
Art by author.
Imagine you are the commanding officer (CO) of a guided-missile destroyer in a war with a peer competitor. For months, your crew has spent more time in General Quarters than any other condition. You are exhausted, and your remaining mental bandwidth is focused on fighting the ship. Despite the wartime stress, routine tasks still need to be completed around the ship. The engineers need to transfer fuel and repair the reverse osmosis system, the fire controlmen need to repair a console in the combat information center, and the gunner’s mates need to tag out the vertical launching system to replace a circuit card assembly. To save time and keep sailors and equipment in the fight, special requests are coming to you left and right. Every department is requesting waivers to minimize maintenance requirements or alter procedures to make work more efficient. Most of these waivers make sense—the warfighting benefit outweighs the increased risk to personnel and equipment. Inevitably, some of the requests are bad ideas and filtering them out taxes the mental bandwidth needed to fight the ship. You wish these issues had been resolved before you left port.
I argue that now is the time to think through wartime procedural compliance and administrative requirements.
War Bill
Rightfully, the peacetime Navy prioritizes safety of personnel and equipment when operating equipment or conducting maintenance and repairs. However, during the next naval conflict, when torpedoes and anti-ship ballistic missiles threaten to sink ships, COs will order sailors to cut personnel- and equipment-safety corners to keep the ship in the fight. That will happen. But hastily cutting corners will surely cause unintended casualties. To mitigate wartime mistakes, the Navy should help stressed and sleep-deprived wartime COs decide which corners to cut by creating a War Bill today.
What would a War Bill look like? In some respects, it would be akin to the Restricted Maneuvering Doctrine used on surface ships. When a ship enters a maritime warzone, the CO would be able to authorize predetermined wartime procedural and administrative deviations with a signature and a 1 Main Circuit announcement. These deviations would prioritize the ship’s readiness to fight over the safety of individual sailors and equipment. Deviations could be authorized for the entire ship or be limited to specific programs or work centers.
For preventative maintenance, wartime deviations could be made to maintenance schedules, procedures, and administrative requirements. To adapt the maintenance schedule, the CO could authorize the maintenance and material management coordinator to trigger wartime preventative maintenance schedule (PMS) in Sked. A global trigger is already used in Sked to switch a ship’s PMS schedule between in port and underway; a similar trigger could be added to switch between wartime and peacetime PMS. In wartime, the periodicity of non-vital PMS requirements would be extended, or in some cases, PMS would even be postponed until the maintenance and material management coordinator returned Sked to a peacetime status. Wartime maintenance that could not be postponed would have a wartime PMS card that cuts out non-vital steps and repetitive non-vital notes and warnings. Non-vital PMS admin, like Force Revisions and Spot Checks, would be postponed until the ship returned to a peacetime status.
Shipboard safety programs, like Tagout, Fall Prevention, or HAZMAT, would also have wartime deviations. These deviations would authorize sailors to take greater risks to complete vital maintenance and repairs quickly, while minimizing the time spent hanging tags or checking out equipment. Often, an entire system does not need to be tagged out. Instead, in some cases, after a brief phone call to deconflict with the central control station, sailors could quickly isolate and repair a component of a system without even hanging tags. When working aloft, there are many cases when a sailor could safely go aloft in specific zones without setting aloft, securing equipment, or checking out a harness. In the HAZMAT program, some of the materials that are considered HAZMAT are not very hazardous; many can be found under a typical kitchen sink or in a household garage. Regulations requiring sailors to check out and promptly return anti-freeze or grease to the HAZMAT locker might make sense in peacetime, but they are needlessly burdensome in war. A War Bill would reduce HAZMAT regulations and allow work centers to keep some HAZMAT indefinitely.
Although the goal of a War Bill would be to streamline procedures and minimize requirements, there would inevitably be cases when procedural requirements would need to become more burdensome in a warzone. Some reporting requirements will increase. For some critical systems, perhaps more permissions and safety requirements will be imposed during wartime, not less. Situations like that likely exist, and again, now is the time to think through those cases.
The above examples are far from exhaustive; readers can surely think of other burdensome requirements that should be modified in wartime. I leave it to subject matter experts to work out the details of a War Bill.
Wartime Mindset
In a fight, the CO does not have time to meticulously wave safety protocols. The CO needs an easy way to alleviate procedural burdens upon entering a warzone and then restore standard peacetime requirements upon exiting the warzone. A War Bill can help make that happen. Of course, by cutting safety corners, wartime procedures assume more risk. We need to accept that.
In a 2018 Proceedings article, Jonathan Panter wrote that, “Today’s surface warfare officers are in a peacetime mindset . . . the community has forgotten that it represents the maritime combat arms branch of the joint service.” With the war in Ukraine, global tensions are rising, and we cannot afford to have a peacetime mindset in the Surface Navy. To adopt a wartime mindset, we need to change how we view risk. In doing so, we need to plan to accept more risk to individual sailors and equipment to keep the ship in the fight.
Wider Implications
The War Bill explored here is focused on wartime procedural deviations for surface ships. However, the concept can and should be expanded to the Navy as a whole. What administrative red tape can we cut in a war? What maintenance and training requirements can be reduced? What inspections can be postponed? On a broad scale, we need to think through what requirements we can streamline the moment the first shots are fired.