First Principles

As a former Surface Warfare Officer, navigator, and Hawaii sailor, I’ve been following with interest the grounding of USS Port Royal (thankfully freed today).  While the actual mishap report won’t be released for months, I have some guesses about what went wrong – mostly because they’re the same things that always go wrong when a ship touches the bottom.

But as I engaged in my SWO speculation (more here for the nerdy), it occurred to me that the lessons that have been and will be learned in this type of event should be heeded by Washington (and Carson City, and every other government entity), too.

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First, a little background on Navy seamanship and the anatomy of a grounding for the uninitiated:

The bridge of a cruiser is (counting the bridge wings) about 55 feet wide and 15 – 20 feet deep.  On it are several large pieces of equipment, including the radars, the helm and lee helm (steering and propulsion), the Navigation station, and a couple of chairs for the Captain and XO.

In that small space during a typical underway watch in the open ocean, there are at least 8 people on the bridge:

• The Officer of the Deck (OOD), the guy In Charge for that watch;
• The Junior Officer of the Deck (JOOD), who is usually learning his or her craft, and has the “conn”, or the one person who has verbal command of the ship;
• A Helmsman, a junior seaman who literally stands at the steering wheel, and usually controls the throttle (called the Lee Helm) too;
• The Quartermaster of the Watch, who keeps track of the ship’s position on the chart (or modern electronic equivalent);
• A Bo’s’n Mate of the Watch, who manages the rotation of the helmsman and lookouts;
• Two lookouts on the port and starboard bridge wings (there’s also one aft);
• An enlisted radar operator called the “bright bridge.”

That’s a lot of people in a pretty limited space.  And that doesn’t count the radar navigation team in the Combat Information Center (on the inside of the ship), also feeding information to the OOD on the bridge.

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When in close quarters to land (which means within a few miles, generally), the bridge gets a whole lot friendlier (and busier and noisier).  In addition to the above, the Navy adds:

• Another officer dedicated to the radio;
• The Navigator, screaming verbal reports to the whole bridge every two minutes;
• In addition to the QMOW, 3 more navigation team members;
• A dedicated Lee Helmsman;
• A Helm Safety Officer (I’ll come back to this one in a minute);
• The Commanding Officer;
• And usually the XO, too.

That’s a total of 17 people in a very small space.  Usually, there’s a civilian harbor pilot who comes on board as well, which adds one more.  Add a couple others if someone is training another watchstander.  And that doesn’t count the large numbers of people manning the engineering plant, standing by on deck to drop the anchor, or standing by in After Steering just in case.

On the bridge alone, you have very nearly the entire crew of your average large ocean-going cargo vessel.

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On the Port Royal, since she’d been in dry dock for quite awhile just before this underway, this team had to have been rusty, which would have made effective communication in that mass of people more difficult.  They were conducting small boat operations, which would further divide the bridge crew’s attention.  They had little or no way (forward movement) on the ship, which meant their ability to maneuver was extremely limited (rudders don’t work very well without some water passing over them).  A cruiser of that type has a lot of “sail area” – the superstructure is tall and flat and is impacted significantly by the wind.   If that all wasn’t enough, they were doing this at night (or at least dusk).

But probably the worst thing is that the CO was relatively new, and people were trying to impress him, not offend him, and/or were scared to give him bad news.

The CO was also a nuclear trained officer.  I’ve had two nuke COs.  Neither of them were particularly focused on seamanship.  One was later relieved after cutting off two aircraft carriers (a picture of that incident is what graces the top of this post).  Nukes are smart as hell, but they have a reputation for micromanagement and the inability to see the forest for the trees.  (That’s not all bad – you want a detail-oriented guy in charge of a nuclear power plant that carries explosives all over the world.)  This of course isn’t always true, but it has been more often than not in my limited experience.  (Jimmy Carter, a Nav Nuclear program alumn and manager of the White House tennis court schedule, is perhaps the most infamous example of the problems these super-smart officers have when put into a more macro-command position.)

My guess (and it’s only that) is that they were too close because they wanted to give the boats a shorter ride in the dark.  They didn’t have enough way on to counter the effects of the wind and tides, which blew them down onto the shoals while everyone’s attention was focused on the small boat operations.  I will further guess that the bridge was chaotic, loud, and probably too bright.  I think the Navigator probably never got his head out of his charts, and failed to use his most important navigation tool – the window.  Someone at some point saw the danger, but couldn’t for whatever reason sound the alarm in time (Panic?  Fear of the new CO?).

But no matter what happened, one thing is for sure:  Of all 17 of those people on the bridge, and the half dozen more in CIC also responsible for watching the navigation picture, it wasn’t enough to protect the ship.

Or maybe it was too many.

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Back to the Helm Safety Officer.

This is a college educated, trained officer whose job is to stand behind the helmsman to make sure he’s following his orders.  Never mind that the OOD and the Conning Officer both have ruder angle indicators scattered all over the bridge, as well as compass repeaters, all of which allow verification that the order was heard and understood.  Never mind that in order to take the helm during a close-to-shore detail like that, one needs to earn a special qualification (called a Master Helmsman).  Never mind that the Master Helmsman has almost certainly been in the Navy twice as long as the helm safety officer, if not quite a bit longer than that.

Never mind that he stands in the line of sight (or running path) between the Navigator and the starboard bridge wing.

Nope.  The point is that there is a safety officer.

It is a certainty that such a position did not always exist.  But after some collision or grounding, someone wrote a report and thought, “If only there had been a safety observer there, to make sure that guy did his job and to catch what none of the other 4 or 5 officers on the bridge caught.  To make double sure, we’ll make the safety observer one of the least experienced people on the ship.  That’ll do the trick.”

After all – they had to do something.  They had to take some action.  It couldn’t be just that someone screwed up, and that the only “lesson learned” they could submit to the Admiral was that people should have done their jobs right.  So instead the created a Plan.  They took Action.  They Did Something.  And the Helm Safety Officer was born.

But somehow ships keep finding ways to run aground, collide, and do other career ending things.

Clearly, we should add some more safety officers.

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The problem with too many safety officers is not just the distraction of so many people and extra noise.  It’s that responsibility is also divided.  Junior people focus in only on their area of expertise or responsibility, which is relatively small.  The system is designed (in theory) with a lot of redundancies, so there’s no sense of urgency to report when something doesn’t seem right – after all, if it’s really a problem, someone else will catch it, won’t they?

People who are supposed to have a more macro view of the situation allow themselves to ignore potential problem areas with safety officers assigned, feeling like they can focus on a single thing (in Port Royal‘s case, launching the small boat), and they can trust the people designated to sound the alarm to actually sound it.

In most cases, this structural weakness doesn’t cause a mishap.  Military officers tend to be smart, conservative (they believe strongly in personal responsibility), and ambitious enough to seek responsibility even where they are in a position to avoid it.  But the human tendency to simply be taken care of, and to follow the path of least resistance is always lurking.  Add a CO that’s hard to work for (and who hasn’t experienced a thick headed boss?), and the danger is clear.

Somehow, merchant ships do this far more often and with a far smaller bridge team – usually only one when in the open ocean, and 3 or 4 when entering or leaving port.  Those ships are easily twice the size of Port Royal.  I have a friend who commands a Coast Guard cutter right now, and he has 4 on the bridge at the most – only two in the open seas.  In fact, if Port Royal had the same bridge compliment that I experienced when I was driving ships, there were more people on the bridge of that ship than my friend has as total crew for his 110-foot patrol boat.

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I didn’t learn to be a good shipdriver on a Navy ship.  I actually learned it on the M/V Lorraine.  The Lorraine was a junky little smuggling ship we caught back when we were pretending to enforce UN sanctions against Iraq under Bill Clinton.  When we boarded her, I had held my commission for just under two years.  It was my second boarding.  I had a team of 7 enlisted guys, none of whom were engineers, and only a few of which had bridge experience.

During the boarding, the Iraqi crew had sabotaged the engines and tried to scuttle the ship (although we didn’t know it at the time – we thought it was just a mechanical problem.)  We were in relatively shallow water in tons of dhow traffic (dhows are little Arab boats used for fishing, spying on Americans in the gulf, smuggling, etc.).  I was out of radio range with my ship.  I had one junky radar, a primitive GPS unit, one chart that may or may not have been up to date, a magnetic compass that was unreliable even by Cracker Jack toy standards, and a ship long past its expiration date.  Half my team needed to act as security for the crew we’d displaced.  And I was charged with getting that ship safely to a previously designated location and dropping the anchor.

The thing I found was that it wasn’t all that hard to drive the ship in traffic.  I didn’t have the stress of calling the Captain every time a fishing boat got within 5 miles (which was always stressful to me for whatever reason).  Things were relaxed and quiet on the bridge, and I could see perfectly well myself and be my own lookout.

The “helm” was a tiny little marginally responsive joystick that I needed manned full time.  That job was taken by a YN3 (an admin guy) who I don’t think had ever been on the bridge of anything before.  I didn’t even have a Helm Safety Officer.

Somehow we navigated miles of open sea (well, open Gulf, but we were out of sight of land) to the spot we needed to go, and were able to drop the anchor without incident.  It was fun.  It was relaxed.  It gave me a lot of new confidence.  And it changed the way I looked at Navy bridge manning forever.

Most importantly, it reminded me of the joys and benefits of freedom.

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The requirement for a Helm Safety Officer is a regulation.  It’s a bad one.  It’s the perfect example of what happens when too much “oversight” is heaped on a problem – the results can often be worse than if no “solution” had ever been offered in the first place.

The same thing is true in government.  The more layers of bureaucracy we lay down, the less people will feel responsible for their own lives.  Most Americans are not military officers, and lack the discipline and drive of a good wardroom.  With the erosion of out culture of individualism over the years, we’re losing our protections from the seductive trap of “Someone else will take care of it” Syndrome.

But the more we rely on other people to take care of every conceivable problem that could possibly occur, the more we invite those problems to become crises before we are ever warned.  We are worse off for all that “help.”

And in the meantime, we’ve sacrificed our freedom in the bargain.

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So now Obama, who has never borne the responsibility of command (sycophantic campaign staff doesn’t count), is now the Commander in Chief.  He’s being asked to implement all kinds of “safety nets”, all for our own good.  He doesn’t know what they’ll do or how they’ll help, but he thinks he has to do something different.

Maybe before we get too mired in this unfettered Change, he’ll read USS Port Royal‘s mishap report, and will stop and think twice.

There is always Hope.