Speaking as a part of a senior enlisted panel at the Navy League’s Sea-Air-Space confab on Tuesday, Master Chief Petty Officer of the Navy Russ Smith called on fellow members of the Goat Locker to work hard to train their sailors for warfare on the high seas against peer rivals.

And they can begin by telling sea stories, which he sees as engaging “eyeball to eyeball” discussions between leaders and their sailors that will make junior enlisted personnel “understand that there is something coming that they need to get ready for, that war will come most likely in their generation and they need to be prepared to fight.”

Chiefs must help them balance and manage their careers but their bedrock duty is to make sure that sailors know their ratings and what they’re expected to do, especially in combat.

Smith believes that a key teaching tool is sharing “stories that some of us older folks have with our experiences and really painting it in a realistic fashion.”

MCPON painted a grisly picture of war at sea, with a “first missile hit that’s going to take out three or 400 sailors on a carrier.”

“Will it be painful? Yes. Will there be lessons learned? Yes. Will some fail? Yes. And will others rise that you did not expect? Absolutely,” Smith told the audience.

Smith said that the Navy must explain to sailors how they fit into their mission as they travel across an often complicated world.

“We need to better inform and not assume that a culinary specialist who’s working down in the galley on your carrier doesn’t need to know what’s going on in the world around them,” he said.” I think that as a Navy, we can do far better at keeping our all of our sailors informed as to the why so that they understand.”

Smith recalled a recent all hands call: “We had an aircraft mech who said, ‘I do corrosion control. What the hell do I do in contributing to this great power competition?’”

It’s a question MCPON often hears and he has an answer ready: “Everything we do in the Navy contributes in one way or another to lethality. We do not have the time, the resources or anything else to waste. Every resource, everything we have goes to lethality in one way or another.”

The sailor fighting corrosion “keeps that jet airborne, which gives that pilot time and proficiency in the cockpit, which contributes to their readiness” so that “they’re ready to fight.”

“Everyone plays a role and without everyone on the team functioning, the team can’t win,” Smith said. “And every rating leads to lethality in one way or another.”

Since 2001, the armed forces were engaged in a vast counterinsurgency struggle in Iraq, Syria, Afghanistan and other global hot spots, Smith said, and the Navy’s skills at waging war at sea began to atrophy.

“The war of the future is not going to look like what we fought for the last 17 years,” he said. “And we know that. And we’re not where we were 30 years ago when it comes to damage control readiness and firefighting readiness, so we’re making the adjustments we need to.”

If confirmed by the Senate, Adm. William Francis “Bill” Moran will fleet up from his position as the vice chief of naval operations to take the helm of a Navy in flux, pursuing a fleet of 355 warships during an era of increasing competition from Russia, China and other rising powers.

In a prepared statement emailed to Navy Times, Secretary of the Navy Richard Spencer welcomed the White House on the nomination of Moran, calling him “a stalwart partner and adviser.”

Richardson told Navy Times he was “thrilled with this announcement” because Moran “is an amazing leader and good friend.”

“He has been central to the Navy adopting a fighting stance in this great power competition,” Richardson said. “As I turn over and go ashore, I will rest easy knowing that, pending confirmation, Adm. Moran has the watch.”

Moran released a terse message, saying only that he was “honored and deeply humbled by the nomination and look forward to working with Congress during the confirmation process.”

Widespread support

Past and present military leaders lauded the president’s decision and urged lawmakers to confirm a four-star they believe is the perfect fit to lead the sea service.

“When he shakes your hand and he says something to you, you look at him and immediately recognize that he’s real and that he cares,” said retired Command Master Chief Aaron Shipley Jr., who served as Moran’s top enlisted adviser after he took command of the Norfolk-based Patrol and Reconnaissance Group in 2008.

Moran is slated to become only the fifth of 39 VCNOs to relieve the CNO as the Navy’s top officer but supporters say he’s uniquely qualified to do the job and they point to his role as chief of naval personnel before taking his current Pentagon post.

As the Navy’s top personnel officer between 2013 and 2016, Moran unleashed a stream of reforms designed to drag the Navy’s human resources system into the 21st century.

Moran’s ambitious “Sailor 2025” program not only has sought to modernize the Navy’s entire personnel system and training process but also change the culture of the sea service to embrace flexibility, reward merit and scrap broad purges of sailors like the despised Enlisted Retention Board.

But it didn’t stop there.

He fought to hike career sea pay and got it.

He wanted to preserve military fitness standards but ditch outdated body composition assessments and won those fights, too.

He tried to muscle the Navy bureaucracy to make it more welcoming to families, including growing the capacity of child development centers, lengthening the hours they’re open, liberalizing paternity and adoption leave and making it easier for military spouses to work in the same community.

As VCNO, Moran also emerged as a candid but insistent voice on Capitol Hill for sustained funding to shore up years of readiness woes.

It was Moran who delivered the stark warning to House Armed Services Committee members in early 2017 that a spending bill was soon to expire and the Navy would almost immediately run out of operations and maintenance funds.

He predicted that without a supplemental infusion of cash the Navy would begin to shutter air wings and defer maintenance for surface ships and submarines.

Lawmakers overwhelmingly passed hefty defense spending hikes, including increased aircraft and shipbuilding procurement and more funding for maintenance.

A man from Walden

A native of the Hudson Valley hamlet of Walden, Moran wasn’t drawn to nearby West Point. Instead, he graduated from the Naval Academy in 1981 and pinned on his golden wings as an aviator in 1982.

A P-3 Orion pilot, his job was to hunt Soviet submarines. That crucial mission took him to Brunswick, Maine and then a long association with Florida — Jacksonville and nearby Naval Station Mayport, home to the famed flattop Forrestal.

From mid-1989 to late 1990, he served on board it as a Carrier Strike Group Six staffer, rising from his role as the admiral’s flag lieutenant to qualify as a Battle Group Tactical Watch Officer.

He got his initial immersion in personnel issues as a detailer at the Bureau of Naval Personnel between 1995 and 1998 but was chosen to command Patrol Squadron 46 and departed for Naval Air Station Whidbey Island.

He went on to command Hawaii-based Patrol Reconnaissance Wing 2 and Patrol and Reconnaissance Group in Virginia before becoming a Beltway fixture in 2010 — first in the office of the Chief of Naval Operations, then as Chief of Naval Personnel and VCNO.

Once confirmed, Moran, 60, will be the first of the nine aviators who became CNO who never rose through the ranks of carrier-based commands.

Retired military leaders who served with Moran over the decades pointed Navy Times to a succession of posts where his competence and commitment telegraphed his ascension to higher rank and greater responsibilities.

They included his stint as a junior captain serving as an executive assistant to Adm. Thomas Fargo at U.S. Pacific Command between 2002-2003 and then a similar task as a senior captain to two chiefs of naval operations nearly a decade later, the position he’s preparing to fill now.

“Shortly after I took over in May of 2002, I had to pick a new executive assistant,” Fargo told Navy Times . “I was so impressed with Bill that I moved him up into that slot.”

To Fargo, it was an unusual move. Typically, those slots are reserved for senior captains soon to pin on their first stars. Rarely do the go to “fresh-caught” captains who had yet to hold a major command, he said.

“He was so impressive in terms of his ability to work with the senior officers on the staff as well as the action officers, folks external to the command, that I just made the decision to bring him into that job at an early point in his career,” Fargo said.

Selected for flag rank a dozen years before he retired, Fargo recalled a number of good executive assistants but said the most junior of them, Moran, “was at the very top.”

That assessment was shared by retired Adm. William “Shortney” Gortney, who helmed both U.S. Fleet Forces Command and North American Aerospace Defense Command, U.S. Northern Command.

A career aviator with 1,265 carrier-arrested landings, mostly in the A-7E Corsair II and the FA-18 Hornet attack jets, Gortney said he likes to chide Moran on his P-3 lineage, but he’ll never disparage Moran’s proven ability to tirelessly conquer any task.

Gortney marked Moran as a rising star while watching him serve as the executive assistant to CNOs Mike Mullen and Gary Roughead.

“We all saw his innate skills,” Gortney said. “He has the ability to pick things up — fast — to listen and understand quicker than almost anyone and that’s why he can be given any task and he’ll proceed to knock it out of the park.”

Fargo and Gortney said it was that drive and intelligence that made him a two-star and sent him to become the Director of Air Warfare on the CNO’s staff. By their reckoning, he was one of the best to ever hold the post.

“I believe he was the first and only P-3 guy to be given that job, and again, he was given that job at a more junior level than that job has normally seen in the past,” Fargo said. “But he has such a command of not only the aviation community, but the Navy at large that he was more than up to the task and, in fact, excelled in the job.”

His secret, they said, was Moran’s ability to study and solve problems, coupled with communication and listening skills that connect him up and down a chain of command, quickly developing strong ties, and trust.

“I think that’s one of the reasons, because he engages and listens really well,” Fargo said.

“He goes out and figures things out first-hand. His willingness to go forward and spend time with the operators and work to understand their problems is how he’s done business his whole career.”

Ambassador to the Goat Locker

Those bonds weren’t merely forged with senior officers but also enlisted sailors.

Retired Command Master Chief Shipley told Navy Times that Moran has a deep understanding of the role of the chiefs mess. As a commissioned leader, Moran would tap into the authority of the Goat Locker in a self-effacing and genuine way, the same way he interacts with everyone, Shipley remembered.

“The first opportunity we had to really talk, once he took command I took him over to the chief’s mess for lunch,” Shipley said. “We talked about everything, but at one point, he came out and told me that ‘I’m going to need your help to learn how to be a flag officer.’”

Shipley didn’t think that Moran really needed his help to become a flag but he understood the sort of counsel he was seeking. To the command master chief, it was “my first of many aha moments with him,” episodes when he saw Moran’s sincerely “humble and modest kind of leadership style.”

On all hands calls across the globe, Shipley watched Moran “listen more than he talked.” When a sailor asked a question Moran couldn’t immediately answer, he’d promise to find out “and would always follow through, even if it took weeks.”

He often made the phone call or wrote the email himself instead of delegating the duty, Shipley remembered.

“That builds trust,” he said.

Shipley recalled Moran donning a flight suit and visiting squadrons at odd hours, simply to talk to sailors to canvass their views. That irked a few commanding officers, Shipley said, until they began to see Moran’s true motives.

“They learned that he wasn’t coming to inspect them,” Shipley said, only to hear their unvarnished thoughts.

Moran also watched his senior enlisted adviser and noticed he was always hanging out at smoke pits.

“Moran knew I wasn’t a smoker, asked me why I was always out there,” Shipley recalled. “I told him it’s because you get a new crowd every 10 minutes.”

Like Moran, Shipley wanted to hear raw opinions and complaints. So Moran started accompanying him to the pits or making solo trips.

Over time, Moran’s respect for the chiefs mess became mutual. While serving with him, Shipley decided to make a pitch to then-Master Chief Petty Officer of the Navy Rick West to anoint his boss as an honorary master chief.

But before he went to MCPON, he took a poll of the Group’s subordinate command master chiefs and they voted unanimously to honor Moran.

What was true for that Group was true for the Navy’s collective chiefs mess, according to retired Fleet Master Chief April Beldo.

She served as Moran’s top enlisted adviser during his 13-month tour as the chief of naval personnel.

“What you see is what you get with Adm. Moran,” Beldo said, a quality he also expects from his staffers.

She said that he respects “you for what you’ve accomplished” but at the same time he expects his officers and sailors to live up to them and if they didn’t, “we were going to have a conversation about that.”

To Beldo, Moran commanded excellence from his subordinates because “no one wants to let him down.”

Right man, right time

All of the retired flags and senior enlisted contacted by Navy Times said Moran was the best choice to lead the sea service.

“You can always come up with reasons why someone shouldn’t be picked for the job and I’m sure that will happen,” Gortney said. “But if you look at what he’s done and what he’s accomplished everywhere he’s been, there’s no reason to believe he won’t do a phenomenal job as CNO, too.”

Beldo and Shipley said they weren’t surprised when they heard Moran got the nod for CNO.

Beldo chalked his rise up to being a “totally fair and honest leader who leads by his own example and brings the same out of others.”

Shipley suspects it’s because Moran is the real deal and everyone in the Navy knows it.

“Sailors can smell a fake from miles away,” Shipley said. “Likewise, they know from the instant they either meet him or hear him speak that he’s about as real and genuine as they come.”

He realizes it could sound like a cliché, but Fargo believes Moran is “the right leader at the right time” and comes armed with the “policy people and budget experience to lead the Navy very effectively.”

To Fargo, the best thing about Moran is that he “is absolutely forthright and transparent with truth” and his inherent credibility resonates down the ranks.

As an aviator, Gortney says he’s happy to see another flyer in the Navy’s top spot but insists Moran is really just the best candidate for the gig.

“I don’t want to spoil it, but I will predict he will be one of the great CNOs as well,” Gortney said.

The combination punch of good news at the Senate Armed Services’ Seapower Subcommittee included testimony that the Navy has recorded significant cost savings during the building of the John F. Kennedy, the next Ford-class carrier, and is prepping to purchase two similar flattops in fiscal 2020.

Pressed by Sen. Tim Kaine, D-Va., on possible problems with the Ford’s advanced weapons elevators, James F. Geurts — assistant secretary of the Navy for research, development and acquisition — predicted the Ford would leave the Newport News Shipbuilding yard with a working system for delivering ordnance to the flight deck.

“I would say of all of the technologies on the CVN 78, of which there were many we proved out on this lead ship, the weapons elevator is the last one that we need to get tied up and work our way through,” Geurts said. “We are making progress to get through all the elevators during this availability.”

The Ford has 11 weapons elevators and each must be built, tested and certified separately, Geurts explained.

“The first two of them have been produced — the first one has been through test and certification and the second one is about 94 percent through testing,” he said.

Pushed harder by Kaine on whether they would be fully operational, Geurts said the “current assessment is we’ll get through all of the production and much of the testing” but might face some lingering “certification issues.” He pledged to monitor the process “very closely.”

The Ford has long been a source of disgruntlement to President Donald J. Trump, who repeatedly has bashed the carrier’s Electromagnetic Aircraft Launch System, or EMALS, which is replacing traditional steam-powered catapults.

In a Thanksgiving call to Capt. Pat Hannifin, the commanding officer of the Nimitz-class carrier Ronald Reagan while it was visiting Hong Kong, Trump asked the skipper to compare his warship to the Ford.

“Tell me about the catapult,” Trump said. “On Gerald Ford, they don’t use steam, which is the first one that I’ve ever heard of that doesn’t use steam. And I know they have some difficulties, which I’m not happy about, and they spent a lot of money. And I was just curious — the steam system is tried and true for many, many years, as long as we’ve had aircraft carriers, how do you find steam versus what they’re doing on the Gerald Ford, which is electronic and digital, if you can believe it.”

Hannifin told Trump that while the Nimitz class of carriers has depended on the reliable steam catapults for generations, EMALS “offered some great benefits” such as reducing stress on aircraft, but like any new system it required experts to “work through the bugs.”

Unlike legacy steam catapults, EMALS was designed to vary the stroke of the launch based on the size and weight of the aircraft its hurling into the air. That’s particularly important for launching relatively light aircraft like aerial drones.

Initial software gremlins prevented the Ford from deploying combat-loaded aircraft but Navy officials believe a system update slated to be installed while the carrier is in the shipyard will fix them.

Echoing Trump on Tuesday, subcommittee chairman Sen. Roger Wicker, R-Miss., grilled Geurts on whether Congress will “be glad we with the EMALS and Advanced Arresting Gear?”

Noting the 747 launches and recoveries at sea the Ford performed since it commissioned in 2017, plus more than 24,000 launch and recovery cycles using the systems at the land-based site, Geurts was optimistic.

“While there have been technical difficulties we’ve had to work through, it really opens up our ability to operate a wider variety of aircraft from the deck, both manned and unmanned which I think is going to be critical to those effective carrier operations as we look to the future,” Geurts said.

Geurts also said there was “good progress” on the Ford’s Dual Band Radar, without “any major technical issues.”

A leader of the Virginia delegation, Kaine was keen on whether the Navy will bundle a two-carrier deal for the future Enterprise and the unnamed CVN-81.

“We are, as you know, in the ’20 budget process right now so we have not made a final decision on that buy,” Geurts said. “I would expect that decision by sometime by the end of this calendar year.”

The Navy is negotiating with Huntington Ingalls Industries to deliver the best price for taxpayers and Geurts said he wanted to forge an order over the next month because “if it were pushed out much further, the savings achievable would start to erode.”

“We think those savings will be better than the $2.5 billion number that I quoted at the last time we spoke,” he told lawmakers.

Despite the initial problems with the Ford, Geurts said that the lessons learned have added up to significant savings in time and money on the next carrier in the class, the John F. Kennedy, including so far shaving 16 percent off the new flattop’s production labor hours.

“As we look towards CVN-79, we’re seeing fairly drastic reduction in labor hours,” Geurts said. “[Huntington Ingalls] has proven that once we get the design nailed down their ability to be efficient in producing those.”

At a ceremony marking Adm. Phil Davidson’s change of command with Adm. Chris Grady as the head of U.S. Fleet Forces Command, Chief of Naval Operations Adm. John Richardson announced the Navy was set to re-establish the 2nd Fleet.

The command was merged into Fleet Forces Command in 2011, but the Navy has been talking about bringing it back since it appeared as a recommendation in the Strategic Readiness Review into last year’s 7th Fleet collisions.

The move is the latest sign that the Navy is focusing its attention away from the war on terrorism and toward its major competitors China and Russia.

“This is a dynamic response to the dynamic security environment,” Richardson told reporters onboard the carrier George H. W. Bush May 4. “So as we’ve seen this great power competition emerge, the Atlantic Ocean is as dynamic a theater as any and particular the North Atlantic, so as we consider high-end naval warfare, fighting in the Atlantic, that will be the 2nd Fleet’s responsibility.”

In the announcement, Richardson credited Davidson for the analysis that led to the decision.

“It is in large part due to the analysis of Adm. Davidson and his team, in response to a changing security environment, that this summer we will stand up the U.S. 2nd Fleet here in Norfolk to train, certify and command U.S. naval forces at the very highest levels of naval warfare to the emerging global contingencies in the Atlantic,” Richardson said.

The announcement from Richardson was immediately followed by an announcement from the Office of the Secretary of Defense that it has offered to host a new NATO Joint Force Command for the Atlantic at Naval Station Norfolk.

Davidson is going on to lead U.S. Pacific Command.

Change gonna come

The secretary of the Navy’s SRR recommended that 2nd Fleet operate similarly to 3rd Fleet, which trains and certifies West Coast ships for deployment and has been increasingly taking operational command of those ships downrange.

Richardson said in Norfolk that the command would come online this summer.

No decision has yet been made on who will be the commander of the new 2nd Fleet but the decision is expected in the coming weeks, said a Navy official who spoke on background.

“It will have the [same] command and control structure of of any fleet, really and I say that in a mind that it is also going to be very tailored to the mission — high end blue water force elements,” Richardson said.

“We’re focused on effectiveness here, so I don’t think it’s going to be a tremendous cost burden, and what you get is this operational focus on high-end in the Atlantic, that will be woth every molecule of effort that we spend.”

The standing up of 2nd Fleet is just one change that the Navy is set to grapple with over the coming years. Recent comments from Defense Secretary Jim Mattis have hinted at even more fundamental changes in how the Navy deploys and does business.

Mattis told lawmakers in April that he wants the Navy to move away from rotational deployments and focus more on being unpredictable — making shorter, perhaps more frequent deployments that focus on keeping the enemy guessing at its next move.

“The way you do this is [to] ensure that preparation for great power competition drives not simply a rotational schedule that allows me to tell you, three years from now, which aircraft carrier will be where in the world,” he told House lawmakers. “When we send them out, it may be for a shorter deployment. There will be three carriers in the South China Sea today, and then, two weeks from now, there’s only one there, and two of them are in the Indian Ocean.

“They’ll be home at the end of a 90-day deployment. They will not have spent eight months at sea, and we are going to have a force more ready to surge and deal with the high-end warfare as a result, without breaking the families, the maintenance cycles — we’ll actually enhance the training time.”

A test of a new, more unpredictable model could be on the horizon as Pentagon leaders weigh whether to withhold the Harry S. Truman Carrier Strike Group from deploying to Middle East, opting instead to keep it in the European theater as a check on Russia.

Class C mishaps are those in which total property damage falls between $50,000 and $500,000, or an incident that causes a sailor injury the warrants missing a day or more of work.

Vice Adm. DeWolfe Miller, head all naval air forces, identified the increase of the mishaps in this year’s annual aviation safety message to all aviation commanders and commanding officers on May 3.

He also announced the requirement for every aviation unit to conduct their annual one-day safety standdown before the Memorial Day holiday.

Navy Times obtained a copy of the message and Naval Air Forces confirmed its authenticity.

In the message, Miller called the rise in mishaps a “disturbing trend.”

“Since 2012, Class C [ground] aviation mishap rates have more than doubled — 9.86 mishaps per 100,000 flight hours in FY12 steadily rising to conclude FY17 at 20.25,” Miller wrote.

“Almost all Class C mishaps are preventable and a significant number of these occur during routine maintenance evolutions.”

Miller pointed to the combination of inexperience among aviation maintenance sailors and diminished flight hours across the board in naval aviation over the same time period as the most likely culprits, and noted that “experience and proper supervision” are the best prevention methods for such mishaps.

But at least half of that formula for success is harder to come by in today’s Navy, he said, and it’s something that requires more attention to detail from commanders.

“Studies show that naval aviation’s average E-5 has 1.5 years less experience as compared with 5 to 10 years ago,” he wrote.

“We also know that with reduced flight hour execution, sailors receive fewer reps and sets performing their maintenance actions.”

Miller called on units to recognize this lack of experience and ensure sailors are qualified and properly supervised during maintenance evolutions.

“Therefore, we need to ensure all evolutions, no matter how routine, procedurally follow the book and are performed by qualified sailors who are properly supervised.

“As an enterprise, we owe it to the American people to be good stewards of their money,” he continued. “We also take great pride that we plan, brief, execute, and debrief every flight. Ensure your entire team does the same with maintenance evolutions.”

Despite the initiative, the number one safety priority in naval aviation remains the rash of physiological exposes plaguing aircrews in flight.

“We are making great strides in mitigating PE, however, much work remains,” Miller wrote.

“Strict adherence to procedures and maintaining a sense of urgency at all levels with all activities are critical as we aggressively tackle PE across affected…aircraft and aircrew.”

“We used the term “Sailor 2025” to challenge ourselves to think about what sailors ten years in the future would expect and need, and to deliver those cutting-edge systems and policies now,” Vice Adm. Robert P. Burke, the Navy’s chief of personnel wrote in a March 2018 blog.

But they’re not waiting until 2025 to roll it all out. The entire effort includes nearly 45 separate reforms that are being rolled out and refined as they go, designed to put personnel decisions in the hands of sailors while at the same time increasing readiness in the fleet.

The effort also includes the development of a new career training system known as “Ready Relevant Learning,” which will cutback on time at traditional “A schools” and is designed to spread more training over a sailor’s career.

“We also knew we had to be smarter about training our increasingly technical force,” Burke wrote. “There were better ways to get the practical knowledge into our sailors’ hands — we could do it faster and in a way that sticks.”

To make this all possible, Burke said that the Navy’s whole delivery system, from database backbones to sailor-facing front ends, has to be retooled. What they want is something more like those available in the business world, because that’s what today’s sailors expect.

The goal is to “treat our sailors like adults, be transparent, give them realistic choices, and even put some market forces to work,” Burke said.

Smartphone access

Burke hopes the Navy’s personnel system will be the among the first in the Defense Department to go into the commercial cloud. And later this year, the service will start to open up the ability for sailors to handle personnel transactions on their smartphones.

“By the end of 2019, sailors will do most of their personnel business via smartphone ashore or desktop apps afloat,” Burke wrote. “Your smartphone has more computing power, better software and update processes, and is more user-friendly than any of our Navy’s personnel IT systems.”

Changes like these will bring the Navy’s practices closer to how the civilian sector and industry is training, managing and detailing their work forces.

“Our personnel system modernization initiatives are aimed at providing better tools to sailors and leadership to empower Commanding Officers and give sailors more choices and ownership over their careers,” Burke said.

“These programs are being rapidly spiraled out as fast as we can deliver them, and modified as we learn. This is not Washington, D.C. business as usual.”

Over the past four years, the Navy has gradually expanded meritorious, unit-level advancements, giving commanding officers the authority to advance their own sailors up to the E-6 paygrade without them having to compete on Navy-wide exams.

The plan for the future is to possibly put exams online while eventually tailoring them to the individual to get a better measure of their on-the-job knowledge.

On the officer side, Navy policy changes in recent years are making it easier for officers to attend graduate school or spend a few years working in private industry to add to their skillset, which they can then bring back to the fleet.

Nearing completion is a total modernization of the Navy’s enlisted rating structure that was started in 2016.

“This is about bringing our rating system into the 21st century,” Burke said.

“We’re modernizing our rating system to redefine enlisted career fields, improve talent management and the detailing process, offer more career choices, and expand professional development opportunities.”

The Navy wants to broaden career fields by linking together ratings with similar skills to eventually allow sailors to move laterally in a way they’ve never been able to before.

Sailors will be able to expand their personal skill qualifications and, in turn, open up alternate routes for advancement as well as more assignment opportunities.

“This will provide greater choices and transparency for our sailors in both detailing and training, as well as greater flexibility for our Navy in assigning our highly-trained and talented personnel to critical billets,” Burke said.

Navy officials use two measures to describe fleet manning levels: fill and fit.

Fill simply means a fleet job is filled with a sailor with the right rating and paygrade. Fit, on the other hand is a higher measure, meaning a sailor has additional skills that make them an even better match for the job.

The Navy wants to expand on this to allow the detailing system to better view the sailor as a whole, and also to allow sailors to have two-way conversations with their detailers and prospective gaining commands.

“We’re developing a system that will be the Navy’s version of LinkedIn, a one-stop shop for reenlistment and billet negotiation, where sailors will be able to connect directly with open positions, communicate their desires, and negotiate orders,” he said.

“Our idea is that sailors will see all available billets and the ‘market’ will drive negotiations.”

At the same time, changes are in the works to allow sailors to negotiate longer-term deals for more than one tour. One proposed change is to offer sailors fast-tracked advancements in exchange for taking hard-to-fill billets in less-than-ideal locations.

Sailors may want to negotiate for geographic stability, education opportunities and even co-location with a military spouse.

Burke has repeatedly said that they want to open up more non-monetary incentives to go along with the existing special pays and bonuses.

Many of these ideas are still in the early planning stages, Burke said, but a new detailing system will begin testing this year, which will include mobile access.

New evals

New advancement ideas and better detailing will be helped along by the service’s overhaul of its existing Performance Evaluation System, which has been in place with only minor adjustments for decades.

As a result, many unwritten rules — mostly at the command level — have popped up, and Burke says the Navy needs to find better ways to measure sailor performance to pave the way for more modernized advancement and detailing processes.

One problem Burke says needs to be eliminated is what the service calls “forced distribution,” which mandates the number of promotion recommendations a command can hand out to their sailors. Over the years, that has led to many unwritten, command-level rules that create inequities among sailors.

“Our vision, now in its third large-scale pilot, features a standards-based scale where individuals are compared against a standard for their rank [from across the fleet] instead of their peers [at their current command],” he said. “The first two pilots showed excellent correlation with the overall grades of the old system, but also provided meaningful individual trait grades, which has significant potential.”

And here, too, the Navy seeks to make it easier for leaders and commands to complete evaluations. A third pilot will be out early this summer, which officials say will be a smoother version of the product, and implementation isn’t far off.

“Once the tool is finalized, we are planning a phased implementation, beginning late this year by using it in the fleet as an informal counseling tool to allow early familiarization and additional Fleet input for refinement while we finalize plans.”

A large part of the overall picture of the Navy’s personnel transformation is in reworking how sailors are trained throughout the course of their careers. That transformation is underway now as the Navy is rolling out its “Ready Relevant Learning” effort.

The goal now is to spread training over the entire career and dish it out only when the sailor needs it. This will result in a 30 percent decrease in initial post-boot camp training and will see sailors return for training during different points of their careers for refresher and new skill training.

Nine ratings are already incorporating the new training path, having their training broken into blocks of learning while identifying when sailors need to receive classwork.

“To date, we have completed Block Learning analysis for 54 rating paths, approved changes for 25 ratings, with nine now delivering training in this new continuum,” Burke wrote.

The end goal, Burke says, is to eventually move the Navy’s training methods into the 21st century by totally reworking when, where and how sailors are trained.

Some of the training will be in traditional brick-and-mortar classrooms, while other “blocks” might be delivered online.

“The second line of effort for RRL will provide modern delivery of training by taking advantage of emerging learning technologies to allow sailors to receive training at the point of need … at the waterfront or aboard their operational unit,” Burke wrote.

This past year, the Navy began developing new ways for training sailors in 29 ratings. At the same time, the Navy is reworking information systems capabilities to be able to deliver this new kind of training where the sailors are.

“These training solutions will apply science-of-learning principles to make training more effective, efficient and available by leveraging technology, thereby minimizing the necessity of repeatedly returning to a brick-and-mortar schoolhouse,” Burke said.

Yet the RRL program has critics. Buried inside the Navy’s recent strategic review was an ominous warning: The program is at risk of failure because the Pentagon is forcing budget cuts on the ambitious multi-year effort.

The review, widely lauded as a thorough and painfully honest assessment of the Navy’s many woes, said the Navy is failing to properly fund the effort, and it drew specific comparisons to the Navy’s previous training reform launched in 2001 — one that ended in failure.

Navy officials reject that view, saying there was no budget cut but rather a ”rephasing” of money that reduced the current year’s budget and pushed some money into future years.

Top Navy officials say the reduction in funding for this year will not affect the long-term implementation effort.

The M80 Stiletto, a sleek 88-foot craft operating out of Joint Expeditionary Base Little Creek, does the vital job of putting new technologies to the test, demonstrating all the newest gear and systems that can then be potentially used by the U.S. military.

And it’s open to more than just the government.

“We’re a maritime demonstration platform that’s accessible, accomodating and affordable,” said Dennis Danko, the project manager for Stiletto.

The ship is managed by the Naval Sea Systems Command’s Carderock Division, but is funded by the Assistant Secretary of Defense for Research and Engineering’s Rapid Reaction Technology Office.

It’s available to test new technologies developed by both large and small businesses, as well as goverment and academic laboratories, Denko said.

Denko said they facilitate, on average, about 60 new technology demonstrations each year.

“Our staff and crew are adept at assisting demonstrators adapting their products to the marine environment,” Denko said. “We work to understand the technology and assist organizations in installing their products and technology onboard Stiletto to best demonstrate it to interested agencies, not just the Navy, but Coast Guard and Army as well.”

And the best part is it’s very affordable, he said, given that once a project is accepted for demonstration, all the developer pays for are their own travel and labor costs.

Recently, Stiletto hosted Savox, a company interested in showcasing a new command, control and communications system that communicates between small boats and carries voice, video and network connectivity.

“Testing on Stiletto was huge for us,” said Wayne Brown, who oversaw the Savox demonstration on Stiletto. “Stilleto is recognized in the maritime industry and an outstanding test bed and if you have your project being demonstrated here, it means you have advanced technology.”

The tests were conducted under the watchful eye of multiple agencies who liked what they saw, but questioned whether the wireless commuications could be encrypted.

Savox “went away for a few weeks and came back, having added encryption to their product,” Denko said. “It’s that kind of feedback coming directly from possible end users that makes for a good back and forth — that’s what we provide.”

Have a project, product or technology you want demonstrated on Stiletto?

Send an email to Stiletto@navy.mil with the basics of your what you’d like to demonstrate. It gets reviewed by the boat’s crew and project managers for feasibility and, if approved there, is sent up to DoD’s Common Maritime Technology Working Group for a review.

What isn’t included in most Navy F-35C discussions, however, is the fact that any first deployment of the Navy’s JSF can’t happen without the CMV-22 Osprey, soon to be the Navy’s new carrier onboard delivery aircraft.

That’s because the Osprey is currently the only aircraft that can land on a carrier flight deck with a large and heavy F-35C engine tucked inside its fuselage.

The aircraft that will actually deploy in 2021 have yet to be built, but they will be here fast.

“Carrier onboard delivery has always been a mission profile for this aircraft from the start,” Rich Meanor, a Boeing global marketing representative, said at the Navy League’s annual Sea, Air and Space exposition.

“It’s no secret that the Marine Corps has been flying these aircraft at sea for sometime now, but the Navy’s CMV-22B will have slight modifications to better suit it for carrier operations.”

Those modifications come in the form of greater fuel capacity in the fuselage and wings that will allow the aircraft to carry up to 6,000 pounds for a distance of 1,100 nautical miles. That doesn’t quite rival the aircraft it’s replacing, the C-2A Greyhound, which has a cargo capacity of 8,000 pounds and a range of nearly 1,400 nautical miles.

A special high-frequency antenna has also been added to help the aircraft navigate long distances over open water, a feature Meanor said the Marine Corps version didn’t need. There’s also a beefed up cargo compartment intercom system, as the aircraft will also ferry people to and from the carrier.

The Navy will soon field two prototype aircraft featuring all the new bells and whistles, with the first one expected to be delivered in late 2019. The production models are expected to start rolling off the assembly lines sometime in 2020.

“The CMV-22B is expected to deploy in much the same fashion as the C-2A does and will most likely have similar three-aircraft detachments when they deploy with carrier air wings,” Meanor said. “But some of those details are still being worked out.”

The Navy has yet to decide where the fleet replacement squadron will be based, but it will either be Norfolk and San Diego.

“The Marine Corps has a training squadron at New River, North Carolina,” Meanor said. “There are Navy pilots already going through training there.”

The skipper then ordered the officer of the deck to change to the ship’s steering configuration so that another sailor could step in and help — a maneuver called splitting the watch.

But instead of fixing the problem, the helmsmen’s failure to properly carry out the procedure plunged the bridge into chaos and put the ship into a sharp turn that ultimately caused the collision.

Ten sailors died as a result of that collision.

The Navy’s accident report, released Thursday, called splitting the watch an “abnormal operating condition,” but multiple Navy experts tell Navy Times that it’s a job a properly trained and qualified bridge team should have been able to handle without incident.

Yet McCain’s bridge team was neither experienced nor qualified to the level they should have been to be steaming a warship through crowded waters, and the Navy’s report acknowledged as much, blaming the failures on the bridge team’s insufficient local training and qualifications.

That’s because multiple members of the bridge team on watch at the time of the collision were temporarily assigned from the cruiser Antietam and had never officially qualified to operate the bridge equipment on board McCain.

The report noted that the differences between the two ship’s steering systems were significant, but none of the watch-standers were given any training to learn the new system.

“Multiple bridge watch standers lacked a basic level of knowledge on the steering control system, in particular the transfer of steering and thrust control between stations,” the Navy‘s report concluded, placing the fault squarely on the ship’s watch-stander training and qualification program.

It’s a common thread between both the destroyer Fitzgerald’s collision in June and the McCain collision: A lack of training on key equipment and a weak understanding of ship operating fundamentals, which ultimately led to failures that killed, in total, 17 sailors.

The Navy’s report on its own internal review found this to be a common factor in all four of the major mishaps in the Japan-based 7th fleet, which included the Fitzgerald and McCain collisions as well as the grounding of the cruiser Antietam in Tokyo Bay in January and the cruiser Lake Champlain’s collision with a South Korean fishing boat in May.

“In each of the four mishaps, the qualification of individuals for specific watchstations did not translate to proficiency to safely execute the mission,” according to the review that was conducted by Fleet Forces Command commander Adm. Phil Davidson.

Many believe those shortfalls in training are rooted in decisions made years before the crashes.

“The leadership of the surface Navy 15 years ago began to cut training,” said retired Navy Cmdr. Kirk Lippold, who commanded the guided-missile destroyer Cole. “The result is that today, they don’t emphasize training. So consequently these commanding officers at sea are in the awkward position that they literally don’t know what they don’t know.”

On board the Fitzgerald, investigators determined the ship’s officers didn’t fully comprehend the International Regulations for Preventing Collisions — colloquially known as the “rules of the road” — that define international norms for how ships should interact at sea.

Retired Navy Capt. Rich Hoffman, who commanded both the frigate DeWert and the cruiser Hue City, acknowledged that being a professional mariner goes well beyond knowing the rules of the road. But without that basic knowledge, it’s nearly impossible for crews to safely perform complex operations in highly trafficked areas.

“Ultimately it’s the captain who is responsible for that lack of knowledge, but it goes much further than that,” Hoffman said.

“We don’t put people in airplanes and drive them around until they have ground school, and the surface warfare community doesn’t have a ground school. And if we don’t know what we’re doing on the most basic of levels, we’re a danger to ourselves and those around us,” he said in an interview.

But the problems on Fitzgerald went deeper than that. The report found that “watch team members were not familiar with basic radar fundamentals, impeding effective use.”

The end result was that “watch team members responsible for radar operations failed to properly tune and adjust radars to maintain an accurate picture of other ships in the area.”

The report also concluded that the command didn’t “foster a culture of critical self-assessment.”

In fact, the Fitzgerald’s crew had reported a near collision just weeks before the one that killed seven sailors, but that was never fully evaluated by the command’s leadership, the report said. No efforts were made to identify that incident’s root causes.

This negligence indicates that “command leadership was not aware that the ship’s daily standards of performance had degraded to an unacceptable level,” the report said.

Meanwhile, on the McCain, the chaos caused by splitting the control of steering and throttle in the final moments before the collision was both a lack of judgment on the part of the commanding officer and also a training failure.

Maneuvering during a loss of steering is something good bridge teams train regularly to handle. But on McCain, the order plunged the bridge into chaos.

According to the Fleet Forces Comprehensive Review of all the 7th fleet incidents, the commanding officer on the bridge saw the helmsman struggling to maintain both the steering and throttle for the ship’s two shafts. The CO gave the officer of the deck an order to split the helm which was relayed to the helm by the conning officer.

The move should have been simple, electronically transferring control of the ship’s throttles to the another console a few feet to his right, a watch station known as lee helm. But the transfer wasn’t performed properly and mistakenly sent the steering control to the lee helm, too.

The resulting chaos began when the helmsmen, unaware of the transfer error, announced that he’d lost steering. They tried to transfer the ship’s steering to another location in the back of the ship, but that station was unable to override what was happening on the bridge.

Amid chaos on the bridge, the watch team transferred the steering control between various bridge consoles five times in the moments leading up to the collision, the Navy report said.

Control over the ship’s two major propellers ended up being split between two different consoles. When one of the helmsman reacted to throttle control orders to slow the ship, the sailor was unaware he was only controlling the port shaft, so the slowing of only the starboard-side engine acted like a rudder turn and turned the ship sharply into the path of the commercial vessel, which McCain had just passed.

The report discovered that even the most senior officer responsible for maintaining training standards didn’t understand how to properly transfer control of steering or throttle functions between watch station consoles, nor did the sailors instructing those operating the system at the time of the collision.

“Personnel assigned to ensure these watch standers were trained had an insufficient knowledge to effectively maintain appropriate rigor in the qualification program,” the report said.

Further complicating the situation was the fact that some of the sailors on the watch team weren’t officially part of the ship’s crew, but were temporarily assigned from the cruiser Antietam to get more experience while their ship was being repaired after running aground.

The Comprehensive Review said those bridge team members included the junior officer of the deck, the boatswain’s mate of the watch and the lee helmsman.

Both the junior officer of the deck and the boatswain’s mate of the watch were not actually qualified to be standing watch that morning. Though the watch bill listed them as qualified, the dates associated with their “qualifications” were, in fact, the dates they reported to the McCain, and they had not done any re-qualifying since. The exception was the lee helmsman, who did qualify for his position within a few weeks of arriving on the McCain.

Both the report and comprehensive review noted there are significant differences between the steering control systems of both ships. Chief of Naval Operations Adm John Richardson, at a press conference on Nov. 2, identified this as a key contributor to the collision because those watch-standers weren’t given any kind of training.

’The requisite training and qualification for the systems that are on that receiving command have got to be in place to ensure that before they operate the equipment that they are trained, qualified and certified to do so, accounting for any differences in configuration between the two commands,” Richardson said.

“That was a gap on the John S. McCain. They did not do any kind of rigorous step to ensure that those watch-standers from Antietam were qualified on the equipment on the John S. McCain, and that ended up contributing to the confusion that led to the collision,” the CNO said.

Though the issues identified in the report are local command culture and climate issues, Lippold said the root causes leading to these gaps and shortfalls go much deeper.

“These skippers that we send out there, while they have 17 or 18 years of experience before they ever get to these ships, they are not receiving the mentorship, leadership or the time at sea necessary to train their crews to be able to run these drills to be able to do the routine things to operate their ship,” Lippold said.

“They’ve never experienced an in-depth, across-the-board training program in port and underway that would build that foundation of experience that would allow them to command their ships safely. And it’s something the Navy needs to focus on because not doing it is costing lives.”

“Monterey will leave on a previously unscheduled deployment to the 5th and 6th Fleet areas to conduct maritime security operations,” Lt. Cmdr. Courtney Hillson told Navy Times Thursday.

“This deployment will allow the Hawaii-based destroyer O‘Kane to deploy to 7th Fleet to provide more BMD-capable ships in the region,” she said, referring to ships with ballistic-missile defense systems.

The demand for ballistic-missile defense capabilities in the west Pacific has intensified as North Korea continues testing missiles, putting allies on edge in Japan and South Korea.

Meanwhile, two Navy BMD-capable destroyers previously in the Pacific, the McCain and Fitzgerald, suffered catastrophic damage in unrelated collisions this summer.

Hillson said that the deployment is currently slated to be “about six months.”

The O’Kane was originally scheduled to deploy to the 5th and 6th Fleet areas, which includes Europe and the Middle East. The Norfolk, Virginia-based Monterey will take its place there, so O’Kane can deploy instead to 7th Fleet in the west Pacific.

It will be Monterey’s second deployment to both regions in the past year. Monterey left Norfolk June 1, 2016, as part of the Eisenhower Carrier Strike Group and spent most of that deployment in 5th Fleet supporting operations there. The ship returned home Jan. 19.

“Monterey has just completed the sustainment phase of the Optimized Fleet Response plan and is ready to respond,” Hillson said. “The ship is fully trained and certified to deploy.”