In any profession, making time to recognize and understand what your organization is doing right and where it’s lacking is crucial to continued improvement and success. This is especially true in the profession of arms, specifically for the U.S. Navy, where failure as an organization would have far reaching consequences and global impact. We like to pay attention to the technologically advanced Ford-class aircraft carriers and the new superior warfighting capabilities of the Joint Strike Fighter, and while these are important elements in the formula to maintain our military might, behind each of these ships, aircraft, or weapons systems, are sailors. Without sailors, the most technologically advanced aircraft would not fly, weapons systems would not fire, and ships would not be in the fight maintaining peace and freedom of navigation around the world. There are few things more important in the naval profession than taking care of sailors. When we as leaders allow our divisions, our departments, and our ships to be undermanned, we are failing them.
Virtually every system in the Navy has a sailor who operates it, and more who administer or maintain it. A Navy F-18 for example, has a pilot and a naval flight officer. These are the operators who fly the plane and operate the navigation and weapons systems, respectively. But when the plane lands on the deck of an aircraft carrier there are scores of sailors required to transport the plane, perform extensive corrective and preventive maintenance, re-fuel, re-arm, and prepare the plane to fly again. But what happens when you take away half of those sailors? On the operator side, if it’s the pilot, the plane is grounded. If it’s the naval flight officer, it will be extremely difficult to navigate the plane and put weapons on target. On the administrator or maintainer side, there may not be someone available to fix a problem, or it could take twice as long for the plane to be flight ready again. This has a real effect on one of the Navy’s largest and increasingly in-demand rates: information systems technicians (ITs).
The Navy, through various methods and manpower studies, decides how many sailors of each rate are needed to operate a ship, man a squadron, or fly an aircraft. Using my own ship as an example, we currently muster about 50 percent of that number for ITs. This means that we have about half of the number of ITs that the Navy says we should have to operate the systems requiring IT training, expertise, and knowledge. Does that mean that we are only expected to operate half of our equipment in the radio shack, or maintain and defend only half of the ship’s computer network? Of course not. This means in practice that the 50 percent who are present in the divisions are doing about twice the amount of work. It also means that the availability and reliability of our IT-related systems suffer when the defenders, operators, and maintainers of our networks are stretched too thin. There are only 24 hours in a day, so what are the implications of our choice as leaders to perpetually underman our divisions?
The number of systems on ships that have computers in them or are connected to the network might surprise you. For example, one of our IT1s spent half of a day troubleshooting our ship’s new plasma arc waste destruction system—basically a very fancy incinerator and trash compactor. Why was the IT1 involved? The system is computer controlled, the pieces set up as a local area network, there are regular software updates required along with continuing network maintenance, and the traditional rates that operate this equipment—machinist’s mates and electrician’s mates—have no experience or training on troubleshooting computers and network maintenance.
The ship’s new advanced weapons elevators are computer controlled, on a network, and use Wi-Fi signals to send the commands from the controlling stations to the elevators. The Navy says our weapons department is now supposed to have ITs working for them to maintain the elevators.
The ship’s new electromagnetic aircraft launch system, the upgrade from old steam catapults, consists of hundreds of block controllers each designed to activate an electromagnetic element along the catapult in a precise sequence to fire the catapult. Each one of these block controllers is connected via a network of over 140 Ethernet switches and has an IP address that must be properly configured to connect to the network. What rate do you suppose the program office deems most appropriate for maintaining this sizable new network?
These are just a few examples of the expanding shift toward controlling and operating everything with computers and software, then networking it all together. As this continues, the maintenance requirements and skillsets required to keep these systems up and running increasingly shift toward those of information systems technicians.
As the number of systems requiring IT expertise increases and the already insufficient number of ITs stays the same, there develops an increasing ratio of systems to sailors. Most systems on a ship have a formal school or some type of other required specialty training for the administrators of those systems, so that means that the sailors who are left need to attend more schools. Schools that, unfortunately, rarely seem to adequately prepare them to maintain the systems as installed on the ship.
Further exacerbating the manning issue, these schools are often not funded during PCS transfers and the command not only has to fund the school, but also provide the time away from the ship to get the training. With so many systems, we are spreading the sailors thin, making very difficult for them to become experts on any of the systems because they are not able to spend the time learning a particular system really well before they are pulled off in another direction. What happens as systems requiring IT expertise continue to grow in number and complexity without the right training and numbers of sailors to adequately maintain them? An over-reliance on civilian technical support.
I have watched sailors troubleshoot many different systems, and it is disheartening when the resources that a sailor has been given to troubleshoot and the training received are insufficient to fix a problem. It proves difficult for sailors to truly take ownership of systems when so often they must submit a Navy 311 trouble ticket and rely on civilian distance support to resolve a problem. Once the ticket has been submitted, it often takes days for a response, especially if something breaks on a Friday. Very few distance-support organizations work on the weekends; often when a system is down and ship needs help, they have to wait until Monday for a response. Systems remain broken for days while a ship waits to hear from the distance-support organization. Not only is the depth of knowledge lacking to troubleshoot while waiting for a response, but there are a plethora of other systems requiring attention and troubleshooting. It is easy to see how a sailor can become jaded with the whole process.
When we as leaders knowingly put sailors in these situations, we are failing them. When we tell them that they have twice as much work to do as everyone else because we will not properly man our divisions, we are failing them. By under manning our ITs, we reduce the quality of service for all sailors, and more significantly, we accept an unquantifiable degradation to the survivability of our most technologically advanced aircraft carrier and the missions she executes. As the number of computers and IT systems continue to increase, and the number of ITs available to administer, maintain, and defend those computers stays the same, there will come a breaking point. I can’t tell you when that breaking point is or what it will look like, but I certainly don’t want to find out, our sailors don’t want to find out, and we as leaders in the Navy shouldn’t want to find out either. But if the Navy is going to continue to increase the number of networked systems or computers in need of administering—and ignore the growing IT manning requirement—we are failing our sailors. Fancy, technologically advanced systems do not win wars; sailors do. Most leaders speak about taking care of our people and putting our sailors first, but if we are willing to stand by and accept 50 percent manning, thereby knowingly putting an exceptional strain on the rest of the fleet, we are failing as leaders.
