I have a theory about organizations and signs of their decay. It is not based on anything scientific-just having led and been lead by people for approximately 32 years. My theory has been reinforced by my current experience working for a customer that is an organization that is : 1) top heavy and 2) totally corrupted by the personality of the psycopath who leads it.
I think a similar observation can be made about the current state of the United States Navy. Not that I am calling the CNO a psycopath, because he’s not; however he has clearly felt the need to pander to too many constituencies ( e.g. witness “diversity as job one”). And a good reason for that is that current US Navy is top heavy with too many flag officers.
How do I know this? Well I was looking at my recent edition of the United States Naval Institute Proceedings. It is the May edition, their annual Naval Review edition. This months magazine has some pretty interesting articles and it also has, as is their custom, the list of all serving and selected flag officers. All 425 of them.
Yes, you read that right. 425 flag officers for a Navy that constitutes 270+ ships. An average of 1.4 flag officers per ship.
That’s too many-and what is creates is a what they would call in my Six Sigma course, non value added effort. Due to something that they don’t label in the course, but should, “attendant baggage”. Flag officers require staffs for care and feeding-and they have to “vette”, “socialize”, properly staff, and respond to other-properly staffed taskers. Its a self defeating death spiral.
Plus it gets even more ridiculous when you look at some of the titles these erstwhile leaders of men and women hold: five of them for example are “Special Assistants” to some other flag. Another whole host of them are deputy chiefs of staff for something-or worse yet Deputy Commanders to two stars. There are reserve flags who are ostensibly Deputy Commanders for numbered fleets-yet ( and in this area I have personal experience) they bring little value added, and in wartime there is no way in hell they would be put in charge of anything active. Hell-most of the time their civilian jobs have no bearing on what their navy responsibilities are.
There are probably seven or so who are commanders of schoolhouses-positions that in the time of a much larger fleet, were held by up and coming O-6′s.
And then there is the staff creep.In the preceding section are listed commissionings and decommissionings. The majority of the commissionings were not for ships or squadrons-they were for flag staffs. Who in their right mind thinks that makes sense? 10th fleet? And a Cyber command? 4th fleet? How many ships do they own anyway? And then one looks at the number of Navy regions-all with a two star commander and one has to ask the question again. Why? What value added do they bring to running what is supposed to be an adjunct to fleet operations? Each of those comes with its own civilian mafia which hires only through cronyism it would appear. ( Sorry personal grievance there-but they clearly are not hiring on the basis of competence or experience).
As I sat eating my dinner-before going back to writing words to justify the selling of other people to work for these self same flags- I made a mental list of probably 100 billets that could be downgraded to an O-6. Or simply eliminated. I’ll not bore you with the entire list unless you want to hear it-but I’ll provide you one example: Rear Admiral Christopher Paul, Deputy Commander Naval Expeditionary Command. Why is this a one star billet exactly? Or why is Charles K Carodine the Deputy of the Naval Warfare Development Command? And what exactly is JTF-300? Why does Martha Herb serve as “Chief Secretariat, Military Agreement Joint Coordinating Body ISAF” ? Yes I know NATO has strange titles-doesn’t mean a flag has to fill them. ( Right now somebody somewhere is saying, ” But his counterpart is a flag from country “X”-did not used to be that way).
The list goes on, sadly. And lest anyone think I am too far off the mark-start asking around of people you know-who know about the Navy. I’ll bet you can get some agreement out of them.
When the Navy was a lot larger-a lot of these billets did not exist, and we were an organization that was 200,000 people bigger and 300 ships bigger. Yet we still got ships deployed. Why does it take so many flag officers to do so now?
It doesn’t-and you know it. More importantly they know it. They also know that unless they are issued a preferred customer card early-or start piling up sacrificial bodies like cord wood ( Yes Admiral Harvey that remark is directly targeted at you) they know they are finished at one star or two star. That’s not exactly a reformist proposition for people who have spent 30+ years on an ambitious track.
The Navy is out of balance and this problem begets other problems.
You current and former Navy folks know I am right. I think there are specific cuts that could be made in staff officers and staffs that would free up the actual personnel for more productive pursuits. I would be happy to detail ( in glossy powerpoint) for any decision maker that would listen. But this needs to change.