The spread of COVID-19 has given the Navy a unique sort of natural experiment seldom observed in our history except during times of great global war and massive catastrophe. We must take this opportunity to analyze changes to the critical functions of manning, training, and equipping to determine what processes are superfluous and what processes truly are essential.
The Navy’s mission success is fueled by well-trained personnel operating in efficient teams. The typical day at every command revolves around meetings, group tasks, and one-on-one training or mentorship sessions. Bringing sailors together to coordinate action, plan for the future, and share knowledge is fundamental to the Navy’s operating philosophy. It is precisely this reliance on group interaction that makes an epidemic such as COVID-19 a challenge to our conventional operating style.
With every command implementing extraordinary countermeasures to combat the spread of COVID-19, while maintaining readiness, we now have an opportunity to assess our business as usual. However, without clear direction and centralization from senior leaders, we will fail to internalize these crucial lessons about operational efficiency and effectiveness confronting every naval command across the globe.
In response to this exceptional threat, Navy leadership has transformed standard operating procedures. To minimize personal contact in accordance with the larger goal of “social distancing,” the Navy has taken steps to cut back on formations, in-person meetings, and halted personnel movement. While the expectation is to temporarily sacrifice operational efficacy and readiness for the greater good of slowing the virus spread, we should not blindly seek a return to normal once the threat from the virus is lessened. Instead, over the next weeks and months, Navy leaders have the opportunity to repeatedly address the question: “Are these countermeasures materially affecting readiness?” If not, certain COVID-19 policies should be retained to enhance operational efficiency once the Navy returns to a more normal footing.
The following are a few lines of questioning that might help both individual commands and the highest echelons of naval leadership tease out unexpected benefits from these changes. While this is not comprehensive, it should serve as a starting point to inspire commanders to reflect on how the unusual pressures of COVID-19 might allow them to improve the efficiency of their organizations.
Given the tight quarters in which sailors frequently work, minimizing the number of people in those spaces is an easier method of social distancing than maximizing the space between them. Over the past few weeks, commands have accomplished this by expanding telework capabilities, allowing some employees to work from home, and by restricting physical manning to only “mission essential” personnel.
Such policies undoubtedly help curtail the transmission of COVID-19 by reducing the number of people in contact with each other. However, the designation of personnel and activities as “mission essential” implies that those not designated as such are non-essential. The exemption for the freeze on permanent-change-of-station (PCS) movement carved out in NAVADMIN 080/20 is similarly thought provoking. A small amount of orders (“very limited in number”) may still be carried out if the move is “determined to be mission essential,” suggesting that the preponderance of PCS travel is non-essential.
While operating under heavy travel restrictions and limited manning—some commands as low as 25 percent of their full-force on a given day—commanders should reflect on the harm to readiness, if any, these reductions cause, and what “mission essential” means for their command. Further, commanders must ask how those personnel could be better used during normal operations.
Can commanders afford to lose more sailors to training courses than previously thought, potentially upwards of 50 percent? Could those sailors be redistributed to commands with a more dire personnel or skill need? More specifically, what is the effect of minimum manning on maintenance and equipment readiness? Could the Navy embrace a flexible four-day work week or incorporate more widespread shift-work schedules, including for ships in port? What actual value does a duty section provide and how many personnel are required? And what effect would less frequent PCS movements have on operations?
These measures in the short term are being embraced as a response to COVID-19. However, answering these questions in the long term could allow a more efficient distribution of personnel or aid in retention by improving the quality of life of sailors across the fleet.
A command-level analysis is required to evaluate the full effect of these operational changes. Since every command is implementing COVID-19 countermeasures in different operational contexts, understanding each context will be necessary to notice changes in readiness. Only a meticulous evaluation by each command can reveal the unexpected benefits in the numerous COVID-19 countermeasures.
These changes, however, also affect the manning, training, equipping, and preparedness of the entire force. Therefore, the disparate analyses from each command must be standardized and aggregated to evaluate the full Navy-wide implications. For example, some commands may conclude that non-standard working hours lead to more efficiency and better communication while other commands may find the opposite. Some conclusions will be specific to a command or a platform, and others will be generalizable to the warfare community or the operating cycle. An aggregation of the individual command results would then allow for best practices to be shared across the relevant communities. In doing so, we can enable other commands to enhance readiness with lessons learned by others and allow higher echelons to better distribute resources to meet the operational demands.
To identify these lessons and distribute new standard operating procedures to the force, we recommend that each individual command implement an analysis of the impact of COVID-19 countermeasures on their daily operations. Commanders already have been empowered to implement responses to the epidemic as they see fit. This responsibility should extend to studying the impact of those responses and not blindly returning to the status quo they notice some improvement. At an institutional level, we recommend that the Chief of Naval Personnel direct the creation of a special task force to assess this novel situation with assistance from each type command. The COVID-19 response provides a unique opportunity for the Navy to experiment with its traditional mode of operations. We must act now in order to emerge from this period of uncertainty as a stronger organization.
