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Campa lays out final initiatives as MCPON

With less than a month to go in office, Master Chief Petty Officer of the Navy (SW/FMF) Joe Campa plans to rock the deck plates one more time.

He said he hopes to get buy-off on new evaluations for petty officers, get final approval for an alternative to captain’s mast that will put more power in chiefs’ hands, and continue laying the groundwork for a massive overhaul of warfare qualifications.

“There’s always more to do. That’s the hard part of a job like this — there’s always something else that needs some focus and attention from this level,” Campa said.

Because Campa — whose last day is Dec. 12 — has vetted and focused all his initiatives through his “leadership mess,” the 121 senior enlisted who work directly for a flag or general officer, there’s a good chance some of Campa’s leftover initiatives will survive. His relief could come from that crop of senior sailors.

“I have tried to focus my efforts on things that will improve sailors’ lives and careers,” he said. “But in the end, it will be up to the sailors to decide if I’ve done that.”

Here are the three big items on MCPON’s bucket list.

New evals

Campa said he considers this year’s overhaul of chief petty officer fitness reports — they’re deck-plate-focused and are called “evaluations” — his most significant accomplishment as MCPON.

Now he said he wants to take that a step further and rework evals for E-6 and below.

He said he wants to create two separate eval forms — one for E-1 through E-3 and the other for E-4 through E-6.

“Right now, we use the same criteria to grade both a seasoned first class petty officer with 15 years of experience and someone who has been in the Navy less than a year,” Campa said. “To me, that is just not right. The expectations of those two individuals are entirely different.”

Though Campa says the move doesn’t have a firm timeline yet, if approved by Chief of Naval Operations Adm. Gary Roughead, both eval forms will use seven new traits in blocks 33 through 39. No changes will be made to the numeric scoring system.

“For the E-1 through E-3, they are learning how to be a sailor, how to be proficient in their rating, how to stand watch and how to live our core values,” Campa said. “So to me, it just makes more sense to rate them on how well they are doing in those areas.”

More is expected of petty officers, Campa said, so their criteria will be more specific.

For example, E-3s and below will be graded on their leadership potential and how they follow orders, as well as how much supervision they need.

In the leadership section, petty officers will be graded on how well they develop the sailors under them, along with their organizational skills, goal setting and how well they operate under stress.

Also new to this form is grading criteria specific to leading petty officers. Other spots will be targeted toward petty officers first class only.

For example, leading petty officers will be graded in leadership and communication traits, and on how well they work and communicate within the “deck-plate triad.” This triad comprises themselves, their leading chief and the division officer.

In addition, under “Rating Expertise,” junior sailors and petty officers are marked on their participation in the Navy’s preventive maintenance program — a completely new addition to the form.

Both groups will be graded on how well they adhere to “strict procedural compliance” within the program.

“Knowledge and expertise in this program is every sailor’s responsibility,” Campa said. “There’s no more critical of a program to our war-fighting readiness,” he said. “We should be grading everybody on this.”

Campa and his staff are working to get a formal proposal to Roughead before Campa leaves.

“We have some proposals I have socialized with the fleet master chiefs — they support it,” he said. “I would like to make a formal recommendation, but [Roughead] may wait till the next master chief on that. I don’t know.”

An alternative to mast

When sailors get into trouble, they go before a disciplinary review board, then to executive officer screening and eventually to captain’s mast, if the offense warrants it. At mast, a sailor may receive nonjudicial punishment and a permanent blot on his record.

Campa and his leadership mess have created an alternative.

The new standards and conduct board will be the first line of Navy discipline — and the responsibility of the chiefs’ mess. In it, chiefs will screen every potential captain’s mast case and have the authority to provide alternative or lighter punishments that will not go on a sailor’s permanent record. Think of it as a cop giving a speeding driver a warning, instead of writing him a ticket.

“Calling it a standards and conduct board, I think, sends a clear message to the chiefs that this responsibility lies squarely in the mess,” Campa said. “The standards we hold our sailors to in their daily conduct are up to them to enforce, to uphold and to get our sailors on the right track.”

According to the Office of the Chief of Naval Operations draft instruction near approval, these boards will be made of a minimum of three chiefs, with the command master chief as the chairman. Commanding officers can designate other “senior enlisted leaders” to fill that role.

When a sailor gets in trouble, the board will interview him and any “relevant witnesses, advisers and supervisors” the board chairman thinks the situation warrants, according to the instruction.

There are many serious crimes that will always end up at mast, Campa said, such as drug use and driving under the influence.

But for many offenses, the board can recommend the sailor receive a “voluntary diversion.” These punishments include extra military instruction, surrendering civilian clothes privileges or even being restricted to the ship or base. Mast is averted.

The punishment comes as part of an overall plan designed to fix behavioral or performance issues through counseling, extra training or even outside the command. But to avoid mast and take the punishment, the sailor must agree to the board’s recommendations.

“Voluntary diversion gives the sailor the opportunity to recognize and accept responsibility for their actions and be held accountable without it being a detriment to their career,” Campa said. The punishment stays off the sailor’s record.

“Young people make mistakes, and it allows them to recover from those mistakes without staining their record and the possible consequences of that — not being able to stay in,” Campa said.

But Campa said chiefs must rethink their attitudes toward transgressing sailors, too.

“We need to be standing side by side with that sailor to get them on the right track instead of keeping them at arm’s length,” he said.

That’s why Campa said the board isn’t only for those on the way to mast — it’s also designed to catch problems in sailors’ behavior before they rise to that level.

“There doesn’t have to be charges as with a disciplinary review board,” Campa said. “It can be proactive if you have a sailor with a track record of just not getting it — and their chief has counseled them and done all they can do, you can bring that sailor in front of a chiefs’ standards and conduct board as well.”

The idea was tested at six commands around the Navy from October 2007 to January 2008 — onboard two cruisers and an aircraft carrier and with a patrol squadron and two training commands.

A total of 201 boards were held, 176 of which involved misconduct charges, while the remaining 25 were conducted for proactive reasons. Recommendations for mast resulted from 116 of the 176.

In 48 of the 60 nonmast cases, the sailors were offered the voluntary diversion punishment. Of those, only nine were repeat offenders. Four ended up at mast as a result of their new offenses.

The remaining 12 nonmast cases were dismissed outright as a result of the board’s findings.

Warfare qual requirements

Further out is a top-down examination of warfare qualifications. Campa said he doesn’t want them to be a requirement for advancement — he wants them to be a requirement for survival in the Navy, a part of every sailor’s job.

“I am not saying that our warfare programs are failing, but I think that in some areas, they can be strengthened,” Campa said.

Here, too, most of the Navy needs a culture shift to accomplish this, he said.

“For the most part, I think the criteria for each is solid; it’s the attitude about the programs that needs to change,” he said.

“I believe in some areas, programs over the years have drifted to, ‘I am going to get my pin because I need it to advance,’ when it should be, ‘I’m going to get my pin because I need to survive at sea.’”

Campa said he wants to see every sailor get qualified as part of their indoctrination into their first command, as is done in the submarine force.

That fact, he said, was driven home when, as the command master chief of the submarine tender Frank Cable, he watched the fast-attack submarine San Francisco arrive in Guam after hitting an underwater mountain in the Pacific.

“When they pulled the submarine out of the water in drydock, it was amazing to see that the submarine survived. There was one thin bulkhead between that crew and the depths of the ocean.”

Campa said all the news reports talked about how well the submarine was built. He agreed that helped, but there was an untold part of the story, he said.

“I tell you, if they didn’t have a strong warfare program on that ship — to be qualified in submarines — that ship would not have made it,” he said. “It was an all-hands effort to get that ship home, and their strong warfare program contributed heavily to that.

“That’s why warfare programs exist — so you have the knowledge and ability to fight your ship on the high seas and bring it home — to bring your ship and your shipmates home. That’s why those programs exist. There’s no other reason.”

In the surface force, warfare qualifications aren’t encouraged and sometimes not allowed until someone has become a petty officer — or has completed a full set of qualifications before going for their warfare qual.

Petty officers second class onboard ship must qualify within a year, or they won’t be allowed to compete for advancement.

The submarine warfare qualification is integrated into the training pipeline first, and sailors must qualify during their first 10 months onboard the boat — along with learning their job.

Submarine officials say that less than 1 percent fail to qualify during that time.

That’s why Campa said he thinks it needs to become afundamental part of sailor training in all warfare communities.

“Every sailor has that responsibility, and it shouldn’t be tied to promotion. It should have impact, but not as a ticket punch — it’s more important than that.”

Campa said much of the groundwork for making recommendations has been done by the leadership mess, but he says he will not have the time to make a formal proposal before he leaves in December.

“I hope this is something the next MCPON will take and run with.”