The release of the “Comprehensive Review of Surface Fleet Incidents” provided a thorough, holistic, and hard-hitting assessment of the current state of the surface warfare community.[1] The nearly 200-page document contained myriad valuable and practicable recommendations for the surface Navy and supporting organizations to improve the health and professionalism of the services’ premier warfighting community. As efforts begin to introduce these improvements in the surface warfare community, the Navy must have boldness and decisiveness to make significant paradigm shifts where needed.
The most important recommendation to be decisively acted upon is that to align the number of surface warfare officer (SWO) candidates assigned to ships with billet requirements.[2] The surface Navy’s longstanding solution to poor retention for midgrade officers has been to purposefully assign, often far in excess of billet requirements as dictated in a Ship’s Manning Document (SMD), an inordinate number of junior officers (JO) to each hull. Technically, this practice is termed “overexecution” and has been under increased scrutiny since at least 2015 when OPNAV N9I (Warfare Systems Integration) sponsored a Center for Naval Analysis studythat sought to understand and analyze the implications and consequences of officer overexecution (OOE) for the Surface Navy.[3] While seemingly innocuous, the policy is expensive, inefficient, and detrimental to creating and sustaining a professional surface officer corps. I wholeheartedly endorse the review’s recommendation that this toxic practice end as soon as practicable.
Introduction to “Overexecution”
To better illustrate OOE, consider the following hypothetical example. Those responsible for meeting the Surface Navy’s manpower demands have forecast that based on expected fleet size, officer retention, shipboard billets, etc. that 350 afloat department heads (DH) are required eight years (~eight years active service to SWO DH given notional career timeline) from now. Since SWO junior officer retention to DH has consistently hovered at 35 percent, the surface Navy would seek to commission 1,000 SWO candidate ensigns in the current year, despite the fact that there are not nearly that many SWO JO jobs available afloat. [4] Since the number of commissionable midshipmen exceeds actual SMD JO requirements, there is no connection between the legitimate JO billets afloat and the number of JOs assigned to each hull. Thus, the surface Navy is “overexecuting” the billets authorized (BA) for their ships’ JO manning requirements.
Some degree of officer overexecution exists in all warfare communities but it is most pronounced in the surface Navy. In addition to the SWO community’s DH manning requirement strategy, are other factors cause this phenomenon: the surface Navy serves as both a “default” option for graduating midshipmen and as an accession source for various restricted line (RL) communities. The surface community ought to abandon both of these commitments and focus solely on improving its own health and professionalism.
For better or worse, the surface Navy traditionally has been the least selective community for new officer accessions. The surface Navy does not mandate the more demanding visual and anthropometric requirements of the aviation community. Nor does the conventional fleet require the same level of academic accomplishment required for the Navy’s nuclear power officers. Midshipmen who, while meeting the basic requirements of their commissioning source, are not eligible or competitive for other communities can always “default” into surface warfare. Since the Navy’s primary commissioning sources, NROTC and the Naval Academy, as a rule commission active-duty unrestricted line officers, the surface Navy sweeps up officers not needed elsewhere. For the health of the surface Navy, this has to stop.
The surface Navy also is the largest source of lateral transfers into various RL communities. Some of these officers commission as “options,” SWO-intel, SWO-information professional, SWO-EDO, etc. These officers access into the Navy knowing they only will serve a tour or two as a SWO before transitioning to their long-term designator. Others, through recurrent lateral transfer selection boards, are selected based on merit and community need to change designators. There is pressure on the SWO community to “feed” these other communities who typically cannot access officers directly from NROTC or the Academy. While all communities in the Navy are valuable, the primary consideration of the Surface community should be the health and professionalism of the Surface community. In an era of extremely overcrowded wardrooms, any provision for officers to meet future RL demand should be immediately eliminated.
Too High a Price to Pay
Unfortunately, prior to the review’s assessment, the primary concern with SWO OOE was cost.[5] Recruiting, providing a scholarship, and paying an ensign is expensive. In the above example, the vast majority of those 1000 SWO-candidate ensigns would have been on a full-tuition scholarship at either an NROTC unit or at the Naval Academy. All those ensigns assigned to ships without legitimate billets receive the normal pay and benefits according to their rank. If including the value of the average SWO-candidate’s scholarship, the cost of an “overexecuted” SWO JO can easily run into the hundreds of thousands of dollars. Further, given that retention has remained consistently low, it is obvious that this practice is inefficient at producing the desired numbers of DHs; some two-thirds decide to not continue their SWO career. Lastly, the surfeit of SWO JOs diminishes their individual scope of responsibility and inadequately prepares them for higher responsibility. Many division officers literally have no division—they are assigned as “Assistant Division Officers” or are given superfluous positions such as “Special Projects Officer.” We can do better.
The most pernicious effects of this phenomenon are seemingly invisible to many well-meaning officers. I have heard multiple successful, competent, and cheerful senior SWOs proudly claim that they would happily train as many officers as were sent to their ships—the more the better. While I can appreciate their enthusiasm for the future of surface warfare, and each leader must do his best by his subordinates, the reality is that training bandwidth is limited and at a certain point, a ship can clearly be oversaturated with SWO candidates. As the review rightly points out, with the Surface Navy’s current overreliance on on-the-job-training (OJT)[6] for qualifying SWO-candidates, an excess of candidates waters down their practical qualification process. A ship only gets underway from a pier so many times during an officer’s formative tours and there can only be one officer of the deck per evolution. As the recent incident reports attest, the consequences of under-trained officers failing to perform their basic professional duties can be tragic.
The Way Forward
The surface Navy’s justification for OOE is that it mitigates the risk of failing to meet future DH demand. By continuing to assume poor retention and overcrowding wardrooms to offset, the surface community is in effect ensuring the professional environment that will perpetuate poor retention. We should instead abandon this self-fulfilling pessimism and challenge ourselves to dramatically improve our retention rates by investing in our junior officers and improving their professional satisfaction and sense of worth. With fewer SWO-candidates competing for scarce training resources and senior leader mentorship, each individual will receive increased professional development and leadership growth. A revised and improved fitness report system, currently under development, can be used to truly identify and reward top performers. Simply properly accessing ensigns to billets, by reducing the numbers of midshipmen in accession programs, represents an incredible efficiency that could potentially translate to increased financial incentives or other initiatives to improve retention.
Ultimately, the Navy already is spending an inordinate amount of money to retain only 35 percent of its SWO JOs; with the same amount of money spent more effectively the service could retain many more of its finest officers, reduce the burden of excessive JOs our ships, and improve the overall professionalism and pride in the surface Navy. While such changes would represent a significant paradigm shift in the surface Navy’s manning strategy over the past few decades, it is clear from both the mishap reports and the “Comprehensive Review” that our current strategy is broken. It is unfortunate that it took losing 17 sailors for the Navy to pause and deliberately reflect on the health of the underlying systems in the surface Navy, but with a renewed sense of purpose and a clear sense of direction we can and must make the foundational changes necessary to bring about demonstrable improvements in our community.
Endnotes
[1] Comprehensive Review of Recent Surface Force Incidents, 26 Oct 17, retrieved from http://www.navy.mil/submit/display.asp?story_id=103136
[2] Comprehensive Review, pg. 56
[3] Parcell, Ann D. (August 2015) Officer Overexecution: Analysis and Solutions. Center for Naval Analysis. Arlington, VA. Retrived from https://www.cna.org/CNA_files/PDF/DAB-2015-U-011041-Final.pdf on 6 Nov 17.
[4] Parcell, pg. 20
[5] Parcell, pg. 3
[6] Comprehensive Review, pg. 47
