If you asked a group of intelligence or submarine officers to describe naval aviators in a word, “humble” probably would not be a common response. Yet, at the core of naval aviation is a system that allows pilots and flight officers to admit their mistakes in public and learn from them. Aircrew learn “crew resource management” to identify and manage threats to safety, many of which are the result of the limits of human performance. Aviators—from the commanding officer with thousands of hours of flight time to the newest pilot—stand in front of their squadron-mates to own up to mistakes they make in the aircraft.
Unfortunately, this good practice is an anomaly in a broader Navy culture that punishes risk-taking and does not promote the course corrections required to produce experienced, effective leaders who can win wars against great powers. The Navy has been discussing the “zero defect” mentality for at least 30 years, and its persistence is a warning that the service is not prepared to embrace “urgent change at significant scale,” as the 2018 National Defense Strategy prescribes. Commanding officers are groomed to follow directions and avoid risk in executing their duties. When skippers fail, they are summarily fired, and the Navy loses officers who often still have much to offer the service.
But the more pernicious—and less appreciated—effect of this risk-aversion culture is that it is driving young officers out of the Navy, depriving the nation of the talent it needs to compete with adversaries. The National Defense Strategy champions “a culture of experimentation and calculated risk-taking,” and imbuing officers with this mind-set should be the Navy’s top priority. Adversaries may have more ships and improving technology, but free societies such as the United States are better at cultivating innovative thinkers and warfighters—if the Navy can alter course and stop surrendering this crucial advantage.
The debate over the “zero-defect” mentality has generally been confined to anecdotes, until recently. Captain Michael Junge analyzed 1,500 command incidents between 1945 and 2015 and published his findings in the spring 2020 issue of the Naval War College Review. He detects “a clear trend, a clear change, and evidence that what the Navy does today is not what it did in the past.” Of the approximately 500 cases considered from around 1985 on, including collisions, groundings, and personal failings, 305 commanders were removed from command, about 60 percent. Only 10 percent were promoted again. Compare that with the years following World War II, when incidents were no less frequent but removals far less common. “Officers who committed missteps in command,” Captain Junge writes of that time, “routinely were retained in command, often forgiven, and allowed to continue with their careers.”
One insight from Junge’s paper is that the Navy has replaced a professional set of military ethics with a system grounded in compliance with rules and regulations, one that treats all incidents the same, whether sexual harassment or a ship grounding. The mentality this creates in officers, as he puts it, is: “Do what you are told, nothing more and nothing less, and you will advance. Take no risks, make no mistakes, and you will advance.” This has indeed been formalized across the fleet. Junior officers are primed to follow an “ideal” path with no deviation—a mediocre fitness report in an early tour can be the difference between screening for command or riding out to 20 years in a backwater office. The incentive is to punch your ticket at all the favored commands without incident. And junior officers often have a front-row seat to watch Navy superiors micromanaging their commanding officers, because those superiors themselves are fretful of risk and having their own careers derailed by an incident in a subordinate command.
A 2014 retention survey showed that many junior and mid-career officers do not aspire to rise through the Navy’s ranks. Of the 3,100 officers who responded, 95 percent were in the ranks O-1 through O-5. When asked, “Do you want your boss’s job?” roughly 50 percent responded, “no.” An additional 15 percent responded, “not sure.” Only 33 percent answered affirmatively. Moreover, 75 percent of the officers surveyed agreed with the statement, “The Navy has a zero-defect mentality,” and 86 percent concurred that, “The Navy has a risk-averse culture.”
These problems have been highlighted in numerous forums, but the pace of change has been slow. Take the tendency of Navy leaders to write off aviation retention problems as primarily the result of insatiable airline demand for military pilots in a good economy. Multiple studies, including a 2016 RAND study of Air Force pilots, have documented how airlines appeal to pilots with good pay and a more flexible lifestyle, and Navy brass has testified to Congress similarly. But the airlines have nothing that can compete with the daring and mastery that initially attracted pilots to naval aviation. The shortage of pilots is pronounced in carrier aviation, but plenty of pilots departing the service are not excited about giving up flying the ball to drive a Boeing 737. Operational tempo and lifestyle matter, but many also may have looked at the grueling climb to command and concluded that what awaits them is a bureaucratic and administrative post, one that could be revoked at any moment if they make a single misstep.
The USS Theodore Roosevelt Message
All of this bled into public view in 2020 with the problems aboard the USS Theodore Roosevelt (CVN-71). I learned most of the details of Captain Brett Crozier’s firing from a copy of the New York Times digest on board the USS Gerald R. Ford (CVN-78), and senior Navy leaders have done little in the months since to explain what young officers should take from this episode. It is not any clearer after spending several hours reading the nearly 2,000-page Navy investigation.
The investigation faults Crozier for not ensuring “physical distancing was implemented on board” the ship, while granting that it is all but impossible on an aircraft carrier. It criticizes his decision to release crew members from an overcrowded quarantine area on the ship, even though the release was designed to improve social distancing among close contacts. He is faulted both for not taking the virus seriously enough (ending the quarantine) but also taking the virus too seriously (requesting CDC-compliant hotel rooms). More broadly, the investigation takes him to task for not taking “immediate and appropriate action . . . to drive outcomes,” yet finds fault with his sending of the letter, which Crozier wrote to focus efforts—or, one might say, drive outcomes—on the plan he and his fellow commanders saw as the most effective in the protection of their crew.
The Theodore Roosevelt affair also bears directly on warfighting at sea. The letter that leaked to the San Francisco Chronicle was not the work of a rogue captain, but a condensed version of a white paper drafted by the command of Carrier Air Wing Eleven, with input from the strike group warfare commanders and the strike group admiral. This is a warfighting team that the Navy would expect to be capable of independent operations in the degraded or denied communications environment that will characterize combat against great powers. But when commanders try to exercise these prerogatives, they are punished for making less-than-perfect choices in the absence of perfect information.
Culture is easy to criticize, difficult to change, and tougher still to measure. But first the Navy needs to acknowledge the problem. Institutional inability to be honest has prevented the fact-finding and data collection critical to understanding and rectifying the Navy’s cultural issues. It should seek to improve on the scope and scale of the 2014 retention survey and run it yearly, and it should also solicit regular feedback from its lower-echelon commanders on their experiences in command. More specifically, I offer three ideas for starting to resolve the Navy’s leadership crisis and follow-on retention problem.
Implement a system to allow worthy commanding officers to recover from missteps and reserve firing for serious failures of integrity or competence. This would require senior Navy leaders to accept this new mentality and foster it throughout the ranks. Junge is correct that the “perceived ability to recover from failure is more important than any commander’s exhortation that we do not have a zero-defect culture.” And there have been many such exhortations. One incremental step in this direction, suggested by the 2014 survey: Stop publicizing the firings of command leaders. Certain incidents are serious enough that press coverage is unavoidable. Most cases do not rise to this level, however, and “once the Navy has gone public there is no chance for the Sailor to recover, regardless of the ultimate disposition of the case.” Preventing the public shaming of commanding officers would give the Navy the option to help them recover their careers. Admiral Chester Nimitz, himself the beneficiary of institutional forgiveness, deplored the “washing of the Navy’s dirty linen in public” and counseled its strict avoidance. This is still good advice.1
Overhaul the fitness reporting system with more than studies and commissions, which promise reform that never arrives. The current fitness reporting system invites officers to look at their career as a game to be played, rather than as a process of developing experience, wisdom, and judgment. The 2014 survey recommended removing the change-of-command fitness report requirement (an outgoing reporting senior must write fitness reports on all his or her officers) and moving to semiannual evaluations, which might decrease the impact of timing on an officer’s career and future promotion prospects. It might also help restore faith that the system rewards those who have potential as leaders, not just as rule-followers. That recommendation came six years ago, and yet the change-of-command fitness report requirement lives on.
Another good change would be to broaden the lens in looking for talent. Take the E-2 Hawkeye community as an example. The current fitness-reporting system assumes that talent is distributed evenly among all nine fleet squadrons, even though one squadron might have three high performers while another has only one. Yet each junior officer who earns an Early Promote (EP) ranking in a squadron is viewed the same across the community and is usually detailed to a coveted billet where they compete with other EP officers. Only years later does it become clear that some of those who earned EPs should become commanding officers and some should not. Those officers who received a Must Promote (MP) but would have earned an EP in another unit or with better timing, will probably never select for operational command, even if they earn an EP in subsequent tours. To evaluate talent more widely, the community commanding officers on the East Coast, for example, could get together and discuss and rank the potential of the junior officers in their units combined. They could produce a ranking that would identify some for command potential and allow others to depart the “golden path” and have a productive career as a pilot or a warfare officer who does not take command.
Finally, the Navy should focus more on identifying its best officers and fighting to retain them through education and training specifically tailored to developing its future leaders. Currently, a mid-career pilot or surface warfare officer must decide whether to stay in the service with limited insight into what their future in the Navy might look like. The Navy needs to scour all communities for exceptional lieutenants annually and enroll the best in a fellowship designed to produce commanding officers, carrier captains, and flag ranks. A tour at the Naval War College comes too late in an officer’s career to accomplish this purpose. Part of the coursework could be case studies in military strategy and decision-making; part could also be a rich education in naval history. Bring in historians to capture the minds of young officers by studying Admirals Bull Halsey, Chester Nimitz, and Ernest King. The point is to intervene and communicate to these officers, just as they are pondering life outside the service, that they have a future in the finest Navy in the world—one with a tradition that turned an ensign who grounded his ship into a brilliant commander of the Pacific Fleet during World War II.
The Navy will know it has the right culture, one capable of adapting to meet new threats, when its retention data shows that its best and brightest mid-career officers in prestigious billets want to stick around. This is possible even in a Navy that cannot compete with private industry on pay or lifestyle: Most officers who get into this business know that it is service and join for the mission. They will stay in a healthy Navy that offers purpose and true opportunities to lead.
China is on track to build a navy more powerful than the U.S. Navy within the next two decades. It takes more than 25 years to produce a flag officer. The question of who will compete to run the Navy in 2040 is being decided today. Navy leaders need to start obsessing over the national security risk that, when the next conflict breaks out, the United States’ finest strategic minds will not be at sea but will have long ago departed the service to work at an investment bank or accounting firm.
1. Walter Borneman, The Admirals (New York: Back Bay Books, 2013), 59.
