{"id":57120,"date":"2020-07-19T14:26:27","date_gmt":"2020-07-19T19:26:27","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/milesfortis.com\/?p=57120"},"modified":"2020-07-19T14:26:27","modified_gmt":"2020-07-19T19:26:27","slug":"57120","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/milesfortis.com\/?p=57120","title":{"rendered":""},"content":{"rendered":"

“On the upside, everyone\u2019s diversity and trans-awareness training is up to date.”<\/em><\/p>\n

\n

The Navy\u2019s Cultural Ship Is Listing<\/a>
\nThe service is trying to do too much with too little public support, as the chain of command frays.<\/em><\/p>\n

In the U.S. Navy, \u201cshock trials\u201d involve taking a warship to sea and conducting drills to see how well she might absorb the stress of combat. The Navy has lately experienced institutional shock trials: bribery scandals, collisions and sundry other public-relations nightmares. This week in San Diego the USS Bonhomme Richard, a $750 million amphibious assault ship, caught fire and burned for days. Earlier this year, Capt. Brett Crozier was relieved of command of the USS Theodore Roosevelt after writing a letter saying he needed to move his sailors off the aircraft carrier to arrest an outbreak of the novel coronavirus.<\/p>\n

High-profile mishaps and unwanted publicity point to an overarching problem: For several years the Navy has been forced to do too much with too little, a debate that deserves wider attention. The Navy also seems to be suffering from a cultural dysfunction in the chain of command. To repair it, the Navy will need to reinvent its process for refining leaders and perhaps even the service\u2019s broader mission. What\u2019s at stake is the quality of American military talent that fights the next war\u2014an eventuality that seems less far-fetched amid the tense mood of a global pandemic.
\nThe 2017 crashes in the Western Pacific involving the USS John S. McCain and USS Fitzgerald still loom large in the Navy. An investigation revealed that Pacific fleet ships were going to sea with too little training and that crews weren\u2019t skilled in the basics of sea navigation. Also implicated was the Navy\u2019s \u201ccan do\u201d culture\u2014the propensity of naval officers to try to get the job done no matter the cost.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

\u201cInterviews revealed that, particularly among ships based in Japan, crews perceived their Commanding Officer was unable to say \u2018no\u2019 regardless of unit-level consequence,\u201d according to a 177-page \u201ccomprehensive review\u201d of the 2017 incidents. Vice Adm. Joseph Aucoin, who commanded the Seventh Fleet during the collisions, wrote in a naval publication that he\u2019d \u201cmade clear\u201d to his superiors \u201cthe impact of increased operational demand on training and maintenance well prior\u201d to the accidents. Despite \u201cexplicitly stated concerns,\u201d he wrote, \u201cthe direction we received was to execute the mission.\u201d He was fired shortly after the accidents.
\nIn 2015, a submarine ran aground in Florida, resulting in $1 million in damage. The Navy fired Capt. David Adams, the officer in command when the accident occurred. Journalist Hope Hodge Seck of Military.com made a public-records request for the 475-page investigation, the details of which she published in March. Capt. Adams had warned his superiors that his crew was too inexperienced to handle a precarious predawn return to port. He was nevertheless told to execute the mission.<\/p>\n

The Navy\u2019s tradition of firing commanding officers who fail is a venerable one, and the Navy has tried to absorb the lessons of these incidents. But as Ms. Seck notes, the sub mishap \u201ccame against the backdrop of a Navy grappling with a culture in which overworked and unready crews were regularly put underway in service of operational needs.\u201d The careers of commanders like Capt. Adams can look like the casualties.
\nThe Roosevelt is a confounding example. The Navy\u2019s investigation makes a strong case for removing Capt. Crozier. He failed to rein in the ship\u2019s senior medical officer, who, according to the Navy\u2019s investigation, was predicting up to 50 virus deaths on the ship and threatening to take the medical department\u2019s grim case to the press. (One sailor assigned to the Roosevelt died from complications of Covid-19.)<\/p>\n

Yet the Navy\u2019s report also details how the Roosevelt\u2019s leadership became frustrated with its superiors at Seventh Fleet headquarters over the chaotic process of moving sailors off the ship. The fleet proposed moving thousands of sailors from Guam to Okinawa, Japan, nine hours away by plane. Capt. Crozier and his colleagues thought this impractical and had been asking to move the entire crew into hotel rooms on Guam, where the situation on the ground was deteriorating. Some sailors were temporarily quartered in open-bay gyms on Guam, and the number of cases among the crew was rising.<\/p>\n

The ship\u2019s top officers, the Navy\u2019s June report says, \u201cfelt they had been distracted by numerous\u201d requests for information \u201cfrom higher headquarters,\u201d and \u201cthat in the end, they were going to be made to stay in the makeshift berthing on Guam, long-term, which they viewed as worse than the ship.\u201d The Navy insists Capt. Crozier\u2019s eventual letter was unnecessary, but in a conflict at sea this culture of distrust could have been deadly. Whatever else was going on here, there was dysfunction in the chain of command.<\/p>\n

In an organization as large as the Navy, improving the culture\u2014an amorphous concept\u2014is difficult. Adding to the challenge are the distinct subcultures found in Navy communities, from aviation to the submarine service. The \u201cFat Leonard\u201d bribery scandal implicated many senior officers. The ship accidents took down more in the Pacific. Talent developed over decades went out the door in a matter of a few years.
\n\u201cWhen you start adding all these things up,\u201d says Rep. Mike Gallagher of Wisconsin, a Republican on the House Armed Services Committee, \u201cwhat it all equals is a generation of our best naval officers has been wiped out.\u201d Had China\u2019s military \u201ca decade ago decided it wanted to wipe out some of our most talented officers, it probably couldn\u2019t have done a better job than we\u2019ve done ourselves.\u201d<\/p>\n

The priority should be developing and retaining a new generation of naval leaders. Guy Snodgrass, a now retired Navy pilot, wrote an internal memo in 2014 while on active duty, later published in the Naval War College Review, stating that the Navy\u2019s system of managing talent \u201ctends to focus heavily on the quantitative needs of the service at the expense of retaining the right officers.\u201d Mr. Snodgrass found that commanding officers who still had more potentially productive years ahead of them in the Navy were packing it in, and too many officers were leaving the ranks after 10 years, even with no pension. One complaint: Service members \u201cperceive a withdrawal of decision-making power from operational commanders.\u201d<\/p>\n

Promotion is predicated on what service members call \u201chitting the wickets\u201d\u2014slaloming down a preset career path, getting the right experience in the right jobs at the right time. It\u2019s an anachronistic process that doesn\u2019t necessarily develop skills and sound judgment. Jobs tend to last 24 or 36 months, which erodes expertise and accountability on board ships that need those qualities in abundance to operate effectively. Service members ride out the consequences of decisions made by others who have left the building or even the Navy.<\/p>\n

Operationally, the Navy needs a culture shift. Congress lacks the political will to fund the ever-expanding commitments with which civilian leadership saddles the Navy. The downward pressure on the military budget will be more severe as Congress spends trillions of dollars responding to the coronavirus.<\/p>\n

Yet the Navy\u2019s operational tempo is rising. Take the unsustainable pace of deployed aircraft carriers and their strike groups. The USS Abraham Lincoln strike group in January finished a 295-day deployment, the longest of any carrier since the end of the Cold War. (\u201cWhile her extension was the best decision we could offer to support the demand for forces,\u201d Navy leaders told Congress in March prepared testimony, \u201cit does not come without consequences,\u201d such as longer and more expensive maintenance.) The carrier USS Harry S. Truman recently completed two deployments in close succession. Another carrier, the USS Dwight D. Eisenhower, last month set a record of 161 consecutive days at sea without a normal stop in port for a pause due to the coronavirus.<\/p>\n

The Navy in June had three carrier strike groups operating in the Pacific, an impressive show of force that may cost something later in overworked crews. The Navy and its political masters will have to decide whether the priority is \u201cpresence\u201d\u2014being on patrol everywhere\u2014or \u201cwar fighting,\u201d a distinction Mackenzie Eaglen of the American Enterprise Institute makes to me.<\/p>\n

One promising development is candor from Navy Secretary Kenneth Braithwaite, a retired rear admiral and former ambassador to Norway, who told senators at his confirmation hearing earlier this year that the department was in \u201crough waters\u201d due to \u201ca breakdown in the trust of those leading the service.\u201d He invoked the late management guru Peter Drucker, whose insights about corporate management perhaps apply in war: \u201cCulture eats strategy for breakfast.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

“On the upside, everyone\u2019s diversity and trans-awareness training is up to date.” The Navy\u2019s Cultural Ship Is Listing The service is trying to do too much with too little public support, as the chain of command frays. In the U.S. Navy, \u201cshock trials\u201d involve taking a warship to sea and conducting drills to see how … Continue reading “”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[4],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-57120","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-military"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/milesfortis.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/57120","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/milesfortis.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/milesfortis.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/milesfortis.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/milesfortis.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=57120"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/milesfortis.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/57120\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":57121,"href":"https:\/\/milesfortis.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/57120\/revisions\/57121"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/milesfortis.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=57120"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/milesfortis.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=57120"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/milesfortis.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=57120"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}