Andrew Tilghman, reporting in the June 28 Navy Times, talked to NextNavy.com about a story coming out (sorry no link available) on the Navy’s problems with rank inflation:
Since 2003, the Navy’s active-duty end strength has dropped from about 380,000 to about 330,000, a reduction of about 15 percent. And yet, the size of the admiralty has grown from 271 in 2001 to 275 last year, according to the U.S. Naval Institute, which maintains a running tally….
…”We need to slaughter some sacred cows,” said Arnold Punaro, a retired Marine Corps two-star general and member of the Defense Business Board..
Look. Each Admiral costs the U.S. $230,000 dollars a year, making for a total of $53 million–not including the staff costs, travel and other trappings. Then add in the efficiency costs and added work each Admiral produces…back of the envelope calculations get pretty ugly, pretty fast. Then comes my bit:
Other billets could be ripe for demotion. For example, Craig Hooper, a Navy expert and defense analyst in San Francisco, wondered why the chief of chaplains needs to be a two-star billet with two flag-level deputies.
Or, Hooper said, why is the superintendent of the Naval Academy a vice admiral?
“A service academy in the hands of an active, [more] junior officer would do the nation good,” he said.
We’ve talked about the Chaplains, but not the service schools…Rather than making the school a parking place for the “passed-over for better commands”, why not put the Academy in the hands of a promising junior person who will, in time, see his charges out in the fleet? I’d rather see somebody eager to invest in his peers than, um, retirement. Take a look at guys like Admiral Edward Eberle–he led the Naval Academy during World War I, but then went on to become the third CNO, retiring almost a decade after leaving Annapolis.
With the Academy in the hands of somebody with a real stake in the composition of the future fleet, I suspect they’d be far less indulgent of wayward mids like, oh, Marcus Curry.
Then there’s the issue of top-heavy tedium. You can’t expect somebody who held the responsibility for a crew and a multi-million-dollar machine to be happy making slides on some staff someplace. It’s not healthy for good sailors:
The “rank inflation” or “brass creep” in the Navy bureaucracy can seem counter-intuitive for a service that traditionally empowers younger officers and senior sailors in the operational fleet.
“In the Navy, you have commanders commanding ships and submarines, and they’re out on their own for six months. People trust them to make good decisions. Why is it when they get back to the Pentagon, we can’t trust them?” Hooper asked.
Let’s give more authority (and real jobs) to the junior commanders. The Navy and Nation will do just fine.
Maybe better.
{ 3 comments }
Yep – like I “kinda know” a bit about time travel because I watch TV. -roll-
See, if you stick to what you know, no one comments. Step outside that and people tend to smack you.
Hmmmmm….that must hurt the ole ego a bit.
I kinda know a bit about the EE scandal. One of those guys caught up in the EE scandal was a childhood friend–and longtime sailing rival. (An aside: He was a super-competitive guy, willing to do anything–sometimes too much–to win…but, in the end, the consequences of the honor violation made him a far better and far stronger man.)
That said, I think the up-grading in rank was simply a solution just looking for a problem.
Obviously the current solution hasn’t solved anything. I mean, look…any luckless, passed-over CDR could, if given the position, screw up and still leave confident he (or she) had done a better job than the current incumbent!
“In the Navy, you have commanders commanding ships and submarines, and they’re out on their own for six months. People trust them to make good decisions. Why is it when they get back to the Pentagon, we can’t trust them?”
I so, so HATE it when you say something that makes sense and I can agree with! 😉
But, I can’t let you off so easy. Since you are coming new to the party you don’t know why USNA is a “three star mandatory retirement” job. It’s issues like MIDN Curry and NOT trying to protects a future career that caused the change. Until the 1992 EE Cheating Scandal the job was for an upwardly mobile 2-star. But, the thought was that those folks would roll over for Navy leadership and not take the tough stands required in a job like that, so ADM Larson was brought BACK (he’d been Supe as a 2-star 1983-86) and the job upgraded to 3-stars.
But, when leadership picks someone who is either maleable, or follos orders explicitly and without question – or fully believes in the intent of leadership you get what we saw in the last Supe.
So…when you make sweeping statements about rank inflation, it’s easy to pick a place to downgrade, but be certain of the rationale for the rank to begin with, and look at the potential second order effects before making some sweeping statement.
How’s that for “dry powder”?
Comments on this entry are closed.