It sounds to me that the admiral’s solution to a problem he really did not define, was to create yet another intermediate HQ to solve the problem. I am reminded of General Abrams, then Chief of Staff, Army, who successfully set about eliminating useless intermediate HQ. He was a tanker and used the analogy to a tank suspension system: there are two types of wheels on a tank — drive wheels which provide impulse to the system; and support rollers, which provide tension but no drive. Intermediate HQ’s fall into the second category.
OK...Command Accountability. With all due respect to Adm. Gray, it is HIS command. It is the SecNav's "command". There is no excuse for the deficiencies. When do they say "this is MY responsibility" and NOT look to form another HQ to do what should already be done? The key to killing anything, and avoiding responsibility, is appointing a committee and looking for consensus. Just as the order is to outfit your ship, sail East, and seek out and destroy the enemy, the order is to get your house in order and quite f-ing around. Build ships. Maintain ships. Build out support infrastructure for repairs, rearming, and refitting the ships you build. Do everything you can to prepare for the fight - from the crews and Captains being ready to fight each individual ship right up to the SecNav providing the resources for the Fleet to fight and win.
All you have to do is say, "Send me!" It is my task to do, my responsibility to do it for the men who rely on me for their lives and livelihood.
Well written Admiral. Cogent and pithy. I think we should also consider abolishing CNIC. This created a new set of flag officer billets that at first pass, appeared to take the responsibility away from the installation CO’s with the predicate that CNIC would fund and repair or maintain our bases. All it truly accomplished was controlling the monies while doing little to actually maintain. I saw it first hand in the late 2000’s when I was still “on the field/in the game”. We couldn’t use our own Sailor’s to maintain the barracks or the heads and beds because CNIC controlled the basics such as stripper and wax materials. Even simple green. They also claimed the contractor’s own it and any Sailor power would be a breech. Yea. I was actually told that. My Master Chief and I didn’t give a rats ass and we found a way but out of our own pockets. Our institutional memory of how we used to have an actual 1st Lieutenant division and its purpose are long forgotten.
Great post and you’re correct. I hope some of your protégés listen.
A very smart Senior Chief once reported to me. He said any job can be defined by three vectors - responsibility, authority, accountability, and power. If a job is well defined, all of those vectors are equal and form a square. If things are somewhat skewed, the job looks like a rectangle or trapezoid. If things are totally and unequivocally screwed up, the job vectors have an unfulfilled gap. This last scenario is where the Navy seems to be today in so many areas of its overall mission.
I agree, CNIC is completely inept. On paper it made sense, but in execution, it has failed miserably. Every single base within Naval District Washington is plagued with dilapidated and substandard building and facilities. NSA Annapolis, responsible for the Naval Academy, has been a parade of SWO CO's spending the majority of their time campaigning for high paying civilian positions or removed for publicly berating sailors and civilians. Command and Control? The bulk of the work force are tasked by multiple masters. Be it CNIC, NDW civilian leadership or the base CO. Go back and look at the CNIC PowerPoint from 2002/03. No longer did you work for a pyramid with a commanding officer or civilian leader at the top. The CNIC leadership model was represented as circle with the sailors and civilians in the middle working for many masters. No wonder there were numerous C2 failures. Naval District Washington is a case study in bureaucracy of civilian leaders who gained positions and grades through the failure of NSPS.
Excellent article Admiral/Phib! If I recall correctly from the early 00s and tours at CNSL and N96, the major congressional pushback to the full CFFC C2 authority was the congressional contingent from Hawaii that feared loss of CPF and even PNSY. Without naming names, perhaps that same contingent has nowhere near the same respect/authority today and Navy/DoD could revisit the CFFC C2 matter during the current administration.
Good points, but part of the problem we seem to have is the lack of effective feedback for responsibility. When those responsible will not take the needed feedback for the system work as it is intended, we get exactly what we're seeing today. The barracks and facilities issues are part and parcel of that. My Reserve Center, where I have seen requests for routine facilities repairs to plumbing have to get sent back to Region, and it taking several months to get fixed. The officer who runs a building off a Navy base as well as the CO of a base should have the authority to get basic things fixed the right way.
Great post by CDR Sal (as usual). Broken record time for me: Here's a thought, regarding the "effectiveness vs efficient" discussion in the article. Military forces need interoperability over interdependence because interoperability can enhance effectiveness...1 plus 1 equals 3. Interdependence (I can't do my job without you...say air refueling tankers and strikers) is a point of failure where 1 plus 1 equals 1 or zero. Managed military violence results from redundancies and conscious hardening and "robusting" (not sure that's a word) of points of failure and respecting loss rates, etc. Such approaches are NOT efficient...but they give you a shot at effectiveness with good leadership. HOWEVER, our incentive structure has for many years rewarded those who took the business model approach of efficiency over effectiveness. The officer and government civilian ranks are now top to bottom largely populated by efficiency advocates because that approach was rewarded. SECDEF has a "steep hill" to climb to reform the system. Fingers crossed.
Copy all. Nor am I familiar with the Admiral. Will state that my experiences working with FFC were never positive, as they seemed to simply be another layer of mediocre "management". When they vanished, nothing seemed to change, which perhaps speaks loudly...or not. Unfunded mandates, responsibility without authority, and the like are topics all of us ancient airman, mariners and grunts likely remember with memories that are "not quite right"...
FFC is simply part of the Big Navy bloat. Harvey himself was a mediocrity. We talked about Harvey at Lex's place while Harvey was FFC. The overall opinion of Harvey was not high. That was the period when Harvey marked himself as unworthy of a commission.
Never having been a sailor, reading all the acronyms provides me with a bit of a headache, as they are not ingrained into my military DNA. I don’t have all that much room to talk as the army had acronyms all their own. That being said, I am curious as to whatever happened to the standard of the commander is responsible for everything his troops do or failed to do. I’m also concerned as to whatever happened to the other standard that the morale and the welfare of the men comes before that of their officers. If, as the saying goes, officers eat last, then, until the quarters of the enlisted sailors are made right, the officers could find themselves in tents. I suspect each service has its own variations on these problems, the most recent army one that I saw was running out of food to feed the troops, forcing them to go off post and eat fast food. I prefer not to believe it’s a whole different world out there, but it might just be, and more is the pity.
I was always taught that a commander is responsible for the welfare of his men. Period. But then I was in the Army, so the Navy may be different. I understand that, sometimes, junior officers may fall short of perfection, being relatively inexperienced. Field grade and flag officers, on the other hand, have no excuse. This article is just more bureaucrat BS, trying to shift the blame from the decision makers to "the system".
So where does the buck stop? “WHO” drawing a flag officer/CMDC paycheck is responsible?
Until that occurs, and those 2 active duty people are demoted, fined, and discharged, the problem keeps going. I won’t buy that a process overrules the health and safety of sailors - full stop.
That's the neat part: the organization is structured so that no one can be held accountable. Everybody has an out, and systemic failures like this are the predicate to fund studies to improve organizational performance.
With almost 40 years around the Navy, including three tours wearing a loop, I can say the bloat in staffs and organizations I've seen has been amazing.
Dirty secret -
We created CAGs coequal with Carrier COs simply to increase the number of Flag eligible O-6s. We created the entire CNIC kingdom so that folks not likely to be CAGs and Carrier COs could advance to and beyond RDML.
And then we added SESs to compound the bloat with 'flag equivalent' civilians who wanted career advancements as well.
None of that was done for efficiency.
None of that contributed to combat capability.
The consequences were inevitable.
The nation is broke and we are following the path the Soviet Union took. Enormous cuts in assets and infrastructure are now critical for national survival.
"We created CAGs coequal with Carrier COs simply to increase the number of Flag eligible O-6s."
Turns out the second and third order effects have had toxic long term effects
And now, once what was 'Naval Aviation', is now just a bunch of generic green suited "Hot Stick/Cool Callsign" jocks who happen to be on a rusty boat...
For what it’s worth, one of the senior folks in the Bonhomme Richard debacle passed through my chain of command last year. All groups were immediately tasked with updating risk registers and incident response and reporting procedures. At least someone learned something from it.
Look, I am a long way downstream from naval service, but the lessons of the Bonhomme Richard were learned long ago. We have know since before WWI that the most vulnerable time for a warship is when it is in an industrial availability. Is there anything more boring than a fire watch? Probably not, but it is vitally important. We have lost ships in shipyards before, and know that it takes to keep them safe. The ship's crew fell down on the job.
No active duty here - just an egghead civilian. I guess I intended the “someone learned something” line to be taken somewhat tongue-in-cheek because, one of the few things I do know is ships and fire mix poorly.
In my immediate circle, we were wondering why those particular issues were suddenly front and center then someone explained the new boss’s background and…yeah, it suddenly made sense. I actually pointed some coworkers toward the CDR’s article on the report to get them up to speed.
Can't speak to the high level C2 thingy of which he speaks.
However, from a white hat, deck plate perspective? Perhaps it's time to delegate certain responsibilities back to the local base facilities officer and tenant 1st Lieutenant offices and just increase their OPTAR.
Do the ol' OODA loop thingy and then cut and build where needed.
If a local O-2 and their CPO can't manage a barracks rehab then there's bigger underlying problems.
with all due respect to the Admiral, and while I agree with his goals... Sir, lose about 70% of the damn buzzwords, and learn to communicate effectively, instead of the "inside the beltway jargon filled fivesided building speak." Study the speeches and writings of Churchill and Reagan, then go forth and do likewise, you'll be more effective at getting the point across to people that don't "have to listen to you and nod around the table because you have the stars."
Today's problem is that there is too little command and too much control. The over-preponderance of "information technology" is a major contributor to this problem. The same problem exists in healthcare. The people who are supposed to be "leading" or, in healthcare, "doctoring" are spending too much time screwing around with computers and monitoring systems and data, rather than getting important stuff done.
It sounds to me that the admiral’s solution to a problem he really did not define, was to create yet another intermediate HQ to solve the problem. I am reminded of General Abrams, then Chief of Staff, Army, who successfully set about eliminating useless intermediate HQ. He was a tanker and used the analogy to a tank suspension system: there are two types of wheels on a tank — drive wheels which provide impulse to the system; and support rollers, which provide tension but no drive. Intermediate HQ’s fall into the second category.
While I respect General Abe greatly, a tank has three general types of round things:
- Drive sprocket, (1 each)
- road wheels (6-7)
- support or return rollers (3-4) (except in "Christie" suspensions)
True enough. And only one support roller was specifically designed to put tension on the system. But you get his drift.
As usual, ADM Harvey gets it right.
The man showed he was a hypocrite with the Honors affair. Harvey should have been reduced to his permanent rank and retired. At a minimum.
OK...Command Accountability. With all due respect to Adm. Gray, it is HIS command. It is the SecNav's "command". There is no excuse for the deficiencies. When do they say "this is MY responsibility" and NOT look to form another HQ to do what should already be done? The key to killing anything, and avoiding responsibility, is appointing a committee and looking for consensus. Just as the order is to outfit your ship, sail East, and seek out and destroy the enemy, the order is to get your house in order and quite f-ing around. Build ships. Maintain ships. Build out support infrastructure for repairs, rearming, and refitting the ships you build. Do everything you can to prepare for the fight - from the crews and Captains being ready to fight each individual ship right up to the SecNav providing the resources for the Fleet to fight and win.
All you have to do is say, "Send me!" It is my task to do, my responsibility to do it for the men who rely on me for their lives and livelihood.
Well written Admiral. Cogent and pithy. I think we should also consider abolishing CNIC. This created a new set of flag officer billets that at first pass, appeared to take the responsibility away from the installation CO’s with the predicate that CNIC would fund and repair or maintain our bases. All it truly accomplished was controlling the monies while doing little to actually maintain. I saw it first hand in the late 2000’s when I was still “on the field/in the game”. We couldn’t use our own Sailor’s to maintain the barracks or the heads and beds because CNIC controlled the basics such as stripper and wax materials. Even simple green. They also claimed the contractor’s own it and any Sailor power would be a breech. Yea. I was actually told that. My Master Chief and I didn’t give a rats ass and we found a way but out of our own pockets. Our institutional memory of how we used to have an actual 1st Lieutenant division and its purpose are long forgotten.
Great post and you’re correct. I hope some of your protégés listen.
A very smart Senior Chief once reported to me. He said any job can be defined by three vectors - responsibility, authority, accountability, and power. If a job is well defined, all of those vectors are equal and form a square. If things are somewhat skewed, the job looks like a rectangle or trapezoid. If things are totally and unequivocally screwed up, the job vectors have an unfulfilled gap. This last scenario is where the Navy seems to be today in so many areas of its overall mission.
Your math is a little off, but good point anyway.
True, the word “skewed” was incorrect. Please accept it as a literary device. 😉
by four vectors - responsibility, authority, accountability, and power.
There, I fixed it.
Duh…..maybe some day I’ll learn to count. 😂
I agree, CNIC is completely inept. On paper it made sense, but in execution, it has failed miserably. Every single base within Naval District Washington is plagued with dilapidated and substandard building and facilities. NSA Annapolis, responsible for the Naval Academy, has been a parade of SWO CO's spending the majority of their time campaigning for high paying civilian positions or removed for publicly berating sailors and civilians. Command and Control? The bulk of the work force are tasked by multiple masters. Be it CNIC, NDW civilian leadership or the base CO. Go back and look at the CNIC PowerPoint from 2002/03. No longer did you work for a pyramid with a commanding officer or civilian leader at the top. The CNIC leadership model was represented as circle with the sailors and civilians in the middle working for many masters. No wonder there were numerous C2 failures. Naval District Washington is a case study in bureaucracy of civilian leaders who gained positions and grades through the failure of NSPS.
Concur.
Combat readiness and efficiency is inversely proportional to distance fro DC.
Well said!
There it is!
Excellent article Admiral/Phib! If I recall correctly from the early 00s and tours at CNSL and N96, the major congressional pushback to the full CFFC C2 authority was the congressional contingent from Hawaii that feared loss of CPF and even PNSY. Without naming names, perhaps that same contingent has nowhere near the same respect/authority today and Navy/DoD could revisit the CFFC C2 matter during the current administration.
Good points, but part of the problem we seem to have is the lack of effective feedback for responsibility. When those responsible will not take the needed feedback for the system work as it is intended, we get exactly what we're seeing today. The barracks and facilities issues are part and parcel of that. My Reserve Center, where I have seen requests for routine facilities repairs to plumbing have to get sent back to Region, and it taking several months to get fixed. The officer who runs a building off a Navy base as well as the CO of a base should have the authority to get basic things fixed the right way.
Great post by CDR Sal (as usual). Broken record time for me: Here's a thought, regarding the "effectiveness vs efficient" discussion in the article. Military forces need interoperability over interdependence because interoperability can enhance effectiveness...1 plus 1 equals 3. Interdependence (I can't do my job without you...say air refueling tankers and strikers) is a point of failure where 1 plus 1 equals 1 or zero. Managed military violence results from redundancies and conscious hardening and "robusting" (not sure that's a word) of points of failure and respecting loss rates, etc. Such approaches are NOT efficient...but they give you a shot at effectiveness with good leadership. HOWEVER, our incentive structure has for many years rewarded those who took the business model approach of efficiency over effectiveness. The officer and government civilian ranks are now top to bottom largely populated by efficiency advocates because that approach was rewarded. SECDEF has a "steep hill" to climb to reform the system. Fingers crossed.
The body of the post is not mine. It is a guest post by Admiral Harvey…just for the record to be clear.
Copy all. Nor am I familiar with the Admiral. Will state that my experiences working with FFC were never positive, as they seemed to simply be another layer of mediocre "management". When they vanished, nothing seemed to change, which perhaps speaks loudly...or not. Unfunded mandates, responsibility without authority, and the like are topics all of us ancient airman, mariners and grunts likely remember with memories that are "not quite right"...
FFC is simply part of the Big Navy bloat. Harvey himself was a mediocrity. We talked about Harvey at Lex's place while Harvey was FFC. The overall opinion of Harvey was not high. That was the period when Harvey marked himself as unworthy of a commission.
Never having been a sailor, reading all the acronyms provides me with a bit of a headache, as they are not ingrained into my military DNA. I don’t have all that much room to talk as the army had acronyms all their own. That being said, I am curious as to whatever happened to the standard of the commander is responsible for everything his troops do or failed to do. I’m also concerned as to whatever happened to the other standard that the morale and the welfare of the men comes before that of their officers. If, as the saying goes, officers eat last, then, until the quarters of the enlisted sailors are made right, the officers could find themselves in tents. I suspect each service has its own variations on these problems, the most recent army one that I saw was running out of food to feed the troops, forcing them to go off post and eat fast food. I prefer not to believe it’s a whole different world out there, but it might just be, and more is the pity.
I was always taught that a commander is responsible for the welfare of his men. Period. But then I was in the Army, so the Navy may be different. I understand that, sometimes, junior officers may fall short of perfection, being relatively inexperienced. Field grade and flag officers, on the other hand, have no excuse. This article is just more bureaucrat BS, trying to shift the blame from the decision makers to "the system".
It is the same, Navy or Marines and possibly the Air Force goes overboard LOL
So where does the buck stop? “WHO” drawing a flag officer/CMDC paycheck is responsible?
Until that occurs, and those 2 active duty people are demoted, fined, and discharged, the problem keeps going. I won’t buy that a process overrules the health and safety of sailors - full stop.
That's the neat part: the organization is structured so that no one can be held accountable. Everybody has an out, and systemic failures like this are the predicate to fund studies to improve organizational performance.
Command what now?
Good question. One I doubt will be answered.
With almost 40 years around the Navy, including three tours wearing a loop, I can say the bloat in staffs and organizations I've seen has been amazing.
Dirty secret -
We created CAGs coequal with Carrier COs simply to increase the number of Flag eligible O-6s. We created the entire CNIC kingdom so that folks not likely to be CAGs and Carrier COs could advance to and beyond RDML.
And then we added SESs to compound the bloat with 'flag equivalent' civilians who wanted career advancements as well.
None of that was done for efficiency.
None of that contributed to combat capability.
The consequences were inevitable.
The nation is broke and we are following the path the Soviet Union took. Enormous cuts in assets and infrastructure are now critical for national survival.
Amen! Thank you for the very clear analysis.
Harvey's former position is part of that bloat.
"We created CAGs coequal with Carrier COs simply to increase the number of Flag eligible O-6s."
Turns out the second and third order effects have had toxic long term effects
And now, once what was 'Naval Aviation', is now just a bunch of generic green suited "Hot Stick/Cool Callsign" jocks who happen to be on a rusty boat...
(IYKYK)
https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/a/a5/NC-4_Crew_in_Lisbon%2C_Portugal.jpg
There was lots of discussion of the pertinence Naval fiction in the latest Midrats.
As for CAG's and Leadership...
I was surprised this book/movie didn't get a mention...
https://youtu.be/T6LoXYBrhiQ?si=gBSXUTZADsMOYTpM
Naval vet Michener's book is a much more compelling story line than the cheesy comic book depth of TOPGUN...
https://youtube.com/clip/UgkxHWXst5LtLuFd46-O1dD1_KvoNtoi8_x1?si=4mmfOov0DqBlnAN8
The navy is not alone in this dirty secret…
For what it’s worth, one of the senior folks in the Bonhomme Richard debacle passed through my chain of command last year. All groups were immediately tasked with updating risk registers and incident response and reporting procedures. At least someone learned something from it.
Look, I am a long way downstream from naval service, but the lessons of the Bonhomme Richard were learned long ago. We have know since before WWI that the most vulnerable time for a warship is when it is in an industrial availability. Is there anything more boring than a fire watch? Probably not, but it is vitally important. We have lost ships in shipyards before, and know that it takes to keep them safe. The ship's crew fell down on the job.
No active duty here - just an egghead civilian. I guess I intended the “someone learned something” line to be taken somewhat tongue-in-cheek because, one of the few things I do know is ships and fire mix poorly.
In my immediate circle, we were wondering why those particular issues were suddenly front and center then someone explained the new boss’s background and…yeah, it suddenly made sense. I actually pointed some coworkers toward the CDR’s article on the report to get them up to speed.
I spent two months of my life terrified of a shipyard fire. Terrified.
Seems to me that accountability throughout society is a rather significant issue overall in the times we live in.
Can't speak to the high level C2 thingy of which he speaks.
However, from a white hat, deck plate perspective? Perhaps it's time to delegate certain responsibilities back to the local base facilities officer and tenant 1st Lieutenant offices and just increase their OPTAR.
Do the ol' OODA loop thingy and then cut and build where needed.
If a local O-2 and their CPO can't manage a barracks rehab then there's bigger underlying problems.
with all due respect to the Admiral, and while I agree with his goals... Sir, lose about 70% of the damn buzzwords, and learn to communicate effectively, instead of the "inside the beltway jargon filled fivesided building speak." Study the speeches and writings of Churchill and Reagan, then go forth and do likewise, you'll be more effective at getting the point across to people that don't "have to listen to you and nod around the table because you have the stars."
He's a typical FO. He talks a good fight, but did not live it in his own office.
Today's problem is that there is too little command and too much control. The over-preponderance of "information technology" is a major contributor to this problem. The same problem exists in healthcare. The people who are supposed to be "leading" or, in healthcare, "doctoring" are spending too much time screwing around with computers and monitoring systems and data, rather than getting important stuff done.