Tag Archives: U.S. Navy

Shipbuilding

Design, Decide, Forget: Why the Navy Needs a Lessons-Learned Center for Shipbuilding

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By Marcus Jones

In March 2025 testimony before the House Armed Services Committee’s Seapower and Projection Forces Subcommittee, Ronald O’Rourke, naval analyst for the Congressional Research Service since 1984, sharpened an excellent recommendation he has raised over more than a decade: the U.S. Navy should establish a dedicated institutional mechanism for systematically capturing, analyzing, and transmitting lessons learned from its shipbuilding programs.1

Although the U.S. Navy has accumulated an extraordinary body of experience in ship design and construction over more than two centuries, it continues to make avoidable mistakes in major acquisition programs such as proceeding into construction with incomplete designs, integrating immature technologies, projecting unrealistic cost and schedule estimates, and eroding accountability structures once a program becomes politically or industrially “too big to fail.” These errors are not unique to the Navy, but they are particularly consequential in the context of shipbuilding, where program timelines are long, platforms are few and expensive, and consequences are measured in strategic as well as fiscal terms.

O’Rourke’s solution is a “lessons-learned center” for naval shipbuilding: a dedicated, continuous, and institutionalized effort to capture knowledge from past programs, distill it into accessible form, and ensure it informs future design, acquisition, and oversight decisions. The value of such an entity, he argues, would lie in its ability to prevent repeated mistakes, reduce waste, improve program outcomes, and help sustain the Navy’s long-term force design and industrial base goals. It addresses key features of the Navy’s acquisition environment: the discontinuous and generational nature of major shipbuilding programs; the structural fragmentation of knowledge across commands, contractors, and government agencies; and the absence of an educational or doctrinal home for critical institutional memory.

Unlike weapons or aircraft programs, which may see dozens or hundreds of iterations within a single career, major ship classes are often designed and constructed once every 20 or 30 years. The effect of this long cycle time is that most individuals involved in a new class of ships – whether program managers, naval architects, flag officers, or congressional staffers – may have had no direct role in the last one. What should be institutional memory therefore becomes diffuse personal recollection, vulnerable to retirement, reassignment, or obsolescence. Moreover, the knowledge necessary to understand past program outcomes is distributed across a complex web of organizations: Program Executive Offices, NAVSEA and its affiliated labs and centers, shipyards and primes and sub-tier contractors, OPNAV resource sponsors, the Office of the Secretary of Defense, and various congressional committees and watchdogs. Each retains only partial and often incompatible records, and there is little incentive or mechanism for aggregating these into a unified analytic understanding. While internal program reviews, GAO reports, and RAND studies may document lessons after the fact, there has never been an entity within the Navy tasked with curating, synthesizing, or teaching these insights.

Interestingly, O’Rourke does not propose a narrowly bureaucratic mechanism but envisions a range of possible instantiations, from a structured repository of documents to a more active, curriculum- and wargame-integrated enterprise. But what matters in his framing is not form but function: the institutionalization of a reflective capacity for learning from experience and applying that learning prospectively in ways that materially improve outcomes.

Such a capability, if properly implemented, would amount to a kind of strategic memory for the Navy, one able to withstand changes in leadership, budget, and political context, while enabling the service to treat shipbuilding not as a sequence of isolated procurements but as a continuous and evolving system of practice. It is not, therefore, a technocratic fix for acquisition inefficiencies, but a cultural transformation within the Navy’s approach to its own history of design, development, and production. It holds out the prospect that the Navy would not only save money and avoid failure, but reaffirm its preferred identity as a thinking, adaptive, and strategically serious organization. It is this deeper institutional value – far beyond process improvement – that makes O’Rourke’s proposal for a naval shipbuilding lessons-learned center important and long overdue.

Joint Lessons on Lessons Learned

The idea has modest precedent and ample justification. One of the most robust models of institutional learning in the defense sector is the U.S. Army’s Center for Army Lessons Learned (CALL), established in 1985 in response to the operational shortcomings revealed during Operation Urgent Fury in Grenada. CALL’s mission was to systematically collect, analyze, and disseminate operational and tactical lessons. Over time, it became fully integrated into Army doctrine and planning, fielding collection teams, producing analytic bulletins, and shaping professional military education. But of particular relevance to the Navy’s shipbuilding enterprise is a less widely known but equally instructive initiative: the Center for Army Acquisition Lessons Learned (CAALL), housed within the Army Materiel Systems Analysis Activity.2

Established following the 2010 Army Acquisition Review, which cited the absence of a centralized mechanism for analyzing acquisition successes and failures, CAALL provides an authoritative source for acquisition-specific lessons across the Army’s program offices. It operates a web-enabled Acquisition Lessons Learned Portal (ALLP) through which project teams submit concise, structured, and searchable lessons, each tagged by acquisition phase, milestone, cost and schedule impact, and functional category.

These are not vague observations, but distilled from real program experience and embedded in metadata-rich formats that support both searchability and trend analysis. CAALL analysts conduct deep-dive studies of recurring issues, such as documentation burden, Earned Value Management failures, or test duplication, and prepare “just-in-time” lesson packages for project managers entering specific acquisition phases. The Center also engages in outreach, publishes bulletins, curates spotlight topic zones, and supports internal Army decision-making with synthesized data on the top five systemic challenges facing Army programs. It demonstrates that institutional learning is within reach but requires structured data, a deliberate submission pipeline, professional analytical support, and educational integration. It also shows how lessons can be transformed from static reflections into dynamic inputs for decision support, policy revision, and curriculum development. Most importantly, CAALL demonstrates that such a capability can be sustained over time, through leadership endorsement, modest staffing, and the aggressive use of digital tools.

A shipbuilding-focused counterpart – scaled appropriately to the Navy’s size, resourced modestly, and empowered to draw insight from both current and historical programs – would not need to reinvent the wheel. It would only need to learn how others have made their institutions learn.

Other models further underscore the feasibility and necessity of such a capability. The Joint Lessons Learned Program (JLLP) applies a five-phase process – discovery, validation, resolution, evaluation, and dissemination – to lessons arising from joint exercises, operations, and experiments. Its information system, JLLIS, acts as a system of record for tracking, archiving, and analyzing lessons that affect force development and joint capability planning.3

A more technical and directly relevant precedent is found in NASA’s Lessons Learned Information System (LLIS).4 NASA’s LLIS arose from the hard-won awareness, following the Challenger and Columbia disasters, that high-stakes engineering efforts demand not only risk management tools but a durable culture of reflection and improvement. NASA’s system integrates lessons into program planning and design reviews and allows for long-term traceability of decisions and failures. The agency’s approach, emphasizing root cause analysis, organizational memory, and education, aligns with the intended mission of an NSLLC to translate the history of naval shipbuilding experience into anticipatory guidance for future programs. Like NASA, the Navy deals with one-off, bespoke, high-cost platforms with life cycles spanning decades. The discipline required to learn systematically from such endeavors is the same.

Even in the commercial sector, complex system integrators such as Boeing, Airbus, and multinational energy firms have turned to lessons-learned systems, both formal and ad hoc, to analyze catastrophic failures and to course-correct future programs. The Construction Industry Institute’s lessons-learned repositories, used by engineering and construction firms to improve execution of large-scale infrastructure projects, is still another model for post-project analysis and feedback. These efforts are often grounded in shared technical taxonomies, design decision trees, and “causal maps” that allow construction organizations to relate performance outcomes to earlier architectural or managerial choices. The Navy’s shipbuilding community, which is distinguished by even greater system and technological complexities and similar exposure to path-dependent design choices, lacks such a coherent and systematized mechanism. An NSLLC would hold out the promise of that capability.

Of course, these precedents cannot simply be imitated wholesale, but they offer essential lessons in form, function, and value. Each succeeds not by relying on passive documentation and informal processes, but by embedding structured learning into the decision cycles and professional cultures of their organizations. What an NSLLC must do is adapt this logic to the particularities of U.S. naval shipbuilding: its long timelines, institutional fragmentation, industrial dependencies, and strategic visibility. It must provide an analytic and educational platform that helps naval leaders and engineers reason more effectively about cost, capability, risk, and design. It must produce continuity across ship classes and across generations of acquisition professionals. And it must do so not as a retrospective archive alone, but as a living resource embedded in professional education, program governance, and future planning.

Over the past several decades, the U.S. Navy has been the subject of repeated and increasingly urgent calls to establish a formal mechanism for doing just that, all of which have, time and again, failed to take root. While the service has often acknowledged the recurrence of major programmatic mistakes – most notably in high-profile acquisition efforts such as the Littoral Combat Ship, the Zumwalt-class destroyer, and the Ford-class aircraft carrier – it has not developed a durable, institutionalized capacity for engineering and acquisition-oriented organizational learning. This failure has not gone unremarked. A lineage of initiatives, proposals, and critiques – some internal, some external, some aspirational, others postmortem – has identified the absence of such a capacity as a root contributor to the Navy’s persistent shipbuilding troubles.

Perhaps the most compelling of these efforts is a 2022 MIT thesis by naval engineer Elliot Collins, which deserves attention not only for its technical sophistication but for its diagnosis of a deep institutional shortcoming.5 Collins, a Navy officer serving in the DDG(X) design program, observed firsthand what he describes as a structural absence of organizational memory in Navy ship design and acquisition. His thesis, written under the auspices of MIT’s Naval Construction and Engineering program, proposes the creation of a Navy Design Notebook System (NDNS): a digital, structured, and lifecycle-aware framework for recording and organizing design decisions, assumptions, lessons, and engineering rationale across a ship’s development. Drawing inspiration from both Toyota’s engineering notebook practice and the best traditions of systems engineering, Collins lays out a clear taxonomy and architecture for capturing knowledge in real time and rendering it useful across multiple programs and decades. Crucially, the NDNS is not just a data storage concept, but a model for how design reasoning can be institutionalized so that the lessons of one generation are accessible and intelligible to the next.

The significance of Collins’s proposal lies in the lineage of failed or underdeveloped efforts that it implicitly seeks to redeem. As far back as the 1970s, the Navy undertook an informal initiative known as the REEF POINTS series, pamphlet-style reflections on acquisition experience intended to help incoming program officers.6 But the REEF POINTS effort lacked formal backing, consistent authorship, or archival permanence, and it quickly faded as personnel rotated out and no office assumed responsibility for sustaining it. Later assessments, including a 1993 Department of Defense Inspector General report, found that the Navy lacked a centralized system for capturing acquisition lessons learned, and more critically, that it made little practical use of the systems it did possess. Data were gathered, but not applied; observations made, but not preserved; patterns noted, but not internalized.7 The diagnosis repeated itself in a 2002 analytical review commissioned by the Army’s War College, which found that across the Department of Defense, lessons-learned programs often failed not for lack of insight but for lack of organizational stewardship, cultural support, and procedural integration.8

Why, then, despite these longstanding recognitions, has the Navy failed to institutionalize a lasting lessons-learned capability in its shipbuilding enterprise? The reasons are multiple and reflect a misalignment between the operational culture of the Navy and the administrative and engineering demands of ship design. Unlike the tactical communities of naval aviation or undersea warfare – where debriefing, checklist revisions, and iterative training are ingrained – the acquisition enterprise lacks a comparable feedback loop. Moreover, the Navy’s engineering education pathways, from undergraduate technical training to postgraduate systems curricula, have not systematically incorporated acquisition case studies or design failures into their pedagogy. There is no consistent mechanism to bring shipbuilding experience into the classroom, the wargame, or the design studio. Lessons remain tacit, siloed, and anecdotal.

That the Navy has lacked such a capacity for so long is a failure of imagination and institutional design, but it not an irremediable one. The architecture of such a capability already exists in other domains, from NASA to the Army to the commercial nuclear sector. The Navy does not need to invent a solution from whole cloth; it needs to adapt proven models to its own technical and cultural context. What is required is not another ad hoc study or retrospective review, but the establishment of a permanent Naval Shipbuilding Lessons-Learned Center, a durable institutional home where technical memory, engineering reasoning, and acquisition insight can be collected, structured, and applied. The central question, then, is not whether such a center is needed, but what it should consist of, how it should function, and where it should reside.

The Devil in the Details

To be more than a bureaucratic corrective or another forgotten archive, a shipbuilding lessons-learned program must fulfill a set of core functions as intellectually rigorous as the failures it seeks to prevent and not just catalog what has gone wrong in previous programs or indulge in generalities about process improvement. The first and most essential function is to identify and preserve actual lessons: not loose observations or platitudes, but knowledge with clear causal content, derived from real program experience, and supported by traceable evidence.

To qualify as such, a lesson must demonstrate causal specificity: what precisely caused the outcome it describes, and why. It must be replicable or at least transferable across contexts, suggesting how it might inform other ship types or acquisition models. It must be traceable to primary sources – engineering drawings, test data, milestone reviews – so that its logic can be reconstructed and its authority verified. It must be actionable, capable of informing future decisions, whether at the level of design margin, contract structure, or policy architecture. And ideally, it should possess counterfactual depth: the ability to show not only what happened, but what might have happened differently under other choices.

When filtered through this lens, the lessons that matter and that a center must preserve fall broadly into five categories. First are design integration lessons, insights into how complex systems interact within the hull, and how early design assumptions or immature technologies can generate cascading failures, as in the DDG-1000’s power system or the Ford-class’s EMALS launch mechanism. Second are construction and manufacturing lessons, which speak to the translation of design into physical product: the timing of block assembly, the thresholds at which digital coordination outperforms paper-based workflows, the effects of workforce experience on productivity. Third are program management and acquisition lessons (perhaps the most politically fraught) concerning contract type selection, milestone pacing, and the dangers of concurrency. Fourth are industrial base and supply chain lessons, which trace how changes in the broader defense industrial ecosystem—supplier attrition, workforce bottlenecks, fragility in the materials base—constrain program execution in ways the Navy and its private shipbuilders often fail to anticipate. And finally, there are historical, strategic, and doctrinal lessons, which reveal how misalignments between strategic ambition and industrial reality (fleet design concepts that outpace build capacity, for instance) can derail even well-managed programs.

Still, it is not enough just to identify them; lessons must be preserved and organized within a structure that allows them to be used. Here, the Navy can draw on models such as that proposed by Collins in his thesis: a digital, lifecycle-aware knowledge framework that tags and stores design decisions, assumptions, and lessons in a manner that makes them accessible not only to current program staff but to future generations. Such a system would form the backbone of the NSLLC’s information architecture: structured, searchable, phase-referenced, and durable. It would allow engineers working on SSN(X) to understand not just that the Virginia-class succeeded or stumbled in certain areas, but why, under what constraints, and according to which tradeoffs. It would enable program sponsors to distinguish between lessons that were context-specific and those that reflect deeper structural patterns.

Ultimately, the most critical function of the NSLLC, however, is not archival but pedagogical. Lessons, to be meaningful, must be taught as part of a living curriculum, and not simply as dry memoranda or summary slides. The center must work directly with educational institutions to embed lessons into the professional formation of officers, policy officials, engineers, and acquisition professionals. This means developing decision-forcing cases that place students in the shoes of historical program leaders, confronting them with the actual dilemmas and constraints those leaders faced. It means designing wargames and exercises that test tradeoffs in acquisition, industrial surge, and fleet composition. It means seeding capstone projects, research initiatives, and faculty development efforts with questions drawn from real program history. And it means, above all, creating a culture in which experience is not simply remembered but used as a guide to reasoning, as a check against institutional hubris or forgetfulness, and as a source of comparative advantage in a strategic environment where time and resources are finite. Finally, the Center must function diagnostically on behalf of Navy decision-makers, as a resource for the review of future program plans, bringing to bear its corpus of structured knowledge to identify early warning signs of known failure modes, or to highlight opportunities for constructive borrowing across ship classes. This is not a matter of punitive oversight, but of anticipatory guidance and bringing past reasoning to bear on present decisions in a way that deepens accountability and reduces risk.

What this amounts to is a knowledge institution, not in the narrow academic sense but in the most operationally vital sense of the term. The NSLLC would exist to ensure that the U.S. Navy no longer builds its ships without memory. It would translate past pain into future prudence, and costly failure into usable foresight. And it would mark, at last, the point at which naval shipbuilding began to behave not just as a procurement function, but as a learning system worthy of the stakes it bears.

The Way Ahead

What would such a center look like in practice? If the value of a Naval Shipbuilding Lessons-Learned Center lies in the integrity and usability of its knowledge, then its organizational structure must be equally deliberate. It should not replicate the diffuse and stovepiped landscape of existing program oversight offices, but rather bridge engineering, acquisition, policy, and education communities. And in keeping with the realities of today’s defense fiscal environment, it must be lean, digitally enabled, and architected from the start to minimize overhead. The NSLLC should be organized as a small, hybrid analytical and educational unit with as small a group of affiliated personnel as circumstances permit, including naval engineers with experience in major design and production programs; acquisition professionals familiar with contracting and program management dynamics; historians of technology and naval policy who can trace institutional lineages and doctrinal consequences; and digital knowledge architects to manage its structured repository and analytic tools. Core activities would be augmented by short-term fellows – rotating billets for officers, civilians, or academics on sabbatical or detail – who would conduct targeted case studies, contribute to curriculum development, or lead diagnostic reviews of current programs. Rather than attempt to recreate or replace existing program data flows, the Center should connect to them and draw from NAVSEA, PEO Ships and Submarines, CRS, GAO, and DoD IG reports, but synthesize across them with the purpose of creating pedagogically and analytically coherent insights.

To reduce cost and footprint, the Center must leverage digital tools aggressively. A cloud-based digital architecture, modeled in part on the NDNS framework, would form the heart of the operation: a searchable, metadata-tagged, phase-referenced archive of lessons that supports analysis, instruction, and red-teaming of future programs. Visualization tools like interactive timelines, decision trees, and traceability matrices should be prioritized over staff-intensive publishing or editorial operations. Whenever possible, the Center’s materials should be reusable across formats: a single case study might underpin a midshipman seminar, an acquisition wargame, and a policy memo to ASN(RDA). In this sense, the Center is less a physical institute than a virtual and modular capability: one that enables reflection, instruction, and anticipatory decision support wherever shipbuilding is debated or taught.

As to its location, the author will admit to a conflict-of-interest, being a longtime member of the U.S. Naval Academy faculty. It may, therefore, sound parochial to suggest that the NSLLC be housed at Annapolis. That said, there are good reasons, symbolic and practical, why the Naval Academy may be a fitting institutional home. The Academy is the Navy’s enduring schoolhouse, the place where generations of officers are introduced not just to the fleet, but to the long arc of naval experience. It offers a rare confluence of technical education, historical reflection, and leadership formation.

Moreover, it sits proximate to the Washington-area institutions with which the NSLLC would regularly interact – NAVSEA, the Navy labs and warfare centers, OPNAV and the Secretariat organization, and the various acquisition and oversight bodies headquartered in the capital region. Perhaps most importantly, the Academy is a place not just of training, but of memory. To locate the Center there would signal that lessons are not just compliance artifacts or after-action musings, but a core component of professional identity. It would allow the Center’s work to be integrated directly into engineering coursework, capstone design, fleet seminars, and acquisition electives. And it would give midshipmen, from the beginning of their careers, access to a body of knowledge that has existed until now only in fragments.

But what matters is not the administrative chain but the Center’s function: to make memory usable, to make learning permanent, and to help the Navy move from a culture of crisis improvisation to one of cumulative, adaptive competence. Wherever it is housed, a Naval Shipbuilding Lessons-Learned Center should embody the values it seeks to cultivate: frugality, clarity, and strategic discipline. And in doing so, it may just help the Navy build not only better ships, but a better institution.

Dr. Marcus Jones is an associate professor in the history department at the United States Naval Academy

Endnotes

1. Ronald O’Rourke (11 March 2025), “Statement before the Armed Services Committee Seapower and Projection Forces Subcommittee, U.S. House of Representatives, Hearing on ‘The State of U.S. Shipbuilding’” (Congressional Research Service Report 7-5700) pp.1-3.

2. Iracki, Jill, 2014. “Army acquisition lessons learned,” Defense AT&L (September–October 2014) pp.36-40.

3. Thomas, J.T. and Schultz, D.L. (2015), “Lessons about Lessons: Growing the Joint Lessons Learned Program.” Joint Forces Quarterly 79, pp.113-120.

4. Ganopol, A., Oglietti, M., Ambrosino, A., Patt, F., Scott, A., Hong, L. and Feldman, G., 2017. “Lessons learned: an effective approach to avoid repeating the same old mistakes.” Journal of Aerospace Information Systems, 14(9), pp.483-492; Also Miller, S.B., 2005. “Lessons Learned or Lessons Noted: Knowledge Management in NASA.” In ASTD 2005 Research-to-Practice Conference Proceedings (p. 140).

5. Collins, E.J., 2022. “A Method for Organized Institutional Learning in the Navy Shipbuilding Community” (Doctoral dissertation, Massachusetts Institute of Technology).

6. Wellborn Jr, R.M., 1976. “Formulation and Use of Lessons Learned in NAVSEASYSCOM Acquisition Programs” (Project Report, Defense Systems Management College)

7. Reed, D.E., Gimble, T.F., Koloshey, J.L., Ward, E.J. and Alejandro, J.K., 1993. “Acquisition-Type Lessons-Learned Programs Within the Military Departments” (No. IG-DOD-93173).

8. Snider, K.F., Barrett, F.J. and Tenkasi, R., 2002. “Considerations in acquisition lessons-learned system design.” Acquisition Review Quarterly, 9(1), pp.67-84.

Featured Image: The USS Harvey C. Barnum Jr. under construction at Bath Iron Works in July 2023. (Photo via Bath Iron Works)

Force Generation

Bringing Command and Accountability Back to Surface Fleet Maintenance

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By Capt. John Cordle, USN (ret.) and Capt. Holman Agard, USN

There are times when “the way things are” are no longer acceptable. Radical change, with incremental and careful execution, is urgently needed within the US Navy’s Surface Ship Repair Maintenance enterprise to rectify the shortcomings of two decades of well-intentioned initiatives that rendered a majority of Surface ships neglected and ill-equipped for combat.

The problem is not wholly maintenance related – the contributing issues came about as an aggregate result of the Navy’s increased operational tempo since the start of the Global War on Terror, changes in Surface Force manning models, and disputes with Congress over the decommissioning of certain classes of ships, among other things. Recent operations in the Red Sea today are eerily reminiscent of the world in 2002 when we stretched the Navy thin to answer the nation’s call – and paid a price for decades. A recent GAO report highlighted the impact of manning shortages to ship crew’s ability to perform corrective maintenance; over 75 percent of Executive Officers stated that it was “difficult or very difficult” to complete required corrective maintenance. To address the lack of sustained success, and avoid the missteps of the past, the Surface Force and NAVSEA should employ a multi-tiered approach primarily centered on retaking control of shipboard maintenance to get us fair in the channel again.

2002-2010: MSMO and Management Failure 

The story begins with the war in the Middle East in 2003. For the first time in decades, the Navy’s answer to the nation’s call to action, pushed the fleet forward, and kept it there, using its Tomahawks and Marines to enable an immensely successful land campaign. It was not by coincidence that the president chose an aircraft carrier as a platform to announce “Mission Accomplished.” The cost of that prolonged surge, however, was the deferral of a mountain of maintenance that had been scheduled for the ships and then canceled. The Navy needed to invent a way to get those ships back in service quickly and efficiently. Working with industry, the Navy developed a plan that would leverage the strengths of certain shipyards for certain types of maintenance and provide stability for the workforce by bundling multiple ships of the same class together with the idea that this would result in money savings and efficiencies in the process. This plan, called MSMO (Multi-Ship-Multi-Option) plan was implemented in the early 2000’s.

As envisioned, this plan was a good idea, however naval officers know very little about the business world. There was an implicit assumption in the execution of the MSMO plan that the Navy would save money by encouraging the industry to voluntarily decrease their bottom line. Read that again. It was never going to happen, and it didn’t happen. As a contractor following my retirement, I learned that ship repair business is just that – a business. Right or wrong, income is predicated on the Navy spending money to fix ships – any significant efficiencies in that process result in less money spent, and thus less profit. Less profit makes stockholders unhappy and drives businesses out of business. 

At the same time, the Navy decided to save manpower dollars for other programs such as the Optimal Manning and Top Six Rolldown initiatives, which reduced shipboard manning and mandated the dissolution of the Ships Intermediate Maintenance Activities (SIMAs), which had been around since the early 1980s. In fact, the GAO reports that the backlog of incomplete maintenance exceeded any savings from manpower cuts that were instituted as part of Optimal Manning and other reductions in shipboard manning.

The SIMA dissolution was especially problematic since SIMAs were primarily designed to be focused on two things: leveraging Sailors on shore duty to conduct relatively minor and mid-level repairs using the expertise gained at sea and training shipboard Sailors in their technical rating. The elimination of SIMAs had a second impact: it meant all work had to go to contractors at a much higher price. While it may be true that the cost of SIMA was higher than the projected cost of giving the work to private industry – SIMA was cheaper only if you did not consider the actual cost of SIMA, e.g. salaries, facilities, etc., the Sailor cost was already spent, and the training and experience of working on equipment in-rate on shore duty is difficult to put a price tag on. 

An additional phenomenon I observed was that the cadre of government planners who performed availability and maintenance planning and preparations were released and hired by contractors as this process moved to industry under the Multi Ship Multi Option (MSMO) strategy. This did not change the net number of personnel in this area, but it made the cost and scope of those with this skill set a bit more difficult to track and quantify, and may have added a cost to the process as well. In parallel, the Navy drastically reduced the footprint of an organization called Supervisor of Shipbuilding, who was basically the “overseer” designed to hold the ship builders and ship maintainers honest and uphold standards.

Around this timeframe (roughly 2007-2010), another dynamic came and went: Ship Class Squadrons, or CLASSRONs. Modeled after the Naval Aviation Enterprise, these groups were formed around each ship class and were given control of maintenance funding, acquisition processes, and current readiness. Led by sequential major commanders with experience in a specific ship class, they consolidated processes, lessons learned, assessments, and maintenance under one individual – wearing a command pin. They also tracked Class Advisories and major modifications across a focused subset of ships. As a cruiser commanding officer, I (Cordle) was overwhelmingly satisfied with the support received by the class advocate. In my specific case, the Cruiser CLASSRON Commander had held my job before, and therefore understood it.

The CLASSRON Commander had the time and bandwidth to deal with roughly 20 ships compared with the current model where one Engineering Duty Officer Captain has to process all of the maintenance information associated with over 100 ships on each coast. The CLASSRON initiative was not given enough “bake time” and would have likely produced significant dividends if left in place. This occurred in 2012 with the justification that it created a parallel C2 process and muddied the waters with respect to funding.

In an effort to improve oversight, Commander Navy Regional Maintenance Center, (CNRMC), was established in 2010 to standardize and oversee the Regional Maintenance Centers, whose processes were perceived to have drifted over the years. The goal was to place a flag officer on the waterfront with the supporting staff to police the maintenance process. While initially successful, the center of gravity of that organization has shifted to Washington and away from the waterfront. And in another manning decision, the Navy combined two flag positions, one for ship maintenance and one for modernization, placing arguably the two most complex functions in the Navy enterprise on the shoulders of one junior Flag officer. From this author’s experience, this task is too great for one individual, no matter how Herculean his or her efforts could be – they will always be pulled in two directions – one toward, and one away from the waterfront.

2011-2014: The Trends Worsen 

In the early 2010s, the VADM Balisle report and subsequent GAO findings were released, indicating a dangerous trend of neglect within the Surface Force. As a result, the Navy looked to reverse course in Sailor maintenance, manpower/manning models, and Officer training – albeit this was a slow change. As an outcrop of these reports and the associated action items, the Navy implemented the Surface Engineering Maintenance Planning Project, SURFMEPP, designed to focus on life cycle maintenance, act as the “conscience of the Navy” to get ships to expected service life, which has been extended several times from 35 to 45 years over the same period. 

With 2013 entered sequestration, government shutdowns, and funding shortfalls across the enterprise. During my time (Cordle) on active duty, I sat at the front table of Naval Surface Forces Atlantic time and again and signed documents that cut significant lifecycle maintenance from Surface ship availabilities because the money was not available.

To be sure, the confluence of these factors did make the MSMO more efficient, more flexible, and able to maximize the work completed, but it did not save money. The other unfortunate side effect was that a lack of rigor and uniformed oversight on the Navy side allowed companies to take advantage of the situation thereby increasing profits, although they arguably used much of the extra income to reinvest and try to grow, train, and pay their workforce in a standard capitalist model (that we laud in most other applications) – but with the Navy as their only paying customer. In the end, industry conducted themselves like any capitalist business that has to make money to stay viable. It is worth noting as background perhaps, but even before sequestration the lack of stability in the funding lines created considerable volatility in the repair community even under MSMO – the long-standing practice of underfunding surface ship maintenance and then using mid-year plus ups to close the gap to meet requirements generates its own uncertainty every fiscal year, as I experienced in my short tenure as a Type Commander Maintenance Officer in 2011 (Cordle). 

Thus, the MSMO financing vehicle coupled with the elimination of SIMAs, which was initially hailed as a process designed to get the most work done (albeit at a premium price), fell victim to economics, in that the expected savings never materialized. As a result, in the decade that was the 2005 to 2015, the Surface Navy gave away its ability to fix itself and took out title loans on its ships in the form of a maintenance backlog to the tune of billions of dollars. Add to this the compounding “interest” of fewer Sailors with less training conducting shipboard self-evaluation, and you get the expected result: a rather large volume of unaddressed maintenance discrepancies aboard ships.

2015-2020:Replacing MSMO with MACMO

About halfway through this journey, in the 2010s after one or two complete change outs of the key leaders who brought MSMO to the table, a new narrative developed: civilian contractors are making too much money and keeping the ships longer to increase their bottom line. Unfortunately, rather than conduct a holistic self-analysis of the system, the Navy abruptly scrapped the MSMO concept in favor of a firm-fixed price, restrictive process that allowed a relatively small set of contractors to bid on large availabilities individually and called it another name bathed in obfuscation: the Multi Award Contract Multi Option, or MACMO, process.

Designed to cure the ills of the MSMO process by driving competition and accountability into the system, this was another good idea, but as Admiral (ret) Jesse Wilson once said, “whenever you create a new process you create new problems”. Since this was a fairly classic “top down” initiative, there was not much of an appetite for pushback or critique and not much time to shift the processes to support it. Several established and complex processes were taken on by the government, including the purchasing of long lead time materials and the complex and detailed planning process, without a robust experience base or training program in place to support it. The learning curve for this change was a steep one, and the Navy paid a price in planning and material delays during the transition to this new process.

A 2017 GAO report captured the precise cost of these manning decisions, in terms of unexecuted maintenance, in billions of dollars and millions of man-days.1 The graphs are eye-popping and relevant even today.

Manpower Savings were more than offset by increased maintenance costs (Source: GAO)

Now came some interesting system dynamics that while predicted, created a new set of issues when juxtaposed against the changes previously mentioned. First, the Arleigh Burke-class Destroyers (DDGs) and the Harpers Ferry-class Landing Ship, Dock ships (LSDs) entered their midlife periods, forcing maintenance availabilities to extend beyond the previous 3 to 5-month durations into durations of 12-18 months. This length change required more planning, more parts, and a larger, better trained workforce in industry, all of which were sub-optimized by the transition to MACMO.

Secondly, the Navy also revived the Coast Wide Bid process that surprised many when it actually happened to USS RAMAGE and again to USS SHOUP a few years later. Navy Manpower and manning management processes in both the active duty and civilian side are not aligned to support such endeavors.

Thirdly, Congress and the Navy treated the Cruisers and LSDs as chips in a game of poker, alternately placing them on decommissioning lists, cutting their funding to near zero, laying them up, and then trying to bring them back after a bluff has been called. This resulted in huge sunk costs, delays in critical repairs, not to mention the impact on manning and morale of crews that were “strung along” for years in a decommissioning mindset. Like trying to restore the old Ford truck that one would find in their grandfather’s pasture, this effort has grown in cost and magnitude far beyond original estimates, sucking money away from other endeavors. Delays in designing a replacement for these capital ships, which are pretty awesome warfighters, have resulted in their being kept around, with the quandary that no capital ship is as capable, nor as expensive to maintain, as our aged cruisers.

2020-Present: The Consequences 

A 2020 GAO report found that “since shifting to the Multiple Award Contract-Multi Order (MACMO) contracting approach for ship maintenance work in 2015, the Navy has increased competition opportunities, gained flexibility to ensure quality of work, and limited cost growth, but schedule delays persist. During this period, 21 of 41 ship maintenance periods, called availabilities, for major repair work cost less than initially estimated, and average cost growth across the 41 availabilities was 5 percent. Schedule outcomes were less positive, and Navy regional maintenance centers varied in their performance.2 This is shown in the graph below:

Schedule delays under MAC-MO Contracting (Source: GAO)

Admiral Galinis, who later commanded NAVSEA as a 3-star, when asked at a 2015 Fleet Maintenance Seminar what changes the MACMO would bring around, he said “two things we will lose are flexibility and teamwork.” In retrospect, he was correct. Unfortunately, they were lost at a time when they were much needed. Another ingredient added to this complex system of setbacks was the ramp up of operational employment based on growing threats in the Pacific and in the Arabian Gulf. This resulted in policies of maintenance deferral and reduced certification requirements, all well documented in the Comprehensive Review of 2017.

Righting the Ship

In a 2019 article, David Larter described Navy Maintenance as a “dumpster fire.” While we do not fully agree with this dark assessment, it is definitely in need of a good overhaul.3 Surface Navy leaders have taken some action to help put us in a good place, including:

1. Surface Type Commanders have established a Post-Major Command Surface Warfare O-6 billet to oversee all aspects of the maintenance domain. This brings experience, oversight, and seniority to the process and is starting to pay dividends. 

2. Establishment of Surface Readiness Groups – this initiative (which is not new) theoretically restores the positive attributes found in CLASSRONs. Under the Surface Readiness Group model, all ships in the Maintenance Phase are aligned under one Commodore per homeport, allowing a singular focus on maintenance and freeing up the deployed Commodores to focus on warfighting.

These are great steps to remedy the problems. Imagine if a Ford F-150 production line had to deal with a change to baseline of about 30 percent – this would be a flawed business model. Yet, this is what we ask the maintenance community to deal with every time a ship enters a yard period. To address this dilemma, the Surface Force needs to improve its scope of work planning for upcoming surface availabilities. Additionally, there should be more margin built into the schedule and price of each availability. Availabilities should start with a measure of float built in, and the Surface Force should resist the urge to plan against this float. Further, the Surface Force should acknowledge that there will be increases to scope and new work, instead of ignoring it or pretending it will not manifest. By leveraging options, frontloads, class maintenance plans, and flexible contracting, it must be possible to fund and plan for both long-term maintenance and current repairs. Things on a ship break all the time, and the process needs to be proactive vice reactive. 

Additionally, the Navy should consider the following measures: 

1. Treat this like the crisis that it is. Assemble a team of the most experienced people and challenge them to come up with a plan but force them to take off their functional “armor” (acquisition, modernization, maintenance, contracting, etc.) to collaborate on a new plan that is innovative, integrated, and responsible. This team should be challenged to openly discuss the best and worst parts of each model from MSMO to MACMO, Firm Fixed Price and Cost-Plus contracts. The narrative that “the utterance of the word MSMO will result in career suicide” is not helpful here.

2. Restore SIMA as a separate command. SIMAs are currently resident within Code 900 at the Regional Maintenance Centers. This construct sub optimizes SIMA’s visibility, employment, and effectiveness. Command is command; and putting a Shore Command Pin on the Commander of Ship Intermediate Maintenance would open additional command opportunities to the Engineering Duty Officer community – and consequently be good for the ships and Sailors.

3. Empower the local shipyard. Currently a Shipyard Commander has relatively no tools or levers to punish or incentivize a lead maintenance activity during a Shipyard availability. For instance, if an LMA neglects to conduct a repair within a prescribed timeline, or the work is not completed to the level of quality that it should, the shipyard has to spend exorbitant amounts of time, resources, and money to present an iron-clad case to fiscally punish the LMA. In many cases, it is more cost effective to not pursue punishment. Conversely, the Shipyard Commander has little to no way of rewarding a LMA who does a job well (on time and/or under budget). Consideration should be given to allowing the Shipyard Commander, with delegation to pertinent Project Managers, to fiscally reward or withhold a relatively small percentage of money at their level. The shipyard represents the “tactical ground commander” and observes many violations in Shipboard maintenance, and has very little ability to affect immediate change.

4. Fix the planning phase of major availabilities. On average, the amount of work during a major availability changes by roughly 30 percent after it begins. This corresponds to a range of 2,000 and 20,000 Requests for Contract Changes (RCCs) depending on the length of the maintenance period. One solution is a “Business Model Cost and Schedule” approach that was published in the Naval Engineer’s Journal in 2021.4

5. Revive the good parts of the MSMO strategy to include focusing certain repair yards on certain classes of ships and providing bundled ship contracts over a period of years to allow consistency, gain some efficiencies, and train a workforce for the nation’s future. This approach does not have to be unitary in its contracting strategy but could include a more flexible pricing process described in #1 above. The contracting officers will have issues with this, but we cannot continue to build the maintenance process around the contracting process instead of around the Fleet. Many in the commercial industry have shared that a predictable and dependable income stream are critical to allowing industry to train the workforce and invest in infrastructure.  

6. Leverage the goodness of processes like the Continuous Intermediate Availability (CIA) model conducted in Rota, Spain, which is similar to the old 13-week availabilities, where TYCOM-level maintenance is accomplished in short, focused maintenance periods. This could be folded into the OFRP, perhaps at the beginning of the Sustainment Phase right after deployment, and the ship return to service for a while before starting maintenance. To be sure, this initiative will have to be balanced against the need of the Operational Commander.

7. Split the Flag Officer billets for maintenance and modernization. There isn’t a single root cause for many of the current issues, nor is the problem with any particular individual. However, the move to put too many decisions on a single individual’s plate was a singularly bad move and needs to be fixed quickly.

8. Move the commander of CNRMC to Norfolk, and place a deputy in San Diego. The vision of CNRMC that was put in place by USFF in 2010 was to place a Flag Officer on the waterfront overseeing ship’s maintenance. That fundamental tenet has been lost but could be regained relatively simply. The new modernization Flag Officer can satiate the appetite in Washington for information, while their maintenance counterpart can get “boots on the ground” and start extracting ships from the yards with a crowbar instead of a 300-mile towing hawser. Of note, a similar move was just implemented with the creation of a Flag Officer billet to supervise the nuclear shipyards in Norfolk, Virginia.

9. Replicate the Supervisor of Shipbuilding model from the nuclear side at the regional maintenance centers. Empower them to provide oversight, accountability, and rigor to the ship repair process. Put teeth back into the process. Rewrite the NAVSEA Standard Item 009-060 to require contractors to provide a detailed, integrated plan that can be graphed, tracked and used to hold them to account. If there is one thing I hear over and over from Commanding Officers in the yards, it is “who is holding anyone accountable?” You can figure out the answer. No one.

10. Bring back a deployable ship repair capability to replace the Yellowstone Class Destroyer Tenders by installing a full machine repair capability (including Additive Manufacturing) into one Expeditionary Sea Base (ESB) class ship in each theater. These multi-purpose platforms have lots of space and could probably support a modular solution as well. Manning could be surged from the Regional Maintenance Centers in time of need.

This is not an argument to completely revert to the old way of doing things. This article is formulated from not just our own experiences, but multiple peers who (at least to some extent) feel the same way. One shared, “Firm Fixed Price is a great model for the commercial industry or Maritime Sealift Command, for basic maintenance on ships that are not all that complex; it is exactly the wrong model for complex warships that require expertise, flexibility, and integration – like Navy ships.”

There were many sins (including some in which at least one of us was complicit), all well intentioned, and many unavoidable over the years. But by scrapping programs that used to work, and failing to look for another solution, we will all simply admire the problem as more and more of the Fleet is tied to the pier when it is needed most. Instead, the Surface Warfare Community needs to take control of its own destiny, help the Engineering Duty Officer community do its core job, assume responsibility for the maintenance of its ships, increase command opportunity, and inject rigor, decisiveness, and accountability into a system where these words have gone out of style.

One key component of any strategy is to “take a fix.” The 2022 GAO report on maintenance backlog provides a stunning insight into the lack of accuracy and estimating the value of deferred maintenance. The amount provided to the GAO was literally off by a factor of 10 ($1.8 billion vs $180 million).5 This gap was then addressed by accelerating decommissioning of multiple ships which collectively represented about 80% of the gap. Unfortunately this approach addresses the immediate problem without addressing the root cause; its effect will be temporary and cannot be repeated. As today’s Carrier Strike Groups and Amphibious Readiness Groups engage in global combat operations unparalleled in modern history, with even less ships than we had during Operation Iraqi Freedom, the same forces at work in 2002 are starting to become evident, with deployments stretching to an average of over 220 days and no end in sight. Unless something changes, we are likely to find ourselves in the same position 10 years from now.

Captain John Cordle, USN, retired from the Navy in 2013 after 30 years of service. He commanded the USS Oscar Austin (DDG-79) and USS San Jacinto (CG-56), earning a Bronze Star in 2003 and the U.S. Navy League’s Captain John Paul Jones Award for Inspirational Leadership in 2010. He is a Plankowner on CVN 75 and CVN 77, where he served as Reactor Officer. He received the SNA Literary Award in 2014 and 2019, as well as the 2019 ASNE Solberg Award and U. S. Naval Institute Author of the Year Award for his contributions to fatigue management in the United States Navy. In addition to serving as Chief of Staff for Commander, Naval Surface Force Atlantic (SURFLANT), he also served as a Program Manager for Maintenance University at Hunnington Ingalls Industries and as a GS 14 Human Factors Engineer at SURFLANT, where he was recognized with the Navy Meritorious Civilian Service Award. Now retired, he is focused on leveraging his life experience to help develop future leaders.

Captain Holman Agard, USN, has a combined 27 years of service between the Enlisted and Officer ranks. He currently is serving as the Commanding Officer of USS SHOUP (DDG 86) and the Integrated Air and Missile Defense Commander for the GEORGE WASHINGTON Carrier Strike Group (CSG-5) based in Yokosuka, Japan. Previously, he served in OPNAV N96 as the Destroyers Branch Head and Ships Deputy. He also was the Executive Officer and Commanding Officer in USS HOPPER (DDG 70). He has experienced extensive maintenance availabilities in all six ships he has been stationed on.

References

1. Actions Needed to Ensure Proper Size and Composition of Ship Crews, GAO, May 2017

2. Navy Ship Maintenance: Evaluating Pilot Program Outcomes Could Inform Decisions to Address Persistent Schedule Challenges, GAO 20-370, May 2020

3. Larter, David, Navy Maintenance is a Dumpster Fire, The Drift, April 2019

4. Cordle and South, Standardized Surface Ship CNO Availability Progress Metrics for Surface Ships, Naval Engineer’s Journal, September 2021

5. Navy Ship Maintenance: Evaluating Pilot Program Outcomes Could Inform Decisions to Address Persistent Schedule Challenges, GAO 20-370, May 2020

Featured Image: The U.S. Navy guided-missile destroyer USS Ramage in a floating dry dock at the Norfolk Naval Shipyard, Va., on May 25, 2012.

History

The Story of William Garrison Payne, The U.S. Navy’s first Black Commissioned Officer

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By Reuben Keith Green

The hidden story of the U.S. Navy’s first Black commissioned officer spans five decades, three continents, two world wars, two wives from different countries, and one hell of a journey for an Indiana farm boy. For mutual convenience, both he and the United States Navy pretended that he wasn’t Black. This story had almost been erased from history until the determined efforts of one of his extended relatives, Jeff Giltz of Hobart, Indiana, brought it to light.1

From before World War I until after World War II, leaders in the U. S. government and Navy would make decisions affecting the composition of enlisted ranks for more than a century and that still echo in officer demographics today. Memories of maelstroms past reverberate in today’s discussions regarding diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI), affirmative action in the military academies, meritocracy over so-called “DEI Hires,” who is and is not Black, and in renaming – or not – bases and ships that honor relics of America’s discriminatory and exclusionary past. Before Doris “Dorie” Miller received the Navy Cross for his actions on December 7th, 1941, and long before the Navy commissioned the Golden Thirteen in 1945, Lieutenant (junior grade) William Lloyd Garrison Payne was awarded the Navy Cross for the hazardous duty of commanding the submarine chaser USS SC-83 in 1918. While his Navy Cross citation is sparse, the hazards of hunting submarines from a 110-foot wooden ship were considerable. His personal and professional history, still emerging though it may be, reveals much about the nation and Navy he served and deserves to be revealed in full. Understanding the racial and political climate during which he received his commission is crucial to understanding the importance of his place in Navy history.

Fig. 1: USS SC 83 underway. Lieutenant (junior grade) Payne was awarded the Navy Cross for his service as commanding officer. (Photo credit: National WWI Museum collection 2012.98, via subchaser.org.)

Quietly Breaking Barriers

William Lloyd Garrison Payne was born on Christmas day in 1881 to a White Indiana woman and a Black man, and completed forty years of military service by 1940 – before volunteering for more service in World War II. Garrison Payne’s virtual anonymity, despite his groundbreaking status as the first Black naval officer and a Navy Cross recipient, stemmed from pervasive racial discrimination, manifested in political and public opposition (notably by white supremacist politicians like James K. Varner and John C. Stennis), and internal resistance within the Navy. His long anonymity exemplifies a failure to learn from the past.2

Fig. 02. Ensign Payne (seated), in command of USS SC-83. (Photo credit: subchasers.org.)

Garrison Payne, or W.G. Payne, served in or commanded several vessels and had multiple shore assignments during his five-decade career. His officer assignments include commanding the aforementioned USS SC-83 and serving aboard the minesweeper USS Teal (AD-23), the collier USS Neptune (AC-8), submarine chasers Eagle 19 and Eagle 31, which he may have also commanded, and troop ship USS Zeppelin. He had a lengthy record as a Chief Boatswain’s Mate (Chief Bos’n).

Fig. 03: 1917 North Carolina Service Card, thirty-three year-old Chief Boatswain’s Mate Garrison Payne was discharged from the Navy and immediately “Appointed Officer” (Commissioned) on 15 December 1917 while assigned to the USS Neptune (AC-8) at Naval Base, Plymouth, England. (Credit: Public record in the public domain.)

After his commissioning in Plymouth, he presumably stayed in England and later took command of the USS SC-83 after she transited from New London, Connecticut to Plymouth, England in May 1918.

Garrison Payne took Rosa Manning, a widow with a young daughter, as his first wife in 1916. The 1910 North Carolina Census records indicate that she was the daughter of Sami and Annie Hall, both listed as Black in the census records. Later census records list Rosa Payne as White, and using her mother’s maiden name (Manning), as she did on their 1916 marriage license. His race was also indicated as White on the license, and his parents listed as Jackson Payne and Ruth Myers (Payne), his maternal grandparents.

Fig. 04: Garrison Payne and an unidentified woman, possibly his second wife Mary Margaret Payne, presumably taken in the latter 1920s, location unknown. Courtesy of Jeff Giltz.

In the photo above, Payne, wearing the rank of lieutenant, stands beside an unidentified Black woman, who may be his wife. He brought back Mary Margaret Duffy from duty in Plymouth, England on the USS Zeppelin, a troop transport, in 1919, listing her on ship documents as his wife. He used various first names and initials to apparently help obscure his identity.

Jeff Giltz of Hobart, Indiana is the great grandson of Gertrude “Gertie” Giltz, Garrison’s half-sister by the same mother, Mary Alice Payne. She was unmarried at the time of his birth in 1881. Her father, Jack Payne was the son of a Robert Henley Payne, who traveled first from Virginia to Kentucky, and then settled in Indiana, may have been mixed race. During the U.S. Census, census takers wrote down the race of household occupants as described by the head of the household. Many light-skinned Blacks thereby entered into White society by “turning White” during a census year. It is unknown when Garrison made his “transition” from Black or “Mulatto” to White.

None of Garrison’s half-siblings, who were born to his mother after she married Lemuel Ball, share his dark complexion. When she married, Garrison was sent to live nearby with his uncle, William C. Payne, whose wife was of mixed race. In the 1900 Census, Garrison is listed as a servant in his uncle’s household, not his nephew.

Taken together – Garrison Payne’s dark skin, the fact that the identity of his father was never publicly revealed and that he was born out of wedlock with no birth certificate issued, that he was named for a famous White Boston abolitionist and newspaper publisher,3 that his White mother gave him her last name instead of his father’s, that he was sent away after his mother married, and the oral history of his family – all point to the likelihood that Garrison Payne was Black.

In the turn of the century Navy, individuals were sometimes identified as “dark” or “dark complexion” with no racial category assigned. Payne self-identified as White on both of his known marriage licenses. According to Jeff Giltz, there are many references to Garrison Payne in online genealogy, military records and newspaper sites, but none appear on the Navy Historical and Heritage Command (NHHC) website. His military service likely began in 1900.

Rolling Back Racial Progress during Modernization

In his 1978 book Manning the Navy: The Development of a Modern Naval Enlisted Force, 1898-1940, former U.S. Naval Academy Associate Professor Frederick S. Harrod discusses several of the policies enacted during that period that helped shaped today’s Navy.4 He describes how the famously progressive Secretary of the Navy (1913-1919) Josephus Daniels, otherwise notorious for banning alcohol from ships, brought Jim Crow policies to a previously partially integrated Navy (enlisted ranks only) and banned the first term enlistment of Negro personnel in 1919, a ban that would last until 1933. No official announcement of the unofficial ban was made, but Prof. Harrod asserts that it was instituted by an internal Navy Memorandum from Commander Randall Jacobs, who later issued the Guide to Command of Negro Personnel, NAVPERS-15092, in 1945. President Woodrow Wilson and Daniels were both staunch segregationists and White supremacists. The Navy became more rather than less racially restrictive during the Progressive Era because of the lasting effects of both Secretary Daniels and President Wilson.

The number of Negro personnel dropped from a high of 5,668 in June of 1919 – 2.26% of the total enlisted force – to 411 in June of 1933, a total of 0.55% of the total force of 81,120 enlisted men. Most of the Black sailors were in the Stewards Branch, and most were low ranking with no authority over White sailors, despite their many years of service and experience. Those very few “old salts” outside that branch, like Payne, were difficult to assign, as the Navy did not want them supervising White sailors, despite their expertise and seniority.

Following his temporary promotion to the commissioned officer ranks – rising as far as lieutenant on 01 July 1919 – Garrison Payne was eventually reverted to Chief Bos’n, until he was given an honorific, or “tombstone”, promotion to the permanent grade of lieutenant in June of 1940, just before his retirement. Payne died on 14 October 1952 in a Naval Hospital in San Diego California, and was interred in nearby Fort Rosacrans National Cemetery on 20 October 1952, in Section P, Plot P 0 2765 – not in the Officer’s Sections A or B, despite being identified as a lieutenant on his headstone. Garrison Payne’s hometown newspaper’s death notice indicates that he was the grandson of Jack Payne, with no mention of his parents. A handwritten notation on his Internment Control Form indicates that he enlisted on 31 March 1943, making him a veteran of both world wars, as also reflected on his headstone. His service in World War II – as a volunteer 62-year-old retiree – deserves further investigation.

Fig. 05: Garrison Payne’s final resting place, in Section P, Plot P 0 2765 of Fort Rosacrans National Cemetery. Courtesy of U.S. Department of Veteran’s Affairs, Veteran’s Legacy Memorial.

The Navy reluctantly commissioned the Golden Thirteen in 1945 only because of political pressure from the White House and from civil rights organizations like the NAACP, led by Walter F. White, the light-skinned, blond-haired, blue-eyed Atlanta Georgia native who embraced his Black heritage. Unlike Walter White, though, Garrison Payne likely hid his mixed-race heritage to protect his life, his family, and his career. When he married Mary Margaret Duffy in 1937, at the age of 54, he travelled more than 170 miles from San Diego, California to Yuma, Arizona to do so. Why? His new wife, Mary Margaret Duffy, was 37, and an immigrant from Ireland. He had previously listed her as his wife when he transported her to America in 1919. Are there records of this marriage overseas? Would that interracial marriage have been recognized, given that interracial marriage would remain illegal in both states for years to come? On their marriage certificate, as with Payne’s first marriage certificate, both spouses are listed as White.

The Navy’s Circular Letter 48-46, dated 27 February 1946, officially lifted “all restrictions governing the types of assignments for which Negro naval personnel are eligible.” Despite that edict, and President Truman’s Executive Order desegregating the armed forces in 1948, it would be decades before the Navy’s officer ranks would include more than fifty Blacks.

The stories of several early Black chief petty officers are missing from the Navy’s Historical and Heritage Command’s website, though it does include the story of a contemporary of Payne’s, Chief Boatswain’s Mate John Henry “Dick” Turpin, a Black man. That Payne, a commissioned officer, is absent and unrecognized can be attributed to at least five possible reasons.

The first is that the Navy didn’t know of his existence, significance, or accomplishments. Table 5 in Professor Harrods’s book is titled “The Color of the Enlisted Forces, 1906 – 1940,” and is compiled from the Annual Reports of the Chief of Navigation for those years, with eleven different racial categories, including “other.” Where Garrison Payne fell in those figures during his enlisted service is uncertain, but he was present in the Navy for each of those year’s reports.

The second is that Payne had no direct survivors to tell his story, and no one may have asked him to tell it. He and his first wife Rosa likely divorced sometime after the death of their only child. It is unknown if his Irish-born wife Mary Margaret produced any children by Garrison.

The third reason could be that the Navy may have kept his story quiet for his own protection, and that of the Woodrow Wilson administration and the Indiana political leadership. Garrison Payne was commissioned by the same President Woodrow Wilson who screened the movie Birth of a Nation at the White House in 1915, re-segregated the federal government offices in Washington DC, refused to publicly condemn the racial violence and lynching during the “Red Summer” of 1919, and whose Secretary of the Navy, Josephus Daniels, was one of the masterminds behind the 1898 Wilmington Insurrection, which violently overthrew an elected integrated government in Wilmington, North Carolina. Acknowledging Payne as a decorated and successful Black naval officer would have been an embarrassment to Wilson, Daniels, and undercut their political and racist agendas.

Black veterans were specifically targeted after both world wars, by both civilians and military personnel, to reassert White supremacy. Payne was from Indiana, where the Ku Klux Klan was revived in 1915, and became a very powerful organization in the 1920’s. Such organizations may have sought out and harassed Payne and his family, had they known that this Black Indiana farm boy, born to a White mother, had not only received a commission in the U.S. Navy but had commanded White men in combat.

The fourth reason is that the Navy may have wanted to hide his racial identity. His record of accomplishment as a Navy Cross recipient and ship’s C.O. would have undermined the widespread belief that Black men could not perform successfully as leaders, much less decorated military officers. He was not commissioned as part of some social experiment or social engineering, but because the Navy needed experienced, reliable men to man a rapidly-expanding fleet and train inexperienced crews. Garrison Payne did just that, during years of dangerous duty at sea.

The fifth reason may be that Payne recognized the benefits of passing for White to his life and career, which may have compelled him to do so. He was raised in a largely white society, by white-appearing relatives. Had he not successfully “passed,” he likely would not have been commissioned.

Regardless of the reasons in the past, it is now time to herald the brave naval service of Garrison Payne. The Navy Historical and Heritage Command, the Smithsonian Institution, the Indiana Historical Society, the Hampton Roads Navy Museum, and others should work together to bring his amazing story out of the shadows.

Why Garrison Payne’s Story Matters

For years, many Black naval officers have searched in vain for stories of their heroic forebearers. Actions taken by politicians regarding nominations to military academies for much of the 20th century helped ensure that Black military officers remained a rarity, particularly those hailing from Southern states.5 The life story of Lieutenant Garrison Payne needs to be thoroughly documented and publicized because representation matters. On a personal note, knowing of his story while I was serving as one of the few Black officers in the Navy would have inspired me immensely. Garrison Payne served as likely the only Black officer in the Navy for his entire career. He showed what was possible. Heralding his trailblazing career can only positively impact the discussions about the future composition of the U.S. Navy’s officer corps as it inspires generations of sailors. Historians and researchers should continue the work of archival research to gain a fuller understanding of his story and significance. My hope is that veteran’s organizations and national institutions such as the Smithsonian Institution begin the effort to flesh out the story of Lieutenant Garrison Payne.

Reuben Keith Green, Lieutenant Commander, USN (ret) served 22 years in the Atlantic Fleet (1975-1997). After nine years in the enlisted ranks as a Mineman, Yeoman, and Equal Opportunity Program Specialist, he graduated from Officer Candidate School in 1984 and then served four consecutive sea tours. Both a steam and gas turbine qualified engineer officer of the watch (EOOW), he served as a Tactical Action Officer (TAO) in the Persian Gulf, and as executive officer in a Navy hydrofoil, USS Gemini (PHM-6). He holds a Master’s degree from Webster University in Human Resources Development, and is the author of Black Officer, White Navy – A Memoir, recently published by University Press of Kentucky.

Endnotes

1. Except as otherwise cited, research in this article is based on documents in the author’s possession and oral history interviews with Mr. Jeff Giltz.

2. War and Race: The Black Officer in the American Military. 1915-1941, 1981, Gerald W. Patton, Greenwood Press

3. All on Fire: William Lloyd Garrison and the Abolition of Slavery, 2008, Henry Mayer, W. W. Norton and Company

4. Manning the New Navy: The Development of a Modern Naval Enlisted Force, 1899-1940, 1978, Frederick S. Harrod, Greenwood Press.

5. The Tragedy of the Lost Generation, Proceedings, August 2024, VOL 150/8/1458, John P. Cordle, Reuben Keith Green, U.S. Naval Institute.

Featured Image: SC 83 underway, steaming under a bridge. (Photo via Subchaser.org)

Information Warfare

Information Warfare is Integrated Warfare

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By Corey Grey

When the USS Carney (DDG-64) downed the opening salvos of Houthi land-attack cruise missiles and drones over the Red Sea in October, the Pentagon hailed the feat as a “demonstration of the integrated air and missile defense architecture.” It was much more than that. Long before Carney’s medium-range Standard Missile-2s (SM-2s) erupted from their launch cells, Information Warfare (IW) capabilities provided crucial combat support to neutralize the inbound threats, enabling these shots with critical IW equipment, intelligence, internal communications, and electronic support. In short, naval IW—with the exception of launching the SM-2s— ensured critical strategic objectives. This event, and many others like it, demonstrates the underappreciated depth of IW for the current and future fight.

As the military grapples with recruiting shortfalls, the IW community has a compelling story to counter: integrated warfighting. This narrative, epitomized by Carney and other units’ recent successes, covers efforts across a diverse range of specialties that are too often seen in isolation: meteorology/oceanography, cryptology, intelligence, communications, space, and cyber operations. As important as the success of these individual elements are for the U.S. Navy, the real impact relies on the full integration of information forces and capabilities through improved recruiting, training and career paths integration, as underscored by the recent Department of Defense Strategy for Operations in the Information Environment (SOIE).

With this in mind, the U.S. Navy should take concrete steps to further promote an integrated warfighting ethos which better incorporates all elements of the IW community, starting from initial officer training to senior level carrier strike group operations. By defining what it means to be an integrated information warfighter rather than just being an Intelligence Specialist, Cryptologist, Meteorologist, or Information Professional, the IW community will better educate, train, and most importantly, recruit the next generation of IW personnel. Equally important is the need to enhance retention. To further maintain the impressive cadre of IW personnel in service, the Navy should improve its career opportunities with better advanced training and cross-detailing availability. In the aftermath of these changes, IW will be better positioned to dominate the information environment and enable mission success.

Shared Identity

The Navy’s IW community currently boasts favorable recruiting but should do more to meet the growing demand from supported operational forces. Vice Admiral Kelly Aeschbach, Naval Information Forces commander, recently confessed that “our biggest challenge right now is facing demand. We are needed everywhere, and I cannot produce enough information warfare capacity and capability to disrupt it everywhere that we would like to have it, and so that remains a real pressing challenge for me: how we prioritize where we put our talent and ensure that we have it in the most impactful place.”

Better recruiting starts with stronger, more compelling messaging. Aviators join to fly, submariners join to drive boats, surface warfare officers to drive ships, but there is less consistency in why each IW officer volunteers for service. Future IW candidates require a holistic message that knits together the disparate range of specialties that encompass the community.

The Navy’s maritime sister service provides a clear model for messaging, encapsulated in five simple words: Every Marine is a Rifleman. This iconic phrase is based on the foundational infantry skills every Marine receives, regardless of their specialty, and the expectation that every Marine can serve in the capacity of a rifleman if called upon to do so. This narrative and ethos is so effective that last year, without any substantial increase in compensation or incentives, the Marine Corps exceeded its recruitment goals while the other services experienced shortfalls not seen in decades. Commandant of the Marine Corps, General Smith said it best: “Your bonus is that you get to call yourself a Marine.”

Sadly, the IW community lacks the clarity of the Marine Corps model. Instead, the community prescribes to an identity built around specialization. Personnel share the title of Information Warfighter, which encompasses seven officer designators and eight enlisted ratings, but the same personnel are only expected to master their own specific capability. Case in point, Congress recently compelled the Navy to produce a new maritime cyber warfare officer designator and cyber warfare technician rating due to a lack of specialization by Cryptologic Warfare Officers and Cryptologic Technicians. This change stands as criticism to the IW community as a whole as it raises questions towards their unified identity. Cyber operations cannot exist without Signals Intelligence (SIGINT) yet the Navy decided to separate the integrated IW capacity under two officer designators (1810, for SIGINT, and 1880, for Cyber Operations). Officers who joined the Navy to perform cyberspace and SIGINT functions should not have to laterally transfer to a new community to ensure they can continue to deliver and lead cyber operations. The capriciousness of this shift only leads to frustration and difficulties in recruiting and retaining talent.

Overall, the true lesson from all this is not the need to create more IW communities, but instead the need to produce a capable warfighter that can understand and provide full IW effects to the operational commander regardless of designator. Many will look to the Information Warfare Commander (IWC) position, both afloat and at maritime operation centers ashore, as the model for this vision, but how does the U.S. Navy assure future and present IW professionals that they will be properly trained to support or even become this commander?

Solutions for Integration

Although the Information Warfare Commander (IWC) for amphibious readiness groups and carrier strike groups drives the Navy towards a more integrated IW force, there is no consolidated career pipeline to properly prepare a rising officer to leverage all IW capabilities. Moreover, if that commander has done well to master his or her specialty, it comes at the opportunity cost of lesser competence in commanding an integrated force. More training is needed to ensure junior IW professionals feel competent, confident, and motivated to stay in the Navy through this milestone. Lengthening and strengthening courses that all IW officers can attend, such as the Information Warfare Officer Basic Course and Information Warfare Officer Intermediate Course, would better develop and refine how every IW specialty supports the fight while also fostering an integrated warfighting ethos, starting from the officer corps and spreading to the enlisted ratings. These trainings should highlight integrated IW operations for air, surface, sub-surface, naval special warfare, amphibious readiness group, and carrier strike group operations while leveraging evolving initiatives such as live, virtual, and constructive training. IW leaders would then be well postured to motivate and further develop the diverse cadres within the larger community.

Beyond better messaging and training is the need for increased cross-detailing, that is, assigning an officer from one IW discipline into a billet normally filled by another. The aim of this process is to ensure greater exposure and integration as IW officers broaden their experiences serving in capacities that are not traditionally aligned with their core skills. However, the IW force is not fully exposed or integrated because few leadership positions at the O-4 to O-6 levels are available for cross-detailing. These few billets are highly selective; consequently, most IW officers will never work outside their designator. The largest pool of IW officers, namely junior officers, are thus unaware of the full breadth and scope of the IW community due to a lack of experience and exposure. One especially important key to retaining talented people is to provide broader career opportunities, especially when they are most impressionable and likely to decide whether to stay in the Navy or leave for industry.

In a time when IW officers are filling senior roles once thought exclusive to unrestricted line officers, such as chief of staff, maritime operations center directors, and IWC, the question stands how they have not fully integrated within their own community. It is inconsistent to think that an Intelligence Officer can serve as the Commanding Officer of the largest Navy Information Operations Command (traditionally a Cryptologic Warfare Command) but a cryptologist cannot serve as a numbered fleet N2/N39. The same can be said for a number of other IW billets at every level. Certainly there are some positions that are best served by specific designators but this should be the exception and not the rule. The lack of cross-detailing creates identity challenges that degrade both community effectiveness and retention.

More deliberate solutions for integration, such as consolidating new accession IW officers under one broad designator and then having them select specific community tracks later in their careers, similar to the Navy’s Human Resource Officer community, should also be considered. Officer candidates would be presented with the full IW portfolio and then have the opportunity to select and support any of the various disciplines. After a set number of years being exposed to the broader community, the officer would then select a designator track from one of the IW disciplines. This could be implemented via a competency based selection process as determined from additional qualification designations (AQDs), type of assignments completed, and personal preference. The framework would enable deliberate career development, preparing officers to better succeed in more challenging IW assignments while also offering greater exposure and integration to succeed in senior level Information Warfare Commander positions.

Five Simple Words

With these solutions and more in this vein, operational commanders will be able to look to a fully pinned IW professional and receive an authoritative voice in navigating throughout the entire IW domain. This expectation should not be reserved for the select few who serve as IWC but for each individual who belongs to the IW community. IW is a compilation of many specialties in one vast domain and each sailor must be able to understand their place within it. As each member of a ship’s crew understands his or her place in maintaining a warship afloat, so must all IW professionals as they sail through the information environment.

The generalist versus specialist argument is not novel, yet these assertions go beyond that. The Navy must refit the individual IW operator’s identity towards integrated domain operations. Attracting and retaining qualified talent to meet the heavy IW demand necessitates a full commitment towards greater interconnectedness. Fourteen years have passed since the establishment of the IW community and while progress has been made, great strides still need to be achieved towards full synthesis. Without a comprehensive approach that meaningfully gets to how the IW community better integrates – from messaging, to training, to detailing. It is questionable whether the Navy will indeed be capable of recruiting and retaining forces for the many and varied challenges along the horizon. More must be done and a good place to start is by putting the community’s initiatives and visions into five simple words – “Information Warfare is Integrated Warfare.”

Lieutenant Corey Grey is a cryptologic warfare officer, qualified in information warfare and submarines. He holds a master’s degree from the Naval War College in defense and strategic studies with an Asia-Pacific concentration. He is assigned as the cryptologic resource coordinator on the staff of Commander, Submarine Group Seven.

Featured Image: PACIFIC OCEAN (Aug. 25, 2023) Operations Specialist 2nd Class Itzel Ramirez identifies surface contacts in the combat information center of the Arleigh Burke-class guided-missile destroyer USS Paul Hamilton (DDG 60) in the Pacific Ocean, Aug. 25, 2023. (U.S. Navy photo by Mass Communication Specialist 2nd Class Elliot Schaudt)