress under the current tight budgetary environment.
U.S. politics further complicate the issue of appropriating funds for eLoran, because no department or agency will commit to being executive agent for running the program. Despite the Department of Transportation’s public request for comment on the use of eLoran for PNT backup and the U.S. Army’s inclusion of eLoran in its assured PNT research program, a federal agency has not assumed lead for the development of an eLoran infrastructure.6 This is understandable, as this responsibility would require a large increase in funding for the full engineering and acquisition life cycle.
Still, the federal government may be in luck: Congress passed the Howard Coble Coast Guard and Maritime Transportation Act of 2014, which prevented the Secretary of Homeland Security, under whom the U.S. Coast Guard resides, from dismantling or disposing of infrastructure that supported the former Loran-C system until a determination is made that the infrastructure is not required “to provide a positioning, navigation, and timing system to provide redundant capability in the event GPS signals are disrupted.”7 Therefore, the U.S. Coast Guard, which operated the previous 19 Loran stations in the United States, cannot dispose of the remaining equipment and property pertaining to Loran until a study is completed to determine whether the property is needed (the properties are not necessarily required as eLoran potentially could be deployed using different characteristics from the legacy system).8 Consequently, currently properties are available from the previous Loran system that are large enough to support an eLoran tower facility with the required radio spectrum rights in place, avoiding any unnecessary environmental struggles associated with a new tower in a new location.
Another challenge for the federal government (and whoever is directed to become executive agent) is the relative immaturity of eLoran policy with respect to current GPS policy. The President’s U.S. Space-Based Positioning, Navigation, and Timing Policy assigns the departments of Transportation and Homeland Security responsibility for developing, acquiring, operating, and maintaining backup PNT capabilities, but that is the extent of the requirement.
There are few documented standards or policy documents for eLoran that could be adopted to begin managing an eLoran program.9 The program would require years of development and international standardization through interagency federal agreements, commercial standards for product development, and directives from the IMO—the leading international nongovernmental organization on maritime policy.
Although the United Kingdom and South Korea (which is motivated by live GPS-denial attacks from North Korea) are moving forward in deploying and testing modern eLoran systems, the lack of international standardization puts the burden on commercial developers to define their own requirements.10 U.S. leadership declaring standardized requirements for this technology could be an important step in driving international commitment to PNT resilience.
The Way Ahead
The U.S. government and industry are unable to design and build a system without first analyzing what the requirements truly are for a backup system. On analyzing the U.S. infrastructure requirements for PNT independent of GPS and taking into consideration currently available technologies and the projected costs to meet those requirements, it is clear eLoran is the best timing-based technology that also fulfills positioning and navigation requirements.
1. National PNT Advisory Board, “National PNT Advisory Board Comments on Jamming the Global Positioning System—A National Security Threat: Recent Events and Potential Cures,” 16 November, 2010. C. Curry, “Sentinel Project Report on GNSS Vulnerabilities,” Chronos Technology, 4 April 2014.
2. MARAD, www.marad.dot.gov/ports/marine-transportation-system-mts 27 February 2016.
3. “Transactions, Statistics, and Data Library,” NYSE www.nyse.com/data/transactions-statistics-data-library
4. B. Obama, “Terminations, Reductions, and Savings, Budget of the U.S. Government Fiscal Year 2010,” Office of Budget and Management, 11 May 2009.
5. U.S. Department of Homeland Security Press Office, “Statement from DHS Press Secretary Laura Keehner on the Adoption of National Backup System to GPS,” 7 February 2008.
6. “Complimentary Positioning, Navigation, and Timing Capability; Notice; Request for Public Comments,” Federal Register, vol. 80, no. 55, pp. 15268-69, 23 March 2015. “Enhanced Loran (eLoran) Receivers for Army Platforms; Request for Information,” U.S. Army solicitation number W56KGY-15-R-ELOR, 14 January 2015.
7. “Howard Coble Coast Guard and Maritime Transportation Act of 2014,” 113th Congress, www.congress.gov/bill/113th-congress/senate-bill/2444/text/pl.
8. G. Johnson, M. Wiggins, P. Swaszek, L. Hartshorn, and R. Hartnett, “Possible optimizations for the US Loran System,” Proceedings of 2006 ION/IEEE PLANS, Coronado, CA, April 2006.
9. “U.S. Space-Based Positioning, Navigation, and Timing Policy,” accessed 28 February 2016, www.gps.gov/policy/docs/2004/
10. G. Offermans et al. “eLoran Initial Operational Capability in the United Kingdom—First Results,” Proceedings of ION ITM, Dana Point, CA, January 2015. G. Gibbons, “South Korea Re-Launches Its eLoran Program,” Inside GNSS, accessed 27 January 2015, www.insidegnss.com/node/4396.
Baby SWOs Need a ‘RAG’
By Commander Royal W. Connell Jr., U.S. Navy (Retired)
Traditionally, because complex weapon-system requirements call for extensive technical knowledge, aviation training evolved into a tiered system of gradually increasing difficulty, until junior aviators could earn their wings and become competent pilots before arriving in the fleet for operational duties. That training track involved reporting first to the Training Command for flight school and then to a fleet replacement squadron (FRS) before ultimately showing up to their squadrons to do their jobs. The term FRS replaced RAG (replacement air group) many years ago, but we in the Navy are slow in changing our language.
Likewise, and for the same reasons, submarine training employs a similar track, with officers and enlisted first attending Nuclear Power School and then moving on to a prototype before ever reporting to their first boats for duty.
Junior surface warfare officers (SWOs), however, face a different set of expectations. In some ways, junior officer (JO)training has not changed since the Age of Sail. Over the years, experiments with Newport’s Naval Destroyer School (Des-Tech) and “Baby-SWO” schools have failed mostly because of national operational commitments and a lack of funding—and maybe just a little reluctance on the part of hard-core senior surface officers to relinquish their favorite sport of showing how great they are as ship handlers, to the embarrassment of the quivering junior officers of the deck under instruction.
Teach Shiphandling
It is time the Navy creates a means of developing newly minted SWOs into at least competent ship drivers before they reach the fleet. Such a proposal requires a training command method of incrementally teaching shiphandling and operations on dedicated training vessels and simulators before SWOs report to their first ships for duty.
Make no mistake, establishing a professional training track from whole cloth is hard. Infrastructure is expensive. Building and buying a training ship requires at least 10–15 years from concept to execution, even if the Navy’s hierarchy and the congressional purse strings were persuaded to support such actions.
The mission of today’s shrinking surface Navy is to operate in defense of our nation and its allies and to respond to national tasking—not to train JOs. In fact, training is counterproductive to operations. Allowing a JO with a learner’s permit the time and resources to experiment—figuratively to take the ship around the parking lot with dad in the right seat to test how it turns, stops, reverses, etc.—normally is not possible on an ocean transit. It slows the speed of advance and lengthens the time it takes to reach the operational theater. And once on station, it interferes with operational commitments.
As a result, JOs do not receive adequate practice in shiphandling, either during independent operations or in fleet conditions. Much of our personal qualifications standards (PQS) are check-off driven. Like some states’ current efforts to require logging a certain amount of time behind the wheel before getting a driver’s license, it is at best a woefully inadequate plan to ensure a JO actually has turned right, left, stopped, changed speed, and watched an underway refueling evolution.
Before anyone leaps to the defense of the PQS process, yes, it has improved by a microscopic margin over that of the 1960s. But to quote children on a long trip: “Are we there yet?” The answer is a resounding NO.
The junior officer of the deck (JOOD) who gets to maneuver to avoid another ship is serendipitously on watch, with the conn, at precisely the right moment. And usually he does not even get to decide which way to turn, with how much rudder, at what speed, etc. Because the OOD or captain is right there to dictate the specific actions to take, rather than risk careers by allowing the JO freedom to fail.
No one advocates allowing a collision at sea to teach the young driver a lesson. But this is why experienced ship drivers are on the bridge in the first place: to make sure the ship is safe—not to prevent the JO from ever making a mistake.
The Navy has long recognized the need for centralizing the training of JOs. After all, the U.S. Naval Academy was founded on the need to standardize midshipman training. We knew in the early 1800s that a ship’s captain had other things on his mind than dealing with the education of his midshipmen, so we moved them ashore to old Fort Severn for training. It has continued pretty much ever since.
Operational commanding officers are not necessarily efficient teachers in this regard. Their job tasking requires them not to be! Again, operational requirements and the training of ship drivers are, for the most part, mutually exclusive. In fact, COs and senior watch officers were not chosen for their positions because of their superlative teaching abilities, but because of their operational abilities.
We are all familiar with the adage that the surface warfare community eats their young, and despite protestations to the contrary, SWO JOs have the lowest morale, lowest retention rate, and lowest job satisfaction of any in the Navy’s warfare communities. We recognized this as far back as the early 1970s, when we formed study groups to come up with ways to improve surface morale and retention. That is why people today wear a Surface Warfare device over their ribbons—a striking contrast to an earlier era, when Arleigh Burke, one of the greatest SWOs ever to cross a quarterdeck, was perfectly happy to be Chief of Naval Operations without wearing any gold at all over his fruit salad.
Today’s surface ship is no less complex a weapon system than a submarine or aircraft, yet we insist on using antiquated training methods founded during the age of square-rigged frigates, when months were spent away from port to prevent the crew from deserting.
A Practical Plan
The surface community needs a dedicated training command whose sole purpose is to produce competent ship drivers. Reinstitute centralized professional training for JOs. Educate them about ship systems and engineering plants. Teach them the effects of wind and waves on a vessel. Allow them to go into open water and make turns and use opposite screws and rudders to see how they work. Then put them in multiple vessel situations and experiment with possible maneuvering and collision-avoidance techniques so they can discover the wisdom learned over the centuries at sea without being simultaneously encumbered with their division officers’ jobs, the operational necessity of daily ship’s taskings, and the concern that their lack of shiphandling experience will adversely affect their fitness report and ultimately their ability to stay in the Navy.
The initial training, perhaps, could be best accomplished by a dedicated fleet of yard-patrol craft (YPs). The Naval Academy introduces shiphandling that way. But the Academy is not in the business of producing qualified ship drivers any more than it is required to produce qualified aviators or submariners. Even the Marines understand that it is necessary to have an officer go to Basic School before leading Marines, despite having just completed four years of education and training in how to be an officer in the first place.
Just as in the aviation training command, which divides training among primary, advanced, and fleet replacement squadrons, there needs to be a follow-on, advanced, full-sized ship to reinforce and refine the primary level YP lessons. There also should be a ship-type specific FRS to familiarize JOs with their ultimate duty stations, or even to refamiliarize an officer returning to sea from shore duty or transitioning from another ship type. This ensures that when officers arrive on board their ships, they are ready to operate—without the career pressure of having to qualify on top of learning to lead a division already in production and still be a contributing member of an operational team.
As an interim measure, a Navy Reserve ship would fit the bill quite nicely, if we had any Reserve ships to dedicate to such duty. This would give the Reserves a meaningful mission in which to perform their required drills.
Today’s Navy is in the throes of becoming the smallest it has been since the 1921 Washington Naval Arms Reduction Treaty, and the essence of the 21st-century Navy’s operational being could be summed up in a paraphrase of John Paul Jones’ famous war-cry: “How much does it cost?” But we must start the conversation, because we are in extremis over our officer manning.
The Navy is hemorrhaging what little talent it allows to stay in, with its rush to get rid of recent graduates of the Naval Academy and Navy ROTC units for being a little slow on the learning curve. We have invested thousands of dollars in their educations, and we are driving them out in droves. The argument that “I learned that way and it has taken me this far” no longer holds water, if it ever did. We need to teach smarter, not harder. If we create truly professionally trained surface JOs in the process, we might just be able to keep them and employ their leadership in a far more effective manner.