Do not regard loyalty as a personal matter. A greater loyalty is one to the Navy or to the Country.1
If you are ever in the vicinity of Groton, Connecticut, I recommend a visit to the Submarine Museum. The museum is sited directly across the road from the main entrance to the submarine base. The historical buildings are tucked into gentle hills that another mile upriver rise to what is now labeled on the maps as Allyn Mountain but was known in years past as Mount Decatur. The original name stemmed from 1812, as Allyn Mountain was where Commo. Stephen Decatur’s sailors constructed a rock-walled fort and anchored the heavy chain on the north side of the Thames River. The chain was to prevent British rowers from towing their heavy gunned ships, wintering a few miles away in New York Harbor, upriver to reach Decatur’s small fleet.
Groton, in addition to being surrounded by national historical sites like Fort Decatur, is the only place in the United States where you can tour a nuclear submarine. Here USS Nautilus (less her uranium reactor, which years ago was entombed in Hanford, Washington) “floats” in concrete.
Simply driving on I-95 by Groton brings back Nautilus memories for me. But mine are not recollections of when Nautilus was the queen of the seas—dazzling the entire world with American technology, setting the Soviets back on their heels, and reestablishing American pride after the embarrassment of the Soviet Union being first to put a satellite and a man in space. No, I walked on board Nautilus in 1969, after she had been operated without proper maintenance for fifteen years—or as the horseman’s phrase goes, “ridden hard and put away wet” too many times. When I knew Nautilus, the boat needed several bottles of extra liniment to prevent her from pulling up embarrassingly lame several years before the end of her planned service.
Most officers who served on board Nautilus looked on their tour in this ship as the high point of their careers. Not I. For me, Gwen Verdon’s sultry musical tones—“Whatever Lola wants, Lola gets”—seem to resonate from each steel strut of what was at one time called the Gold Star Bridge.2 When I was in New London, Nautilus’ sobriquet was “Lola.”3 The comparison was apt. The diva of the stage and the siren of the sea both demanded inordinate attention. During the three years I dedicated to Nautilus, my shipmates selflessly sacrificed their families and personal lives to fix the ship for those who would follow us. My team’s experience was particularly difficult, dangerous, and downright unpleasant. I remember Lola well.
Ten years after my Nautilus tour, a decade that witnessed another three generations in submarine technology development, I was the commanding officer of a much newer nuclear submarine in the Pacific. We had been at sea for most of the last three years and were now beginning an overhaul at the nation’s premier shipyard. I had never been in the Puget Sound Naval Shipyard at Bremerton, Washington, but the situation looked to me a lot like the one in New London. This time the crux of the problem wasn’t the first nuclear submarine but rather the first nuclear cruiser (USS Long Beach), which was being simultaneously overhauled along with the first nuclear carrier, USS Enterprise.
The situation in Bremerton was even more difficult than the Nautilus problem had been. Bremerton was normally efficient precisely because of its large size. The engineering duty officers and the civilian trade-shop stewards who managed the yard were able to shift people and their skills around as necessary to address the complexities of a varied workload. In fact, while several American shipyards could handle only one or two nuclear submarines, Bremerton had proved it could overhaul three or four nuclear submarines while it also processed two large surface ships and an aircraft carrier. Its huge capacity, along with the dozen or so smaller shipyards throughout the country and the large Norfolk Naval Shipyard on the East Coast, was normally sufficient to keep our Navy running like a well-oiled clock.
The key words in the previous paragraph are “two large surface ships.” Two large surface ships was the precise workload the Bureau of Ships in D.C. had assigned to Bremerton around the time I arrived there. The only problem was that someone forgot to check nameplates before dispatching those particular two surface ships.
Once nuclear ships had been introduced into the Navy, the assignment of ships to overhaul yards became a more complex scheduling problem. It was no longer simply a matter of planning ship overhauls as if they were simply Chrysler 300s being assigned a repair bay. Repairing a nuclear-powered ship involved a much different workload than the same size conventionally powered surface ship.4 And the two particular surface ships assigned to Bremerton were special indeed. They were both Lola wannabes.
In fact, Enterprise and Long Beach were close cousins of the original Lola. After Nautilus’ original quick success, Congress, failing to recognize that the revolutionary technology change was not nuclear power but rather the marriage of nuclear power with the submarine platform (just as the technology transformation at the beginning of World War II had been the marriage of the tank with the radio), had immediately authorized building the first nuclear-powered surface ship, the cruiser Long Beach (CGN-9), as well as a nuclear-powered carrier, Enterprise (CVN-65). These two surface ships were quickly constructed, and both were commissioned in 1961, only seven years after Nautilus had initially rounded the New London sea buoy.
Given that the learning rate in nuclear design was extraordinarily high in those early years, the engineering plans on the first two nuclear surface ships were still a product in development. When compared with their oil-fired counterparts, these two ships would always require a greater engineering level of effort. To place these two nuclear overhauls simultaneously in the same shipyard was to dare disaster to ring the doorbell. But the Navy is such a large organization that the staffs for the surface force and the carrier force independently planned overhauls. Even worse, the respective organizations rewarded their staffs for estimating at the low end of probable costs.5 As a result, the overhauls for Long Beach and Enterprise overlapped and were underfunded.
By the time both ships had steamed into the shipyard, the buzzards spawned from the decision for simultaneous overhaul had already begun roosting in the Bremerton trees. The people in Washington, D.C., who had scheduled the problem had long ago gone on to other roles, and—because Congress had been continually assured by many, many admirals that nuclear ships would be no more difficult than oil-fired ones to repair—there was absolutely no one in any Navy office interested in now speaking up and announcing to the world, “Whoops! We have just discovered that the first nuclear ships ever built are much more complicated (and much, much more expensive) to overhaul than the run-of-the-mill conventionally powered ship.”
Within a few months after Long Beach and Enterprise had settled on their dry-dock keel blocks, so much unplanned work had originated from these two black holes that the shipyard was basically overwhelmed and unable to effectively plan. These two ships broke more items each day than the shipyard had qualified workers to repair. Since the shipyard management couldn’t effectively schedule work, the shipyard workforce was working harder and getting less done.
There were other consequences. The Navy never has as many ships as it has tasks. Therefore, every day a ship of any kind is in overhaul is doubly destructive. Not only is a day in dry dock expensive; every week Long Beach and Enterprise were on keel blocks was another seven days the ships and crews at sea in the Persian Gulf and Indian Ocean were over-stressed. In addition, each day an attack submarine was late getting out of overhaul (and nearly 10 percent of America’s attack-submarine fleet was tied up in Puget at that time) meant another twenty-four hours a top-secret mission could not be performed or another day a ballistic-missile Soviet submarine would be free to fire nuclear missiles at the United States without the threat of being destroyed first.
One day I awoke and the tenth attack submarine was steaming up Puget Sound looking for any vacant bollard to throw a mooring line on. Do you recall that Puget had the capability to service three or four submarines? Not only was no pier available; there were insufficient qualified workers to even begin the preliminary work. Furthermore, few houses were left in Bremerton to buy, rent, or borrow, and the jobs for submarine spouses were scarce.6 At the same time, new bars and strip joints were opening every night, and crew members had too much spare time on their hands. No one seemed terribly interested in telling Admiral Rickover (or any other senior authority) that there was a “developing situation.”7 The local people in charge were vested, like broke Grateful Dead fans, in hoping for a miracle.
I was still responsible for getting my ship, USS Plunger (SSN-595), out of Bremerton on schedule and under budget. With every day that went by, I feared this was less and less possible. I was also responsible for the welfare of all crew members, their wives, their children, and (it seemed) their girlfriends. The extra free time and the new bars were proving detrimental to everyone.
As I recall, the Plunger overhaul was initially planned to last about fourteen months, and we were off to a reasonable start until the day USS Long Beach appeared over the horizon. Then, weeks began passing with no appreciable progress being made on any of the major tasks involved in our overhaul.8 I am using weeks as the unit of time measurement for two important reasons. First, I, along with all the other commanding officers, met with the shipyard admiral and his staff every week to discuss major issues in the shipyard. Second, every other week Rickover expected each nuclear commanding officer undergoing a shipyard availability to write the admiral a personal letter about the ship’s progress. The letter was labeled “personal” so that it could avoid the delays in the many layers of the Navy chain of command. This personal letter went directly to Rickover’s desk. Most commanding officers hated writing this missive.
From my perspective, it was an open invitation to discuss deficiencies in material, training, and personnel or whatever other problems I might think were not being adequately addressed by either me or someone in the larger Navy. I knew there was only one golden rule if I raised an issue: I had better be correct—because Rickover read each and every letter carefully. And if he thought I was in error, he would call to ensure that we “reached agreement.” The call was never a social chat.
To prepare to bring the Bremerton shipyard’s problems directly to the attention of Admiral Rickover, I asked my duty officers to count how many shipyard workers were actually in our spaces during each work shift. The shipyard production officer gave a presentation every Tuesday to the shipyard admiral and all the commanding officers. His brief included how many people from each of the trades (welders, shipfitters, pipefitters, etc.) were working in the back shops (on our equipment elsewhere in the shipyard) as well as the number actually working on board each ship. His numbers appeared a bit expansive to many of the submarine commanding officers.
The production officer (who was doing an excellent job in his off-hours coaching my sons in basketball) had begun providing us these data in response to continued complaints from Capt. Bill Hicks, a particularly alert fellow commander, that Hicks’ submarine seemed to be deserted. Well, my compartments seemed a bit lonely too. As we were the next in line behind Hicks’ submarine, I decided I should look at the same information he was reviewing. Given Plunger’s phase in overhaul (most machinery had been stripped from inside the hull), I had reasoned that my equipment was being worked on in the back shops scattered around the shipyard’s 180 acres. But then I began listening more carefully at the Tuesday meetings.
Each week the production officer provided numbers indicating a hundred or so skilled men and women were working on board Hicks’ submarine and a few less on board mine. Another couple of hundred workers (roughly evenly divided) were reportedly devoted to our equipment in the back shops. Each week Hicks missed key dates on his schedule and became more agitated. My engineer began hiking around the shipyard, visiting the inside machine shop as well as the electric motor, hydraulics, and other repair areas. He reported to me that he was unable to identify the hundred industrious souls reportedly working on our equipment. I wondered if I had misunderstood the shipyard’s system.
As I was jogging one morning in the mists that tended to cling to the hills just above the waterfront, I mentally tried to integrate all this information. I decided the key had to be the time cards. The shipyard was a large organization, employing more than ten thousand people. If everyone was paid every two weeks, a system must exist to accurately record their work. If the shipyard workers weren’t on board the denuded submarines, they should be documented as working elsewhere. Since the production officer said they were working on our equipment, then, this being the Navy, somewhere there existed records proving his case (he couldn’t be lying because he was my sons’ basketball coach)—and the location of those records would most likely be . . .
Now most of your friends probably avoid difficult situations. Tricky circumstances often result in someone being hurt—physically, emotionally, or professionally. Many wise people deliberately make wide detours around potential potholes in life. Of course, if you tackle problems head on and survive, they may provide a story for your grandchildren. I personally could not avoid poking at a potential problem any more than a moth can only wink appreciatively at an open flame and flutter on by.
About 2:00 a.m. the night after my jog, armed with a universal bolt cutter, a thin steel ruler, and a few other implements I had tucked into a black tool belt, I found myself sitting thoughtfully in the production officer’s black leather chair, looking around as I used my right foot to swivel his seat slowly back and forth. I had carefully reclosed his front door, pulled the blinds shut, and turned on all of the lights. The building was deserted, and I hoped any outside passerby would assume the production officer was working late. I’d visited his office several times before in an attempt to try to understand why we were falling behind (he had assured me I was mistaken).
The graceful old high-ceiling wooden buildings had been built before World War II, and as I had accurately recalled, the door casings had shrunk a bit unevenly as they dried over the last hundred years. When I had inserted my steel ruler, there had been a good quarter inch between the jamb and the door lock tongue.
As I slowly rotated in his truly comfortable chair, I took in the framed pictures and models of the many fine ships built at this historical shipyard. I considered where the production officer might have filed the shop stewards’ real production reports. He would never have thrown them away because the shipyard finance office needed the true reports to pay people. But I had grown confident the shop-steward reports filed at the end of each week bore little resemblance to the weekly brief he had been providing. The row of padlocked old wooden file cabinets against the wall appeared to be taunting me. I ignored them.
Since I didn’t think witnesses to the crime of breaking and entering were terribly desirable, I was alone in the production officer’s office that early morning. I was sure he and I had similar survival instincts. But maybe different motives.
During my run that morning, I had come to the conclusion that he and the local admiral were under such pressure that the production officer must have begun personally altering his official reports to make it look as if work were occurring on the submarines—by skilled men and women actually assigned to work on the surface ships. My reasoning had been that he would have to keep two sets of books to maintain accurate shipyard payroll numbers, but he would never trust this duplicitous task to a subordinate who might later spill the beans. It was Monday night. He would have completed his double-bookkeeping task for tomorrow’s meeting before leaving for basketball practice. I had several new locks to replace those on the safes if it came down to the universal bolt cutter.
As I continued to revolve in the production officer’s chair surveying the room—I really did not want to start breaking into the safes and pawing through every folder—I noted a small pump impeller serving as a paperweight on the desk. Beneath the impeller lay a two-inch pile of single sheets of paper, face down.
Curiosity often gets a bad rap. The top sheet was a signed weekly summary report from the shipfitter shop steward for Hicks’ ship. The various shipfitter skills were listed down the left side of the page with ship-hull numbers across the top; total work hours for that week were penciled in the appropriate intersecting box. There were two sections on each sheet: the top portion for work on board the ship, the bottom for backshop work. Reports on my ship began with the eleventh sheet in the pile. I located the on-off switch for the secretary’s copy machine, fired it up, and waited for what seemed like an interminable warm-up time. Some of the pencil sketches of the old sailing ships were exceptionally well done.
Later that day, after listening carefully to the production officer’s brief, I sat down to write my biweekly letter to Admiral Rickover. I searched for the proper words and finally selected an opening I thought had the potential to catch his eye, “I have never met an engineering duty officer I could trust.” The letter went on to request that the shipyard production officer be fired for misrepresentation.9
Two days later the senior submarine officer in Rickover’s office, Capt. Zack Pate, called me: “Dave, Admiral Rickover received your last letter.”
“Yes?”
“Do you recall that Admiral Rickover is the senior engineering duty officer in the Navy, and has been so for more than twenty years?”
I don’t think Pate really expected an answer, for he continued without my reply: “He underlined your first sentence with his red pencil. He also directed the Bureau [of Personnel] to relieve the production officer at the Puget shipyard.”
As you may recall, Rickover had graduated from the Naval Academy when submarines were the domain of that university’s graduates. After two surface-ship tours Rickover volunteered for submarine duty and was so assigned. After his initial tour he was posted to a second submarine, in which he served as executive officer (the number-two officer on board). Unfortunately, he had been judged not sufficiently suited to be permitted to command a submarine, was reassigned back to surface-ship duty, and eventually commanded a minesweeper. Thus, in the naval service, where command at sea is the pinnacle nearly all officers strive for, Admiral Rickover had only commanded the Navy’s smallest ship—a ship with limited responsibilities. A minesweeper does not project power or provide presence. It does cleanup work.
Not only had Rickover been limited in his command assignment to one of the Navy’s most inconsequential ship commands; that command lasted only three months, instead of the more normal year or year and a half. By comparison, for four years I had experienced the thrill of command of USS Plunger, one of the most powerful ships in anyone’s Navy. Plunger had carried the American flag unchallenged throughout the world. We had sailed alone into several oceans against America’s strongest foe. My crew and I had been fortunate enough to face challenging adventures. We had received accolades and medals, and I had even gone to the White House to brief President Ronald Reagan on our ship’s exploits. But Plunger existed because of thirty years of Rickover’s dreams and work, not mine.
Yet, in my letter I had made a snide comment (inadvertent, but how would he know?). How many great men would only lightly underline in red what must have been hurtful words and then proceed to focus on the real issue—and act as I requested? Most leaders I have known could never have gotten past what they would have perceived as a personal insult. Admiral Rickover was one of life’s great exceptions. He was focused only on results. He never even mentioned my letter.
However, not everything turned out for the best. My sons’ athletic progress suffered. I was a terrible substitute basketball coach.
Admiral Rickover had organizationally established three independent watchdog groups in each shipyard. However, apparently not one of these groups in Bremerton felt sufficiently empowered to inform Admiral Rickover that there was proof on the hoof at the Puget Sound Naval Shipyard relevant to one of the most pressing public discussions of the day—whether nuclear surface ships required more or less repair effort than conventionally powered ships. Of course, being human, they might have been affected by Admiral Rickover’s own omission of this inconvenient fact in his testimony in Congress.
This problem falls under the category of not seeing the pile of rubbish leaning against your own house. It also has to do with how a strong manager’s presence can stifle disagreement. A leader can rely on one thing: If one has established a policy, promoted a specific idea, or become personally identified with a concept, no matter how many safeguards are in place to promote independent thinking, it is the rare person who will contradict a leader, no matter how absolutely wrong the chosen path.
So how does a leader or manager prevent an organization from having to rely on extraordinary corrective measures? Leadership always begins with the leader.