SWO Manning, Then and Now

The Navy Times has an article about the shitty retention rates for Surface Warfare Officers. One of the things mentioned in the article is that the Navy sends far more junior officers to ships than there are billets for them to fill.

The Navy, on average, commissions nearly twice as many SWOs each year as it needs to fill junior SWO positions on ships, leaving these newbies to compete for ship driving time or other hands-on experience needed to be a good surface warfare officer, according to both the GAO and several SWOs who spoke to Navy Times.
...
From fiscal 2017 to 2021, GAO found that the Navy commissioned an average of 946 SWO ensigns a year, exceeding the number of required ensigns by about 85 percent.

For example, the destroyer Mustin averaged 18 SWO trainees aboard the ship when it only required six during the first quarter of 2020, while the cruiser Monterey averaged 21 such trainees when it only had eight slots, according to GAO.

I don't know how that can work.

Let's take a typical destroyer back in the day. It might have three or four division officers in each of the three line departments. So that was nine to twelve officers. There were three department heads, one XO and one CO. Because of difference in tour length, those officers had about five department head slots available, two or so XO slots and about 1.3 CO slots available. So if half of the baby SWOs stayed in, there would be plenty available to fill the department head pipeline.

The thing was, those baby SWOs all had meaningful jobs. They were division officers, learning how to lead people and manage material. They weren't doing assistant anything. Their primary job wasn't wardroom party planner or ship's PAO or photographer-- if they were, they were major-league fuckups.

"We eat our young" has been the unofficial motto of the SWO community since forever. Now, it seems to be official policy.

No wander morale sucks even worse than it once did.

Sky Pilots

"Sky pilots" is an old slang term for members of the military chaplain corps.

Chaplains were usually received direct commissions and were sent to Officer Indoctrination School. They berthed on the upper floor of King Hall in Newport, RI, over the floors assigned to OCS. OIS was pretty funny, as the students there marched in formation. They wore the ranks that they were commissioned into, ranging from ensigns to lieutenant commanders. When they marched, whoever was ordering the formation about (slang term was "driver") was under orders to salute all officers. It usually boggled the minds of the ensigns at Baby SWOS to receive salutes from lieutenants and lieutenant commanders, but that's the way it was.

Chaplains afloat were found on ships the size of cruisers and above, including tenders. They had one or two sailors to assist them, who were yeomen or personnelmen with the sub-designation of "chaplain's assistant". They got their own rate of "religious personnelman" (RP) in the late `70s, then became "religious programs specialist", or some shit like that. Navy chaplains also served the Marine Corps.

Chaplains weren't assigned to frigates and destroyers. Sometimes, a deploying task group would have a chaplain assigned to minister to all of the tin cans. That chaplain was supposed to spend a month or on each ship. On Sundays, if nothing overly intensive was going on, the chaplain would be ferried from ship to ship by the "Holy Helo", often a SH-2 or SH-3 that was on one of those ships. Those helo-ridering chaplains were typically sent out without RPs.

Chaplains were supposed to minister to all comers. Which meant that if there were a few Jews on a ship and Passover was coming up, it was the chaplain's job to make it happen. On smaller ships without a chaplain, the senior person of each faith was given the collateral job of "lay religious leader" for that faith.

This is no shit: I was the Jewish lay leader for a ship. I was the only Jew aboard. So I had the word passed that "Services for the Jewish Sabbath will be held in Main Control." The XO went batshit. The CO thought it was funny.

This is also no shit: One of the helo-riding chaplains was such a worthless piece of shit that the first ship to host him got stuck with him, as none of the other ships would take him. Nobody on the first ship was very pleased about that. But they had to suck it up.

That ship was in port in Naples, Italy one fine summer afternoon. The chaplain was given a teletype radio message with his next set of orders. The orders were to the Marine Recruit Training Center in Camp Lejeune, North Carolina.

He was not pleased by the orders. He was less pleased at lunchtime when he walked into the wardroom; every officer stood up and began singing the Marine Corps Hymn.

The chaplain went to the navy base early the following morning to place a call to Washington to talk to his detailer. The detailer told him that the orders would not be changed, and that if he wanted to resign his commission, he was free to do so. The story was that he'd talk to his superiors in the church hierarchy, and was told that if he did resign his commission, he would be sent to a church that would make Camp Lejeune looks like New York City, in comparison.

He accepted his orders. Nobody that I knew of ever saw him again. We assumed that he was fragged and dumped in the swamp, somewhere.

Which was fine with everyone, for reasons that I'll tell another time.

"I'm So Proud Of My Spousal Unit."

So there is this person I know who is not in the naval service, but in one of those lesser services that aren't specifically named in the Constitution. That individual got an officer's commission and was recently promoted to first lieutenant. Said officer's spousal unit sent out online correspondence bragging about the promotion and "how proud I am of, etc, etc."

I don't know how it works over there, but in the Navy, being promoted to lieutenant, junior grade is damn near automatic. They did cut the time as an O-1 down to 18 months, at least for that service. It was 2 years back in the day and may still be for the Navy. One really had to fuck up to not make JG.

On my first tour, I was reviewing the records of a sailor who had just reported into my division. He had come straight from A school. The papers, from the recruitment station, we signed by an ensign who was in my OCS class.  The date of his signature was two months after he should've been promoted to JG. I guessed that he had to have done something especially henious in order not to be promoted (not to mention being kicked off his ship), but I didn't contact him to find out what it was.

Be proud of your spousal unit, but know that a promotion from O-1 to O-2 is basically the equivalent of a participation trophy. Spousal unit gets a little more money and is no longer a "butter bar," but that's about it.

Pee-Tee

The Navy has PT standards.

It once wasn't that way. Physical fitness was generally ignored or given short shrift, like small arms training. Sailors were supposed to be fit enough to do their jobs and if they weren't, that's what evaluations were for. There really wasn't a height and weight standard, other than for sea-going sailors, who were supposed to be able to fit through a 18" scuttle.

There was one sailor on my first ship who was pretty damned obese. The XO told him that if he became too fat to fit through a scuttle, that he'd be medically discharged. So the sailor went on an eating program to get that fat. When he got too fat to get through a scuttle, the XO didn't have him discharged. The sailor was bitterly disappointed and felt that the XO had broken a promise.

That began to change in the mid-`80s. An annual PT test was ordered into effect. First-class petty officers had to submit full-body photos of them, standing sideways, against a contrasting background, because the Navy had gotten tired of making chiefs out of fat-assed PO1s. They might still end up sitting in the Goat Locker on the ROAD program, but not because they were too fat.

The initial reaction from the Fleet was basically one of: "OK, get into shape, but do it on yer own goddamned time." I can recall one (count it) one command PT session on two ships. A command PT session took a hell of a lot of time, from changing out of the work uniform into PT gear, going to the exercise field (not enough room on most ships for this), warming up, doing the exercises, ending with a run, then going back to the ship, taking a shower (for the office pukes, anyway) and then getting back into the working uniform.

Other than the command PT coordinator (if there was one) and maybe the XO, everyone hated it. It took too much time out of the work day on ships that really needed a 30-hour day to get done what needed to be done (except for the Ops pukes and most of the Pork Chops, that is). So command PT was seen being done by those commands that had the time: Airdales and shore pukes.

I don't imagine that things have changed overly much.

Some Damn Football Game is Being Played in Philly

Big effing deal.

As readers of this blog know, I've not been terribly impressed by the output of the service academies. Some of them were good officers, but too many of them were brainwashed Kool-aid drinkers with an inability to think critically or creatively. The officers who excelled at backstabbing and buddy-fucking were more often than not academy products.

Too bad they both can't lose.

UPDATE: Apparently the Army won the coin toss to start the game and then went right into losing the game itself.

The Duffel Blog has it right: The Cadets would have to call in an airstrike to win.

No Job Was Too Insignificant, But They Sure As Hell Could Be Career-Limiting

Back in the immediate post-Vietnam era, the Navy, among other services, had a problem in both attracting and holding onto good people. The "General Hershey Volunteer Incentive" (otherwise known as "get drafted and go to `Nam") was done. Lots of ships were sent to the breakers (including almost all of the WW2 builds), but the Navy still had a problem.

One was with filling slots for department heads. The officers with four to six years in service in the mid-`70s were heavily made up of men who had joined to avoid the tiresome duty of slogging through jungles with a pack and an M-16 while being shot at. A number of them had gone onto shore duty after their sea tours with an eye of taking night classes to get their masters degrees while also pulling down a paycheck. They weren't interested in going back to sea.

But the Navy still had to fill those department head jobs. So what they did was offer them to hard-charging first tour junior officers (like this guy), at least on some ships. Cruisers and destroyers were still staffed by graduates of Department Head School, but the auxiliaries and smaller amphibs were partially filled by those young JGs. On a sea-duty ship such as an LST or a replenishment ship, the Operations and Weapons officers would be JGs. The Chief Engineer and Deck Officer (on an LST) was more likely to be a limited-duty officer (LDO). (On "neutral duty" ships, such as tenders, most were LDOs).

Come the early-80s and things had begun to change. Pay had been increased, helping to make up part of what had been lost to high inflation. Morale was up. The economy was still kind of sucky, which made staying in a bit more desirable, especially to young lieutenants with families. So the Navy began filling those department head billets on amphibs and replenishment ships with department head school graduates.

A lot of the captains of the replenishment ships were ecstatic at the change. For a fair number of them were aviators who had been sent to those ships to get some experience in commanding a ship (and driving one) before they were selected to be the captain of an aircraft carrier. They were happy to get officers who had had more training and experience. (The XOs were even happier.) There was one AO or AE captain who had ordered that the Bridge radar repeater display be changed from a 360-degree sweep to a 90-degree sweep, because that's what he was used to seeing from his days flying a F-4, but I digress.

Most graduates of the Department Head School didn't want those jobs. They all knew that the Department Head School had been first named the Destroyer School and that the career enhancing jobs were on destroyers and frigates. They also suspected that the selection boards would know that someone sent to be a department head on a LST or an A-something was filling a job that had been handled by a `JG in years past; no matter how good a job somebody did on one of those ships, they'd not be viewed as favorably as someone who did even a tolerable job on a DD/FF.

But there were guys who wanted those jobs, nonetheless. The other folks, the ones who wanted jobs on DDs and FFs, thought that the folks who bid on the jobs on LSTs and A-somethings were idiots and that while it was one thing to be ordered to do a shit job, it was quite another to volunteer for one.

How it all shook out, I don't know. But in a few minutes of Googling, I didn't find any senior officer biographies that bragged about being a post-DH school department head on those ships (other than Chief Engineer).

Then and Now

Take a good look at the official portraits of Generals Petraeus and Eisenhower:

General Eisenhower was a five-star general. He commanded the largest multinational force ever put together. Other than maybe Marshal Zhukov, Eisenhower commanded the largest land army in modern times, possibly in human history. He commanded the largest seaborne invasion in recorded history.

Ike reportedly had maybe ten ribbons/awards that he could wear. It was a common custom at the time to wear only the top row. It was a custom that held at least into the 1980s, for I knew a commander who was in the riverine force in the Vietnam War. The only ribbon he wore on his uniform was the Silver Star.

Next to Ike, Petraeus looks like something out of a comic opera.

This is no shit: During the Vietnam war, a Marine unit got into some heavy-duty combat. The company commander and XO were killed. The senior ranking officer was a navy JG, assigned as a naval gunfire spotter. The JG took command of the company and, by all accounts, acquitted himself well in the job until things quieted down enough for the Marines to send in replacements. The JG was given an awards ceremony for his valor and awarded, not a Silver or Bronze Star, but the Navy Commendation Medal.

I suspect it really began going downhill in the `80s. There was a report at the time that the Army had awarded more Bronze Stars for the Grenada campaign then they had boots on the ground. Somewhere along the line, awards such as the Achievement Medal and Commendation Medal began to be awarded, not for extraordinary performance, but for simply doing a good job, something that was previously handled by a command "attaboy letter".

Around the same time, it was explained to me by another officer during a department head meeting with the XO and the Captain that a department head should be awarded a NAM after the first tour and a NCM after the second tour, with a Meritorious Service Medal after the XO tour. I was aghast and I asked, in a rather sarcastic manner, what happened to the notion of doing one's job and getting top marks for that.

The answer was simple, I reckon: Grade inflation. If almost everyone is getting "top 1%" marks, then the way to discern the hard-chargers from the rest of the pack is by who got gonged with a medal or three. Which cheapens the medals themselves.

Ribbons began to be awarded for things such as completing basic training, which is equivalent to giving out diplomas for, oh, graduating from first grade, or possibly a special ed "participating trophy". There is the National Defense Service Medal, which everyone who serves in wartime is awarded (basically everyone since 1990 on), even if all one did was work in a supply depot in Biloxi.

To be fair, this is not only the military's problem. Congress keeps authorizing, or trying to authorize, decorations. The "Cold War Victory Medal" is one such bit of tripe.

It should be reined in. There is precedent for doing so; nearly a century ago, the awarding of almost a thousand Medals of Honor during the Civil War were revoked.

Officer-in-Charge

Officer-in-charge (OIC) was a position held by an officer (duh) who was in command of either a shore facility or a project management office. The insignia was a little gold wreath pin with a gold trident on it.

There were pretty much two flavors of OICs. First were really hard chargers. It was sort of permissible to goof off a little on shore duty and do things like get to know one's kids or maybe earn a masters degree, but that's not what hard chargers did. They wanted command time to add gloss to their service jacket and if it wasn't command at sea, they angled for command ashore.

The others were officers who had, somewhere along the line, screwed up a little. For them, having shore-based command time could repair earlier damage and get them back on the career track. So they would be on what was known as a "get well" tour.

A pretty common job for a get-well tour was to be the OIC of a NavFac, or SOSUS station. SOSUS stations were pretty close to being considered operational commands. For obvious reasons, they were considered to be critical national security assets. Unfortunately, some of the OICs were as clueless as the male junior officer fuckups who had been sent to the NavFacs.

Some of the NavFacs had their own housing. This was common in places where renting a house for a family might be prohibitive, especially in areas where there was a large summer community and renting a house for an entire year was difficult.[1]

At one NavFac, a new OIC had taken command. For reasons lost to time, he took a distinct dislike to one of the male officers. That officer and his family lived next door to the OIC. The OIC ordered LT Fuckup to move to another house. Fuckup challenged the OIC's power to make him move and declared that there was no way in Hell that OIC could force him to undertake the effort of moving from one house to another, just because the OIC didn't want to see him outside, playing with his kids.

Turned out that there were rules on when a move from one unit of base housing to another could be made and Fuckup was right. The XO talked to Fuckup and asked him what it would take to get him to agree to the move, since the XO was damn well sick and tired to hearing the OIC bitch every day about having to live next to Fuckup.

Fuckup's terms were that he and his family would not be inconvenienced. Professional movers would have to be brought in to pack everything up and unpack everything. Fuckup correctly guessed that such a move would cost a couple of thousand dollars and that the OIC would have to pay for it out of his discretionary fund.

And so it came to pass. Movers came in, they packed up everything and loaded it all onto a moving van. Fuckup asked why were they using a van when he was moving three or four doors down, why not just put the crap on handcarts and roll it into the new house? The movers told Fuckup that they had to take the truck to a set of truck scales so they could determine the weight of his effects, so they'd know what to charge the navy for this little evolution. As far as the movers were concerned, it was as much work to move Fuckup's family down the street as it would have been to move them across the country. The only difference to them was the mileage.[2]

By then, Fuckup was sort of throwing a block party. He, along with several others and their beers, immediately climbed into the moving van for the ride to and from the truck scales. Because Fuckup was going to make sure that the OIC's funds took as big a hit as possible.[3]

Supposedly the OIC was aghast at how much the move cost. Which, much to the XO's displeasure, gave the OIC something else to whine about on a daily basis.
______________________
[1] For example, Naval Station Newport, RI had a fair-sized family housing area that was allowed to fall into disrepair following the removal of Newport's active duty warships in 1973. In the late `80s, those houses were refurbished and reopened.
[2] 300 feet, as opposed to 3,000 miles.
[3] Someone later pointed out to Fuckup that he could have borrowed a few cast-iron engine blocks. As it was, two or three roll-aways full of tools somehow showed up in his garage the night before the move.

The Best and the Worst People Could Be Found There

They could be found at the various naval facilities, known as Navfacs. That was the cover name for SOSUS stations.[1]

Female line officers started being assigned to the SOSUS stations at the end of the 1960s. Until the early 1980s, when women began being assigned to surface ships and began going into flight training, assignment to a SOSUS station was the closest thing to an operational job that the Navy had for women.[2] The women officers were unrestricted line officers (designator: 110x)[3] and they were the cream of the crop. Many had hard science degrees and/or advanced degrees

Male junior officers who were assigned into SOSUS in the 1970s were, on the other hand, generally a group of serious fuckups. Oh, there were some who were just there because of bad luck, like a few pilots who had been in crashes, been hurt badly enough to be disqualified from flight duty, and were serving out their time. But mainly, the male JOs were complete fuckups who had been booted out of their warfare communities. These were guys who couldn't hack being on ships or guys who had been washed out of flight school and then couldn't hack sea duty. They were the guys who would eventually fail to select for lieutenant.

You could find these guys scattered all over the Navy, if you knew where to look. They were the ensigns and JGs who were doing paper-pushing at the recruiting offices, the ones that were not let within a league of a potential recruit. You might find them nominally in charge of the pass offices at places like the Brooklyn Naval Shipyard.

It took being a serious fuckwad to get fired from a ship as a first-tour junior officer. A captain who sent such a JO to the beach might have to wait a year or more for a replacement, when a twit like that could at least stand watches as a JOOD underway or an OOD in port.[4] So for a captain to throw someone like that off the ship meant that the young lad had to be one serious piece of human shit.

And that khaki-wearing turd could be pretty much counted to wash ashore at a SOSUS station.

[1] It's hard for me to grasp the fact that I can even write about this. SOSUS was once one of the most secret programs that the Navy had.
[2] As opposed to an administrative-type job.
[3] 110x was the designator for "unrestricted line", which by the late 1970s, meant women. Men who had the 110X designator were fuckups (or were possibly in a secret specialty).
[4] I knew of one JO on a ship on the East Coast whose job was "ship's photographer". It was more common to find them nominally as division officers of divisions with very strong chiefs.

A Fitness Report

This is a fitness report on Rear Admiral Spruance following the Battle of Midway.

Note that it is not fully "left-justified", in that Admiral Spruance had five marks that were 3.9s. Times were different then.

Admiral Spruance was one of the greatest commanders in the history of the US Navy, though there has been the inevitable sniping by the chairborne naval historians.

Two destroyers have been named in his honor.

BZZT! Wrong!!

In surfing around for news on the repairs of the USS Port Royal, I stumbled across this press release about the retirement of a RP1 (chaplain's assistant) from the Navy. It had this nugget of bullshit in it:

"There are not many people in the Navy that can tell you they have served on five different ships," said [Chaplain] Wade.

That is wronger than wrong. Virtually every surface warfare officer who made it through the commander command tour has served on five ships, and quite a few have served on six ships: First Division Officer tour, second DivO tour, first and second Department Head tours, XO tour and then CO tour. Sailors might serve on fewer, as their first sea tour used to be about five years or so.

Duty Stations

The Navy had several types of duty stations and periodicity of assignments.

There were four basic types of duty stations: Sea duty, shore duty, training duty and neutral duty. The first three are pretty obvious. Neutral duty was for assignments that were not as cushy as shore duty, but did not have the separations of sea duty. Assignment to a destroyer or submarine tender was neutral duty, but if the ship was out of her home port for more than 30 days, the time away was reclassified as sea duty.

There were several kinds of periodicity:

Permanent change of station: This was a full move. The Navy paid to move your family and your shit. Actually, if you had a family, you were damned lucky if what the Navy paid covered your costs. A PCS assignment was longer than 26 weeks, but most were between 18 months and five years.

Unaccompanied duty: Your family stayed behind and you went for a year. Before the Iraq War, the most common unaccompanied duty was to the Naval Support Activity in Bahrain and to the USS La Salle (AGF 3), the flagship of the Commander of the Middle East Force, which was homeported in Bahrain. Now, unaccompanied duty includes being sent as an individual augmentee to Iraq or Afghanistan.

Temporary duty: This was usually training duty, where one was sent to a short-duration school. The most common was when you were sent to a school after you left one permanent duty station and were enroute to another. But it could also happen when you were loaned to another command for one reason or another.

Temporary additional duty: These were times when your command sent you away on a trip. It may be to a conference or a short school, ranging from a day or two to a few months.

When you were on TD or TAD, you were paid TDY, which was enough for three decent moderately-priced meals. For obvious reasons, TAD was also known as "traveling around drunk".

This is all background information for some stories, of course.

Drugs

It is fair to say that drug use was very common in the Navy in the 1970s. The only way to nail someone for drug use then was to catch them possessing drugs. Normally, that happened when some idiot was smoking grass in a place where the odor was detected.

Ventilation fan rooms were a common place to smoke weed, but some fools did not bother to check to see where the fan output went. One classic case was a sailor who was smoking pot in a fanroom which fed air to the Captain's cabin. One sailor made sure that the fanroom he used exhausted to the outside of the ship; it was his bad luck that the exhaust outlet was over a refueling station and the ship was refueling alongside an AO at the time, bathing the ensign in charge of the refueling station, the BM1 who was really in change, and the twenty or so linehandlers with the sweet smell of pot smoke.

One funny one was when two sailors were smoking pot in the ship's vehicle; the next user was the ship's master-at-arms, who then obtained the permission of the Command Duty Officer to search the two sailors and their lockers. Another one was when two signalmen, one on each ship, made a deal for some hash by using semaphore signals; they didn't know that an officer on one of the ships, who could read semaphore, read the conversation. The purchasing sailor was met at the quarterdeck by the master-at-arms.

Court-martials on smaller ships were a real pain in the ass to conduct. They could only be held in port and they were a major drain on the ship as it took a considerable amount of time to go from beginning to end. As a result, most disciplinary problems were handled at Captain's Mast, otherwise known as Non-Judicial Punishment, or NJP. The most that could be done at Captain's Mast was to reduce a sailor by one paygrade, a maximum fine of half a month's pay for two months, and confinement.

Confinement options ranged from a maximum of three days in the brig on bread and water or thirty days in the brig or 45 days restriction to the ship with 45 days of extra duty. Hardly anyone was sent to the brig for other than the three days of bread and water and that was only done when those in the sailor's chain of command thought that he was still reachable. Otherwise, restriction to the ship was awarded, for that that way, the miscreant was still available for duty. Extra duty often tended to involve chipping paint and painting either the weatherdecks or the bilges in the enginerooms and firerooms.

The problem was that once a sailor decided that he liked to smoke pot, you might end up catching him once or twice a year, if that. The hard-core stoners just put up with the punishment, even if it meant that they were sent for repeated cranking tours, for they had no intention of re-enlisting, they lived on the ship and they simply didn't care.

In the early `80s, it all changed. The Navy instituted mandatory urine testing, which was soon nicknamed Operation Golden Flow. Once a year, everyone in the command was urine-tested, including all of the officers. Every so often, maybe once a month or once a quarter, the XO rolled a ten-sided die; everyone whose social security number ended in that digit was immediately mustered for a random piss test. Those who had security duties or high security clearances were subject to an additional piss test each year. The urine sampling was witnessed in order to combat cheating.

For officers and chief petty officers, failing a piss test was grounds for discharge. Petty officers, non-rated seamen and strikers were on a "two strikes" system. Some sailors appealed the discharge order and they were then brought before an administrative discharge review board made of three officers, normally headed by a lieutenant commander. The command was represented by a junior officer, the only attorney present was provided to the accused. Most of the boards took their duties seriously and some sailors did prevail, but the vast majority had their discharge orders confirmed and they were thrown out.

The result was, over time, drug usage in the Navy was greatly reduced. There were a lot fewer NJPs (and fewer extra-duty men available for dirty jobs).

Google Search Results

This Google search result popped up today:

"i got a 3.2 on my fitrep in the navy am i in trouble?"

Probably not, because if you had to go to the Google to ask that question, then you probably are too junior for that grade to hurt you too badly. You're probably an ensign who has received his or her first fitness report. You have time to improve your performance. The critical selection boards are likely several years away and since it is not unheard of for butter-bars to trip over their feet a time or two, don't sweat it. (But don't make a habit of it.) I once knew an ensign who screwed up so badly that he almost wound up in front of a general court martial, but he survived his fuckup and did command tours both afloat and ashore.

But if you are a lieutenant and you've been an officer for at least four years and you're asking that question, then you need to have a good long talk with someone, and by that, I don't mean talking to the chaplain and getting a key to the Weep Locker. For while I don't know the current climate, back in my day, when the Navy had a lot more ships than it does now, for an O-3 to get a 3.2 on a fitrep was a subtle message that one should consider investigating another line of work.

(And if you are an O-3 and you don't already know the answer to the question that you Googled, that smelly stuff that you are neck-deep in is not kimchee.)

The Flesh-Peddlers

Most civilians seem to think that the military assignment system works this was: One day, you just receive a set of orders to go someplace. And you go.

Not exactly.

The overall principle was "the needs of the Navy." Within that, there is a whole lot of wriggle room.

The assignment process was basically run by two groups of people: Assignment officers and detailers. Assignment officers represented the commands, such as small combatants, cruisers, squadron command staffing, bases, and all that. Detailers represented the people being assigned, by warfare community; there were surface detailers, sub detailers, aviation detailers, and so on. The detailer's job was to get his or her clientele the best possible and most career-enhancing jobs they can. The assignment officers worked to get their clientele, the commands, the best people. So it roughly worked that the best people went to the best jobs. Assignment officers and detailers were collectively referred to as "the flesh-peddlers," which was as good a sumation of what they did as any, I suppose.

This worked out really well for sea assignments, but not so well for shore duty. Line officers who went ashore often were more concerned with geography than what they did, for they know that unless they really screwed the pooch, what they did ashore mattered little.

Every so often, the detailers would travel to the western Pacific and the Mediterranean to meet with the junior officers on the ships. They would meet with all of the officers for individual counseling sessions; they had cards with them which summarized each officer's present assignments, past assignments and the numerical scores from their fitness reports.

So one fine day, a team of two surface detailers was on a ship that was visiting a French port. (It was kind of interesting how the detailers seemed to pick the best ports for their visits.) They had posted a signup sheet with all of the officers' names so they could sign up for appointments. At lunch that day, a lieutenant asked one of the detailers why his name wasn't on the signup ship. The detailers asked his name, which was David Jones. The two detailers were flipping through their cards, first slowly, then frantically, as LT Jones was complaining that he had been on the ship for five years (the normal length of a first sea tour was three years) and that he never got any responses to his letters to BuPers and his calls were never returned.

The two detailers were showing visible signs of panic when the Captain took pity on them and told them that Jones was a LAMPS helo pilot (he had borrowed a SWO pin). The detailers were too relieved to be mad and one of them said: "You know, this has happened before."

The detailers really did try to get the best jobs for their people, as being a flesh-peddler was very good for one's career. Flesh-peddlers pretty much got to write their own next set of orders and the goal was to, on the next shore duty assignment, come back as a more senior flesh-peddler. If your clientele complained a lot, you weren't going to be invited to come back.

The maddest I ever heard of them getting was at one Destroyer School class. Each class had fifty officers in it. When it came time to bid for assignments, the bidding was by ship type, job type and home port; you ranked each in order of priority. And, as it turned out, of the fifty officers in that class, thirty two or so put down that their number one choice was to be the operations officer on a Spruance class destroyer with a home port of Norfolk, VA.

There was one billet open for an operations officer on a Norva Spru-can. Which meant that over 30 officers were not going to get their first choice. And that had a factor in how well the detailers were rated on their jobs. So they were extremely unhappy.

Not that anybody gave a shit.

Selection Boards

The Navy was big on selection boards. They all operated out of BuPers and they all served the same function: To screen the records of candidates for schools or promotion. The criteria depends on the times.

All officer promotions, other than to lieutenant (junior grade), were screened by a selection board. Selection to LTJG was almost automatic.[1] Selection to lieutenant was nearly automatic, but each year, there were a few JGs who were so hapless as to not warrant selection to LT. If you failed to select to LT, they would look at you the following year, but good luck with that, and you were let go.

Selection was done on the basis of the "year group" of the officers, which was the fiscal year of commissioning. If you were commissioned in fiscal year 1982, you were in Year Group 82.

It worked like this: Say you were in YG 82. The Navy determined what would be the normal point of selection to LCDR, which generally would have been eight years after commissioning. (This was adjustable for different designators; some might select a year earlier, some might select later.) Say that you were a LT in YG 82 and you were due for regular screening by the LCDR selection board in `90. You would first be screened in `89 for "deep selection." Deep selection was basically a free bite at the apple; if you were not selected, it didn't hurt you. Deep selection was available to real superstars and if you were "deep-screened," it was a sign that you were on your way to a storied career, provided you didn't fuck up.[2]

Promotions were effective at the beginning of the fiscal year after selection in order of seniority. The OCS grads who were commissioned early in the year went first, then the big bulge of ROTC and Boat Skool grads, followed by the last OCS classes. (OCS back then had about seven classes a year.)

The next year you would be screened for regular selection. This was the make-or-break point. If you didn't screen for LCDR, your career was on hold. The selection board would look at you again next year, to see if your subsequent fitness report showed that you had gotten your shit together, but late selection was a rarity and was more a sign that the earlier selection board had made a mistake. That was the principal reason for late selection, to catch mistakes made by the selection board in the previous year. (I believe that it was not permitted to be a member of two successive selection boards.) If you failed to late-select for LCDR, you were separated from the naval service (though nowadays, you could cross-deck to the Army and go get your ass shot at).

Prior to the 1990s, promotion to LCDR meant that you were guaranteed your 20 years in for retirement. If you then selected for commander (CDR), you had 23-25 years guaranteed and for captain (CAPT), 25-30 years. The funnel got narrower each step along and it really tightened down for selection to commodore, er, excuse me, "rear admiral lower half."

The surface navy had three other major selection boards. The first was for selection for Department Head, which was commonly called "Destroyer School." This board screened people well before the LCDR selection board. If you failed to select for Destroyer School, you didn't select for LCDR. If you were in Destroyer School and you didn't select for LCDR, they pulled you out of the school right then and there and it was so fast that you'd have thought that Stalin had ordered you purged (I knew of someone who had that happen.)

In the 1970s, selection for Destroyer School was damn near automatic. In the early 1980s, they had so many people backed up in the pipeline for the school that nobody would have made it through the school prior to their regular screening for LCDR. As the Navy generally preferred to have one fitrep as a department head in each officer's record prior to LCDR selection, they rescreened the pool and got rid of a lot of people. Those who were bilged out were told that they would never select for LCDR and they might as well go home sooner, rather than later, and many did.

Screening for XO was done after the department head tours. If you didn't screen for XO, you didn't make CDR. Sometime in the 1980s, the rules were changed so that to screen for XO, you had to have taken both the written and oral test for command-at-sea. And, as you might imagine, if you didn't screen for CO of what was known as a "commander command," you didn't make CAPT.

There were selection boards that operated pretty much below the radar. Two of those were selection to the Naval Postgraduate School and selection to attend the Naval War College. You didn't find out that you were up for them or if you weren't selected, only if you were selected. The Navy formed an engineer designator in the 1980s to keep talented ship's engineers who were not screening for XO or CO, this selection board also operated unseen (unless they chose you).

Supposedly they all operated the same: There were a bunch of senior officers who did the screening and one who operated as the recorder/secretary. They'd pop the records up on a screen, which was easy to do as BuPers kept all records on microfiche cards, and make a decision. Close calls might be set aside for further debate, but for most, pass or fail was done in a matter of minutes, if that long, by near unanimous votes of the selection board.

[1]It took fucking up on a level of "done fucked the Admiral's dog and run over his daughter" kind to not get promoted to `JG.
[2]If I remember correctly, there was one guy who deep-selected to both LCDR and CDR. Six weeks or so into his command tour on a Sprucan, the ship ran around off the acoustic range off Fort Lauderdale. That was the end of his career (I've forgotten both his name and the ship).

Evaluations and Fitness Reports

Officers received fitness reports ("fitreps"), enlisted men and women received evaluations ("evals").

There were some similarities between the two. Ensigns and `JGs (lieutenants junior grade) received fitreps every six months, as did sailors who were third class petty officers or lower (E-4 and below). The early promotions came sooner and it was important for junior officers and sailors to build up a track record. Everyone else was evaluated on a yearly basis or when they were transferred to another command.

Evals and fitreps were both originated by the immediate supervisor, which is to say that the division chief wrote the first draft on evals and the department heads wrote the first draft on division officers. Eval grades were 4.0, 3.8, 3.6, 3.2, though once it got down below 3.0, I think the intervals got larger. Fitreps grades were top 1% top 5%, top 10%, top 30% top 50%, Bottom 50%, bottom 30%, bottom 10%. I didn't recall if they went lower than that, they could have. E-4 and below evals could be signed by a lieutenant commander. On cruisers, that usually meant that the department head could (and did) sign them. On frigates, where the department heads were typically lieutenants, the XO signed them. E-5 and above evals and fitreps were signed by the CO. The Captain signed all fitness reports.

To say that these were important is sort of like saying that the Sun provides useful heat to the Earth.

For sailors, there was a bit of a cushion, as up though PO1 (E-6), the selection for promotion was statistical-- the Navy promoted the top sailors in each rate (defined in this post) as determined by evaluation scores and by scores at rate schools and the required correspondence courses, so it was possible, by killing the schools and courses, to get a little bit of an edge. Sailors generally were not screened by a selection board until they were up for selection for chief petty officer.

For officers, it was all about fitreps. As long as one got through the schools, that was all that counted there.

First of all, the grades mattered. Fitreps and evals were done on scannable forms back as far as the mid 1970s and maybe earlier. The grades were X'd into blocks on the form, with "top 1%" and 4.0 indicated on the far left of the grading row. If you were receiving one and if you were ambitious, you wanted one that was "fully left-justified."

The next thing the CO had to do, and probably the hardest, was to rank his officers. If he had six ensigns, somebody had to be 6 of 6. If you were a middling officer in a wardroom loaded with outstanding performers, your career was in trouble. While BuPers{1} had the ability back then to use the computers to sort officers by grading, they did not have the ability to sort them by rankings within a command. So if a CO had three outstanding JGs on his ship, he'd sometimes rank all three of them "1 of X" and just hope that when the fitreps were reviewed by the selection boards, that nobody would catch that.

Then came the written evaluation. This was were the CO justified his grading and his ranking. The written evaluation portion was vital, as this was where the selection boards made adjustments for the grading. An officer who might have had a third-rate job and scored top 1% would not be regarded as well as an officer who had a really tough job and scored top 5% or even top 10%.

Awards also mattered back when both the Navy (and even more so, the Marines) had a reputation for not handing out medals and awards like Halloween candy. It was a point of real awe to say, about a naval officer, that "he has as many ribbons as an Air Force major."

Fitreps obviously mattered for promotion, but they mattered for assignments. The better the fitrep, the better the next job. Good fitreps meant that one got to advanced schools such as the Naval Postgraduate School or the Naval War College. Mediocre fiteps meant that one was sent to jobs nobody wanted.

Selection boards and the assignment process will be another topic.

{1} (BuPers stood for the Bureau of Personnel, which was renamed the "Naval Military Personnel Command" (NMPC) decades ago and then they dropped "Military" to make it the NPC, but almost everyone still refers to it as BuPers.)

Ossifer Training

In an earlier post, I discussed where the Navy gets its officers. This post will discuss post-commissioning schools, with a focus on the 111x/6x community: Surface Warfare Officers or SWOs.

When a young ensign was commissioned into the SWO community, he or she was designated as an 116x. 11xx signified "SWO", the "6" was a training designation. Generally, after leave and maybe a short stint on the ship that he or she was going to, the first school was Surface Warfare Officer School Basic- "SWOS Basic" or "Baby SWOS," located in Newport, RI.

The bible for SWOS Basic was the Personnel Qualification Standard (PQS) for Surface Warfare. All PQS has three components: a Theory section, a Systems section and a Watchstation (ie, performance) section. SWOS Basic was 16 weeks long and in those sixteen weeks, the ensigns (and the lieutenant JGs who have washed out of aviation) learned all of the systems and theory part of SWOS PQS. The course was basically everything one needed to know to be a junior officer on a ship, taught at "drink from this here firehose" speed. The goal was to leave SWOS Basic with only the watchstation training to do. That was not an insignificant amount of work, it took 18 months to two years to finish that.

SWO PQS replaced the infamous "JO Journal" from the days when the only surface warfare training was on-the job. SWO PQS also standardized the training as much as possible, but it couldn't completely level the playing field. Ensigns sent to the engineering departments of aircraft carriers would be lucky if they amassed 40 hours of underway time as a fully-qualified Officer of the Deck, something that an OOD on a destroyer would do in five to seven days of routine underway watches. Ensigns who were sent to ships that were about to enter a major overhaul would wind up a year behind the power curve and those sent to a carrier that was entering an overhaul were basically screwed forever.

After SWOS Basic came the specialty schools. The longest pipeline back in the day was the ASW school, which lengthened quite a bit once surface ships became players in the passive ASW sonar game. Some specialty schools covered other topics; the communications and CIC officer schools had a section on administration of classified materials, as those officers generally were in charge of the classified materials system ("CMS") on their ships. (There was a long-standing joke about the annual softball game at Leavenworth Military Prison between former CMS custodians and disbursing officers.)

Depending on what collateral duties the officer was assigned, there could be other schools. Chief among those, back when surface ships were capable of carrying nuclear weapons, was a nuclear weapons admin school. Those going to main engineering jobs usually had to take a seven day boiler water/feed water school; the first two days of which were equivalent to a semester of freshman chemistry without the lab work. Most going to an engineering job also were sent to an advanced firefighting course.

SWO PQS was unique because it was the only officer warfare specialty which was wide open. All it took was obtaining a set of PQS books and anyone could try to complete it. Ambitious officers in both the intelligence (163x) and cryptology (161x) communities would, when on sea duty, try to complete SWO PQS. They did so both because it made them stand out (marking them as "hard chargers") and for the fact that line officers, the ones who were the customers of their specialties, tended to pay more attention to the spooks who were warfare-qualified.

Once the PQS was fully completed, all that was left was an intensive oral exam, given by the CO, XO and the three line department heads (Ops, Weps, CHENG). The general rule was the longer the oral exam, the worse you were doing. If you really knew your shit and they knew that you really knew your shit, you might have your exam scheduled for 1600 in the wardroom, which gave them only an hour to examine you before the cooks had to set up the wardroom for supper. If they thought that there was some serious question as to whether or not you knew your shit, your oral exam would be scheduled for 0800 or 1300.

When that was over and if you did indeed know your shit, your designator was changed to 111x and you got to wear this pin on your uniform.

Where Do They Find Such People?

If you wanted to enlist in the Navy back in the day, you just strolled into your local recruiter and chatted him (or her) up. You'd take the ASVAB (Armed Services Vocational Aptitude Battery) test, fill out some forms, take a physical, and off you'd go. The big determiners on what you did were the needs of the Navy and your ASVAB score, with added pluses for relevant experience. If your requested skill required that you'd have to learn a foreign language, you also had to take the Defense Language Aptitude Battery (DLAB) test.

Then it was off to the Recruit Training Centers, known throughout the Navy as "boot camps." There were three of them, RTC Orlando, RTC San Diego and RTC Great Lakes. If you had scored well on the ASVAB and there were slots open, you would go from boot camp to "A School" to learn the basics of a technical rating. If you couldn't get what you wanted, you would be sent to the Fleet as an undesignated seaman (deck), fireman (engineering) or airman (carriers). There you would take a correspondence course in the rating you wanted to get into, or "strike for." You would have to demonstrate your interest and ability to the Striker Selection Board in order to be transferred into that division. And, most important, you had to impress that division that you'd be a good addition, as nobody wanted to be saddled with a dirtbag.

For officers, there were several routes.

Oldest of all: The Naval Academy (USNA) in Annapolis, MD, the official brain washer of the officer corps, also referred to as the Boat School or the Chesapeake University of Nautical Technology. Their job was to produce the Kool-Aid Drinkers, the ones most likely to make a career out of it. USNA grads were the ones most likely to treat rules and regulations as Holy Writs. You could enlist, then apply for the Academy. In that event, you normally had to first go to the USNA Prep School in Newport, RI. They had a five year commitment after being commissioned.

The Reserve Officer Training Corps (ROTC): They produced more officers than did the USNA. The ones on scholarships got all of the benefits of going to Annapolis (a free education), without the stringent 24/7 horseshit. If you wanted the free education, but you wanted to be able to drink copious amounts of beer and have frequent sex, you went to ROTC. 2 year ROTC grads had a four year commitment, 4-year ROTC grads had a five year commitment.

Both 4-year ROTC and USNA midshipmen went to sea serving as enlisted sailors during the summer between their freshman and sophomore years. Between their junior and senior years, they went to sea as junior officers. Between their sophomore and junior years, they went to play with the Marine Corps and/or the aviators.

Officer Candidate School (OCS): OCS was open to those who already had a 4-year college degree. The aviators had their OCS at Penascola, FL. Almost everyone else went to OCS in Newport, RI. This was a 19-week cram course that later was reduced to 16 weeks by increasing the class day from seven hours to eight hours. These were the "90 day wonders." A sailor in the Navy who had earned a degree could apply to go to OCS and many did. A fair number of enlisted from all services who had gotten out and then earned a degree went to OCS. The non-prior service OCs tended to have a few years of experience after college, some had master's degrees. OCS grads had a four-year commitment, though the ones who went off to nuclear school had a longer commitment.

Officers who went to USNA tended to stay in in greater percentages, as they were the ones who had been brainwashed. Those who went to OCS tended to leave after their initial service was done, as they saw the Navy more as "just another shitty job." OCS graduates were far less likely to have drunk the Kool-Aid than the others. OCS grads were the ones most likely to think outside of the box; they could be the superstars or the problem children of any wardroom. If you needed something done that was not usual procedure or might even be borderline on legality, you probably asked an OCS grad to do it. ROTC officers tended to fall in between the two extremes, but they tended to be more towards the OCS side of the spectrum.

Officer Indoctrination School (OIS): OIS was a four or six week school in little more than how to wear a uniform and not make an utter fool of yourself. OIS was only open to staff corps; people who had a skill the Navy needed, were not in line to command anything and were less likely to be sent to sea (baby supply pukes were sent to OCS). Doctors, nurses, chaplains and lawyers went to OIS. If the Navy needed them badly enough, they were given direct commissions, shown briefly how to wear a uniform and set loose. The results were often comical.

Limited Duty Officers (LDO): LDOs were senior enlisted who were directly commissioned as line officers. Because LDOs often had ten or more years of service, most retired soon after being promoted to lieutenant commander.

Post commissioning training for officers will be a topic for another day.