Management Makes Warfighting Possible

A July 2021 report commissioned by members of Congress critiqued the warfighting culture of the surface navy. The authors, a retired Navy rear admiral and a retired Marine Corps lieutenant general, wrote, “Finding and sinking enemy fleets should be the principal purpose of a Navy.” The report continues, “But many sailors found their leaders distracted, captive to bureaucratic excess, and rewarded for the successful execution of administrative functions rather than their skills as a warfighter.”¹ The authors also express “considerable apprehension” that the surface navy has “lost its fighting edge since the end of the Cold War.” A recent Naval Postgraduate School study and follow-on article published by the Center for International Maritime Security reveal similar critiques through interviews of serving surface warfare officers.²

No doubt there is some truth in these concerns. Surface navy leaders must acknowledge that more than 75 years without peer-to-peer conflict and 25 years without serious peer-to-peer competition have diluted warfighting culture and prowess. How could it be otherwise? Andrew Gordon’s 2005 classic history of the Victorian and Edwardian Royal Navy, Rules of the Game, describes ample precedents for this problem.

There is much to be done. Certainly, the Navy must continue to reorient toward its core mission—destroying other fleets—vice the unopposed land-strike, presence, and maritime security missions that have predominated since the end of the Cold War. And, of course, many business processes could be streamlined or eliminated. But these changes cannot alter a fundamental truth: Maintaining the readiness of a globally mobile warfighting team across more than 20 mission areas will always be a tremendous feat of management.

The critiques in these reports thus ring somewhat hollow. They fail to confront the real challenge of command at sea today: fostering and maintaining a warfighting culture while carrying an extremely demanding management load that can be reduced only at the margins. Warship commanding officers must find creative ways to develop a focus on warfighting around and through the daily tasks of management.

The Management Burden Is Built In

Modern warships are probably the most complex systems-of-systems of their size ever built. Sophisticated hull, mechanical, electrical, and navigation systems are akin to those of commercial vessels but with higher performance plus added redundancy and survivability and a huge array of mission payloads that tie into every domain and warfighting mission across the armed forces.

With these elaborate systems-of-systems come necessarily complex human organizations. Numbering dozens to hundreds of people, crews are complex, overlapping teams of teams trained with dozens of skills. In various combinations, crews must maintain continuous material, human, and resource readiness at sea and in port to carry out as many as 23 different missions.³ Minimum proficiency demands months of building-block training in controlled and simulated environments and periodic revisitation to maintain it. And, before they can execute any mission, commanding officers and their teams must first safely navigate the ship, land and launch aircraft, and operate a complex industrial plant.

Ready—and Lethal

But the mission of warships is not simply to generate and maintain readiness on paper—or even to bring it safely overseas for presence missions. Captains must prepare their ships and crews to compete in the most challenging and unpredictable of all human endeavors: warfare—Clausewitz’s violent clash of wills. The skills required and the potential challenges faced have increased in sophistication. Simultaneously, it has become more difficult for leaders to balance demanding jobs as managers with the imperative to be warfighters first and foremost. But these must be reconciled; millions of minuscule business considerations that deliver a fully ready warship are brought to bear in minutes or seconds of danger and uncertainty that require indomitable leadership and human performance. The warfighting is not possible without the management, and the management means nothing if the results are not employed aggressively and creatively.

These challenges are not novel. For centuries, successful commanders have managed maintenance and preparedness while also finding ways to maintain the physical and mental edge required to defeat motivated adversaries. However, as warship complexity increases, the never-ending tasks of maintaining and administering have crowded out time and energy for contemplating the problems of combat and preparing sailors to prevail. Said another way: Leaders must spend so much time building and maintaining their weapon systems that they get insufficient time to think about or practice using them. This reality is hardly unique to surface warships, but it is especially pronounced in them.

Unfortunately, the trend cannot be reversed. Proposed solutions often take the form of calls to reduce administrative distractions or other aspects of commanding officers’ workloads or to adjust force management processes to a supply-side model that better protects time for maintenance and training.⁴ There is, indeed, room for improvement in these areas, but even perfect solutions would not meaningfully reduce the daily number of readiness variables.

A Fundamental Purpose

So, how do commanding officers reconcile these competing demands to be simultaneously diligent managers and creative warfighters? How do they prepare a team that is constantly performing mundane, structured readiness tasks to fight and prevail in extreme and unpredictable conditions? What components of a warfighting culture should they instill?

Foremost, a captain must impart a fundamental sense of purpose: to prepare for missions at sea, the most important of which is to defeat other navies. One helpful consequence of the ships’ sophistication and management load is that nearly every task undertaken by each crew member relates directly to mission. There is little time for anything else. Maintenance, administration, and training—even cleaning!—all support the ship’s global mobility, the mission proficiency of its teams, and crew readiness. Identifying and relentlessly highlighting this connection can create focus, prioritization, and stimulus to think realistically and creatively about the challenges of combat.

Keeping this at the forefront of sailors’ minds daily is difficult, especially in extended periods of deep maintenance. But persistently setting the terms of routine expectations can help. For example:

• Trash pulpers and sewage systems are not maintained to simply provide “hotel services”; they are key to the ship’s global mobility and endurance.

• Exterior preservation and painting do more than look nice. They protect a ship’s physical integrity and ability to withstand damage. And, like sharp uniforms and customs, the sharp appearance of the ship fosters in the crew precision and confidence. To a potential adversary, it demonstrates focus and competence.

• Software upgrades and security rules about mobile phones protect the ability to maintain and administer the ship anywhere in the world and resist digital attacks.

• Training and programs to support equal opportunity and prevent sexual harassment or assault help foster trust, teamwork, and a sense of mutual safekeeping critical to a crew’s performance.

Captains and their subordinate leaders must learn to communicate in terms of such connections. If they find, on certain topics, they cannot, changing the task’s prioritization may be indicated.

Purpose, Thought, Practice

A warfighting culture proceeds from a fundamental emphasis on preparing to fight and win. Shipboard leaders must foster an atmosphere that values proficiency, managing schedules and resources to provide time for growing it. Once building-block training to execute basic mission tasks is complete, leaders must create opportunities to test and improve those skills.

Commanding officers also must find novel ways to measure individual and team performance. Rewards for excellence and corrections of shortfalls must match the life-or-death seriousness of a task’s fundamental purpose. In many cases, falling short of a time requirement or completion of a task must equal failure, and measures of effectiveness must constantly be improved. However, time will not allow proficiency tests across every mission, so leaders must be selective. They must prioritize the tasks most likely to be at issue—and, perhaps, those most likely to have a positive cultural effect.

Leadership teams also must make themselves and their crews visualize the harsh realities of combat to the maximum possible extent.⁵ They must contemplate extended periods of austerity—lack of communications and outside support, reduced or unavailable logistics, discomfort, fatigue, etc.—alongside the uncertainty and fear that accompany combat operations. They must consider the worst possibilities of battle damage and human casualties, think about how to cope with them, and incorporate them into training. Organizational implications must be identified, queried, and tested, too: loss of coordination and awareness, disruption and succession in the chain of command, and autonomous execution in the absence of instructions. Last, all involved must recognize and discuss the difficult imperative to inflict all of these on other humans. There is no way to prepare a person or a team fully for combat’s shock and stress, but anticipating and internalizing their likely components—and training to handle them—are the best available tools.

Damage control training presents a virtuous intersection of the imperatives to value proficiency and to visualize combat. The bulk of a warship’s crew will experience combat through damage control. Not coincidentally, this mission comes with perhaps the best doctrine—and certainly the most developed training methods. The results of institutional experience and training can be seen in the success of damage control in the USS Samuel B. Roberts (FFG-58), Stark (FFG-31), Cole (DDG-67), John S. McCain (DDG-56), and Fitzgerald (DDG-62) situations. The experience of fighting fires, flooding, structural damage, and medical casualties in noncombat scenarios does not differ much from those that result from enemy action. This provides a vivid and meaningful connection: The peacetime dangers faced by crews—even pierside or in deep maintenance—require many of the same precautions and responses as those of combat. Sailors are at war with the dangers of the sea every day.

Creative Destruction

A warfighting culture fosters the capacity to think creatively about combat. The value of adaptive thinking is highlighted in nearly every case study of combat or damage control in recent memory. It takes the form of disciplined learning and adaptation through repetition, as well as rapid improvisation to solve problems on the spot. A fundamental sense of purpose, valuing proficiency, and visualizing combat all provide the impetus to think creatively about solutions to the problems of combat. By thinking about, discussing, and—when possible—testing these ideas, commanding officers can prepare crews as much as possible for combat’s hardships and uncertainty.

The final aim—with confidence gained by good management and a culture focused on warfighting—is to stop thinking about managing risk and instead create opportunities to impose risk on the adversary. “Coup d’oeil” describes a general’s ability to ascertain almost instantly the relationship of terrain and position to combat advantage.⁶ At sea, the same skill can be applied to variables such as distance, weather, information fidelity, propagation paths, and weapon performance. In a warfighting culture, commanding officers can develop a team skilled at coup d’oeil. This will enable them to act with initiative and confidence to (in the late Captain Wayne Hughes’ formulation) “attack effectively first”—bringing to bear not only the warfighting mindset, but also all the endless management effort.

Support Them

Many commanding officers, subordinate leaders, and sailors are already contemplating aspects of warfighting culture; so, too, many senior Navy leaders. Given the ever-increasing complexity of ships and crews, how can senior leaders help warship commanders maintain an emphasis on warfighting while managing readiness?

In his January 2022 revision to the Navy’s “Charge of Command,” then–Chief of Naval Operations Michael Gilday directed operational chains of command to “embrace your duty to remove barriers.” Short of radically simplifying ship designs or overhauling the Global Force Management system, Navy, fleet, and surface community leaders should undertake several measures to assist commanding officers in this task:

Transition certain secondary mission areas—such as naval surface fire support or visit, board, search, and seizure—to become “as needed” requirements. Remove the requirement that every ship train for them in every cycle. Proffer instead specialized training packages to develop these capabilities rapidly when needed.

Require, fund, and protect dedicated at-sea “commanding officer’s combat training time” periodically after Basic Phase training. Allow captains to tailor integrated training to challenge their crews and inculcate the elements of warfighting culture. Given already acute training-phase time pressure, this will require firm direction from Echelon II fleet commanders and formal incorporation into predeployment training, possibly offset by reductions in secondary mission area training. Sporadic opportunities during interfleet transits and incidental schedule gaps are insufficient.

Continue to sponsor and develop better methods by which to quantitatively measure individual and team proficiency, such as those forthcoming under the “Surface Warfare Combat Training Continuum.” These will not only enhance captains’ abilities to identify and remedy shortfalls, but also give them better means to value proficiency and ingrain it in their team culture.

Deliberately move the training readiness standard away from “all green all the time,” and encourage commanding officers to report failure and low scores in repetitive exercise requirements. The pleasant, PowerPoint-deep fiction that ships are ready for all missions all the time will no longer suffice. Encourage transparency and enforce an understanding among immediate superiors that ships may at times dip in proficiency in some areas. Allow commanding officers to balance time and resources (with input from their operational chains of command). Developing the trust and confidence to do this will require clear direction and reinforcement from the most-senior fleet leaders.

Foster a system of critiques and problem reporting in tactical training—similar to “near miss” safety reporting—to facilitate forcewide learning and development of best warfighting practices. Rapidly incorporate the lessons garnered into Basic Phase and other training events and resource tailored team training to ships to remedy identified problems and gaps.

Incorporate damage control and ship survivability exercises into Surface Warfare Advanced Tactical Training, Composite Training Unit Exercises, and other multi-ship tactical events. This will challenge captains and crews to visualize more realistically the harsh realities of combat and to think creatively while contending with external stimuli.

Direct that existing “warrior toughness” and resiliency training incorporate specific discussion of the likely hardships of at-sea wartime operations, such as lack of communications, reduced logistics, uncertainty, and long periods at heightened readiness postures. Increase the specificity of that training to foster pride in the unique, surface navy form of warrior toughness.

In Peace and War Prepared

A renewed, realistic, and aggressive warfighting culture can be inculcated in today’s surface navy, but it must be done with a clear-eyed appreciation that the requirements of management cannot be appreciably reduced. Commanding officers are rightly seen as the nexus for establishing and maintaining other positive aspects of culture in their commands, and a focus on warfighting is no different. Rather than hoping in vain that “distractions” can be reduced or removed, captains and their superior chains of command must find ways to instill a sense of purpose that values proficiency and prepares for combat—while still keeping up with the never-ending management required to keep ships ready. In concert, these will deliver creative and aggressive crews ready to defeat enemy fleets where and when required.