Nascent Strategy Foreshadows Seismic Personnel Changes

Sea Power, Feb 2005 by Barnard, Richard C

While the public spotlight in Washington, D.C., is focused on defense numbers, as usual, relatively scant attention is being given to a nascent personnel management strategy that foretells of fundamental change to the Navy and its people, possibly to include several revolutionary shifts in the service's recruitment and staffing practices.

Under development by the Navy's senior officers, the Human Capital Strategy foreshadows far-reaching effects on the service that potentially dwarf the consequences of the latest budget phenomenon - the $30 billion of Pentagon procurement cuts over six years - that has for weeks galvanized Congress and the defense press corps.

Chief of Naval Operations Adm. Vern Clark has directed his admirals to challenge every assumption "inherent in our current manpower approach." The central pillars of that approach are rooted in the post-World War II era, when the nation had a conscript Navy with a 20-year vested retirement plan as the chief financial incentive for the corps of professionals who ran the service.

The Human Capital Strategy is a work in progress intended "to change our policies and organizational structures - like non-rated billets - that inhibit the growth and development of our people," Clark said in his "Guidance for 2005." He wants nothing less than to inspire "great leaps in human possibilities" throughout the fleet.

To achieve that lofty goal, the service is assessing personnel changes that, if implemented, would create a profoundly different Navy of the future. Among the possibilities:

* A blurring of the roles and responsibilities of officers and senior enlisted personnel;

* Changes in the concept and purpose of shore assignments;

* Improvements in what one admiral called sailors' "work-life balance;"

* The creation of new "on-ramps" and "off-ramps" enabling individuals with high-value skills to enter the Navy for a few years and leave with a substantial sum of money tucked in their personal bank accounts, thanks to a vesting program that would be created;

* Major changes to the ways in which support services - from dentistry to weather forecasting - are provided, saving millions of dollars;

* Force reductions beyond those already announced, as the Navy continues to scrutinize its personnel requirements, transferring many jobs now done by uniformed personnel to civilian employees or contractors.

Navy officials emphasize that these and other possibilities are under assessment. Some will turn out to be nothing more than interesting experiments. Most decisions lie months or years away.

Vice Adm. Gerald. L. Hoewing, chief of naval personnel, said the prospective changes in the wind are a product of the times. The Navy has to deliver new warfighting capabilities at a pace faster than ever before.

"We have changed our business processes to ... drive up the capability performance of our platforms," Hoewing said. The service's Fleet Response Plan, for example, includes shifts in ship maintenance schedules to get more sea days out of the fleet. The idea behind the Human Capital Strategy is to change personnel processes and drive up productivity.

That means challenging virtually every tenet of the service's personnel policies and practices. The Navy will have to reshape much of its culture to accommodate the tectonic shifts in personnel management envisioned for the future. The service has for years been a fast-changing organization. But the ideas being discussed, such as recruiting highly skilled individuals into the Navy for a five- or six-year tour and assigning senior enlisted personnel as division officers aboard destroyers are, for many in today's Navy, a radical departure from the norm.

Two keys to success are good communications with the Navy's rank-and-file and robust testing of new ideas, Hoewing said. Both will be needed as, for example, the Navy takes a long and skeptical look at the whole idea of shore tours.

Sea-shore rotations are "a big cultural thing for our Navy," Hoewing said. "After a sailor has spent a certain amount of time at sea, he has to go to a shore-duty assignment even if the job is worthless. He has to have that break from sea duty," and time to be with his family.

In too many instances, however, the process is a waste of sailors' energy and talents. While on sea duty, sailors become "as technically competent and mission capable as they can possibly be," Hoewing said. However, sailors often then move to jobs ashore that have nothing to do with their specialties. Their skills atrophy and their motivation declines. The Navy spent time and money training them, but much of that investment is lost because of the way sea-shore rotation is done.

"We need to create an opportunity for that sailor to have a work-life balance but be able to stay in his or her skill set," Hoewing said.

One possibility is to assign sailors on shore duty to back up the crews preparing their ships for a sea tour. The additional people would reduce the long hours and stress involved in preparing a ship to get underway.