As America’s “away team,” the U.S. Navy is on watch around the world 24/7/365, ready to respond to adversaries seeking inroads against U.S. strategic interests. The novel coronavirus (COVID-19) has elevated Navy unit and individual sailor health protection as a key feature of combat readiness, while at the same time posing a major challenge to force generation. To meet these challenges during and immediately after the pandemic, the Navy should give ship commanding officers even greater authority across the man, train, equip, and operate spectrum than they currently have.
Force Health Protection Is Combat Readiness
Nothing today is more survivable and more lethal in projecting conventional and nuclear assurance than a fully operational, “COVID-free” warship at sea. This is the Navy’s center of strength, and so we must work to protect our ships from COVID-19 without compromise. It is equally true no environment is more suitable to the spread of a virus than the tight quarters of a ship, as first observed on cruise ship Diamond Princess and later on the Nimitz-class aircraft carrier USS Theodore Roosevelt (CVN-71).
An early example of prudent and tough actions taken to prevent an infected crew were the pre-patrol measures by the Arleigh Burke–class destroyers USS Donald Cook (DDG-75) and USS Porter (DDG-78), both forward-deployed naval forces–Europe (FDNF-E) ships homeported in Rota, Spain. Prior to their March 2020 deployment, while the coronavirus was already raging in Spain, they began deployment with COVID-free crews by first completing a 14-day (one COVID-19 incubation cycle) observation period. This consisted of a pier side quarantine with no physical contact with the outside world followed by a period of local area operations underway. Anyone joining these ships afterwards must complete a 14-day isolation, or “sequester”, to ensure they have not brought the disease on board. These precautions are now mandatory throughout the fleet, but they did not originate as Navy-wide direction.
In the intervening months since the Donald Cook and Porter left Rota, the Navy’s COVID-19 guidance had grown to a library of instructions from DoD, the Department of the Navy, fleet commanders, type commanders, the Bureau of Navy Medicine, and others. In addition to the precautions required prior to starting a patrol, ships overseas had to cease nearly all off-ship schools and training not in homeport, and had to cease or minimize all onboard technical assistance from outside entities, such as Navy maintenance facilities and industry contractors. Navy-wide, advancement selection exams have been postponed, slowing down a necessary process to advance crewmembers to the appropriate paygrades to fill leadership positions.
Our ability to mobilize (prepare and organize forces) is challenged by the pandemic. Policies formulated to find wiggle room, or protective “bubbles,” for continued force generation and sustainment seem like a tactical feint meant to fool an enemy. Superstitious sailors—which are all sailors to some degree—can imagine the virus personified and daring us to be careless, to take a short cut, to be too open, too soon.
Fear, superstition, and hyperbole can be effective tools to paint a picture and, as one of my former commanding officer’s was fond of saying, there is use for them in the workplace. Although the language of “war” motivates, we are not at war with COVID-19. To say this is like saying that we are at war with salt. We detest salt’s corrosive effect on ship hulls, but it is just Mother Nature in action. We must adjust to her with science, and a lot of grinding. But we do not fight her. However, thinking of COVID-19 within the conceptual framework of war does offer thoughts on command worth exploring.
Commanding Officers Have the Helm in Rough Seas
COVID-19 is teaching us all a bit about our vulnerabilities and our strengths. We have the best and most highly trained commanding officers in the world. It is time to call on their full measure of boldness and accountability and endow them with wartime-like authority. The Porter and Donald Cook have since sailed to the Barents Sea, a first for the surface fleet since the mid 1980’s. One of the commanding officers, an O-5 surface warfare officer, was in command of the five-ship surface action group during this historic event. This is how you get from a culture of compliance to a culture of excellence. You empower it. We have plenty of problems in the Navy, but poor leadership and lack of zeal among the vast majority of our commanding officers at the tactical level are not among them. In the din and fog of the current wave of COVID-19, Navy leaders should apply strategic focus to midterm (the next 1-6 months) readiness and stability, and, in so doing, ensure tactical and operational commanders are empowered to forcefully deal with the second wave.
Between now and the future unknown point of final victory over COVID-19 is the most important time period for the Navy. What leaders do during these coming months will determine what victory will look like, and Navy commanding officers are in the best position to shape the best possible outcome. The Navy will emerge from COVID-19 saddled with large debts in unit and personnel training, readiness, and maintenance. To address the growing backlog of certification requirements with inspectors unable to travel, commanding officers should be authorized to recertify their ships in every expiring training and certification warfare area during the crisis. Commanding officers should be reassured that there will be no repercussions if, in their professional judgment, they determine their ship is unsatisfactory in a warfare area. The organizational focus should be placed on assisting them in correcting the deficiencies. Extending waivers should be avoided, as that simply increases a debt that must be paid with valuable time and effort later.
Give commanding officers more power to stabilize personnel readiness in their ships and squadrons during COVID-19. They should be able to retain the right skillsets, manpower levels, and warfighting spirit within their commands. Naval Personnel Command’s “Force Management Operational Mitigation Measures” puts the rudder in the right direction, but these are well-meant reactions rather than action. Commanding officers should have the authority to operationally hold personnel for up to six months or more. The DoD travel stop movement was a smart move. However, if stop-movement extensions are made in fits and starts, a huge part of the force will be sitting and waiting, adding to the permanent change of station backlog and gapped billets. Give naval personnel scheduled to rotate this summer a viable option and incentive to extend for up to one year at their current commands and give commanding officers the authority to approve the requests with an administrative fast track.
Finally, expand command meritorious advancement program (MAP) authority significantly in response to postponed advancement exams and have the aggregate numbers match Navy-wide advancement quotas. No one knows as well as the chain of command whether a sailor is ready for the next pay grade.
A Massive Maintenance Bill is Looming
Intermediate level maintenance execution is a dimension of force readiness made especially difficult by COVID-19. The material readiness deficit in the chapter after victory will be big, expensive, and time consuming. All nations have yet to find the top line of the breathtaking economic costs of COVID-19. The complexity of naval platforms and systems, and the lack of government shipyard industrial workers and equipment that could be compelled to work at full capacity through the crisis compounds the problem. You cannot build or fix a warship via telework. After protecting the health of the force from COVID-19, the maintenance deficit is the most challenging future headwind on the horizon. Anyone who cares about the long-term health of our ships does not want to see ship lifecycle maintenance revised with an eraser, but this will likely happen to some extent when discretionary budgets are targeted to help fund the larger economic recovery.
Until that future budget cycle, which is also often mistakenly called a “war,” commanding officers and their crews can emerge from the COVID-19 pandemic even stronger than before. But there still needs to be an effort to tighten up and streamline the COVID-19 guidance and a willingness to push wartime-like authority to commanding officers. What better preparation could there be for the real war, when the sea again will not be calm?
