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New 5-week program for aspiring COs

The surface force is reviving a long-dormant material readiness course for prospective commanding officers in the hope that it will better prepare captains and executive officers to keep their ships in good shape.

The senior officer ship material readiness course will add five weeks to prospective commanding officer training at the Surface Warfare Officers School in Newport, R.I., and officials want it to give COs and XOs a base of engineering knowledge to make sure their new commands are being well cared for. Its first students will report in January.

Naval Surface Forces and SWOS officials acknowledged that leaders’ inability to assess the state of their own equipment has been a leading cause of problems on the waterfront. Navy inspectors deemed five surface ships unfit in 2008.

“There has been a degradation of material readiness out in the fleet,” said Cmdr. Angel Cruz, head instructor of the new readiness course. “We are linking poor material readiness to a lack of fundamental shipboard system knowledge. This course will provide [prospective COs] with the tools to walk into a space and be able to quickly assess the health of a shipboard system.”

Thirty prospective XOs and COs will take four weeks of classroom instruction about the types of ships to which they’ve been assigned, and then spend a week at sea on a ship of that same type with a SWOS instructor and small groups of classmates. Students will then go on to eight weeks’ worth of traditional PCO school before moving on to their commands.

SWOS will offer four material readiness courses per year, handling a total of about 140 prospective XOs and COs.

The objective is for every officer, especially those without engineering backgrounds, to get a good baseline understanding of equipment throughout the ship, said Capt. Neil Parrott, commander of SWOS.

“You know all that noise you hear all night long — blowers blowing and stuff like that — you have to recalibrate people to say, hey, when that noise stops or the noise becomes different, or you see extra rust that you haven’t seen before, you’ve got to take some action on that,” Parrott said.

One goal is for commanders to think about their ships holistically. Parrott gave the example of a radar: “In order to make a radar work, you’ve got to have cooling water; in order to have cooling water, you need a good air conditioning plant. To make that one work, you need a good seawater intake — I mean, I could just walk that whole thing back,” he said.

Another goal is for captains to be so familiar with their ships they know where trouble could occur before it does, especially the out-of-the-way or uncomfortable-to-reach areas.

“You gotta crawl into that fan room on the O-6 level that nobody gets into,” Parrott said. “It’s been 23 years since I was chief engineer on [a frigate], but I could still tell you where the problem areas are on that ship, where’s the rust, all that. That’s what we want to convey to them. Get your butt out of the seat and go engage on the deck.”

Rebuilding the foundation

The new SWOS course is the latest step in Naval Surface Forces commander Vice Adm. D.C. Curtis’ bid to get “back to basics,” announced in April 2008 after Navy inspectors found two Aegis warships — the destroyer Stout and cruiser Chosin — in such poor shape they couldn’t fight. Later inspections revealed systemic problems with maintenance and readiness across the surface force.

Poor self-assessment was just one cause of SurFor’s readiness woes. Observers have also blamed shrinking crews; too much reliance on computer-based instruction; and the Navy’s “enterprise” concept of trying to behave like a business, which many sailors grumble makes them feel nickel-and-dimed.

And as it turns out, Parrott said the topics about which prospective COs ask most are manning, funding and operational tempo.

In response, Curtis and SurFor have:

• Created a “war room” of experienced sailors that convenes at the waterfront to listen to crews’ problems.

• Stood up an introductory course for junior surface warfare officers to augment the computer instruction they take from CDs while assigned to their first ships.

• Authorized ships to train with more live rounds, including guns and torpedoes.

• Begun resurrecting the Propulsion Examination Board, a team that will assess the fleet’s machinery spaces.

Reviving the SWOS material readiness course has been one of Curtis’ priorities since taking over SurFor in March 2008, said his spokesman, Lt. Cmdr. Chris Servello. Prospective COs have not had such a course at Newport since the mid-1990s, Servello said.

One graduate of that earlier class is retired Capt. Jan van Tol, who commanded three ships before becoming an analyst with the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments.

Van Tol applauded the Navy’s decision to revive the SWOS course, although he wondered about the consequences of making it less than half the length of its predecessor. He also said that he hopes the material readiness course trains new XOs and COs not just to spot problems, but to manage and follow through when their sailors discover problems.

“A lousy feedback system is something that gets a lot of ships into trouble,” Van Tol said.