The following is republished with permission.

By Jan van Tol

Dear Admiral,

Astonishingly, I find myself at the end of my time in OBRIEN already. At the risk of being too forward, I will take the opportunity to enclose a few thoughts from a serving CO’s perspective on a couple of issues in the same spirit as my earlier comments on the Tactical Training Strategy.

Not surprisingly, my time in OBRIEN has flashed by. Things have gone quite well by and large. I have done well in the FITREP sweepstakes, so I very much hope to do this again in a couple of years. Our March-August MEF deployment received good reviews from what I have heard. I have had a great crew and wardroom throughout the tour, high morale and retention, few disciplinary problems, good tactical execution. In short, within the lifelines, it has been great! As you told me during a visit to GATES years ago, it is a gratifying thing to be able to make life a bit better for three hundred people and their dependents.

But, while this tour has been immensely satisfying professionally and personally, I have to say that much of it has not been particularly enjoyable – and that this view is common among my fellow COs out here. I have spent entirely too much of it angry professionally for reasons I will note. In many ways, I have found myself as CO being not much more than a glorified janitor, carrying out a multitude of tasks and requirements imposed by various staffs and outsiders with little input asked or tolerated. In many cases, some staff O3 or O4 has more influence on my ship than I do as CO. I say this even having worked for a pretty good commodore.

Yet, were this only personal frustration, I wouldn’t have the temerity to bother you with it. However, I am very concerned about how junior officers are looking at our profession. What I hear them saying on the Yokosuka waterfront is that most of their time and effort is not spent working on “naval things” – shiphandling, tactics, leadership – but on an ever-growing cancer of administrative requirements. Every inspection and assist visit seems to have a longer and longer “checklist” of micro-things (all equally important, of course) that must be just so, or else an area is unsat or “ineffective.” Reporting requirements and the care and feeding of staff databases grow inexorably.

The problem is that this kind of administrative minutiae is much closer to that found in many civilian occupations than it is or should be to the profession of arms. So, say many JOs in conversation, why do essentially the same thing for less money and the opportunity to be separated frequently from home and family? It is this – the defining downward of what constitutes the naval profession – that in my view underlies the JO retention problem. It is not about SWO bonuses or more medals. It is about whether there is meaning in what we ask our people to do.

A related problem is that this de facto changing of the substance of what it means to be a naval officer has also concomitantly placed a fast-growing time burden on JOs and crews. One day early during my time on BRISCOE, you and I discussed “smart scheduling” and the fact that many things could be done simultaneously since not everyone onboard was involved in every evolution. I have used that notion in OBRIEN and mostly been able to keep our work hours down to about 8 hours/day (except during preps for specific evolutions like E-CERT or certain TTS events) inport for the crew. But our system requires major planning/scheduling efforts which have placed heavy demands on CO/XO/DHs since slippage anywhere has rapidly cascading effects due to the overwhelming burden of inspections and preps. I have found that a large part of my personal energy has gone to just keeping this whole mechanism going over the last 18 months. I simply don’t remember you or any of my other COs having to devote nearly so much time to this kind of thing as my peers and I have had to.

This, coupled with the growing manning problems, is also driving another kind of vicious circle. As the manning levels go down and the time demands rise, many ships are still able to get most of the work done through various efficiencies and longer workhours. Since the work is still ostensibly getting done, one of the more pernicious effects, namely reduced training of junior personnel, has been relatively obscured. As an example, we just finished a rather mediocre Mid-Cycle Assessment right after standdown (a price paid for maintaining faith with the crew on a real standdown after a brutal year). One of the weaknesses turned up was that junior engineers weren’t getting enough training on the basics because the reduced number of senior personnel were too busy keeping things running during deployment. The senior personnel themselves don’t have the time they need to remain current on new information or pub revisions. Worse, as some of the seniors reach PRD, the experience level is notably falling.

As a numerical measure, OBRIEN had 51 pers assigned to M-division for her E-CERT two years ago. I had 31 at CART II the next year and, after a bump-up in numbers leading up to deployment, am once again back down to 31 today. Yet the inspection and engineering standards remain the same. Higher authority can do all the screaming they want, but ultimately there are only so many manhours available. I have been able to have my wardroom spend several hours a week on tactical training inport and underway (since the tactics part is one of my particular professional interests). Each of the JOs have fired the guns (including 5-inch) and driven the ship around in tactical scenarios. Not surprisingly, that’s the stuff that grabs them, and we need much more of it.

This letter has been a long time in gestation. On the positive side, after I started writing it, there have been a couple of things which seem to initially address some of the above concerns. I felt a shot of relief and hope from two recent messages. The first was your message on “Warrior Spirit,” the second the CNO’s message on lowering the ITDC “time tax” on our crews. I see the two as quite related – when the time burden of professionally irrelevant admin burdens is greatly excessive as it is today, it is almost impossible to inculcate “Warrior Spirit.”

Today it is too obvious to JOs that reward and punishment incentives for COs are greatly skewed towards getting the admin and inspection requirements done rather than fostering a psychological spirit of combat readiness on the part of officers and crew. It seems to me that there is no way out of that bind other than to rigorously carry out the ITDC reductions described in CNO’s message. And yet, one already hears the “yeah buts” on the part of various constituencies. As a current CO, I can’t urge strongly enough the pressing need to continue the thrusts contained in both messages – that is what will start staunching the outflow of JOs, and squadron and ship COs who might otherwise happily have stayed a lot longer after 20 years.

One other comment on “Warrior Spirit,” based on what I saw in the Gulf. When we have been out on our own (i.e., not under the TTS burden), we have tried to train hard and as realistically as possible with the idea that we might have to go to Korea at any time – because it could be a life-or-death issue not to. We kept the same attitude in the Gulf. I can honestly say that my guys and I gave our MIO and other ops our best shot. We were aggressive in doing night-time non-compliant boardings, even in very shallow waters – and, I think, tried to maintain the traditional U.S. Navy offensive spirit of taking reasonable risks in order to carry out our mission.

A couple of other ships out there had the same spirit, but others, it seemed to me, were unwilling to take many risks at all because of the potential consequences of making mistakes. I wonder if the subtle apparent changes in what it means to be a naval officer these days – i.e., the focus away from “naval matters” – is not contributing significantly to a sort of “psychological disarmament” of some of the officer corps. If so, your “Warrior Spirit” message is especially on the mark.

All that said, I would happily do this all over again. I have constantly told my JOs that there is no satisfaction like it and that what we do is important, and some of them believe me. I have also told them that there is growing awareness at the senior levels about much that disturbs them and that things will get better. But there is also a high level of wary cynicism on the waterfront which practically shouts, “Show me!”

I am certain, Admiral, from reading some of your recent interviews, that you are aware of most of these points. But, again, I don’t want to be part of the problem by not speaking up.

Very respectfully,

Jan van Tol
1 November, 1998

Jan van Tol served over 28 years as a naval officer. Assigned to several different kinds of warships, he was successively captain of a minesweeper, a destroyer, and a largedeck amphibious assault ship. While on sea duty, he deployed extensively throughout the Mediterranean Sea, the Western Pacific, and Southeast Asia, and made several deployments to the Persian Gulf. In his shore assignments, Mr. van Tol was employed in multiple strategic planning positions, including at the Naval War College (NWC), the Chief of Naval Operations Executive Panel (CNOEP), and the Office of the Secretary of Defense’s Office of Net Assessment (OSDNA).

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