by Navy Capt (Ret) Pete O’Brien, Project Sentinel Chairman and Distinguished Fellow
And to the soon brand new Secretaries of the Army, and Air Force: Congratulations on your new job(s). There is an awful lot on your plate: fixing readiness and recruiting, refilling our weapon magazines, saving our shipyards, saving the Merchant Marine, making the right choices about future forces and future weapons programs. These are all incredibly important issues that you face.
But none of them is your most important issue.
Your most important issue is leadership; the real root of every problem in the Navy, the real root of the issues just listed, is the failure of senior leadership. It will be up to you to fix that.
Nominally, you will address that via a series of letter: you write the guidance to those who sit on promotion board, telling them what the Navy (you) want in the officers they pick. Obviously, it’s been a long time since a SecNav (or any service secretary) actually wrote the guidance himself, your staff does that. But you sign it out, you make it yours.
And that drives who becomes captains, and admirals. It drives who becomes commanders and lieutenant commanders as well. Frankly, that part of going moderately well, the services, all of them, have good “field grade” officers. But as I sit and think about the very best leaders I’ve met in the last 45 years, there have only been a handful of good admirals. Most of them are BOALs – Bumps On A Log, easily overlooked, and forgotten as soon as you met them.
Where have the great officers gone? They never made captain, never mind admiral.
Very simply put, the services, with few exceptions, don’t want leaders as senior officers. Why is that? Because leaders do just that: they take charge, they move the organization, whether it’s a fleet, a great army, or a nation or any private enterprise, leaders embrace change, they create change.
But the services are, in fact, very large bureaucratic organizations that like stasis. The services, like Hobbes’ Leviathan, rewards those that provide for and protect the organization itself. What that translates into in the Washington DC of today is a cadre of senior officers (each service does this) who protect budgets and position, who protect the service more than they protect the nation. Loyalty is not to the country, loyalty is to the service and the budget. Those who show promise to protect the service will be considered for flag, those who do not, will not. Conversely, those who stand out early in their career as true leaders will be shunted aside early as well. Hence they do not make captain (or colonel in the Marines).
GK Chesterton once wrote that a man who likes something will like the dirt and the mess of the place, but a man who loves it will do anything to make it beautiful, he will tear it down and rebuild it to make it all it should be. The Navy for more than 15 years – and really, for perhaps 30 years, has been led by men who only liked the Navy – but loved their position, loved their credentials, loved their medals.
The sad proof of this is to look at the steps taken in the last 10-15 years by the 3 and 4 star officers in the Naval Service: what have they done to fix issues such as readiness or ship maintenance delays or a series of bad program decisions that have cost the Navy tens of billions of dollars? In fact, they’ve done very little. Endless papers have been written as they studied the problem, but little has actually been done.
What is needed into find men who love the Navy and love their country and are willing to do nearly anything to fix the Naval service.
Will this be easy? No. It will, in fact, be the most difficult thing you do. And you will get tremendous pushback from the flag ranks and the senior civilians. You will find that all of our flag officers look the part, they have the credentials on paper. But they do not possess the leadership skills necessary for what the Navy is likely to face in the next 2 decades. Your job is to change that.
The officers you want won’t necessarily be well liked, they won’t necessarily be smooth, or glib. In all likelihood if they have a masters degree it’s from the Naval War College or from Monterey. They didn’t go to Harvard, they don’t have an MBA.
They will have lots of time in operational assignments; they will have less time in Washington DC.
They are professional in their approach to naval warfare and are unapologetic about it.
But there is little other common ground. The good ones come in all types – a look at the stellar officers of WWII reveals a wide range of characters, none of them perfect by any stretch, but truly superior leaders that the nation needed. But just consider how different each of these officers were from each other: Nimitz, King, Spruance, Halsey, Mitscher, McCain, Fletcher, Lockwood, Lee, Oldendorf, Kincaid. You and your immediate staff must learn – quickly – how to find such figures. And you have precious little time.
You need to find a few folks who understand the problem and also understand the types of officers the Navy needs, not the ones who look and feel right, but the ones who are right. As the Under Secretary has no fixed tasking, it might be that this becomes his tasking, working in coordination with you.
If everything else succeeds and you fail at this, you will have failed. Make no mistake, this is the most important thing you will do.
