Navy Surface Warfare Officer Training: Now Open the Band-Aid Box!

First, read this. I'm not going to quote from it, just comment on it.

It's good that the baby SWOs are going to get some training on how to run a radar set. But really, if they're standing Officer of the Deck watches underway and they don't already know how to do that, it's a serious problem.

Back in the day, sure, SWOS-Basic didn't teach how to work a SPA-4 radar repeater. But we learned pretty quickly in standing Junior OOD watches. I had one evil-ish OOD who would detune the JOOD's radar repeater. I gather that things are lot more complex, now, so formal training is a good thing.

Here is my biggest beef: They're doing that by expanding radar repeater operation training from one hour to 11 hours. That means that ten hours of training on something else just went bye-bye. The Navy is only allotting nine weeks for basic SWO training. And that training is not done prior to the junior officers reporting aboard for their first sea tours. They're already there when they get a slot to mini-SWOS. It's not unheard of for a command to yank its JOs out of mini-SWOS for an urgent need on the ship. They can do that because the JOs are at mini-SWOS on temporary orders, their home commands still own their asses.

Training used to be sixteen weeks for SWOS Basic. That was sixteen weeks of roughly 37 hours a week in the classroom, or in simulators, or even out on YPs in Narragansett Bay. Baby SWOs would go out for several hours at a time on YPs, doing things from multi-ship maneuvering drills to sea and anchor details. They stood every watch from helmsman to OOD, albeit under the watchful eyes of a Chief Bosun's Mate, a Chief Quartermaster and a SWO-qualified LT. The concept was that a OOD on a ship couldn't effectively supervise the watch team unless the OOD had hands-on experience doing those jobs.

(Mind you, there were additional specialty training schools, depending on the division officer job that they were assigned. Collateral duties, in rare circumstances, also had training schools or courses.)

Training for all baby SWOs (as well as prospective Department Heads, XOs and COs) was carried out by the Surface Warfare Officers School Command in Newport, RI. That ensured that every officer reporting to sea duty in the Fleet had been trained in the same way and to the same standard. Yes, there were some guys who were duds. I knew a few of them. But almost every junior SWO who wanted to become qualified made it. Because they all had the basic training they needed; all they lacked was underway seasoning. Which almost all got (except for the poor bastards sent to aircraft carriers).

As I said, that was sixteen weeks of receiving instruction at a firehose flow rate, in a world where high-tech was Link 11, Talos was on its way out and some of the Terriers and Tartars were still beam-riders. Harpoon missiles were new; how to use them was not the stuff of ensigns. Some things were simpler back then. Some weren't.

Training is expensive. Beancounters hate it. That's why the Most Supreme Beancounter Since McNamara, Rumsfeld, eliminated SWOS Basic in 2003, replacing a sixteen week course with a box of 21 CDs. That was an abject failure, and, so it seems, has been mini-SWOS.

The Navy sends submariners and aviators to dedicated schools prior to sending them to sea. The reasons for the wisdom of doing that should be obvious to even the most casual observer. Sending minimally-trained junior officers to surface ships is proving to have a very high cost in both ships and lives.

Big Navy needs to get a clue and stop trying to patch this problem. They need to go back to doing training right. The story of why training is necessary is being written in blood. And the real tragedy is this: It didn't have to be that way.

(H/T)