The day after the USS John S. McCain collided with a cargo ship off the coast of Singapore in August of 2017, I began a course at the Navy’s Surface Warfare Officers School in Newport, Rhode Island. The school’s commanding officer gathered all students and staff into the auditorium to address the elephant in the room: just two months after the USS Fitzgerald tragedy claimed the lives of seven sailors, ten more from the McCain were dead in a similar incident.
Nearly five years after two of the most shocking peacetime accidents in the history of the U.S. military, however, the surface community has seen little substantive change. Without serious overhaul of the surface officer corps, our Navy remains in peril.
For nearly two decades, ever since budget cuts forced the restructuring of SWO training, naval officers have been pushed out to ships without formal training. Instead, they rely on shipboard qualifications and on-the-job training, a system that hasn’t proven the most efficient way to create leaders and mariners. Today, the knowledge and skills required to take ships out to sea are noticeably lacking among surface warfare officers.
The U.S. Navy adheres to the “generalist” concept: surface officers, as they advance in rank and eventually become commanding officers of ships, are better off knowing a little about everything than specializing in any one profession, be it engineer, mariner, or tactician. Given the highly specialized nature of modern warships and their increased demand for technical and professional know-how, this construct is failing sailors. In trying to be knowledgeable about everything, SWOs end up being experts at nothing.
In their reports on the Fitzgerald and McCain collisions and the subsequent comprehensive review of the incidents, Navy leaders blamed everything from culture to fleet readiness to the ships’ crews themselves. Yet if we examine the decade-long string of collisions and groundings in the surface force, a more obvious problem emerges. The Fitzgerald and McCain tragedies were the result, more than anything else, of officers’ lack of knowledge about navigation and shipborne systems.
There is an obvious path out of the Surface Navy’s crisis: end the generalist culture among surface warfare officers. For one, it takes the focus away from being actual mariners. If a brand new ensign is expected to oversee gas turbine technicians, manage crucial engineering programs, and serve as the ship’s legal officer all at once, that doesn’t leave much time to learn, as mariners call it, the art and science of navigation. Additionally, the generalist view of surface officers relegates their role to that of low-level manager, rather than leader.
It’s time to divide surface warfare officers into specialties and train them accordingly. The aviation and submarine communities are already doing this, as officers in both fields undergo rigorous training before reporting to their first duty stations. Britain’s Royal Navy, meanwhile, specializes their surface officers as engineers or warfare officers who spend at least thirty weeks learning naval fundamentals at the Royal Naval College before months at sea honing their skills to take on a leadership role onboard a ship.
The collisions of 2017 should have been a wakeup call to Navy leaders—they owe it to our sailors to do better.