The recent decision by commander, Naval Surface Forces, Vice Admiral Richard Brown to restrict the surface warfare officer device, commonly known as the surface warfare officer (SWO) pin, to unrestricted line surface warfare officers was a step in the right direction to professionalize the community. But it does not go far enough. His goal of ensuring the SWO pin maintains its position as the professional equivalent of naval aviator wings of gold and submariner dolphins is laudable. However, the SWO pin equivalence argument misses a larger issue—the SWO qualification process on board ships does not begin with a solid academic foundation from a schoolhouse, as it once did.
Admiral Brown’s decision put the brakes on a qualification process that had gotten progressively watered down over the years. It became one that devolved to chasing personnel qualification standard (PQS) signatures and passing an oral board that varies in difficulty and depth based on the knowledge base and inclination of the ship’s captain and other board members. The oral boards were often not comprehensive. For non-surface-designated officers there was no additional requirement, other than being ship’s company. For unrestricted line surface warfare officers, an additional prerequisite for the SWO pin includes completing the Basic Division Officer Course (BDOC), which provides exposure to the knowledge and skills junior officers require to become SWOs. However, BDOC’s abbreviated length means it fails to go into sufficient depth. Leaving aside the need to standardize SWO qualification boards, the surface warfare community should address the academic preparation of the SWO candidate.
From SWOSDOC to BDOC
Incremental strides have been made in the past few years to expand the length and content of BDOC, which is currently nine weeks long. This is encouraging, but it must be remembered that BDOC’s predecessor, the Surface Warfare Division Officer Course (SWOSDOC), was a six-month-long course that included classroom academics, hands-on practical labs in navigation, shiphandling, and maintenance management among other topics central to being a surface warfare officer. Students were assessed through written exams and practical performance. Being a “mando commando” on mandatory study was a common experience for many an ensign not meeting the academic mark. However, ensigns reported to their first ship with a solid professional knowledge base.
Upon reporting to the ship, the SWOSDOC graduate then learned about its systems and capabilities and how to “drive’ the ship, and developed the confidence and competence to earn the captain’s trust to qualify in watch positions of increasing responsibility and complexity. Only then would the young officer be considered for qualification as a SWO. The resulting SWO qualification board was the culmination of 12 to 18 months of hard work and shipboard learning—on top of the six-month SWOSDOC. This nearly two-year process also may have included one or more billet-specialty schools, such as combat information center (CIC) officer school. This SWO education and training process was equivalent in length to what aviators and submariners experience to earn their warfare devices. Today’s generation of surface warfare officers and SWO candidates simply lack this knowledge base because of the elimination of rigorous in-depth professional studies. This lack of fundamental warfare knowledge too often is evident in predeployment integrated and advanced training.
In the wake of the 2017 USS Fitzgerald (DDG-62) and USS McCain (DDG-56) collisions and the resulting Comprehensive Review, the Navy is applying course correction to address shiphandling shortfalls with increased emphasis on “reps and sets’ in realistic shiphandling simulators and “bridge resource management” training. This is a positive step but does not address shortfalls in knowledge of shipboard weapon systems, tactics, and threat capabilities. There was a time, however, when every SWO was expected to be a “tactics officer.”The weapons and tactics instructor (WTI) program only partly addresses these deficiencies because not every junior officer will become a WTI. Further, the plans and tactics officer billet is another attempt that only partly addresses the decline of tactical proficiency.
For the surface community to put substance behind the claim of professional equivalence with its aviator and submariner colleagues, it must go beyond restricting who can qualify as a SWO and return schoolhouse academic rigor and depth to SWO education and development. A template for BDOC to replicate in length and academic depth is the Navy Officer Candidate School (OCS) of the 1980s. At 16 weeks, OCS addressed all the topics necessary for SWO qualification in sufficient depth, including: celestial and piloting navigation, shiphandling, damage control, administration, naval justice, engineering, and combat systems fundamentals. Learning occurred through classroom instruction, written exams, and practical labs in which the students had to demonstrate competence in the subject areas as well as shiphandling at sea in yard patrol (YP) craft. In my memory, OCS graduates of that time typically arrived at SWOSDOC better prepared academically than their Naval Academy and NROTC peers and performed more successfully on average during SWOSDOC by virtue of this concentrated, intensive academic preparation.
Complaints about the brevity of BDOC continue among recent graduates. In his January 2018 USNI Blog article, Lieutenant John Tanalega states: “The main flaw of BDOC is that it is too short.” Lieutentants (junior grade) Richard Kuzma and Tom Wester in their December 2018 Proceedings article criticize the course length and advocate, among other things, inclusion of at-sea shiphandling in the form of YP training.
Complementing an expanded BDOC is the return and expansion of billet specialty courses, which used to be the norm but are currently limited largely to engineering billet training. For example, a junior officer assigned as a ship’s communications officer should attend a “COMMO” course, a CIC officer a CIC watch-officer course, gunnery officers a gunnery officer course, and so forth. A naval officer better trained for his or her duties is a naval officer not only more professional but also more confident. The result is greater job satisfaction, which may have the additional benefit of enhancing SWO junior officer retention.
Expanding BDOC to 16 weeks and reestablishing billet specialty courses will entail increased funding. But professionalism cannot be “bought on the cheap” or with the stroke of a pen. It requires rigorous, in-depth academic preparation of Navy surface warfare officers.