This is what terrifies me. Organizations like Navies do not change from within. Change is usually forced from the outside. And it is usually very painful.
In the immortal words of one of my C.O.’s “When the sh*t hits the fan, I don’t need people to clean up up the sh*t, I need someone who knows how to turn off the fan.”
Once upon a time you suggested I was blind when I stated the Navy needs a very heavy and toothy lessons learned organization. Your words were “that is the last thing we need “ so I’ll say it again, you cannot/should not expect big Navy to learn lessons- they are not built this way. While the ships are still afloat let’s all push for an enterprise wide “Sub Safe” copy cat organization that makes Admirals learn and act accordingly. P.S What happened to the Navy’s last learning officer?
More fun facts about WW2 service rifles: The M1, adopted in 1936, had to have a major redesign of the gas system. Fortunately, John Garand (the 2nd greatest War Department hire after John Hall) was able to do it. The 1903 was cheapened to the 1903A3, which had better reliability and better combat sights than the original.
In reluctant fairness to the FOGOs, Congress and the Executive Branch are as bad about shiny and new and sexy. Tankers, tenders, drydocks, shipyards, ammunition plants, Patrol Craft, and ASW frigates are only interesting as jobs programs. And they've been set aside for "bigger and better and shinier (at least until the corrosion becomes obvious)".
Whether or not the nation will produce the change in leadership remains to be seen.
A very thought provoking post (even more than usual), and I don't know if I really have all that much of an alternative theory or explanation to offer for your call to action at the end. I would offer, though, at least for the shipbuilding programs and the parallels that you drew between the Springfield and Garand, is that the problem for Navy leadership is that they didn't (or at least, saw themselves as not having) the resources to keep building the current stuff while designing the next generation. That is to say, it would be as if the Army in the 1930's didn't have the money to keep Springfield production going and fund the development and fielding of the Garand. The big difference of course that the Garand was great and the LCS/DDX/CGX were all stinkers. This also brings up a challenge that I think is unique to the Navy (and to the lesser extent the USCG); no other artefact of the Military Industrial Complex is as expensive on a per-unit basis as a ship. The closest I can think of are the gold-plated comms and ISR birds we park in GEO orbit. That translates into a lot less maneuver room when it comes to transitioning from one generation of platforms to another IMO. Of course, it is one thing to get dealt a bad hand, and another to then play that bad hand badly. And finally, it is a source of shame and frustration to me that, despite having dedicated 18 years of my life to the Navy (so far), I'm at a loss to understand what I could have done to make an impact on these issues over the course of my career at any level other than advocating for the individual sailors I've led when they run into problems with the Navy's bureaucracy.
Your mention of DTS, we’re still using it, with a higher level of manning than when we did it on paper. As a member of the original DTS test group, when I entered our second meeting seeing a PP slide being projected saying,”99% of DTS users say they love DTS!” Hilarious then as now.
Hooked me!! I am a modest collector of WW II firearms and have 1903s(Both versions) and M-1s (Both rifle and carbine), Worthy of note that the 1903 was as good as (and because of better sights) more accurate than the main infantry rifle of any of the other countries, Allied or Axis. The Garand was a world beater even so, and its modernized version, the M-14, still is. Little plastic rifles are little plastic rifles :-).
More seriously, the various debacles you describe cause me pain. We didn't (and I gather still don't) take care of our sailors or our ships. Those are fundamental duties, and the failure to perform them is infuriating. Condign punishment is deserved by those who are participants thereof. Unfortunately, our uniformed "leadership " is dominated by those bureaucrats you so accurately disparage, and is apparently immune from the consequences of their dereliction.
The only way this gets fixed is with someone above the top brass in the Navy, say a President whom is actively interested and understands the DoD and in particular the Navy and says he is going to fix it and be fixated upon it daily, with heads rolling in shame for those that do not get moving. That Prez will need to do the equivalent of the Army's nightcourt, start culling needless positions, converting true civilian jobs disguised as sailors into civilian jobs by cutting the federal workforce but moving the cut personnel over to the Navy jobs (or those sailors that don't want to be real sailors can resign and be govt. workers) and put all those extra bodies into manning maintenance berths at the major bases, if needed slow down new ships while having the big shipyards do maintenance, get the fleet back to a fighting stance, and then start working on what they need to win a war against a numerically superior enemy hell bent on denying them access. Easy right? May need to drop some woke training and building ships with no purpose while at it.
Great post. I found the section on pay the most interesting at it ties to my experience in the Army, the Army brass made great comments about redoing the pay systems back in early 2009 and spent ungodly amounts of money on it since they trusted the vendor's promise. It became on ongoing boondoggle for over a decade, and I am not sure there was any success. (I was an Army (ARNG) Finance Sr NCO with extensive civilian experience in technology systems.) One thing i have learned over the years is, "how do you know the vendor lied to you? You bought the product!" It is amazing level of wishful thinking that is done by Sr leadership in any organization. However, I used to think the military was too pragmatic for that. Silly me.
This was a really well written piece. We really have a problem where much of the current baseline of the Navy is broken and we know fixing it the right way will be hard, so we fall for the "miricle cure" approach. While this can work in a start-up (where the examples come from), this rarely works in an established enterprise.
The Intergrated Pay and Personnel systems that Navy (along with Army and Air Force) continue to try to implement is the perfect example. All of the legacy systems were cobbled together over many years, worked only with significant manual work and couldn;r be supported in a modern network environment. Clearly they needed to be replaced. Each service used the DOD software acquisistion guidance and set off in search of what they belived it requied - adapting off the shelf software for a commercial application. Except, military pay and personnel isn't a commercial application. Each service got bogged down into trying to make a commercial product (which successfully uses the idea of making your processes conform to the product) adapt to the constraints which Congress and others have imposed on us. This involved customizing the software beyond the creators imagination at great time and expense. The vendor told us that what we were doing wasn't wise, but we pushed ahead. They were happy to take our money!
Meanwhile the Marine Corps kept upgrading their legacy system which was purpose built for the military pay and personnel process. OSD didn't like it, but amazingly, the Marine Corps remains the only integrated pay and personnel system in DOD.
Navy doesn't need more processes. We don't need more diversity / equity programs. We certainly don't need more pronouns....Nope. We are *not* a microcosm of America. We are an Elite fighting force that is being diluted by the trendy B school processes, incessant and unnecessary calls for diversity/equity and social consciousness by pimple faced 'Poll watching politico' neophytes who surround our President. Regretfully, that seems to include Civilian leaders who all think they'll be SECDEF / SECNAV for another 4 years.
What's missing is Leadership Backbone to say BS to all this touchy feely nonsense that dilutes our ability to think, fight, and win. If, hypothetically, CNO were urged to be more supportive of equity (not equality)and to accept minimal funding for shipbuilding and other urgent war fighting needs, he should pushback - hard. If nothing changed, he should immediately resign and go public with the reason why..., or accept well deserved criticism of being part of the problem and not part of the urgently needed solution.
Anything software-related, especially support software for pay, travel, etc., is guaranteed to have problems. Mostly caused by adopting the software on a fixed schedule...one usually related to the person ramming the shoddy-ware down people's gullets retiring to a job with the vendor.
I think much of the problem is a job-hopping management system. Spend two or three years in a position, then move on. Make a big splash, move on and leave your successor to clean up the mess. Perhaps it's time to change the time-in-position standards.
Another issue is the Iron Law of Bureaucracy. People get promoted for growing the bureaucracy, not for accomplishing the mission. Scars do NOT earn Stars (ask me how I know).
All this "mindset" is a Leadership, leadership, leadership.
“If you want to know how a man runs his business, look at how he runs his personal life - and likewise.” A manger or director can afford to separate his off duty conduct from his on duty conduct a leader cannot. If your leadership is having affairs, zipper control failures and mishandling classified materials how are things with his crew/unit?
How you do the small things is how you do the big things or attention to details. There should be no casual Fridays aboard ship or in the military in general.
“Be careful doing business with anyone that has an ichthys on their business card.” Fat Leonard anyone?-
"Associate yourself with Men of good Quality if you Esteem your own Reputation; for 'tis better to be alone than in bad Company" attributed to George Washington
Marine Corps Leadership Trait#7 Integrity
Manning? Failure of Leadership. Nobody want to follow mangers and directors.
Training? Failure of leadership , taking care of the troops/sailors is training making sure they can accomplish the mission
Equipping? Failure of leadership, making sure troops/sailors have the tools to do the job
Accountability for all this? Where is it? Marine Corps Leadership Principle #10 Seek Responsibility and Take Responsibility for Your Actions
This is what terrifies me. Organizations like Navies do not change from within. Change is usually forced from the outside. And it is usually very painful.
In the immortal words of one of my C.O.’s “When the sh*t hits the fan, I don’t need people to clean up up the sh*t, I need someone who knows how to turn off the fan.”
Once upon a time you suggested I was blind when I stated the Navy needs a very heavy and toothy lessons learned organization. Your words were “that is the last thing we need “ so I’ll say it again, you cannot/should not expect big Navy to learn lessons- they are not built this way. While the ships are still afloat let’s all push for an enterprise wide “Sub Safe” copy cat organization that makes Admirals learn and act accordingly. P.S What happened to the Navy’s last learning officer?
More fun facts about WW2 service rifles: The M1, adopted in 1936, had to have a major redesign of the gas system. Fortunately, John Garand (the 2nd greatest War Department hire after John Hall) was able to do it. The 1903 was cheapened to the 1903A3, which had better reliability and better combat sights than the original.
In reluctant fairness to the FOGOs, Congress and the Executive Branch are as bad about shiny and new and sexy. Tankers, tenders, drydocks, shipyards, ammunition plants, Patrol Craft, and ASW frigates are only interesting as jobs programs. And they've been set aside for "bigger and better and shinier (at least until the corrosion becomes obvious)".
Whether or not the nation will produce the change in leadership remains to be seen.
A very thought provoking post (even more than usual), and I don't know if I really have all that much of an alternative theory or explanation to offer for your call to action at the end. I would offer, though, at least for the shipbuilding programs and the parallels that you drew between the Springfield and Garand, is that the problem for Navy leadership is that they didn't (or at least, saw themselves as not having) the resources to keep building the current stuff while designing the next generation. That is to say, it would be as if the Army in the 1930's didn't have the money to keep Springfield production going and fund the development and fielding of the Garand. The big difference of course that the Garand was great and the LCS/DDX/CGX were all stinkers. This also brings up a challenge that I think is unique to the Navy (and to the lesser extent the USCG); no other artefact of the Military Industrial Complex is as expensive on a per-unit basis as a ship. The closest I can think of are the gold-plated comms and ISR birds we park in GEO orbit. That translates into a lot less maneuver room when it comes to transitioning from one generation of platforms to another IMO. Of course, it is one thing to get dealt a bad hand, and another to then play that bad hand badly. And finally, it is a source of shame and frustration to me that, despite having dedicated 18 years of my life to the Navy (so far), I'm at a loss to understand what I could have done to make an impact on these issues over the course of my career at any level other than advocating for the individual sailors I've led when they run into problems with the Navy's bureaucracy.
Your mention of DTS, we’re still using it, with a higher level of manning than when we did it on paper. As a member of the original DTS test group, when I entered our second meeting seeing a PP slide being projected saying,”99% of DTS users say they love DTS!” Hilarious then as now.
Hooked me!! I am a modest collector of WW II firearms and have 1903s(Both versions) and M-1s (Both rifle and carbine), Worthy of note that the 1903 was as good as (and because of better sights) more accurate than the main infantry rifle of any of the other countries, Allied or Axis. The Garand was a world beater even so, and its modernized version, the M-14, still is. Little plastic rifles are little plastic rifles :-).
More seriously, the various debacles you describe cause me pain. We didn't (and I gather still don't) take care of our sailors or our ships. Those are fundamental duties, and the failure to perform them is infuriating. Condign punishment is deserved by those who are participants thereof. Unfortunately, our uniformed "leadership " is dominated by those bureaucrats you so accurately disparage, and is apparently immune from the consequences of their dereliction.
The only way this gets fixed is with someone above the top brass in the Navy, say a President whom is actively interested and understands the DoD and in particular the Navy and says he is going to fix it and be fixated upon it daily, with heads rolling in shame for those that do not get moving. That Prez will need to do the equivalent of the Army's nightcourt, start culling needless positions, converting true civilian jobs disguised as sailors into civilian jobs by cutting the federal workforce but moving the cut personnel over to the Navy jobs (or those sailors that don't want to be real sailors can resign and be govt. workers) and put all those extra bodies into manning maintenance berths at the major bases, if needed slow down new ships while having the big shipyards do maintenance, get the fleet back to a fighting stance, and then start working on what they need to win a war against a numerically superior enemy hell bent on denying them access. Easy right? May need to drop some woke training and building ships with no purpose while at it.
Great post. I found the section on pay the most interesting at it ties to my experience in the Army, the Army brass made great comments about redoing the pay systems back in early 2009 and spent ungodly amounts of money on it since they trusted the vendor's promise. It became on ongoing boondoggle for over a decade, and I am not sure there was any success. (I was an Army (ARNG) Finance Sr NCO with extensive civilian experience in technology systems.) One thing i have learned over the years is, "how do you know the vendor lied to you? You bought the product!" It is amazing level of wishful thinking that is done by Sr leadership in any organization. However, I used to think the military was too pragmatic for that. Silly me.
USAF: It’s too expensive to store the F-22 production tooling, so Lockheed cut it up for scrap.
This was a really well written piece. We really have a problem where much of the current baseline of the Navy is broken and we know fixing it the right way will be hard, so we fall for the "miricle cure" approach. While this can work in a start-up (where the examples come from), this rarely works in an established enterprise.
The Intergrated Pay and Personnel systems that Navy (along with Army and Air Force) continue to try to implement is the perfect example. All of the legacy systems were cobbled together over many years, worked only with significant manual work and couldn;r be supported in a modern network environment. Clearly they needed to be replaced. Each service used the DOD software acquisistion guidance and set off in search of what they belived it requied - adapting off the shelf software for a commercial application. Except, military pay and personnel isn't a commercial application. Each service got bogged down into trying to make a commercial product (which successfully uses the idea of making your processes conform to the product) adapt to the constraints which Congress and others have imposed on us. This involved customizing the software beyond the creators imagination at great time and expense. The vendor told us that what we were doing wasn't wise, but we pushed ahead. They were happy to take our money!
Meanwhile the Marine Corps kept upgrading their legacy system which was purpose built for the military pay and personnel process. OSD didn't like it, but amazingly, the Marine Corps remains the only integrated pay and personnel system in DOD.
This page says it all: https://my.navy.mil/quick-links.html
Navy doesn't need more processes. We don't need more diversity / equity programs. We certainly don't need more pronouns....Nope. We are *not* a microcosm of America. We are an Elite fighting force that is being diluted by the trendy B school processes, incessant and unnecessary calls for diversity/equity and social consciousness by pimple faced 'Poll watching politico' neophytes who surround our President. Regretfully, that seems to include Civilian leaders who all think they'll be SECDEF / SECNAV for another 4 years.
What's missing is Leadership Backbone to say BS to all this touchy feely nonsense that dilutes our ability to think, fight, and win. If, hypothetically, CNO were urged to be more supportive of equity (not equality)and to accept minimal funding for shipbuilding and other urgent war fighting needs, he should pushback - hard. If nothing changed, he should immediately resign and go public with the reason why..., or accept well deserved criticism of being part of the problem and not part of the urgently needed solution.
Anything software-related, especially support software for pay, travel, etc., is guaranteed to have problems. Mostly caused by adopting the software on a fixed schedule...one usually related to the person ramming the shoddy-ware down people's gullets retiring to a job with the vendor.
I think much of the problem is a job-hopping management system. Spend two or three years in a position, then move on. Make a big splash, move on and leave your successor to clean up the mess. Perhaps it's time to change the time-in-position standards.
Another issue is the Iron Law of Bureaucracy. People get promoted for growing the bureaucracy, not for accomplishing the mission. Scars do NOT earn Stars (ask me how I know).
All this "mindset" is a Leadership, leadership, leadership.
“If you want to know how a man runs his business, look at how he runs his personal life - and likewise.” A manger or director can afford to separate his off duty conduct from his on duty conduct a leader cannot. If your leadership is having affairs, zipper control failures and mishandling classified materials how are things with his crew/unit?
How you do the small things is how you do the big things or attention to details. There should be no casual Fridays aboard ship or in the military in general.
“Be careful doing business with anyone that has an ichthys on their business card.” Fat Leonard anyone?-
"Associate yourself with Men of good Quality if you Esteem your own Reputation; for 'tis better to be alone than in bad Company" attributed to George Washington
Marine Corps Leadership Trait#7 Integrity
Manning? Failure of Leadership. Nobody want to follow mangers and directors.
Training? Failure of leadership , taking care of the troops/sailors is training making sure they can accomplish the mission
Equipping? Failure of leadership, making sure troops/sailors have the tools to do the job
Accountability for all this? Where is it? Marine Corps Leadership Principle #10 Seek Responsibility and Take Responsibility for Your Actions