The Self-Designing High-Reliability Organization:
Aircraft Carrier Flight Operations at Sea
By Gene I. Rochlin, Todd R. La Porte, and Karlene H. Roberts
The following article was originally published in the Autumn 1987 issue of Naval War College Review. Reprinted here with the kind permission of Naval War College Review.
"A hundred things I have no control over could go wrong and
wreck my career . . . but wherever I go from here, I'll never have a better job
than this. . . . This is the best job in the world."
-- Carrier commanding officer
Recent studies of large, formal organizations that perform complex, inherently
hazardous, and highly technical tasks under conditions of tight coupling and
severe time pressure have generally concluded that most will fail spectacularly
at some point, with attendant human and social costs of great severity.1 The
notion that accidents in these systems are "normal," that is, to be expected
given the conditions and risks of operation, appears to be as well grounded in
experience as in theory. 2 Yet there is a small group of organizations in
American society that appears to succeed under trying circumstances, performing
daily a number of highly complex technical tasks in which they cannot afford to
"fail." We are currently studying three unusually salient examples whereby
devotion to a zero rate of error is almost matched by performance--utility grid
management (Pacific Gas & Electric Company), air traffic control, and flight
operations aboard U.S. Navy aircraft carriers.
Of all activities studied by our research group, flight operations at sea is the
closest to the "edge of the envelope"--operating under the most extreme
conditions in the least stable environment, and with the greatest tension
between preserving safety and reliability and attaining maximum operational
efficiency. 3 Both electrical utilities and air traffic control emphasize the
importance of long training, careful selection, task and team stability, and
cumulative experience. Yet the Navy demonstrably performs very well with a young
and largely inexperienced crew, with a "management" staff of officers that turns
over half its complement each year, and in a working environment that must
rebuild itself from scratch approximately every eighteen months. Such
performance strongly challenges our theoretical under standing of the Navy as an
organization, its training and operational processes, and the problem of
high-reliability organizations generally.
It will come as no surprise to this audience that the Navy has certain
traditional ways of doing things that transcend specifics of missions, ships,
and technology. Much of what we have to report interprets that which is "known"
to naval carrier personnel, yet is seldom articulated or analyzed. 4 We have
been struck by the degree to which a set of highly unusual formal and informal
rules and relationships are taken for granted, implicitly and almost
unconsciously incorporated into the organizational structure of the operational
Navy.
Only those who have been privileged to participate in high-tempo flight
operations aboard a modern aircraft carrier at sea can appreciate the
complexity, strain, and inherent hazards that underlie seemingly routine
day-to-day operations. That naval personnel ultimately accept these conditions
as more or less routine is yet another example of how adaptable people are to
even the most difficult and stressful of circumstances.
We have now spent considerable time aboard several aircraft carriers in port and
at sea, though our team of non-Navy academics retains a certain distance that
allows us to recognize and report on the astonishing and unique organizational
structure and performance of carrier flight operations. 5 We do not presume that
our limited exposure to a few aspects of operations has given us a comprehensive
overview. Nevertheless, we have already been able to identify a set of causal
factors that we believe are of central importance to understanding how such
organizations operate.
In an era of constant budgetary pressure, the Navy shares with other
organizations the need to defend those factors most critical to maintaining
performance without, at the same time, sacrificing either operational
reliability or safety. Following many conversations with naval personnel of all
ranks, we are convinced that the rules and procedures that make up those factors
are reasonably well known internally, but are written down only in part and
generally not expressed in a form that can be readily conveyed outside the
confines of the Navy.
The purpose of this article is to report some of our more relevant findings and
observations to our gracious host, the Navy community; to describe air
operations through the eyes of informed, yet detached observers; and to use our
preliminary findings to reflect upon why carriers work as well as they do.
"So you want to understand an aircraft carrier? Well, just imagine that it's a
busy day, and you shrink San Francisco Airport to only one short runway and one
ramp and gate. Make planes take off and land at the same time, at half the
present time interval, rock the runway from side to side, and require that
everyone who leaves in the morning returns that same day. Make sure the
equipment is so close to the edge of the envelope that it's fragile. Then turn
off the radar to avoid detection, impose strict controls on radios, fuel the
aircraft in place with their engines running, put an enemy in the air, and
scatter live bombs and rockets around. Now wet the whole thing down with salt
water and oil, and man it with 20-year-olds, half of whom have never seen an
airplane close-up. Oh, and by the way, try not to kill anyone."
-- Senior officer, Air Division
Today's aircraft carrier flight operations are as much a product of their
history and continuity of operation as of their design. The complexity of
operations aboard a large, modern carrier flying the latest aircraft is so great
that no one, on or off the ship, can know the content and sequence of every task
needed to make sure the aircraft fly safely, reliably, and on schedule. As with
many organizations of similar size and complexity, tasks are broken down
internally into smaller and more homogeneous units as well as task-oriented work
groups. 6 In the case of the Navy, the decomposition rules are often ad hoc and
circumstantial: some tasks are organized by technical function (navigation,
weapons), some by unit (squadron), some by activity (handler, tower), and some
by mission (combat, strike). Men may belong to and be evaluated by one unit
(e.g., one of the squadrons), yet be assigned to another (e.g., aircraft
maintenance).
In order to keep this network alive and coordinated, it must be kept connected
and integrated horizontally (e.g., across squadrons), vertically (from
maintenance and fuel up through operations), and across command structures
(battle group--ship--air wing). As in all large organizations, the responsible
officer or chief petty officer has to know what to do in each case, how to get
it done, whom to report to and why, and how to coordinate with all units that he
depends upon or that depend upon him. This is complicated in the Navy case by
the requirement for many personnel, particularly the more senior officers, to
interact on a regular basis with those from several separate organizational
hierarchies. Each has several different roles to play depending upon which of
the structures is in effect at any given time. 7
Furthermore, these organizational structures also shift in time to adapt to
varying circumstances. The evolution of the separate units (e.g., ship, air
wing, command structures) and their integration during workup into a fully
coordinated operational team, for example, have few, if any, applicable
counterparts in civilian organizations. 8 There is also no civilian counterpart
for the requirement to adapt to rapid shifts in role and authority in response
to changing tactical circumstances during deployment.
No armchair designer, even one with extensive carrier service, could sit down
and lay out all the relationships and interdependencies, let alone the
criticality and time sequence of all the individual tasks. Both tasks and
coordination have evolved through the incremental accumulation of experience to
the point where there probably is no single person in the Navy who is familiar
with them all. 9 Rather than going back to the Langley, * consider, for the
moment, the year 1946, when the fleet retained the best and newest of its
remaining carriers and had machines and crews finely tuned for the use of
propeller-driven, gasoline-fueled, Mach 0.5 aircraft on a straight deck.
Over the next few years the straight flight deck was to be replaced with the
angled deck, requiring a complete relearning of the procedures for launch and
recovery and for "spotting" aircraft on and below the deck. The introduction of
jet aircraft required another set of new procedures for launch, recovery, and
spotting, and for maintenance, safety, handling, engine storage and support,
aircraft servicing, and fueling. The introduction of the Fresnel-lens landing
system and air traffic control radar put the approach and landing under
centralized, positive, on-board control. As the years went by, the
launch/approach speed, weight, capability, and complexity of the aircraft
increased steadily, as did the capability and complexity of electronics of all
kinds. There were no books on the integration of this new "hardware" into
existing routines and no other place to practice it but at sea; it was all
learned on the job. Moreover, little of the process was written down, so that
the ship in operation is the only reliable "manual."
For a variety of reasons, no two aircraft carriers, even of the same class, are
quite alike. Even if nominally the same, as are the recent Nimitz-class ships,
each differs slightly in equipment and develops a unique personality during its
shakedown cruise and first workup and deployment. 10 While it is true that each
ship is made up of the same range of more or less standardized tasks at the
micro level, the question of how to do the job right involves an understanding
of the structure in which the job is embedded, and that is neither standardized
across ships nor, in fact, written down systematically and formally anywhere. If
they left the yards physically different, even such apparently simple matters as
spotting aircraft properly on the deck have to be learned through a process of
trial and error. 11
What is more, even the same formal assignment will vary according to time and
place. Carriers differ; missions differ; requirements differ from Atlantic to
Pacific, and from fleet to fleet; ships have different histories and traditions,
and different equipment; and commanding officers and admirals retain the
discretion to run their ships and groups in different ways and to emphasize
different aspects. Increased standardization of carriers, aircraft loadings,
missions, tasks, and organizational structure would be difficult to obtain, and
perhaps not even wise. 12 There is a great deal to learn in the Navy, and much
of it is only available on the spot.
Shore-based school training for officers and crew provides only basic
instruction. 13 It includes a great deal about what needs to be done and the
formal rules for doing it. Yet it only provides generalized guidelines and a
standardized framework to smooth the transition to the real job of performing
the same tasks on board as part of a complex system. NATOPS †and other written
guidelines represent the book of historical errors. They provide boundaries to
prevent certain actions known to have adverse outcomes, but little guidance as
to how to promote optimal ones.
Operations manuals are full of details of specific tasks at the micro level but
rarely discuss integration into the whole. There are other written rules and
procedures, from training manuals through standard operating procedures (SOPs),
that describe and standardize the process of integration. None of them explain
how to make the whole system operate smoothly, let alone at the level of
performance that we have observed. 14 It is in the real-world environment of
workups and deployment, through the continual training and retraining of
officers and crew, that the information needed for safe and efficient operation
is developed, transmitted, and maintained. Without that continuity, and without
sufficient operational time at sea, both effectiveness and safety would suffer.
Moreover, the organization is not stable over time. Every forty months or so
there is an almost 100 percent turnover of crew, and all of the officers will
have rotated through and gone on to other duty. Yet the ship remains functional
at a high level. The Navy itself is, of course, the underlying structural
determinant. Uniforms, ranks, rules and regulations, codes of conduct, and
specialized languages provide a world of extensive codification of objects,
events, situations, and appropriate conduct; members who deviate too far from
the norm become "foreigners" within their own culture and soon find themselves
outside the group, figuratively if not literally. 15
Behavioral and cultural norms, SOPs, and regulations are necessary, but they are
far from sufficient to preserve operational structure and the character of the
service. Our research team noted three mechanisms that act to maintain and
transmit operational factors in the face of rapid turnover. First, and in some
ways most important, is the pool of chief petty officers, many of whom have long
service in their specialty and circulate around similar ships in the fleet. 16
Second, many of the officers and some of the crew will have at some time served
on other carriers, albeit in other jobs, and bring to the ship some of the
shared experience of the entire force. Third, the process of continual rotation
and replacement, even while on deployment, maintains a continuity that is broken
only during a major refit. These mechanisms are realized by an uninterrupted
process of on-board training and retraining that makes the ship one huge,
continuing school for its officers and men.
When operational continuity is broken or nonexistent, the effects are observable
and dramatic. One member of our research group had the opportunity to observe a
new Nimitz-class aircraft carrier as she emerged from the yard and remarked at
how many things had to be learned before she could even begin to commence
serious air operations. 17 Even for an older and more experienced ship coming
out of an ordinary refit, the workup towards deployment is a long and arduous
process. Many weeks are spent just qualifying the deck for taking and handling
individual aircraft, and many more at gradually increasing densities to perfect
aircraft handling as well as the coordination needed for tight launch and
recovery sequences. With safety and reliability as fixed boundary conditions,
every moment of precious operational time before deployment is devoted to
improving capability and efficiency.
The importance of adequate workup time--for flight operations to be conducted
safely at present levels of technical and operational complexity and at the
tempo required for demonstrating effectiveness--cannot be overemphasized. During
our research we followed one carrier in which the workup was shortened by "only"
two weeks, for reasons of economy. As a result, the ship was forced to complete
its training during the middle of a difficult and demanding mid-ocean exercise;
this placed an enormous strain on all hands. While the crew succeeded--the
referees adapted compensating evaluation procedures--risks to ship's personnel
and equipment were visibly higher. Moreover, officers and crew were openly
unhappy with their own performance, with an attendant and continuing impact on
morale. 18
"As soon as you learn 90% of your job, it's time to move on. That's the Navy way."
--
Junior officer
Because of the high turnover rate, a U.S. aircraft carrier will begin its workup
with a large percentage of new hands in the crew, and with a high proportion of
officers new to the ship. The U.S. Navy's tradition of training generalist
officers (which distinguishes it from the other military services) assures that
many of them will also be new to their specific jobs. Furthermore, tours of duty
are not coordinated with ship sailing schedules; hence, the continual
replacement of experienced with "green" personnel, in critical as well as
routine jobs, continues even during periods of actual deployment.
Continual rotation creates the potential for confusion and uncertainty, even in
relatively standardized military organizations. Lewis Sorley has characterized
the effects of constant turnover in other military systems as "turbulence" and
has identified it as the prime source of loss of unit cohesion. 19 A student of
Army institutional practices has remarked that the constant introduction of new
soldiers into a unit just reaching the level of competence needed to perform in
an integrated manner can result in poor evaluations, restarting the training
cycle, and keeping individuals perpetually frustrated by their poor job
performance. 20
Negative effects in the Navy case are similar. It takes time and effort to turn
a collection of men, even men with the common training and common background of
a tightly knit peacetime military service, into a smoothly functioning
operations and management team. SOPs and other formal rules help, but the
organization must learn to function with minimal dependence upon team stability
and personal factors. Even an officer with special aptitude or proficiency at a
specific task may never perform it at sea again. 21 Cumulative learning and
improvement are also achieved slowly and with difficulty, and individual
innovations and gains are often lost to the system before they can be
consolidated. 22
Yet we credit this practice with contributing greatly to the effectiveness of
naval organizations. There are two general reasons for this paradox. First, the
efforts that must be made to ease the resulting strain on the organization seem
to have positive effects that go beyond the problem they directly address. And
second, officers must develop authority and command respect from those senior
enlisted specialists upon whom they depend and from whom they must learn the
specifics of task performance.
The Navy's training cycle is perforce dictated by the schedule of its ships, not
of its personnel. Because of high social costs of long sea-duty tours, the Navy
has long had to deal with such continual turnover--it attempts as best it can to
mitigate the negative effects. Most important is the institutionalization of
continual, cyclic training as part of organizational and individual
expectations. This is designed to bring new people "up to speed" with the
current phase of the operational cycle, thus stabilizing the environment just
before and during deployment; however, this is accomplished at the cost of
pushing the turbulence down into individual units. Although the deployment cycle
clearly distinguishes periods of "training" from those of "operations," it is a
measure of competence and emphasis, not of procedural substance, that applies
primarily to the ship as a unit, not its men as individuals.
The result is a relatively open system that exploits the process of training and
retraining as a means for socialization and acculturation. At any given moment,
all but the most junior of the officers and crew are acting as teacher as well
as trainee. A typical lieutenant commander, for instance, simultaneously tries
to master his present job, train his juniors, and learn about the next job he is
likely to hold. If he has just come aboard, he is also engaged in trying to
master or transfer all the cumulated knowledge about the specifics of task,
ship, and personnel in a time rarely exceeding a few weeks. 23 In addition to
these informal officer-officer and officer-crew interactions, officers and crew
alike are also likely to be engaged in one or more courses of formal study to
master new skills in the interest of career advancement or rating.
As a result, the ship appears to us as one gigantic school, not in the sense of
rote learning, but in the positive sense of a genuine search for acquisition and
improvement of skills. One of the great enemies of high reliability is the usual
"civilian" combination of stability, routinization, and lack of challenge and
variety that predispose an organization to relax vigilance and sink into a
dangerous complacency that can lead to carelessness and error. 24 The shipboard
environment on a carrier is never that stable. Traditional ways of doing things
are both accepted and constantly challenged. Young officers rotate in with new
ideas and approaches; old chiefs remain aboard to argue for tradition and
experience. The resulting dynamic can be the source of some confusion and
uncertainty at times, but at its best leads to a constant scrutiny and
rescrutiny of every detail, even for SOPs.
In general, the Navy has managed to change the rapid personnel turnover to an
advantage through a number of mechanisms that have evolved by trial and error.
SOPs and procedures, for example, are often unusually robust, which in turn
contributes another increment to reliability. The continual movement of people
rapidly diffuses organizational and technical innovation as well as "lessons
learned," often in the form of "sea stories," throughout the organization.
Technical innovation is eagerly sought where it will clearly increase both
reliability and effectiveness, yet resisted when suggested purely for its own
sake. Data is logged with grease pencils by operators who read sophisticated
radar systems; indicators for the cables to arrest multimillion-dollar aircraft
are set and checked mechanically, by hand. Things tend to be done in proven ways
and changed only when some unit has demonstrated and documented an improvement
in the field. The problem for the analyst and for the Navy is the separation of
functional conservatism from pure tradition.
"Here I'm responsible for the lives of my gang. In civilian life, I'm the kind of
guy you wouldn't like to meet on a dark street."
--
Deck petty officer
Our team noted with some surprise the adaptability and flexibility of what is,
after all, a military organization in the day-to-day performance of its tasks.
On paper, the ship is formally organized in a steep hierarchy by rank with clear
chains of command, and means to enforce authority far beyond those of any
civilian organization. We supposed it to be run by the book, with a constant
series of formal orders, salutes, and yes-sirs. Often it is, but flight
operations are not conducted that way.
Flight operations and planning are usually conducted as if the organization were
relatively "flat" and collegial. This contributes greatly to the ability to seek
the proper, immediate balance between the drive for safety and reliability and
that for combat effectiveness. Events on the flight deck, for example, can
happen too quickly to allow for appeals through a chain of command. Even the
lowest rating on the deck has not only the authority but the obligation to
suspend flight operations immediately, under the proper circumstances, without
first clearing it with superiors. Although his judgment may later be reviewed or
even criticized, he will not be penalized for being wrong and will often be
publicly congratulated if he is right. 25
Coordinated planning for the next day's air operations requires a series of
involved trade-offs between mission requirements and the demands of training,
flight time, maintenance, ordnance, and aircraft handling. It is largely done by
a process of ongoing and continuing argument and negotiation among personnel
from many units, in person and via phone, which tend to be resolved by direct
order only when the rare impasse develops that requires an appeal to higher
authority. In each negotiation, most officers play a dual role, resisting
excessive demands from others that would compromise the safety or future
performance of their units, while maximizing demands on others for operational
and logistic support.
This does not mean that formal rank and hierarchy are unimportant. In fact, they
are the lubricant that makes the informal processes work. Unlike the situation
in most civilian organizations, relative ranking in the hierarchy is largely
stable and shaped by regular expectations, formal rules, and procedures.
Although fitness reports and promotion review boards are not free of abuses or
paradoxes, the shipboard situation tends to promote cooperative behavior, which
tends to minimize the negative effects of jealousy and direct competition. 26
Although officers of the same rank are competitively rated, each stands to
benefit if joint output is maximized and to suffer if the unit is not performing
well. Thus, we rarely observe such strategies as the hoarding of information or
deliberate undermining of the ability of others to perform their jobs that
characterize so many civilian organizations, particularly in the public sector.
"How does it work? On paper, it can't, and it don't. So you try it. After a
while, you figure out how to do it right and keep doing it that way. Then we
just get out there and train the guys to make it work. The ones that get it we
make POs. ‡ The rest just slog through their time."
--
Flight deck CPO
Operational redundancy--the ability to provide for the execution of a task if
the primary unit fails or falters--is necessary for high-reliability
organizations to manage activities that are sufficiently dangerous to cause
serious consequences in the event of operational failures. 27 In classic
organizational theory, redundancy is provided by some combination of duplication
(two units performing the same function) and overlap (two units with functional
areas in common). Its enemies are mechanistic management models that seek to
eliminate these valuable modes in the name of "efficiency." 28 For a carrier at
sea, several kinds of redundancy are necessary, even for normal peacetime
operations, each of which creates its own kinds of stress.
A primary form is technical redundancy involving operations-critical units or
components on board--computers, radar antennas, etc. In any fighting ship, as
much redundancy is built in as is practicable. This kind of redundancy is
traditional and well understood. Another form is supply redundancy. The ship
must carry as many aircraft and spares as possible to keep its power projection
and defensive capability at an effective level in the face of maintenance
requirements and possible operational or combat losses. Were deck and parts
loading reduced, many of the dangers and tensions involved in scheduling and
moving aircraft would be considerably lessened. Here is a clear case of a
trade-off between operational and safety reliability that must be made much
closer to the edge of the envelope than would be the case for other kinds of
organizations. Indeed, for a combat organization, the trade-off point is
generally taken as a measure of overall competence. 29
Most interesting to our research is a third form, decision/management
redundancy, which encompasses a number of organizational strategies to ensure
that critical decisions are timely and correct. This has two primary aspects:
(a) internal cross-checks on decisions, even at the micro level; and, (b)
fail-safe redundancy in case one management unit should fail or be put out of
operation. It is in this area that the rather unique Navy way of doing things is
the most interesting, theoretically as well as practically.
As an example of (a), almost everyone involved in bringing the aircraft [in for
a landing] on board is part of a constant loop of conversation and verification
taking place over several different channels at once. At first, little of this
chatter seems coherent, let alone substantive, to the outside observer. With
experience, one discovers that seasoned personnel do not "listen" so much as
monitor for deviations, reacting almost instantaneously to anything that does
not fit their expectations of the correct routine. This constant flow of
information about each safety-critical activity, monitored by many different
listeners on several different communications nets, is designed specifically to
assure that any critical element that is out of place will be discovered or
noticed by someone before it causes problems.
Setting the arresting gear, for example, requires that each incoming aircraft be
identified (as to speed and weight), and each of four independent arresting-gear
engines be set correctly. 30 At any given time, as many as a dozen people in
different parts of the ship may be monitoring the net, and the settings are
repeated in two different places (Pri-Fly [Primary Flight Control] and LSO
[Landing Signal Officer]). § During our trip aboard Enterprise (CVN 65) in April
1987, she took her 250,000th arrested landing, representing about a million
individual settings. 31 Because of the built-in redundancies and the personnel's
cross-familiarity with each other's jobs, there had not been a
single recorded
instance of a reportable error in setting that resulted in the loss of an
aircraft. 32
Fail-safe redundancy, (b), is achieved in a number of ways. Duplication and
overlap, the most familiar modes of error detection, are used to some
extent--for example, in checking mission weapons loading. Nevertheless, there
are limits to how they can be provided. Space and billets are tight at sea, even
on a nuclear-powered carrier, and unlike land-based organizations, the seagoing
Navy cannot simply add extra departments and ratings. Shipboard constraints and
demands require a considerable amount of redundancy at relatively small cost in
personnel. In addition to the classic "enlightened waste" approach of tolerance
for considerable duplication and overlap, other, more efficient strategies that
use existing units with other primary tasks as backups are required, such as
"stressing the survivor" and mobilizing organizational "reserves." 33
Stressing-the-survivor strategies require that each of the units normally
operate below capacity so that if one fails or is unavailable, its tasks can be
shifted to others without severely overloading them. Redundancy on the bridge is
a good example. 34 Mobilizing reserves entails the creation of a "shadow" unit
able to pick up the task if necessary. It is relatively efficient in terms of
both space and personnel but places higher demands on the training and
capability of individuals. What the Navy effects, through the combination of
generalist officers, high job mobility, constant negotiation, and perpetual
training, is a mix that leans heavily on reserve mobilization with some elements
of survivor stressing. Most of the officers and a fair proportion of senior
enlisted men are familiar with several tasks other than the ones they normally
perform and could execute them in an emergency.
The Combat Direction Center (CDC, or just "Combat"), for example, is the center
for fighting the ship. 35 Crucial decisions are thereby placed nominally in the
hands of relatively junior officers in a single, comparatively vulnerable
location. In this case we have noted several of the mechanisms described above.
There is a considerable amount of senior oversight, even in calm periods. A
number of people are "just watching," keeping track of each other's jobs or
monitoring the situation from other locations. There is no one place on the ship
that duplicates the organizational function of Combat, yet each of the tasks has
a backup somewhere--on the carrier or distributed among other elements of the
battle group. 36
In an "ordinary" organization these parameters would likely be characterized in
negative terms. Backup systems differ in pattern and structure from primary
ones. Those with task responsibility are constantly under the critical eyes of
others. Authority and responsibilities are distributed in different patterns and
may shift in contingencies. In naval circumstances, where reliability is
paramount, these are seen as positive and cooperative, for it is the task that
is of primary importance.
Thus, those elements of Navy "culture" that have the greatest potential for
creating confusion and uncertainty turn out to be major contributors to
organizational reliability and robustness under stress. We believe this to be an
example of adaptive organizational evolution to circumstance, for it responds
very well to the functional necessities of modern operations. In the days of
great, compact flotillas, loss of navigational or deck or gun capability by one
ship could be compensated for by shifting or sharing with another. There is only
one carrier in a battle group and only a handful of other ships spread over many
hundreds of square miles. Each, and most particularly the carrier, must
internalize its own processes and modalities for redundancy.
"The job of this ship is to shoot the airplanes off the pointy end and catch them
back on the blunt end. The rest is detail."
--
Carrier commanding officer
Even though our research is far from complete, particularly with regard to
comparisons with other organizations, several interesting observations and
lessons have already been recorded.
First, the remarkable degree of personal and organizational flexibility we have
observed is essential for performing operational tasks that continue to increase
in complexity as technology advances. "Ordinary" organizational theory would
characterize aircraft carrier operations as confusing and inefficient,
especially for an organization with a strong and steep formal management
hierarchy (i.e., any "quasi-military" organization). However, the resulting
redundancy and flexibility are, in fact, remarkably efficient in terms of making
the best use of space-limited personnel.
Second, an effective fighting carrier is not a passive weapon that can be kept
on a shelf until it is needed. She is a living unit possessed of dynamic
processes of self-replication and self-reconstruction that can only be nurtured
by retaining experienced personnel, particularly among the chiefs, and by giving
her sufficient operational time at sea. This implies a certain minimum budgetary
cost for maintaining a first-line carrier force at the levels of operational
capability and safety demanded of the U.S. Navy.
The potential risk of attempting to operate at present levels under increasing
budgetary constraints arises because the Navy is a "can-do" organization,
visibly reluctant to say "we're not ready" until the situation is far into the
red zone. 37 In time of war, the trade-off point between safety and
effectiveness moves, and certain risks must be taken to get units deployed where
and when they are needed. In peacetime, the potential costs of deploying units
that are less than fully trained are not so easily tolerated. If reductions in
at-sea and flying time are to be taken out of workups to preserve operational
time on deployment, training and evaluation procedures will have to be adapted
to reduce stress--perhaps by overlapping final readiness evaluations into the
beginning of the deployment period.
Third, as long-term students of organizations, we are astounded at how little of
the existing literature is applicable to the study of ships at sea. Consider,
for example, the way in which the several units that make up a battle group
(carrier, air wing, supply ships, escorts) are in a continual process of
formation and reformation. Imagine any other organization performing effectively
when it is periodically separated from and then rejoins the unit that performs
its central technical function. 38 More importantly, most of the existing
literature was developed for failure-tolerant, civilian organizations with
definite and measurable outputs. The complementary body on public organizations
assumes not only a tolerance for failure, but at best an ambiguous definition of
what measures failure (or for that matter, success).
Fourth, we have been encouraged to reflect on the new large Soviet nuclear
carrier now being fitted out in the Black Sea. 39 The Soviet Navy is completely
without experience or tradition in large carrier operations. Their internal
structure is more rigid and more formal than ours and with far less on-the-job
training, especially for enlisted personnel. 40 It will be very interesting to
watch their workup time, deck loading, and casualty rates. Of course, it is not
clear that they will be trying to emulate U.S. carrier operations rather than
the somewhat different style and objectives of the British or French. 41 In
either case, we estimate a minimum of several workups (each taking perhaps two
or three years) before they begin to approach the deck loads and sortie rates of
comparable Western carriers and, unless they are remarkably lucky, there will be
some loss of lives in the learning process. 42
*The first U.S. Navy aircraft carrier, commissioned as CV 1 (after conversion
from a collier) in 1922. Langley was sunk by the Japanese in 1942. [Return]
†Naval Air Training and Operation Procedures Standardization.
‡Petty officers, the middle ranks of U.S. Navy enlisted personnel, specializing
in a "rate" (such as Aviation Boatswain's Mate). "CPOs," or chief
petty officers, occupy the three highest enlisted pay grades (aside from
Master Chief Petty Officer of the Navy).
§Located in the island structure, and on the flight deck, respectively.
At the time of publication, Professor Rochlin
was adjunct professor of energy and resources and a research political
scientist at the Institute of Governmental Studies, University of
California, Berkeley. At the time of publication, Professor La Porte was
professor of political science and associate director of the Institute
of Governmental Studies, University of California, Berkeley. At the time
of publication, Professor Roberts, an organizational psychologist, was
professor of business administration at the University of California,
Berkeley.
This article was originally published in the Autumn 1987 issue of Naval War College Review. Reproduced by GovLeaders.org with the kind permission of the publisher.
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