"Tim LaFleur had the courage
to lead us on this new journey. He got to the heart of why we did things.
Challenged decades old assumptions. Helped give our institution a corporate
perspective, applying business principles to logistics and training and manning.
He taught us the potential of fleet alignment.
“He
rewrote our Navy’s flag officer assessments. He drafted the fleet requirements
for the Littoral Combatant Ship. He engineered the concepts behind Sea Swap. He
orchestrated our Optimal Manning concepts. He agreed that it was time to
capture the full potential of our senior enlisted force and is now putting
chief petty officers into division officer billets on the United States Ship
Decatur."
-ADM Vern Clark
CAPT Eyer couldn't wrap up these issues any better. I came into the Surface Warfare Community in 2001. Here are three most-significant things I noticed in the more than 16 years I've spent in Surface Warfare:
-Decline in training. CAPT Eyer's paragraph about a lack of specialized SWO training until cruise missiles is referencing the Surface Warfare Officers School Command in Newport, RI. The school was established as the Destroyer School in 1961. The mid-grade training referenced is what we know today as the Department Head course. When I first started my career, the Division Officer Course and specialty follow-on courses took at least six months. Ensigns, regardless of commissioning source, arrived aboard their ships with a roughly level baseline of knowledge. In 2003, we experienced the effects of the "Revolution in Training," with the Division Officer Course being cancelled and replaced with a set of CD-ROM disks that were sent to each ship. It became the responsibility of the ship's Training Officer to track training progress and to ensure the unqualified officers developed the requisite level of knowledge and proficiency so that their Commanding Officers could qualify them as Surface Warfare Officers.
For SWOS to maintain a stake in the development of Division Officers, a three-week course was implemented: Advanced Shiphandling and Tactics (ASAT). Junior Officers who had attained their Officer of the Deck would attend ASAT in a TAD status, return to their ships, and qualify as a SWO.
In 2008, realizing that the CD-ROM/ASAT construct left gaping holes in training, a decision was made to replace ASAT with Basic and Advanced Division Officer Courses (BDOC and ADOC), located in the Norfolk (actually at Dam Neck in Virginia Beach) and San Diego. In this construct, which remains the status quo, a newly-reported Junior Officer is sent to Norfolk or San Diego in a TAD status for eight weeks. Upon graduating (it's not a guarantee as some JOs are forced to repeat the course), the JO returns to the ship and upon qualifying and concluding their first Division Officer tour, the JO spends three weeks in Newport attending ADOC.
Likewise, the Enlisted courses of instruction were supplemented with the "Integrated Learning Environment" at the expense of quality classroom instruction.
-Decline in maintenance. Until ADM Clark's reign, all Navy Fleet Concentration Areas had Shore Intermediate Maintenance Activities (SIMA). SIMA was a place where Sailors rotating to shore duty would go to continue working in their respective Ratings. They would not forget the intricacies of their complex equipment and the ships benefited because Sailors, unlike civilian technicians, are not constrained by overtime and salary rules. This meant that ship repairs often happened at all hours of the night. The realignment of personnel that ADM Clark and VADM LaFleur executed killed the SIMAs, which were replaced by Regional Maintenance Centers that were, like the ships, "optimally" manned. Moreover, this had the tragic effect of eliminating the pool of uniformed manpower. Where SIMAs had hundreds of Sailors across a variety of Ratings and specialties, the RMCs were largely manned with retired Sailors who were now working as civilians. This meant that repairs could only be accomplished during the normal work day unless higher authority granted overtime. This also meant that most major shipboard systems only had one of two technicians. When I was the Combat Systems Officer in a Mayport-based Frigate, I often struggled to get any technical assistance from the RMC. There were, for example, two technicians who could work on the 76-mm gun and only ONE technician who could work on the radars. Maintenance essentially became a "take a number and wait" game unless your ship was about to deploy (when it became a game of leapfrog).
-Optimal manning. This means undermanning and it left wide gaps in talent, experience, and redundancy. Optimal manning has been felt in all classes of ships and was a foundational precept for the Littoral Combat Ship program. Optimal manning's effects were further compounded by the onslaught of Individual Augmentation, when Sailors were sent to Iraq or Afghanistan (and other places) to augment the Army.
As if manpower reduction initiatives like optimal manning weren't compounded enough by the huge increase in IAs, the Navy in 2012 decided to separate nearly 3,000 First Class Petty Officers (who should have been allowed to complete 20 years and get a retirement). The official reason for that board was to trim numbers from overmanned Ratings so that junior Enlistees could have a chance to advance. The problem is that the ERB happened in a vacuum with no consideration toward shipboard "Fit/Fill" requirements. As the Training Officer in an LHD at the time, I lost no fewer than THREE 1 of 1 Critical NEC holders. Which leads me to another effect: "Rip to Fill," where Sailors serving in non-deployed ships are assigned TAD orders to a deploying ship to fill the critical school and NEC gaps that were created by optimal manning and exacerbated by IA requirements and the ERB. Also, during that timeframe, the Navy's Physical Readiness Standards were changed in an attempt to force even more Sailors to attrite.
Now that it is 2018, we are short by roughly 6,000 Sailors across all seagoing commands, even though we are trying to increase our ship numbers from 283 to 355. The spate of mishaps we suffered in 2017 highlight training and cultural deficiencies across our surface ships. As we closed out Calendar Year 2017, the Navy did two major actions to patch the wounds left by the manpower reduction/force shaping initiatives that men like Clark and LaFleur visited upon us: a sweeping moratorium on early out programs, and a revision to the Physical Readiness standard to keep Sailors from being separated on account of failure to meet physical readiness standards.
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