Read the followup to this article here.

If you want to look at a prime example of single individual impacting an entire organization, watch the Navy’s Chief Learning Officer, John Kroger, as he creates a series of potentially sweeping educational changes for both enlisted and officers. The recent Secretary of the Navy memo on the topic adds a requirement for education to be part of the fitness report and Evaluation, as well as the Selection Board precepts. Specifically:

LEARNING AS A DESIRED WARFIGHTING TRAIT. Both the Navy and Marine Corps shall make, as a separate category in officer fitness reports and enlisted evaluations, competitive grading criteria for educational and learning achievements, with a new reporting system reflective of these criteria by January 1, 2020. The CLO for naval education, in collaboration with the OPNA V N7 and DC CDI, will devise precept guidance for my signature for statutory and administrative selection boards that will ensure learning achievements are appropriately weighted when selecting our best and brightest for promotion and command of our most valuable resource, our Sailors and Marines[i].

These efforts are long overdue and I firmly believe that they will be good for the naval service. My enthusiasm, however, is steeped in trepidation, based on years spent at sea and just as many years studying crew endurance, fatigue, and cognitive task management. The issue is this: We all know, but often fail to acknowledge (much less analyze!) the tradeoffs, in that anytime new requirements are added, they to come with a price. While it appears that these new initiatives will come at no financial cost to the sailor, the real price may be a much more precious currency: time.

Don’t get me wrong—the Navy paid for me to earn a bachelor of science, a master of arts, a master and a doctor of engineering management, and to learn a foreign language. Add in my salary during those school years, and that is probably a $500,000 investment in one knucklehead—me. However, it is important to note that two of those degrees were earned using the GI Bill after retirement—because that’s when I finally found the time to focus on the cognitive learning required for higher education. I should also note that I attended two war colleges during my career; I completed my joint professional military education (JPME) through the Air Force Command and Staff College (AFCSC, to check a block in the easiest way possible, since this version at the time was all remote and the tests were all multiple choice. I was on my executive officer tour and JPME I had been made mandatory for selection to command. I did the absolute minimum to graduate!) A year later, having screened for command, I , attended the Naval War College (NWC) Senior Course to obtain a master’s degree in the shortest time possible at the 15-year mark in my career. There was no comparison between the two—the AFCSC was a two on a “value added” scale of one to ten, while the NWC was a nine in terms of education and professional development, largely because of the personal interaction with my professors and peers. Perhaps I am an outlier, and while I am sure many of the points below have been considered in crafting these new programs, I will include all of them for completeness.

1. On the enlisted side, the Navy Community College is an excellent initiative. Aligning education with the Navy’s future needs is a long overdue idea. As long as the sailors are able to dedicate time to this study, and the results are certified for use in later life, this will be a success. However, a parallel initiative threatens to compete for their time. The training plan of Sailor 2025 and block learning calls for sailors to leave the ship for training a couple of times during their career. As Kroger will quickly point out, his charge is education not training; however, they both may compete for the same time and if sailors have to make the choice themselves, it is possible—even likely—that both will fail.
2. On the officer side, I also applaud the idea of prioritizing graduate and continued education in fitness reports as required by the new NAVADMIN. Again, my trepidation here is that most department heads, executive officers, and commanding officers already operate in a “yellow zone“ of fatigue and cognitive task management especially at sea—recent studies have shown an average of less than six hrs/night under way, much less than the stated goal of seven. Each of my graduate programs asked me to contribute about ten hours per week of work outside of a two-hour class. That’s about two hours per day. Where does that time come from? Watch? No. Writing casualty reports and fitness reports? No. Sleep? Ask any college student. A hypothetical: As a commanding officer I have two department heads, one of them excels at his tactical and equipment maintenance job, but does not make time for continued education. The other has completed three courses, but is falling asleep on watch and his reports are late or substandard. Who gets the “EP“ ? Can the next selection board tell the difference?
3. For both, let’s not forget the impact on families. My wife accepted the six to ten hours each week that I spent in the evenings doing homework and studying for exams, but there was an end in sight, and I did not have little ones to parent at the time, as many do. If the sailor or officer does not give up work or sleep, the next in line is family time. Worth it? Time will tell.

We have been down this road before, so these waters are not uncharted. It did not end well—there was a push about a decade ago for every chief to get a bachelor’s degree and every officer to get a master’s degree by a certain time to be eligible for promotion. It died on the hill of task management, time, and combat effectiveness, and the requirement was eliminated. Not every naval officer can be Clausewitz or Bill Gates, and no amount of education is going to make all of them great critical thinkers at the strategic levels. There are other wolves at the door as well; The 2017 Comprehensive Review of Surface Force Incidents, has much about training, manning, fatigue, and little about “broadening the educational horizons” of sailors and officers to prevent collisions, much less to fight the ship. But there are ways to learn from these past events, and they should all inform any strategic decision. A Naval Postgraduate School thesis even captured the current state of where officers spend their time (per figure 1 below: less than 0.5 hr/week) and begs the question: if we are going to demand three to six hours per week of graduate study to be competitive, where will those hours come from?[ii]

Figure 1: Officer Self-reported time spent on various tasks. Currently, Graduate School study is not in the top 15 topics. (Source: Fletcher, March 2018).

Here are a few thoughts.

1. On the enlisted side, map out periods for continued education and adjust promotion timelines accordingly. Deconflict Sailor 2025 “training“ blocks with “education“ blocks and ensure the sailors know what the priority is at any given time.
2. Dramatically expand programs like USMAP and NAMTS for sailors to capture the work that they are already doing towards certification in technical skills. Combined with the Navy Community College, these programs could be true force multiplier’s but are currently very much sub optimized.
3. For officers, take advantage of the programs that provide college credit for Navy schools such as the Old Dominion University Master of Engineering Management for officers and bachelor’s for enlisted – this program grants large credit for those who have completed nuclear power school. Adding a short block of time (1 year) to the nuclear career path to allow all Nuclear operators to earn this degree rather than putting it on the backs of the individuals to do in their free time would be a game changer for the surface nuclear and submarine community. There are probably similar opportunities for aviators to do the same given the right academic partners. Another option would be to expand the offerings at the Naval Postgraduate School and Naval War College curricula to leverage the sunk cost and immense academic resources available there—for example, the NPS Human Systems Integration program, an area specifically called out in the Comprehensive Review of Surface Force Incidents as a Navy weakness, has withered on the vine and could be reinvigorated by this effort.
4. Show how important it is by baking it into the standard career paths. Add a block titled “graduate school education“ to every officer career pipeline chart generated by Navy Personnel Command. If you have to adjust other flow points, so be it. In a class long ago the vice chief of naval operations put up a pie chart of how he spent his time because he said it showed what was important to him. If education is important to an officer’s career, it should be a part of his or her career path, not something he or she does “on the side.” This is particularly true for female officers who often use a shore assignment as the best window to start a family, and many have complained about the challenge of doing so while both working and going to school. The recent addition of a third department head tour to the Surface Warfare pipeline adds another challenging twist to this plan. Something will need to give here – or the entire plan could backfire.
5. Finally, find a way to get a payback tour from said education. I previously authored an article promoting the idea of “Professional Military Trainers,” a program akin to the Professional Military Professor, but to allow these officers and senior enlisted to shift out of the competitive path and serve well beyond 30 years. Like many of my peers, I spent the last six years as a contractor providing training on the things I learned in the Navy. I wanted to give back. I had the experience, but I had reached my maximum time in uniform. If the Navy had a special category for senior enlisted and officers to spend as trainers and educators while still in uniform, a great many would do so and it would both provide payback for the education and save tons of money. Many navies have their people serve until the age of 62 and as I can tell you, once you realize that the next pay grade is not a possibility, it is a game changer and allows you to focus on what is important.

When I was in command of the USS Oscar Austin (DDG 79), I informed my commodore that I was planning on taking course remotely toward the Old Dominion master’s in engineering management while on deployment. His reply was, “What aspect of your command responsibilities and focus on your crew will you give up while spending time on yourself?” I dropped the class, picking it up only after retirement. Maybe times have changed, but the workload and demands on our officers has not been reduced—I would submit that I had it easier back in 2002, even in 2010, than those in the fleet today. The Navy is infamous for adding requirements without taking any away. One final recommendation: establish a true “red team” to calculate the true time load of any additional educational requirements and capture the true cost in time and risk, even if in parallel with implementing the process. This effort is too important to repeat the lessons of the past; if these educational programs are to become institutions and survive one individual’s tenure, a realistic assessment of the cost in a Sailor’s time must be calculated, and some type of offset must be applied.

Endnotes

[i] SECNAV Memorandum Education for Seapower Decisions and Immediate Actions dtd 5 February 2019

[ii] Fletcher, Christine, The Unresourced Burden on United States Navy Sailors at sea, Naval Postgraduate School, March 2018