Navy Line Officers

SURFACE FORCES : Why The US Navy Is Falling Apart

July 15, 2011: Three years ago, the U.S. Navy began to realize that the readiness of warships was deteriorating to an alarming degree. Some eight percent of them were failing inspections. Since then, it's gotten worse. Now, 24 percent are failing inspections. Currently, about 20 percent of navy ships have failed readiness inspections or are unfit for combat. About 40 percent of ships at sea have one major system broken. About half of combat aircraft and helicopters at sea are not fully functional. Admirals and staff officers scrambled to discover what went wrong. Turns out there was a lot wrong. Crew size has been shrinking, and the navy has not adapted its maintenance needs to this. This is a trend that has been going on for over a century. In the early 19th century, a typical 3,500 ton "ship of the line" had a crew of 800-900 sailors. That was about 240 sailors per thousand tons of ship. A century later, capital ships had eliminated labor intensive sails and were running on steam, and lots more machines. The 12,000 ton pre-World War I battleship had a crew of 750 (62 sailors per thousand tons of ship). But for the last century, not a lot of progress was made. The current U.S. nuclear carriers have 57 sailors per thousand tons of ship. But the new LCS gets that down to 25. Advances in automation, as well as the introduction of the combat UAVs in the next decade, will make the thousand sailor crew for a carrier possible. That's ten sailors per thousand tons of ship, plus a lot of robots, and equipment built to require very little manpower to fix or operate. That last innovation is already happening with warplanes, greatly reducing the man hours of maintenance required per flight hour. The navy has long since accepted those concepts for missiles (delivered in sealed containers, requiring little maintenance.) These are trends that have been building for some time, and show every indication of continuing. Although these new techniques are expensive, so are sailors. Each one costs over $100,000 a year. For a carrier crew of 5,700, that's over half a billion dollars a year. That buys lots of automation, and keeps a lot of people out of harm's way. The problem is that the civilian automation has not adapted well to military needs.

People Management for PMs « The Slalom Blog

– General George Patton Jr.

Tony Troup is a delivery focused PM at Slalom.  He is also a Naval Reserve officer. As a Submarine Officer with the rank of Commander and over 22 years in the Navy, he has been part of many commands. Tony states that some commands have been a dream to work with and others have been extraordinarily challenging. Tony and I want to share our joint philosophy on people management as it relates to project management.

Know your people. Both Naval and civilian experiences have made the importance and value of teammates clear. You truly can’t be an “Army of One” and be successful; you need the support and effort of your project team. As the leader (yes, PMs are indeed leaders) you need to know your team: their capabilities, their explicit roles and their availability. This will help you manage the expectations that you and the team will share. Without good understanding and communications, project teams will at a minimum be ineffective and will likely fail.

Get the right resources. While there is often a concerted effort to schedule resources’ time, additional effort must be placed on appropriate skills sets. I’m sure a fair share of you have worked on a troubled project that had inadequate skills as its root problem.

Projects require different types of resources. Managing the roles and responsibilities and understanding the capabilities of each person is critical for success. Without understanding your resources, their capabilities and their work assigned, tasks may slip through the cracks with an “I thought YOU were going to do that” excuse. Explicit role definition and careful resource skill matching will help in the overall success for your project.

Manage by walking around . “Cube Leadership” is at best ineffective and at worst problematic. Your team will see that you are not engaged and will equate that disengagement with how little you appear to care about the success of the project and the team as a whole. Many project managers believe that they can simply use status emails or Excel spreadsheets to manage projects. These tools alone are not sophisticated enough to handle true project management, even on a small scale. Face-to-face meetings, daily stand-ups and other means for getting the feel of the project can significantly improve your chances for success and minimize miscommunications.

Having a team see you as much as possible is important for team cohesion, especially for teams that are not co-located. If necessary, pick up a phone and call your teams, both individually and as a whole. Ensure they are tracking with the project plan, get a feel for how they are doing personally and get to the bottom of issues with a personal touch.

Report on foreign systems of naval education

CHAPTER I. GENERAL STEPS IN THE CAREER OF LINE OFFICERS. The regular grades of executive or line officers in the Royal Navy are as follows : Admiral of the ...

Naval Institute proceedings

We have, therefore, as large a surplus of engineers in our Navy as of line officers, in comparison with foreign navies. Is this surplus as necessary in the ...

Hearings on the proposed reorganization of the Navy Department before the Committee on Naval Affairs of the House of Representatives [December 16, 1909 to February 17, 1910]

Can a line officer give orders to a staff officer? Paymaster-General ROGERS. Yes , sir; the line officer can give orders to every other officer in the navy, ...

Sky and ocean joined, the U.S. Naval Observatory, 1830-2000

There are two types of officers in the Navy: line officers and staff officers. Line officers fall into two categories, restricted line and unrestricted line ...

The Navy

In time of war the presence of combatants — that is, of line officers or crew ... the practice in the navy be assimilated to that now obtaining in the army. ...