Op-Ed: A "Night Court" for the U.S. Navy's Administrative Overload

 

[By Lt. Chris Rielage]

Time is our critical resource now. The Navy knows that we have a few scant years before we face major risk for an invasion of Taiwan. In the Naval Surface and Mine Warfighting Development Center (SMWDC) headquarters in San Diego, countdown clocks on the wall measure the days before mid-2027 arrives. The force is in a dead sprint, not a marathon – and we need to throw off excess weight.

To meet the challenge of war with China, the surface force has been driving hard towards more tactical competence. New equipment is rapidly hitting the fleet. New simulators are being built around the world. New cohorts of Warfare Tactics Instructors (WTIs) are graduating. SMWDC is even expanding the Surface Warfare Combat Training Continuum (SWCTC) to boost and standardize tactical knowledge across the surface force.

All of this looks good on paper. But when these efforts reach the ships, they collide with the tight schedules of sailors who count the hours in the day and often come up short. Sailors already work an average of 88.3 hours a week while underway. Where will the time for these warfighting reforms come from?

If sailors are already fully occupied and their schedules are overflowing, it hardly matters how good the new simulators or WTIs are. The present system of time allocation in the surface fleet is not a deliberate product of a warfighting-centric focus, but rather an unchecked process of creeping administrative overload. When new tacticians and training tools hit the fleet, they are eclipsed and diluted by a vast array of miscellaneous requirements. The leaders of the surface force must launch an effort to systematically protect time for tactics by aggressively pruning other requirements, or else these new efforts will fall short.

Guarding the Fleet’s Time

Thankfully, a model for how to do this already exists – a “night court.” Twice, Secretaries of Defense have convened night courts, which are rapid reviews of large groups of programs by a top official to aggressively triage acquisition programs. Most recently, then-Secretary of Defense Mark Esper convened a night court for both the Army and the larger Pentagon in 2019. In the process, Secretary Esper refocused billions of dollars to better fund reform efforts. In the defense world, night courts like this are also occasionally called “zero-based reviews.” The difference is subtle – a zero-based review starts from a clean slate and adds programs that are considered the most necessary, while a night court starts with the existing plan and cuts out excess.

The term “night court” will be used here, but the Navy could reasonably use either method. The end goal is the same. Senior admirals should review every program that owns a fraction of a sailor’s day, and ruthlessly remove the ones that, as the Secretary of War wrote recently, get in the way of “winning our Nation’s wars without distraction.” 

Are there truly programs the fleet can afford to cut? Certainly. Consider the Fall Protection program. Warships are expected to:

• Appoint a Fall Protection Program Manager and several “Competent Persons” to run the program. 
• Send those individuals to school – three days for the program manager and four days for each Competent Person. These individuals are usually senior Combat Systems personnel, already hard-pressed to maintain equipment and train for war.
• Develop a command instruction for fall protection and rescue plans for a fall.
• Perform a shipwide inspection for hazardous areas – anywhere with any height over four feet – and make design changes to the ship to remove the hazard. When this is impossible (which is usually the case on warships), post warning signs.
• Train end users – any sailor who might go near a height over four feet – on the program. 
• Regularly inspect the program, and be prepared for outside assessors to audit it.

The Department of the Navy’s Fall Protection instruction, which outlines these requirements, is 185 pages long – twice as long as many of the surface fleet’s latest tactical publications. 

We all agree that stopping falls is good in the abstract. No one wants to see a shipmate get injured. However, the truth is that the fleet simply cannot afford to spend precious time like this when pressing warfighting demands are calling. Sailors are continuously ensnared by programs, well-intentioned but ultimately misguided, that detract from fundamental tactical work. Warships do not have two crews – one that handles programs and one that handles combat. We face a zero-sum game with our time. Every minute that a sailor spends on an administrative program is a minute not spent on sharpening combat skills. 

Leading the Night Court

Commander, Naval Surface Force Pacific (CNSP) – the surface fleet’s Type Commander (TYCOM) – is best placed to run this night court. Not only is CNSP close enough to ships to personally speak to the urgency of the problem, they also have the senior authority to directly cut many programs. CNSP has the holistic perspective to rebalance the time allocations of the surface force, understanding both the urgency of the strategic situation and which administrative requirements do truly matter. No one leader can remove every detrimental program alone. Fall Protection, for example, will require congressional action to exempt warships from OSHA. CNSP is senior enough, however, to cut a wide swath using the span of their own authority, and to advocate for the changes that require departmental or congressional authority. 

CNSP is not the only path to success, but it is the simplest. The Chief of Naval Operations (CNO) or Secretary of the Navy (SECNAV) could also build a programmatic night court – more directly replicating the acquisition night court that Secretary Esper created – but they are too distant from the fleet. The more echelons a leader is removed from a problem, the more they face what public economist Anthony Downs called a “message-distortion problem.” In any large bureaucracy, each layer of the chain of command, even when completely well-intentioned, naturally filters out some portion of any message as it works its way up. This feature of large bureaucracies makes the Navy’s most senior leaders ill-placed to judge which programs should be removed to improve time allocations at the deckplate level. Not only is CNSP closer to the fleet, senior leaders at CNSP have bypass mechanisms – tours, direct conversations with sailors, and a network on the waterfront – available to get to the core of each program’s value. Instead of leading it directly, the CNO and SECNAV are better suited to act as senior champions for a TYCOM-led night court.

The Night Court Process

The night court should go through three phases. First, measurement. Surface force leaders need to understand every program that takes up a sailor’s time. The team that runs the night court should be careful here. If they turn this information-gathering step into yet another tasker for ships, they may actually make the problem worse. The better answer is to put three or four SWO-qualified officers who have just departed sea tours in a room, and have them brainstorm a list of every requirement they encountered. Start the night court off of that rough draft, and only afterwards follow up with more comprehensive studies and requests for information. The goal is to move quickly, not to waste a year waiting for a formal – and quickly outdated – product.

The next step is adjudication. Each program must defend its existence to the night court. The key here is that program owners must not simply explain that a problem exists, but convince CNSP that their program meaningfully addresses the problem. Using Fall Protection again as an example, it is not good enough to list fall statistics – the Fall Protection team must convince CNSP that their program stops falls without putting an undue burden on ships.

Once the night court judges against a program, the last and hardest step is removal. The night court should identify the source of the program requirement, and if it is within CNSP’s influence, cut it directly. If the requirement is imposed on the surface fleet by a higher authority like congress, CNSP should push them for reform. Some of this work will generate natural friction amongst stakeholders. To build support, the night court should aggressively publicize how many hours of fleet time it saves, emphasize how many pages of administrative requirements it has cut, and cultivate support from combat-focused leaders who can speak to the warfighting benefits.

The goal is that, in the long run, regular night court reviews – perhaps every 1-2 years – cease to be radical. Ideally, guarding sailors’ time to emphasize warfighting will become a standard part of how the surface fleet operates and conceives of its identity: a more austere and focused force, supported by a more disciplined bureaucracy.

Dragging the Fleet Down

If surface force leaders like CNSP do not do the work of cutting time requirements, more time will not magically appear. Instead, the task of prioritizing will fall to unit commanders, junior officers, and chiefs. They will be forced to make changes within the margins of a system overflowing with years of creeping administrative overload, which has long surpassed the available time of sailors. The best of them will be honest about the fact that they cannot do everything, and accept hits to their record in exchange for a ruthless prioritization of combat skills. Ships with strong warfighting focus will fail more administrative inspections, earn fewer awards, and look worse on paper. Those leaders – the ones willing to be honest – will be winnowed out by a personnel system that does not appreciate nuance. The remaining leaders will take dishonesty as a norm and even an unavoidable price to be paid in exchange for career security. They will superficially hit their required administrative wickets at the cost of lethality. The Army War College report “Lying to Ourselves” famously described this dynamic within its own service, and the surface fleet is just as prone to it. Our failure to control excess time demands on ships yields an overflowing system that incentivizes dishonesty.

At this late hour, we cannot keep everything. When a crew member falls overboard, we teach them to immediately shed their steel-toed boots. Boots are normally vital – they keep our sailors safe in a shipboard industrial environment. But in the crisis of a man overboard, they drag sailors down. Our peacetime programs are the same. We can shed weight now, or we can drown in wartime.

LT Chris Rielage is a SWO and ASW/SUW WTI onboard USS CARL M LEVIN (DDG 120) in the Pacific. His publications have previously appeared in USNI’s Proceedings and CIMSEC. These opinions are expressed in a personal capacity and do not necessarily reflect the official views or policies of the Department of the Navy or the U.S. government.

This article appears courtesy of CIMSEC and may be found in its original form here.